President Andrés Manuel López Obrador Promises the “Rebirth of Mexico”

By: December 4, 2018
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Andrés Manuel López Obrador took the presidential oath on December 1 and then gave an hour and a half oration to the legislators as well as another lengthy speech to the people of Mexico City gathered in the zócalo, in which he reiterated his campaign promises to end corruption, to bring about economic prosperity, and to lead Mexico into a new historic fourth period of Mexican history, a period of “rebirth.” The speech made clear that AMLO, as he is called by his initials in the press, is a reformer, but not a radical and certainly not a revolutionary as his opponents have claimed. His call for an end to neoliberalism and to corruption are accompanied by invitations to Mexican and foreign capitalists to invest and make a profit.

AMLO’s challenges are many. He must deal with the country’s powerful economic oligarchy that working with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the National Action Party, have for a hundred years dominated the country. He must confront the powerful, multi-billion dollar drug cartels that have penetrated and permeated the government and police and even infected the military and whose armies of gun thugs and assassins contributed to the deaths and disappearances of over 300,000 people since 2006. He must find a modus vivendi with the Colossus of the North and deal with its maniacal rightwing and racist president. And finally, he must now find a way to meet the needs and even more important satisfy the new aspirations of the Mexican people—who may be more radical than he is—without jeopardizing his reformist program. He will for the next six years have to both wrestle with the oligarchy and both mobilize and reign in the plebeians if he is to be successful in his own terms.

The Challenge of Trump and the Economy

With a certain irony, AMLO thanked out-going president Enrique Peña Nieto for not interfering in the elections and stealing them as had happened to AMLO twice before and to others many times over the more than seven decades of the rule of Peña Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party’s rule. With Peña Nieto sitting beside him, AMLO blamed the country’s problem on the combination of the thirty-six years of the neoliberal economic model and the unbounded government corruption during that same period.

AMLO recognized Ivanka Trump who was present, sent as her father-president’s emissary, and he thanked President Donald Trump for his message of friendship. Turning directly to the new U.S., Mexico, Canada Agreement (USMCA, which replaces the former North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA) ) and which was foisted on him by Trump and Peña Nieto—AMLO stated that he wanted to go beyond to USMCA and see new investment agreement between all three countries that would help to develop Central America as well as Mexico and in that way deal with the migration issue that in the form of the migrant caravans has dominated the news recently.

Ivanks Trump, by the way, committed the faux pas of referring to AMLO’s wife Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller as the “first lady,” a title she has rejected, saying that the title suggested the superiority of one woman over others.

López Obrador in these speeches promised once again, as he had so often in his campaign, that the investments of Mexican and foreign stockholders would not only be safe in Mexico, but would make decent profits under his honest administration. He promised that with the rule of law, clear rules, and economic growth there would be economic confidence.

AMLO told the legislators and the people that he was being given a country in bankruptcy, and he asked them to be patient with him and to have confidence in him. He complained particularly about the economic situation of the Mexican Petroleum Company (PEMEX), but promised with the help of the workers and the technical employees of PEMEX and of the Federal Electrical Commission to rescue those two great national corporations of the Mexican people. He declared that there would be no increases in gas or electric prices beyond the rate of inflation and, ignoring the issue of carbon fuels and global warning, promised to build a new refinery to make possible the lowering of gasoline prices.

An End to Corruption and Impunity

Taking on the question of corruption, AMLO told the assembled lawmakers that anyone who “trafficked on the poverty of the people” by buying votes or engaging in electoral corruption would go to prison without bail. And he declared an end to the use of private planes and helicopters by high government functionaries and said he would be selling off the presidential plane immediately. To confront the country’s tremendous violence, a result largely of the drug cartels, and recognizing the uselessness of the existing police forces to deal with them, he called for the creation of a new National Guard.

He argued that while the Mexican military was not without its problems, it had not formed corrupt groups within it such as in other parts of the Mexican government. And unlike in other countries, the military did not form part of the oligarchy, he said. He promised that during his administration the president would never use the military to oppress the Mexican people nor cover up such repression—a strong implicit condemnation not only of the Peña Nieto administration but of the entire history of modern Mexican governments, from the assassinations of the immediate post-revolutionary period of the 1920s, through the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre, to the kidnapping and murder of the Ayotzinapa student teachers in 2014.

There were three demonstrations during the speech in the national legislature. When at one point in his speech, AMLO said he would not persecute those in the old government, a demonstration brokeout among his own supporters who stood waving white handkerchiefs and began counting from 1 to 43 for the victims of the Ayotzinapa murders and kidnappings. AMLO has created a truth commission to investigate the disappearances of the 43 students. At another point, when foreign dignataries were being mentioned and the name of Nicolás Maduro was called, the rightwing legislators began chanting “dictator,” though in fact Maduro’s plane was late and he was not in the hall. Finally, the rightwingers also raised signes calling for a reduction in the “IVA,” the value added tax.

As he was bringing his inaugural speech to a conclusion, López Obrador told the story of a boy on a bicycle who had come up to him shortly before and said, you cannot fail us, and the new president told the legislators, I have a responsibility not to fail you. He talked of his confidence in the people of Mexico and in their culture—in their cultures—a hardworking people, as demonstrated by the emigrants to the United States who sent $30 billion a year home to their families. AMLO expressed his optimism and his faith that with the Mexican people’s support he would succeed in bringing about Mexico’s rebirth.

Finally, López Obrador promised that he would never seek reelection—something forbidden by the Mexican Constitution—and that in two and half years he would submit to the Mexican people a referendum asking them if they wanted him to continue in office.

The new president will face challenges from the old political parties. The National Action Party, historically the religious and pro-business party, is already carrying out a leafleting campaign with a flyer that compares AMLO to Stalin, Hitler, Nicolás Maduro, Hugo Chávez and Kim Jong-un and promises to defend freedom. And at the same time, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, for seventy years the ruling party, has called for a united front of the people to resist AMLO’s proposed reforms and what they say will be the militarization of the country. Both parties compare AMLO to Maduro and point to the disaster of the dictatorship and disintegrating economy there. AMLO will have his hands full.

After the last twelve years of violence and the hundreds of thousands of dead and disappeared, one has to hope that AMLO will be able to end the violence and the corruption and that the people of Mexico will take advantage of a new safer and more democratic life to push forward their own demands for their needs and desires, going beyond the reforms that the new president envisions.

 

Winter Palace Seized; Claus Overthrown; Elves Form Councils, Declare Socialism

By: November 23, 2018
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[Nov. 23] – Thousands of Elves seized the Winter Palace and overthrew Santa Claus late last night, ending the Claus family dynasty whch has ruled the North Pole for hundreds of years. “We took advantage of the Thanksgiving reverie at the palace—everyone was drunk—and took control with almost no violence,” said one Elf who preferred not to use his name.

Throughout the workshops of the North Pole, Elves have seized the factories and warehouses and formed councils to manage their workplaces themselves. The new National Polar Council has declared that they will not only run the factories but plan to administer the entire society. As the same time they have declared their national sovereignty, saying that they will not be controlled by Russia, Canada, Greenland or any nation.

Asked if he was a leader, the Elf spokesperson said, “We are all leaders here.”

At the first post-Claus era council meeting, an Elf rose to say, “We will now begin the construction of socialism!” The declaration was met with cheers throughout the hall that lasted a good five minutes.

Elves said they plan to continue the traditional distribution of toys, but now they will distribute them on the basis of need. “We will have no contact with Walmart, Target, Amazon or any of the other capitalist corporations that in the past worked with the Claus family,” the National Polar Council declared.

The Elves council called upon parents and children to show their solidarity by refusing to have anything to do with department store and Salvation Army Santas who they say, have for years promoted the cult of personality around the figure of Santa Claus. “We Elves who do all of the work, will be happy to meet and talk with the children.”

An Elf spokesman denied rumors that there were plans to behead Santa Claus and other members of the Claus nobility. “We will put the Clauses to work like the rest of us.”

This morning, the day after Thanksgiving, perfect calm reigns in the North Pole, all is orderly.

Migrant Caravans Challenge the Continent’s Governments

By: November 12, 2018
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Central American migrants, both desperate and courageous, have thrust themselves into the center of Mexican and U.S. politics with their demand for refuge and asylum. As the head of the NGO Pueblos Sin Fronteras told a reporter, “This isn’t just a caravan, it’s an exodus created by hunger and death.”

The thousands of migrants organized in caravans and walking north from Central America, through Mexico, and to the United States—some 3,000 miles—have raised a challenge to the governments and to the people of North America. Driven by poverty and violence, their long march is an implicit critique of the Central American governments that have failed to protect them and have made it impossible for them to earn a living. At the same time, it is in its very form a denunciation of Mexico, since they must travel in caravans because of the violence that migrants face in Mexico from both criminals and the corrupt police. And when the caravan reaches the border, it will be a challenge to the United States to adhere to its laws and international agreements that allow migrants to present petitions for refugee or asylum status.

Beyond all that however, the simple act of walking north is a courageous and defiant act of resistance against the economic and political system that envelopes North America, with its “free markets,” its authoritarian governments, and its failure to meet the basic human needs of millions. The migrants have put contemporary capitalism and imperialism on trial.

The migrants—men, women, and children—formed the caravans in late October. Migrants have for years traveled in groups because of the danger in both Central America and Mexico of being beaten, robbed, raped, kidnapped, or murdered by either criminals or police, but these caravans of thousands represent a new development. Usually migrants pay thousands of dollars to smugglers known as coyotes or polleros who arrange to take them across the Mexican and U.S. borders. These new migrant caravans, however, at first simply forced their way across the Mexican border, overwhelming border police, or crossed the Suchiate River. They have compelled the Mexican government to permit them to enter the country.

In Mexico, migrants have been supported by local governments, the Catholic Church, and NGOs such as Pueblos Sin Fronteras (Peoples Without Borders), which have helped to provide them with water and food and also aided in choosing the best routes and campsites. The NGOs have also helped with the many who have become exhausted, gotten sick, or been injured. Irineo Mújica, the director of Pueblos Sin Fronteras, reported that Mexican police had roughed up both men and women in the caravan. “Never in the history of the caravans have we seen such violence. I understand that the Mexican government is desperate, but violence is not the solution,” said Mújica. At times groups have broken off from the caravan to find their own way or to take advantage of passing flat bed trucks, riding, crowded on the trailers. There are reports that as the caravan moved along some 100 migrants have gone missing and some believe they have been kidnapped by the criminal cartels.

As the migrants come, Mexico’s in-coming President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who will take office on Dec. 1, proposed an international development program for Central America to get to the root of the issues that cause the migration problem, and promised that his planned public works programs would create 400,000 jobs Mexicans and immigrants. Speaking in late October, he said, we will have jobs for all, for both Mexicans and Central Americans. Faced with migrants challenge and under pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump, out-going Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto offered the migrants a program called, “Estás en tu casa” or “You are at home,” that would provide asylum, work permits, identification cards, medical care, and schooling. At the same time, he made that plan contingent upon the migrants remaining in the southern Mexican states of Chiapas and Oaxaca. The caravan held meetings to discuss EPN’s offer, which was rejected by the group as a whole. Most wanted to continue on. As one man said, “These states are overwhelmed by poverty, in Mexico the jobs are up north.” Hundreds, however, accepted the Mexican offer and dropped out of the caravan.

At this moment, two caravans, several thousand migrants altogether, have now reached Mexico City where the Mexican government has offered them shelter in the Jesús Martínez “Palillo” stadium. Portable toilets have been set up, but they haven’t been adequate for the numbers of people and visitors, creating unsanitary conditions. Edgar Corzo Sosa of the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) says that, “Pregnant woman, and above all, the newborns, are the most vulnerable group. There is no census, it’s complicated, but a third of the caravan is made up of children, and there are altogether about 5,000 people”

President Donald Trump, campaigning feverishly, attending 17 election rallies, principally to support Senate candidates in the midterm elections, made the caravan the center of his campaign. He called the caravan an “invasion,” asserted that the migrants were members of Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13, “hardened criminals” and he claimed that there were “Middle Easterners”—read terrorists—among them. Trump threatened to send 15,000 U.S. troops to the border and said that U.S. soldiers could fire on migrants if they threw stones. He has threated to cut off aid to the Central American nations from which the caravans have come and the American president also raised the idea of using his executive power to end constitutional birthright citizenship in the United States.

What Caused the Caravan Crisis?

American imperialism is at the root of the current migration crisis. The story of the United States in Central America is a long one going back to the nineteen century, but the most recent chapter begins in 1981 when U.S. President Ronald Reagan supported right-wing governments in Guatemala and El Salvador while also fighting against a popular revolution in Nicaragua. U.S. weapons poured into those countries during the civil wars there that lasted until the 1990s. Those wars took hundreds of thousands of lives and left parts of those countries in ruins.

Peace in these Central American nations was negotiated in the mid-1990s, just as the United States and the Central Americans governments were negotiating the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), a treaty that opened their economies to foreign competition. The treaty devastated local industries and agriculture, leading to vast unemployment. Farmers lost their farms; factories threw workers out on the street.

More than a decade and a half of war had flooded the region with heavy weapons and the disbanding of the various armies left thousands with no means of employment. The United States government set up a chain of drug dealing operations that were used to fund the Contra War against Nicaragua and those continued after the war ended. In the 1980s, the United States also began to deport Central American gang members in groups like the MS-13 and M-18. Many of these men and women had had no contact with the countries to which they were being deported, and once back in Central America they established branches of the gangs they had belonged to in the United States. This toxic mix of groups trained in violence, easily available heavy weapons and criminal drug activity has made the “northern triangle” Central American countries of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala some of the most violent countries with the highest murder rates in the world.

The most recent imperialist intervention in Central America occurred when former President Barack Obama and his then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sponsored a military coup in Honduras against the democratically elected leftist president Manuel Zelaya. Since then, the antidemocratic government of President Juan Orlando Hernández has instituted a neoliberal model that has deepened the economic dependence on the United States and worsened living conditions for millions of Hondurans. Hernández has also criminalized the organizers of the caravan who have attempted to respond to the humanitarian crisis that so many Hondurans have been living.

Today, a new ruling elite dominates Central America. As Aaron Schneider and Rafael R. Ioris wrote in NACLA, after the extraordinary violence in the Honduran election of 2017, there has been “a growing consolidation of power by a new kind of right-wing alliance in Honduras and across Latin America: an alliance that brings together the power of the traditional landed elites and that of the financial elites who have benefited more recently from globalized neoliberalism. This alliance emerged amid the ashes of the Cold War and the dawn of the Washington Consensus…”

Today, Poverty and Violence

Poverty has been and remains endemic in most of Central America where about one-third of the population lives in extreme poverty. Extreme poverty is defined by the United Nations as “a condition characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information.” The World Bank recently put this in economic terms, describing those in extreme poverty as earning less than $1.90 per day.

As the International Labor Organization wrote a year ago, “Over 50 million young people in Latin America and the Caribbean face a labor market characterized by unemployment, informality and a lack of opportunities.” About half the people in Latin America work in the informal economy—in Central America the rate is between 40 and 80 percent—that is to say people work for employers who often ignore labor laws and provide no benefits, or people are self employed in micro-businesses or as peddlers. The lack of jobs and decent pay, mean a life of poor housing and bad health, while families face insecurity and children are put at great risk of malnutrition that can affect both their physical and mental development.

Climate change is also playing a role in the Central American migration. According to Scientific American, a drought this year deprived some 2.8 million people in the region of their food. The drought has affected the so-called “dry corridor” of Central America, that runs through southern Guatemala, northern Honduras and western El Salvador. Olman Funez, a young farmer from Orocuina in southern Hunduras said, “The drought has killed us. We lost all our corn and beans.”

The choices made in Washington and New York, decisions to promote so called “free markets” or to continue to permits the expansion of carbon fuels such as coal and petroleum, have brought misery to Central America, exacerbating poverty and setting people in motion, moving out and moving north, going to where they can find jobs.

Violence in the Central American nations is also a way of life, and it has been increasing recently. Guatemala has been violent for years, but the terror has increased recently. While anyone might be murdered at almost any time, peasant and worker activists are often the victims of violence. Between May 9 and June 8, seven leaders of peasant organizations were murdered in Guatemala.

As Simon Granovsky-Larsen writes in NACLA, “Data collected by human rights organizations over the years show a relatively consistent pattern: outside of police or military shootings at protests, one rights defender has been killed in Guatemala every month or two all the way back to 2000. The campesino murders of 2018 obliterate any predictability with shocking violence. Guatemala has not seen anything like this since the official end of its armed conflict in 1996.” The violence against peasant leaders is intended not only to stop their labor organizing, but also to deter peasants from politically challenging the government.

A popular democratic rebellion against Daniel Ortega’s authoritarian regime in Nicaragua was violently suppressed by his government with arrests, torture, and hundreds of deaths, led tens of thousands of Nicaraguans to flee to neighboring Costa Rica. Political violence in some states has combined with the criminal violence found throughout the region creating an expanding blood bath. Survivors of the slaughter have joined the migration through Mexico toward the United States to escape the misery and violence that enveloped them.

The Challenge Facing the Caravan in the United States

The migrant caravans may face its greatest challenge at the U.S.-Mexico border when migrants attempt to present their applications for refugee or asylum status. The immigrants must present their application for asylum to an immigration judge, which means they must be given an immigration hearing. Economic refugees, those who come simply because they want to work and earn a living are not eligible for refugee or asylum status. The U.S. law defines refugees or those seeking asylum as “a person who is unable or unwilling to return to his or her country of nationality because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”

The United States today offers hope to few refugees. Under President George H.W. Bush the government accepted between 125,000 and 142,000 refugees. In the 2000s, George W. Bush and Obama years, the United States admitted about 80,000 people each year. However, under the Refugee Act of 1980, the president has the responsibility, in consultation with Congress, to set a maximum number of refugees who will be admitted to the United States each fiscal year. This year only about 22,000 refugees have been admitted. Trump has said that that number will now be 30,000 for 2019.

Trump has declared that, “The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility.” He has threatened to close the U.S. southern border altogether, though for economic reasons though he seems unlikely to do so. Trump’s Homeland Security used the U.S. Border Patrol to “systemically deny entry to asylum seekers,” according to an immigration rights group. The Trump administration’s policy is that all adults crossing the border without inspection or without immigration documents are to be arrested. When they are arrested children are now routinely separated from their parents, as thousands have been, among them hundreds of small children. Trump’s most recent step week, based on national security from threats coming from abroad, has been to order that any migrant who crosses the border illegally be denied asylum. Civil rights groups argue that many of Trump immigration policies are illegal and they are challenging them in court.

The U.S. border is now largely militarized, with thousands of Border Partrol agents backed up by the National Guard and now some U.S. Army troops. Except along the Rio Grande River, there is a nearly continuous border wall between the United States and Mexico. It is possible to climb the wall or cross through the gaps, though cameras and radar monitor the area, and many who attempt to cross are captured, though hundreds also die in the desert every year. Thousands make it to the other side, to a life in the legal shadows, constantly under the threat of arrest and deportation.

The caravan, nevertheless, moves on, now heading into the dangerous arid regions of northern Mexico dominated by drug cartels and the corrupt police who work with them. Meanwhile, throughout the United States groups of humanitarians—religious and political—have been organizing to go to the border, to greet the migrants and to show solidarity with the migrants. They will be protesting government policies and attempting to welcome those who come as refugees and asylum-seekers.

Migration as Class Struggle

This caravan is not the first and will not be the last. As Laura Weiss wrote recently, “The use of caravans as an activism—and survival—strategy was popularized in Central America. Since 2008 Central American mothers whose children disappeared while crossing through Mexico have carried out an annual caravan through Mexico to create awareness about their struggles. In 2012, the poet Javier Sicilia and the Movimiento Por La Paz con Dignidad y Justicia (the Movement for Peace with Dignity or MPJD) ran a caravan through Mexico and into the United States to draw attention to drug war violence after his son was killed, and a number of similar caravans zooming in on drug war violence and abuses followed in later years.” Caravans in Mexico go back decades: caravans of peasants, of teachers, of miners. They are versions of the religious peregrinations that form part of Central American and Mexican culture: people walking in their faith. Walking to where the Virgin once visited the earth, to where the saint helped the poor and downtrodden. Walking with God.

We do not usually think of walking as a form of rebellion or class struggle, but it often surely is. The caravan has been called an exodus, like the exodus of the Jews from slavery in Egypt. Black people in slavery in the United States took up the story of exodus, seeing themselves like the Jews of Egypt, living in slavery, dreaming of freedom, and they sang in their famous hymn, “Let my people go!” Today the migrants are engaged in their exodus, walking toward freedom, though they are finding that Pharaoh is not only in Egypt, not only in Central America, but also in Mexico and in the United States. Still the caravan moves on, holding the migrants in the embrace of hope, inspiring them to struggle, inspiring us to stand in solidarity with them. We are, after all, all of us, implicated in this caravan, in this walk toward freedom.

Spanish Language Version

*Dan La Botz is a co-editor of New Politics.

The Google Walkout: An International Working-Class Movement

By: November 3, 2018
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Thousands of Google employees throughout the United States and around the world walked off their jobs yesterday, Nov. 1, “to protest sexual harassment, misconduct, lack of transparency, and a workplace that doesn’t work for everyone.” Beginning in Singapore and working its way around the globe the movement closed Google offices from Mountain View, California, in Boulder and New York, as well as in London, Dublin, Zurich, Berlin and Hyderabad.

Signs on placards or on the walls read “Don’t Be Evil,” or “Times Up Tech,” One woman wrote, “My outrage won’t fit on this sign.” Nearly everywhere workers held short rallies where women read the movement’s demands. Looking at the many photos and videos of the walkouts and rallies, as well as reading the Google workers comments, it is clear that this was a mass working class movement.

The walkout, which lasted several hours in many places, represents one of the largest international worker job actions in modern labor history. Seldom in recent decades have workers either unionized or non-union workers such as these engaged in such a global, crossborder action. It is also the largest action by tech workers in the United States since this industry was born a few decades ago. And it is one of the most significant expansions of the #MeToo movement into workplace. The Google walkout’s international character, the fact that these are highly skilled technical workers, and that this was a fight for women make this an event of enormous significance for the labor movement.

Google workers have carried out a strike and out of it, created union—if not yet a union. Will the Google workers recognize this as a labor movement? And will organized labor in the United States be able to embrace Google workers who do so without smothering or strangling them in the conservative labor bureaucracy? Whatever happens, we have had a demonstration of a grassroots workers movement of tremendous potential.

Sparked by Anger at the Company Policies

A New York Times investigation into Google’s handling of sexual misconduct cases sparked the protests. The Times reported that after Google management of learned of credible allegations of sexual harassment by Andy Rubin, the developer of the Android phone—including one of forced oral sex—he left the company with a $90 million settlement. Rubin denies the allegations. Google’s women workers, many indignant and some infuriated by the reports, joined by their male coworkers, began to organize over the issue, and then issued the call for the walkout.

The Google workers demanded:

  • An end to forced arbitration in harassment and discrimination cases; a commitment to end pay and opportunity inequity;
  • A sexual harassment transparency report disclosed to the public;
  • A clear inclusive process for reporting sexual misconduct safely and anonymously;
  • The chief diversity officer to report directly to the CEO and make recommendations to the board of directors;
  • The appointment of an employee representative to the Google board.

The Company’s Response

Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, attempted to identify himself and the company with the walkout. Speaking by web conference at the  DealBook Conference in New York, Pichai said, “Obviously, it’s been a difficult time. There’s anger and frustration in the company. We all feel it. I feel it. At Google we set a high bar and we didn’t live up to our expectations.”

Pichai attempted to deflect anger about the Rubin settlement in 2014 by arguing that the company had made important strikes since then. n his conference appearance, Pichai insisted Google had taken measures to tackle sexual misconduct across the company since Rubin left in 2014. “Let me be clear, these incidents are from a few years ago. We have always as a company, and it’s been important to me … that we draw a hard line on in appropriate behavior,” he said. He alluded to 48 employees who had been terminated after allegations of sexual misconduct, among them 13 senior executives. “But,” he conceded, “moments like this show we didn’t always get it right.”

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Google’s workers seem unlikely to be assuaged by Pichai’s words. They’re demanding to have a voice on the board, new policies, and no more nonsense. At one Google site the protestors could be heard chanting, “Women’s rights are workers’ rights.” Googlers have entered the workers’ movement. And hopefully they will help to change it.

 

Anchoring an Argument

By: October 30, 2018
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Scott McLemee considers Leo R. Chavez's Anchor Babies and The Challenge of Birthright Citizenship, which makes clear how little has been added to the stock of anti-immigrant rhetoric over the past century.

Reports of the forcible separation of parents and children at the border by U.S. immigration authorities tell only part of the story of the violence now being directed against hard-won norms of civil society.

To continue doing harm to children once the risk of long-term damage has been spelled out requires something worse than callous indifference. It verges on the deliberate use of cruelty as a deterrent. But suppose you manage to take as sincere the expressions of concern dragged out of Jeff Sessions by an interviewer earlier this week. It is important nonetheless to consider everything the U.S. attorney general says and does concerning immigration the in light of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which he has called "good for America."

The act established quotas favoring immigrants of Northern European origin while sharply restricting everyone else (or in the case of Asians, excluding them entirely). It was created in response to what Clarence Darrow called, in sarcastic but accurate terms, American "cries in the night of 'race suicide,' 'the rising tide of color,' 'the race is dying out at the top,' and 'torrents of degenerate and defective protoplasm.'"

The United Nations is free to call the detention of children separately from their parents as a violation of human rights. The administration doesn't care, and the AG only wants what's in the best interests of the protoplasm.

Though not the main emphasis by any means, Leo R. Chavez's Anchor Babies and the Challenge of Birthright Citizenship (Stanford University Press) makes very clear how little has been added to the stock of anti-immigrant rhetoric over the past 100 years. The eugenicist sentiments are expressed less openly now, but multiculturalism as a refusal to assimilate makes up the difference. "Although born among us," one nativist complains about immigrant communities, "our general instinctive feeling testifies that they are not wholly of us. So separate has been their social life, due alike to their clannishness and our reserve; so strong have been the ties of race and blood and religion with them; so acute has been the jealousy of their spiritual teachers to our institutions — that we think of them, and speak of them, as foreigners."

The diction probably gives away that this point was made in another era — the author was Francis A. Walker, superintendent of the United States Census of 1870 and 1880 — but the sentiment is as contemporary as hysteria over the impending arrival of sharia law or the specter of "a taco truck on every corner." The alarms raised about alien fertility, criminality and disloyalty haven't really changed in content, even if you don't hear it much about those of Irish or Japanese descent now. A steep decline of birth rates among Latinas over the past decade or so ("both immigrant and native born," Chavez notes) ought to curtail demographic fearmongering, though it hasn't so far.

It is against this backdrop of seemingly perennial nativist obsessions that Chavez depicts the fairly recent emergence of the "anchor baby" trope, added to the American Heritage Dictionary in 2011 with the definition "a child born to a noncitizen mother in a country that grants automatic citizenship to children born on its soil, especially such a child born to parents seeking to secure eventual citizenship for themselves and often other members of their family." This definition was later tweaked to indicate that the expression is derogatory. Among its earlier uses, in the mid-'00s, was to warn that terrorists were coming to America to create sleeper cells disguised as families. (That claim has long since receded back into the fever swamps, along with all those Spanish-Arabic dictionaries supposedly found in roundups of undocumented workers.)

More recently, the term serves as the basis for efforts to revise or repeal the opening sentence of the 14th Amendment: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." It sounds categorical enough. Born in the U.S.A. equals citizen of the U.S.A. The immediate purpose when the amendment following the Civil War was adopted was to establish the citizenship and rights of former slaves, but Chavez shows that it had roots in English common law. Anyone born in the kingdom was automatically a subject of the king, with the exceptions of children of ambassadors, diplomats and alien enemies, who were all under the same jurisdiction as their parents.

"The child of an alien, if born in the country," an article in the American Law Register in 1854 stated, "is as much a citizen as the natural born child of a citizen." In 1898, the U.S. Supreme Court made the continuity explicit by grounding the amendment in "the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory, in the allegiance and under the protection of the country." A few additions to the aforementioned common-law exceptions were made, including "children of members of the Indian tribes owing direct allegiance to their several tribes" — a cunning instance of denying citizenship by pretending to respect another's sovereignty.

Recent efforts to get around the amendment's codification of birthright citizenship stress the reference to claimants being "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States, on the grounds that the parents, as noncitizens, are not so subject. No more than a few seconds of thought are needed to see that this interpretation of the phrase, if valid, would negate the whole force of the amendment — something it really does seem would have been noticed while it was being ratified, or at least when it came up in Supreme Court deliberations for the first time. A foreign national residing on U.S. soil is "subject to the jurisdiction thereof," in the words of the amendment, which goes on to specify that no state can "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction equal protection of the laws." Note the words "any person," used twice — not "any citizen."

"The life of the nation should be a life examined," writes Chavez, and the attempt to delegitimize or whittle away at the principle of birthright citizenship merits the scrutiny of both its logic and its implications.

The effect of the "anchor baby" slur is to define a sector of the population Chavez calls "suspect citizens." Identified as unworthy of the rights enumerated in the U.S. Constitution, they are characterized as "a threat to the nation," making them plausible if not inevitable scapegoats due to an accident of birth — at the hands of "deserving citizens" who have earned their place by virtue of having selected the right parents.

 

Originally published at Inside Higher Education, June 8, 2018.

 

Why I'm Not Voting Green in New Jersey

By: October 29, 2018
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ImageThe case for voting for Green candidate Howie Hawkins for governor of New York is a strong one and were I a New Yorker (I live in New Jersey), I would do so. True, he made a serious error in sharing a platform with Assadist, Islamophobic, and conspiracist Jimmy Dore,1 but there's no doubt that on a whole host of issues Hawkins' position is an admirable left position, far closer to my views than are those of the awful Democrat, Governor Andrew Cuomo.

My friend Dan La Botz has offered an argument in favor of DSA endorsing Hawkins. But the problem with his argument is what he doesn't say, and which, if one applies his same argument to New Jersey, leads to a conclusion I very much reject, namely, that one should vote Green in the upcoming contest for U.S. Senate.2

What Dan's analysis totally omits is any consideration of the crucial spoiler problem. In New York, a vote for Hawkins is a safe choice; there's no spoiler danger. But by not discussing this issue, Dan implies that we don't need to examine the potential spoiler effect in other races. Some suggest we should vote for every Democrat, Dan says, but these people forget that the Democrats have been awful, pursuing neoliberal policies and in many ways facilitating the rise of Trump. Of course they have. But their awfulness is not the only question. We need to consider the question of relative awfulness, and whether our actions, our votes, might contribute to our being saddled with a significantly more awful outcome.

Any decision on how to vote needs to be informed by an analysis of how people's well-being and left prospects will be furthered by one's vote and how they will be harmed. If someone refuses to participate in this analysis, if one is unconcerned with actual consequences, then it's hard to see that they are engaging with politics. Obviously, people performing this analysis may come to different conclusions, but all too often no analysis is performed at all.

Instead we hear things like "Vote your hopes, not your fears." But this is hardly sound advice in other areas of life. I hope that if I sell off my life savings in order to buy lottery tickets, I'll become rich. But my fear of the odds of losing leads me to reject that idea. "Vote for the candidate you really prefer." But if I were really voting for the candidate whose views most closely coincided with my own, I'd write-in myself, and other leftists would write-in themselves. But no one does that because we care about consequences; it's not just a matter of feeling good.

In the November 2016 election, Jill Stein's Green party presidential campaign in swing states had disastrous consequences. (I voted for her, not without second thoughts, in safe New Jersey.) If Green voters in three states – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan – had instead voted for Clinton, the election outcome would have been different. Green voters, as inconsequential as they seem, had it within their power to block the two Republican presidents of the 21st century, both of whom failed to secure a majority of the popular vote. Greens, of course, reject this analysis, but their arguments are unsatisfactory.

Greens tell us all the things that Clinton (and Gore) did wrong. Their list of Democratic party perfidy and plunders is accurate enough – and Democratic party responsibility is immense. But why tell us about what Democrats did when obviously they were not as blameworthy as Republicans? Because when an establishment Democrat complains about the outcome it makes sense to challenge them in terms of what they could have done differently. People are responsible – politically and morally — for their actions, not for the actions of others. But the same applies to the left. The left couldn't control what Clinton (or Trump) would do. But they could control what they would do. And what the Green party and some other components of the left did was fail to provide votes that could have made an immense difference to the world.

Some argue that if Green voters hadn’t voted Green, they wouldn’t have voted at all, or maybe would have voted for some other party – Bush or Trump — so their votes didn't matter. (It’s a sad commentary on the educational efficacy of the Green campaign or its potential to become a significant left vehicle for social change that it attracts people to its ranks whose second choice might have been Bush or Trump.) It is true that if all Green voters would otherwise have been non-voters, then their Green votes had no effect on the outcome. But that doesn’t lessen the moral responsibility of these voters. They still had it within their power to change the outcome of the election from the greater evil to the lesser evil and they chose not to do so. They didn’t create the horrible choices they faced, and they aren’t responsible for what they can’t control. But they could control whether they voted.

What did we lose by voting for Greens in swing states in 2016? For starters, had those voters voted otherwise the United States would still be in the Paris Climate Agreement, the U.S. would still be in the Iran nuclear deal, the U.S. embassy would not be in Jerusalem, the KKK would not be empowered, and the huge tax giveaway to the rich would not have been enacted.

Moreover, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh would not be sitting on the Supreme Court. Trump's Supreme Court is going to entrench partisan gerrymandering, voter suppression, big money in politics, the crushing of unions. All of these things will set back tremendously the long-term struggle for socialism.

Some like to point to Howard Zinn's famous comments about how we shouldn't despair over the loss of the Supreme Court; what ultimately matters is the power of popular movements. But those who quote these remarks conveniently ignore his clear statement favoring strategic voting:

"Yes, there are candidates who are somewhat better than others, and at certain times of national crisis (the Thirties, for instance, or right now) where even a slight difference between the two parties may be a matter of life and death…. Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes—the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth."

This is very different from saying that election outcomes don't matter or that there's never a difference between the Democrats and the Republicans.

The Green vote in swing states hurt the left in another way as well. To all the victims of policies on which Trump has been worse than Clinton would have been, it looks like the left was saying the differences didn't matter. Yes, deportations were bad under Obama, but one looks obtuse to ignore how much worse they are under Trump. And the same goes for the environment, for LGBTQ rights, for affirmative action, for reproductive rights, and on and on. Having these life-and-death matters for so many treated by leftists as not worth voting to prevent can't help but discredit the left.

Against all these costs, what was the benefit of voting Green? The party got 1 percent nationally. It's hard to see the major difference this made compared to garnering 0.5 percent. And, in fact, they might have gotten more votes nationally if they had put their resources into safe blue states rather than spending in the swing states.

To be sure, while voting for awful Democrats may offer us some protection from reaction, it won't promote progressive change. For that we need to build the social movements — rank and file labor organizations, community organizations — that in the short run can force the politicians to come to them and in the longer run can serve as the basis for an effective left ballot line.  But we're nowhere near that yet and the Greens getting 1 percent instead of 0.5 percent doesn't make a dramatic contribution to that goal.

***

So what is the current situation in New Jersey? In the Senate contest the incumbent Democrat is Robert Menendez, an opponent of the Iran nuclear deal3 and an advocate for strangling Cuba, who just narrowly avoided conviction for corruption charges brought by the Obama justice department. He is running against Republican Bob Hugin, a self-financing multi-millionaire drug company executive who made his fortune overcharging cancer patients. He claims to be a moderate Republican, but he seems a sure vote for Trump: he gave two hundred thousand dollars to Trump in 2016, was chair of Trump's NJ finance committee, and a Trump delegate at the Republican convention. He says he would have voted for Kavanaugh. And in the long-shot possibility that the Democrats win some of the lean-Republican Senate races, this seat could be the difference between Democratic control of the Senate or not and thus the difference between being able to block Trump appointments or not.

Right now, the polls show the race to be very close. Menendez seems to be ahead, but in several polls his lead is within the margin of error. The Cook Political Report rates the race a toss-up, while FiveThirtyEight thinks Menendez has a seven out of eight chance of winning (it had given Clinton a 71% chance of winning in 2016). So we are in a situation where the Green party vote could potentially decide whether a Trump supporter wins the Senate in New Jersey, and even who controls the Senate.

The Green party candidate is Madelyn Hoffman. As with Hawkins, her views on most of the political issues of the day are close to mine (though not on Syria, where I find her position awful). We have been at demonstrations together and we have been arrested outside the offices of Senators Booker and Menendez together. The NJ Green party has been a vital part of progressive activism in the state. But Hoffman's Green party Senate campaign in my view is extremely ill-advised. More precisely, while her campaign may have made sense back in the summer, before the polls showed a very tight race, today the campaign poses a real danger.4

Like Jill Stein, Hoffman supports what is variously called instant run-off voting or ranked-choice voting, a voting system that would negate the spoiler effect. This is commendable, but it is not enough to favor alternative voting systems; it is necessary to offer ways for us to address the spoiler problem in the meantime, until we get a new voting system. Sadly, neither Stein nor Hoffman have done this. Stein went out of her way to refuse to acknowledge that there was a meaningful difference between Clinton and Trump (obviously, there's no spoiler problem, no danger of getting the worse evil, if the two major candidates are equally evil).

In September 2016, an interviewer asked Jill Stein whether a voter in a swing state should vote for Clinton to stop Trump? She replied “absolutely not.” Even if this allows Trump to take the White House? Stein continued with her stock response: “I will feel terrible if Trump gets elected and I will feel terrible if Clinton gets elected.” Trump and Clinton, she said, are just “two ways to commit suicide.” “I would rather go down fighting than to allow myself to commit suicide by voting for” either Trump or Clinton.

In return for short runs losses and long run losses, third party advocates point to the long-term educational benefits of their campaigns. But if we think education is key, surely we need to be conveying the truth. The problem is that if the Greens in 2016 had told the truth, there was the danger that people would draw the reasonable conclusion that they ought to vote for the lesser evil. So they obscured the actual differences between the parties.

In New Jersey, too, the Greens never seriously confront the spoiler problem. If climate change is really the tremendous threat to humankind that the Greens claim – and I believe it is – then allowing the victory of a Trump supporter over a supporter of the Paris Climate Agreement is extremely problematic. And the same is true across a host of issues. There are serious differences that the Green party elides. And rather than pointing out which is the greater evil, the NJ Greens' recent mailing of their accomplishments highlights a single demonstration focused on one of the major party candidates: they protested at a Hillary Clinton fundraiser for Menendez.

Notice, that in some cases it is possible to argue that a left third party campaign pushes the Democrat to take a better position. So Howie Hawkins, for example, claims his presence in the 2014 gubernatorial race pushed Cuomo to the left on fracking. The causation here is not easy to prove – it's certainly not as clear as the evidence that Bernie Sanders' primary challenge in 2016 pushed Clinton to adopt a host of more left positions in her platform. But in any event, it's hard to see how this argument is relevant to this year's New Jersey Senate race. If the Greens succeed in taking enough votes from Menendez that he loses, then obviously this will not move Hugin left. But even if Menendez wins, there is no evidence that he has taken or modified positions in response to the Green campaign.

How can we ever get radical change, some ask, if we never want to risk harming Democrats? Yes, when the Greens actually have a chance of winning, when they are polling 30 or 40 percent, they will need to take that risk. But here we're talking about a party polling 1 percent and hoping against hope to increase that a bit.

In other areas of life, we understand that in an imperfect world one has to make compromises. I wish I never had to buy products from companies that operate on the profit motive, let alone that pay their employees horrible wages, or whose workers are not unionized. A tiny fraction of folks opt out of the cash economy – but most do not. Likewise, if you ask a non-pacifist leftist whether violence can ever be justified, they reply that we wish social change could all come from nonviolent actions, but that's not always possible.  Most leftists don't condemn people who make those compromises. So why condemn the compromise that says that while we are working, organizing, and fighting for social change, we sometimes have to reluctantly cast our ballots for awful candidates?

***

Does Menendez "deserve" our vote? Of course not. He is totally unworthy. But I'm not voting for him as a favor to him, I'm voting for him as a favor to me and to all the people in New Jersey and beyond who will be better off having him in office than his Republican opponent. In the same way, when I participate in the capitalist economy, it's not because I feel that Exxon and Google "deserve" my support, but because my doing so is currently necessary to survive.

I am not "endorsing" Menendez, I am not "supporting" Menendez. I will be voting for him, while working as hard as possible to oppose his rotten policies. I like the formulation of Adolph Reed in 2016 in urging leftists to cast their ballots for Clinton: "Vote for the Lying Neoliberal Warmonger." My slogan is "Vote for Mendacious Menendez. Then Work Like Hell to Fight His Awful Positions."

Notes

1. The NYC chapter of the International Socialist Organization rescinded its endorsement of the Hawkins-Lee ticket over this issue; while others urged "critical support." One can of course vote for someone – as I urge below – without endorsing them.

2. As an aside, let me note that I don't agree with Dan's claim about the impossibility of the Democratic Party being captured by the left. All the arguments he adduces could have been made just as well about the Republican Party, and yet that Party – once firmly in the control of the Republican establishment — was taken over by Donald Trump. Sure, the centrist Democratic party establishment has lots of power and rigs the system against leftist challengers. But no one believed that Sanders could do as well as he did. He was able to raise money on a scale that refuted simplistic views of "what capital wants." And, if, for example, he had been able to win over more African Americans, all the super-delegates and all the Debbie Wasserman Schultzian manipulations in the world wouldn't have been able to keep him from winning the nomination – or at least would have been no more successful in keeping him from winning the nomination than the Jeb Bush establishment was able to block Trump from securing the Republican nomination. It's not that I'm saying the Democratic Party is subject to capture; it's just that I'm no longer willing to accept a priori arguments about its impossibility. Given all of our erroneous political predictions of the past, I feel we all could use a little humility in trying to predict the future.

3. Though even here, Menendez is better than Trump; he opposed the deal but also opposed the U.S. withdrawal from it.

4. The same applies to the one New Jersey Green party contest for the U.S. House of Representatives. The challenge is not being made in a safe Democratic district, but in the 7th district, where Democrat Tom Malinowski has a slight edge against Republican Leonard Lance. (FiveThirtyEight rates it a "lean Democrat" [10/28/18]; Cook Political Report says it's a "Republican toss-up" [10/23/18]). This is one of the districts important for the Democrats to flip if they are to gain control of the House.

 

Stephen R. Shalom is a member of the New Politics editorial board. 

 

Journalists Are Calling Trump’s Caravan Claims ‘Evidence-Free’: It’s Worse Than That

By: October 25, 2018
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Image

As the GOP’s fears of a progressive wave in November grow, Donald Trump has made it his personal mission to make everyone else afraid, too.

Over the past few week’s he’s been telling evermore fantastical tales of dangerous riffraff inching their way up to the U.S. border.

In reality, there is a caravan of Honduran migrants — fleeing violence and economic strife so bad that they’d risk our own horrific family separation policies — making its way through Mexico. Traveling in the thousands has helped protect the group from the usual dangers of border-crossing, like getting lost or robbed on the way.

Meanwhile, the media has been reporting on Trump’s response.

He’s called them “criminals.” They’re not. They’re desperate men, women, and children forced to flee their homes, many of whom have legally applied for asylum in Mexico.

He’s accused them of being paid for by the Democrats, to increase votes in the midterm elections. They’re not. They’re people fleeing death who, when asked about this by a reporter following the caravan, said they didn’t even know what “the Democrats” meant. (Not to mention that non-citizens can’t vote.)

And recently, he’s warned of “unknown Middle Easterners” in the group.

Reporters from the progressive Mother Jones to the mainstream New York Times assure us these claims are “without evidence.”

As someone who studied journalism myself, I have to say the journalists who stop there are doing the American public a disservice. “Without evidence” leaves the door open to the possibility of evidence. That is to say, these things could be true, but he hasn’t given us any proof.

But we know that isn’t the case. It’s our duty to say flat out: These aren’t just lies, they’re fantasies. They don’t deserve an iota of consideration.

Beyond being unwilling to call out obvious lies, they’re leaving out any reporting on the impact of these words from the president of the United States.

These are lies and they are serving a purpose: to stoke racism and fear among his base ahead of the elections.

Consider closely what Trump said in his latest remarks: “unknown Middle Easterners.” He didn’t say Middle Easterners who are “extremists” or even “affiliated with extremist groups.” He’s sending the message that any and all Middle Easterners are dangerous.

This isn’t an accident. He didn’t just forget to use some of his favorite words.

And by letting that phrase sit in a fact-checking article, criticized only for its “lack of evidence,” what journalists are telling Americans is: No, you don’t have to be afraid, because there are probably not Middle Easterners in this group.

It begs the question: if there were, would your fear of them be totally reasonable?

Journalists have a duty to give context, not just to report on whether a sound bite contains truth on a sliding scale. It’s unacceptable not to unpack the racist and xenophobic claims that come out of the mouths of the most powerful.

In fact, it’s journalistic malpractice.

Domenica Ghanem is the media manager at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Originally posted at Otherwords.org. 

Why New York City’s teachers should vote “no” on the proposed contract – By Dan Lupkin

By: October 24, 2018
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ImageNote: While teachers in Los Angeles Unified School District have voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike, members of the largest teachers union local in the US, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) in New York City, are debating a proposed contract settlement. In this guest blog, UFT activist Dan Lupkin explains why he wants the proposed contract to be voted down. We invite other opinions on this debate underway in the UFT. – Lois Weiner

The best way to get laughed out of the UFT Delegate Assembly is to ask about lowering class size limits: “The City will never buy it.” “It’s that or your raises, nobody is willing to give anything up to achieve that” etc… I certainly know teachers who would be willing to make some trades for lower class size limits, but more to the point, there’s no reason they should have to; we CAN demand more, we just have to be willing to back up our demands with action. At those same Delegate Assemblies, we frequently hear about the heroic Founders of the union, and how the UFT membership went out on strike (illegally) to win the rights we currently enjoy. That we have class size limits at all is testament to the power of the militancy of the UFT rank-and-file who were willing to take risks and picket, agitate, and strike for the good of the union, their students, and public education as a whole. Suggest that we do the same today to lower those limits for the first time in 50+ years and you will be dismissed as a deluded radical.

Which brings us to the contract. There seems to be a misunderstanding about what MORE means when we say that this is not the contract UFT members or NYC schools deserve. Some UFTers jump to the “defense” of the negotiating committee, arguing that they did they best they could under the circumstances, take it easy on them. Others places have it worse, they say, stop complaining. The city was never going to give us anything more, and they are going to be annoyed with us if we reject this contract, we might as well approve it. I am personally grateful that UFT members gave up so much of their own time to work on negotiating this contract, and I have no reason to think they did anything other than the best they could under the circumstances.

The problem runs much deeper than anything the negotiation committee could address: it was as though those +/- 400 people were out there on their own, with no support from their hundreds of thousands of colleagues.  No rally, no march, no occupation of City Hall, no credible strike threat much less a strike certification vote. The power of workers like us lies in our labor, and if our employer is completely sure that our leadership will not leverage the potential withholding of that labor and the people power of 200,000 members, why WOULD the city cut us a better deal, regardless of how big the city’s surplus is? You can’t blame someone you’re negotiating with for trying to get the best deal possible from their end- if we want a better result, we’re going to have to apply more pressure.

The core issue here is conciliatory bargaining- it is taken as a given by UFT leadership and their very cozy counterparts in the NYCDOE (New York City Department of Education) that the slice of pie we got in the 60’s is all the pie we’re going to get, and contracts are just a question of how we want that slice of pie apportioned; in fact, we are frequently reminded that if we make a fuss, we’re liable to lose the slice of pie we already have. It’s rarely discussed at the Delegate Assembly, at district meetings, or in official UFT communications that militancy was how our slice of pie was achieved in the first place, and if we want more, that’s how we’re going to have to get it.

I am willing to go along with the idea that a fairly limp commitment to better enforce the current (fairly elastic) class size limits was the best the negotiating committee could do; what was their leverage? Teachers across the country have been making huge gains in the last year or so by taking it to the streets via collective action with parents and community members backing them up in the #RedForEd movement. Their employers didn’t want to give them a bigger slice of pie any more than ours do, and are certainly no more sympathetic to organized public sector workers than NYCDOE is, but they ended up with a bigger slice of pie because they demanded it in a way that could not be ignored. The tactics and issues have varied a bit, but in all cases, educators have brought home the goods (largely from austerity-obsessed, public education hating Republican politicians) by getting out in the streets with parents largely supporting them because they were standing up for the kids, for themselves, and for public education at large.

So let’s take, for example, class size reductions. Parents and educators consistently rate it near the top of their priorities in the NYC school survey, and extensive research supports them as one of the most effective tools we have to improve education outcomes. Few people need convincing of this, since expensive private schools and public schools in wealthy suburbs would never accept 1st grade classes with 32 students (or more) the way we have here.  The only constituency likely to push back against this is politicians, who do NOT want to be on the wrong side of a city full of mobilized constituents.

A genuine across the board class size reduction would be expensive for sure; our schools have been underfunded for decades, and many new school buildings would be required, it is certainly not an easy lift. I would, in fact, say it’s impossible using the bargaining techniques that have produced the give-back laden contracts of the last few decades, in the same way that it is impossible to lift something heavy with both hands tied behind one’s back. Those bonds are self-imposed, let’s break through them! We have 200,000 UFT members and more than a million students, many of whom have people in their lives who would be willing to come out onto the streets to support the betterment of education in this city.

The UFT has a massive infrastructure that purports to get parents and community groups involved, what if we used it to mobilize the people of New York to take direct action to improve our schools? Reduced class size is an issue that unites educators, parents, and students; imagine if we utilized people power to grab a bigger piece of the pie. Asking our negotiating committee to achieve that sort of result absent support from the rest of their colleagues (and the city) IS impossible: what if we came out en masse to support them? I think the early UFT strikers, who established the first class size limits in this city, would be proud. More importantly, we’ll have brought back an undeniable win to the community, to our colleagues, and to our students.

Dan Lupkin is UFT Chapter Leader of P.S. 58 in Brooklyn.

He Got the Story

By: October 23, 2018
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ImageSeymour Hersh. Reporter: A Memoir. Knopf, 2018. 368 pp. 

Writing in 1940, George Orwell opined in a review of a Bertrand Russell book that “we have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” Much the same can be said about the more than fifty-year career of journalist Seymour Hersh, whose pioneering exposés of the lies of the Great Powers report and affirm facts that follow Orwell’s dictum.

His memoir Reporter showcases Hersh as nothing less than journalism’s energizer bunny, unstoppable in exposing not only the My Lai massacre in Vietnam — for which his accumulated freelance pieces won him a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 1970 — but for essential information breaking the Watergate scandal cover-up and the Nixon administration’s development of offensive chemical and bacteriological weapons.

Reporter works its way through a conga line of miscreant US presidents, from Kennedy to Bush (though Obama and Trump get scant attention) and the venality of Henry Kissinger, of whom Hersh says, “the man lied the way most people breathed.” We’re told about the excesses and connections of a major West Coast mob fixer, the domestic spying efforts of the CIA in direct violation of its governing charter, the sexual abuse by soldiers of male Iraqi inmates at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, and the incapacity of the bulk of a credulous US press corps to do more than cozy up to administration sources and miss the big stories.

This laggard media practice isn’t new, of course. Nation editor Carey McWilliams despaired in the early 1950s over how “large majorities can be manipulated by carefully timed headlines, revelations, and a thoroughly unscrupulous exploitation of the silence and secrecy surrounding many phases of government.” For some five decades, Hersh has strived to do better.

Hersh’s story then, as he tells it, is among the world’s lengthiest curriculum vitae. It’s all about the work, and not much about the man. We’re told he was born in 1937, one of two sets of twins born to post-World War I Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. In his late teens, he ran his father’s micro dry cleaning plant on Chicago’s South Side while going to college at the same time. We’re told he’s married and with two grown children, but the rest of the memoir is all about his work — at Chicago’s legendary City News, then the Chicago Tribune, United Press International in South Dakota, and the Associated Press.

Hustling as a media flack for Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential bid, his revelations about McCarthy are a tell-all that should disabuse any former “Be Clean for Gene” warrior that McCarthy was in any way an improvement over the run of mainstream Democrats on anything beyond slamming the Vietnam War. His work at the Washington Post, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and freelancing is all there, too.

A stint writing screen plays in Hollywood taught him that “it’s all about character,” though his own character abstracted from his work ethic can’t be easily inferred from the memoir. Beyond a drive to be first with a scoop, there’s no person presented here beyond the quarrelsome, even splenetic, proverbial Peck’s Bad Boy in every reporting job he held. His wrangles with top editors including the New York Times’ Abe Rosenthal were legendary, all the while being whipsawed by a mélange of bosses who were either dismissive or supportive of him — sometimes both, as with Rosenthal and the Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee. His narrative is at its best a testament to how stories should be investigated and told. Without his having to say so, the recent New York Times exposé of the seamy origins of the Trump family fortune aptly follows in that tradition.

The largest single section of the book details his ferreting out the real story of the My Lai massacre. His descriptions of GIs wantonly skewering small Vietnamese children with bayonets bring the horror back viscerally, and his fevered hunt for Lieutenant William Calley is a wonder. Calley was later dubbed the chief perpetrator of the war crimes despite ample evidence that he was the fall guy for more senior officers derelict in self-servingly viewing the slaughter as a firefight.

Not only did he expose the massacre, but he located Calley, then hidden away by the military in senior officer bachelors’ quarters at the military’s sprawling Fort Benning, Georgia, base. “I was stunned,” Hersh writes about the result of his tortuous hunt, “a suspected mass murderer hidden away in quarters for the army’s most elite.”

Such masterly investigative and sleuthing justified his conclusion that Calley was a scapegoat for a hypocritical military rule abjuring torture as policy while permitting it factually and blaming such massacres on lower-ranking “bad apples.” The suspicion that the policy was in fact to tolerate such horrors is inescapable, though Hersh never says as much.

In this bizarro-world war, he noted how “many navy pilots, convinced that their targets in Vietnam were not worth the risks involved, were eager to get out of the service as quickly as possible. It was a story that no one at the top wanted to hear.” The reality, as numerous flyers told him, was that just 10 percent of bombs dropped actually hit their intended targets, a figure that made bombing itself not only a hell for noncombatant Vietnamese but — given flack from the North’s anti-aircraft batteries — organized suicide for pilots.

If Hersh learned one golden operating rule, it’s this: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” After a series of his was, as is still the custom, scrupulously fact-checked by the New Yorker, resulting in damaging but exacting exposes that mooted any libel threats, “I’ve been an avid supporter of fact-checking ever since.” He likewise adopted the savvy credo, “Read before you write.”

Culling sources also became a key piece of his modus operandi. “I learned early in my career,” he writes, “that the way to get someone to open up was to know what I was talking about and ask questions that showed it. Humor and persistence often would work, … but being threatening or aggressive never would.”

One of his trade secrets was tracking retired senior generals and admirals, a class of people beyond the military’s’ reach to punish for telling tales. Insider sources “quickly became more than sources; they were friends and stayed friends after they left government.” Often criticized for his voluminous use of unnamed sources, he made it a practice of revealing source names to every editor he’s worked with, with the consent of the sources.

One such source had been a Middle East CIA station chief. Asked why other CIA operatives had such apparent contempt for the FBI that sharing information was a non-practice, even after 9/11, “[h]is answer stunned me,” Hersh writes. “”Don’t you get it, Sy?” he’s told. “The FBI catches bank robbers. We rob banks.”

In writing 1983’s The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, his tell-all book on the rest of the press’s sanctified warlord Henry Kissinger, he added “Find people who know the truth, or a truth, and let the facts tell the story.” While the book was shunned by the mainstream press whether or not it was read at all, it got accolades from Noam Chomsky, who called it “really fabulous, apart from the feeling that one is crawling through a sewer. “ That and reporting on Kissinger for the Times, Hersh claims, kept Kissinger out of any Reagan White House appointment in 1984.

Even after 9/11, when arch-neocon Vice President Dick Cheney was orchestrating the undermining of constitutionally required congressional oversight of foreign affairs, Hersh had sources willing to talk about “operations, planned and ongoing — and only those operations — that were contrary to American values, or what was left of them.” Still, Hersh had to be selective about what he used, lest he risk Cheney’s unearthing critics. Much as today with a leaking Trump administration, sources used Hersh “as a conduit to have their say without any risk” to their careers.

In his work there’s no thick description beyond what he is told or dug up, the kind of color and texture so richly done by Orwell or Clancy Segal, whose in-depth depictions of working-class life are classics. Hersh’s strengths are elsewhere: they lay in what he’s heard, read, gotten sources to tell him and confirmed. While much of the information had to be on background so as not to expose sources, it was so well-grounded that it made its own mark, particularly in a field in which mainstream reporting consisted in large measure of aping administration spokespersons and retouching press releases.

In these ventures Hersh was a pre-eminent outlier. Among his influences was the independent journalist I.F. Stone, saying he “was wowed by Stone’s ability to take on, and debunk, the official accounts of events annunciated by the Johnson administration. There was no mystery to how Stone did it. He overworked every journalist in Washington.” (It was Stone who said, “All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.’’) Hersh describes the Pentagon press room as “stunningly sedate,” with “the earmarks of a high-end social club” and a press claque too ready to repeat whatever pap the administration handed out that day. Its line was always the Pentagon’s.

Keynoting a conference of the American Civil Liberties Union, Hersh told the crowd, “There is a corporate mentality out there, but there is also a tremendous amount of self-censorship among the press. It’s like a disease.”

His research is indefatigable. Even in My Lai, where he is justly revered for relentlessly hunting facts, working sources and breaking the story, he also makes clear that he built his case on earlier work, especially that of Times reporter Harrison Salisbury’s dispatches from North Vietnam. While widely assumed by the growing anti-war movement that US war policy was not only unjust and unnecessary but murderous, he turned that subtext into text — even before the release of the Pentagon Papers that blew the lid off of every government war lie.

Piggybacking on Elinor Langer’s research in Science magazine on the Pentagon’s chemical and bacterial warfare (CBW) program, Hersh was also instrumental in targeting the Defense Department’s CBW programs, which were aimed not as defensive measures as claimed, but for offensive forays. He also broke the story that Arkansas’s Pine Bluff Arsenal in the late 1960s was storing bombs filled with anthrax and other poisons as well as anti-crop agents “especially tailored for crops grown in Cuba.”

As his reputation for exposing government perfidies grew, so did his battery of sources. While his bosses at the Times and Washington Post were queasy about his against-the-grain reporting, “more and more officials on the inside were talking to me and knew I would deal honestly with the information they shared and protect their identity.”

It’s never clear whether this self-described “fast-talking, hot-headed operator” thinks that bad policy leads to monstrous results, or that the policies have intrinsic value and can be separated from the odious outcomes by a more righteous adhesion to stated rules of war. Were the massacres of peasants in Vietnam the logical outcome of imperialist penetration, or could closer government oversight of troop actions have made for a less barbarous outcome? Marxists would say the latter is nonsense, and that the slaughter of populations is implicit in how a counter-guerilla offensive by imperial forces is waged. But humane rules of war seem to be Hersh’s lodestar.

Similarly, his coverage of Israel’s developing nuclear weapons made him a host of enemies, but his own defense is problematic, as when he writes, “My point was not that Israel should not have the bomb but that the sub-rosa American support for it was known throughout the Middle East and made a mockery of American efforts to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons in Pakistan and other nations with undeclared nuclear ambitions.”

Would imperialism in Hersh’s view be defensible if the neocons surrounding George W. Bush or the neoliberals in the Obama brain trust were amenable to giving the wise men in the CIA more say in policy? Or if a more inquisitive, less subservient press corps dominated news cycles? We don’t know his thinking, though his comment that he was “only interested in CIA operations or any intelligence activities that were stupid or criminal” leaves the door open for great power abuses that are neither. By that yardstick, Russian support for Assad or US backing of the Saudis can be justified as rational and excusable, no matter the body count.

Hersh admits he was whipsawed between reporting the truth as he knew it and protecting the careers of his sources — a problem plaguing him throughout his career, forcing him like Bob Woodward to rely on unnamed sources. On the administration’s venality, Hersh admits to being

"more than a little frightened. I had no idea of the extent to which the men running the war would lie to protect a losing hand. I was dealing with a dilemma that reporters who care and work hard constantly face; America needed to know the truth about the Vietnam War, but I had made a commitment to an officer [his source, then a Navy captain] of integrity."

Hersh stayed in touch with that source for decades, who retired as a three-star admiral, and only revealed his name after the man’s death. Adding to the difficulty was a Defense Department edict requiring officers to inform the department of all requests for information by reporters, a sure way to freeze out dissenting views, such as there were, from the public.

Hersh also prides himself on staying best buds with his informers for decades, something his mentor Stone refused to do, short- or long-term. As Stone put it about a New York Times Washington bureau chief who played medicine ball with Herbert Hoover regularly at the White House, “That’s enough to kill off a good reporter. … You can’t get intimate with officials and maintain your independence.” Even good guys, Stone believed, “will use you.”

Does Hersh get everything right? Who does? Even as astute a chronicler as Stone could get it wrong, as in his early insistence that it was South Korean provocations that sparked the Korean peninsular war and not dirty dealings from all sides — including, as he would later suggest, dueling intrigues from Truman and Stalin. Despite Hersh’s remorseless heresy hunting of every administration since Kennedy’s, there’s no hint that the needs of US-based businesses shape and often determine domestic and foreign policy.

Despite his interest in Gulf and Western’s perfidies as performed by then-head Charles Bluhdorn, “the dirtiest mogul in town,” Hersh has more to say about a culture of greed and malpractice than about the logic of capital. With his eyes on Washington’s misdeeds and on occasion — when editors permit — Wall Street’s avarice but not its systemic prerogatives, he’s more of a humorless court jester than a rebel. In whose interest does the governing elite serve? Hersh won’t tell us. Where is his curiosity about diagnosing and exposing a system that requires victims? He doesn’t do that.

His division of labor makes him look — penetratingly but partially — elsewhere. His exposures of Bluhdorn’s sharp practices are characterological, not systemic. Gulf and Western had bad, self-serving leadership: end of discussion. Taking in Hersh’s work practice is like watching a Punch and Judy show; you catch a miscreant performance but never see the puppeteer.

Even on the stage on which he performs so well, Hersh can stumble. He holds that Syria’s minority Alewite government did not use nerve gas against rebels — this despite claims from the United Nations and other credible sources to the contrary that chemical bombs were used. In a late June 2018 interview with the BBC on the destruction by chemical explosion of the town of Kan Sheikhoun, Hersh insisted that stored chlorine, and not a sarin or chlorine bomb, was responsible for the devastation:

“All I can tell you,” he says in the interview, “is that the American intelligence community report — I wish I could flash it here — but the American intelligence community has been very clear that there’s no evidence that the Russians, that the Syrians, the regime used a chlorine weapon because there is no such thing. Chlorine exists. You bomb. Chlorine gets out there.

Stephen Shalom’s in-depth reconstruction of the controversy over the use or non-use of Sarin gas as an offensive weapon effectively demolishes Hersh’s claims.

Hersh also praises dictator Bashar al-Assad as someone with “integrity” because he never lied to Sy. As yet, Hersh has written nothing on Kurdish independence efforts, popular civilian and secular democratic resistance to both jihadist terrorists in the north and the Assadist regime now in control of most of Syria, and intent on seizing the land of many of the more than one million Syrians displaced by the fighting. The operative word “all” in I.F. Stone’s dictum that “all governments lie” means the US can’t be disparaged as the world’s lone malefactor.

Still, we internationalists who count Assad among the more despicable tyrants of the present age shouldn’t be too hard on Hersh. He can get it wrong, too. Yet throughout his career he’s shouldered a broad and brave consistency, adopting in effect what Orwell said so well in Homage to Catalonia: “Every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency.” Hersh’s career is nothing if not a life lived working to take the media out of that grim equation. 

Michael Hirsch is a New York-based labor and political writer and a New Politics editorial board member.

Originally posted at Jacobin. 

Hard Questions in Israel-Palestine

By: October 22, 2018
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ImageJamie Stern-Weiner, ed. Moment of Truth: Tackling Israel-Palestine's Tought Questions. OR Books, 2018. 518 pp. 

The fact that, after fifty years of Palestinian support efforts, the Israeli occupation is more entrenched than ever should inspire some intellectual humility among those hawking solutions to the conflict, notes Jamie Stern-Weiner in the introduction to his edited collection Moment of Truth: Tackling Israel-Palestine’s Toughest Questions. It is humbling as well to read through the volume, with more than seventy essays and rejoinders by more than fifty different authors, from almost every one of which something new can be learned.

The book is organized into fifteen chapters, most of them containing contending views on crucial questions regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict. Stern-Weiner acknowledges up front that his own political views influenced his choice of questions to explore. He believes that “an end to the occupation would represent an important milestone” in the Palestinian quest for freedom, that “the occupation’s demise is a prerequisite for more far-reaching, if still always and only partial, advances toward justice,” and that the occupation “is at present the most ambitious objective around which Palestinians and their supporters might effectively organize.” But he has not insisted on ideological uniformity: many of his contributors disagree with his assessment of the occupation.

Obviously, one cannot include coverage of every controversy in a single volume. Regarding one omitted topic, the Palestinian right of return, Stern-Weiner writes: “of all the issues at the core of the dispute, the refugee question is the one on which least concrete debate has unfolded, and there does not at this point appear to be much new to say about it.”

This seems an unfortunate choice, given that there are contending views on the scope of the right of return as well as on the practicality of implementing it (with, for example, Salman Abu Sitta having offered an argument in favor of feasibility). In addition to questioning this editorial decision, there are times when one wishes that a contributor to one of the debates had offered her or his views on a different controversy.

But the range of topics covered in the book is broad and engaging: the role of the Palestinian authority, East Jerusalem, whether the settlements make a two-state solution impossible, Gaza, armed struggle versus nonviolence, the role of Hamas, lessons of the intifadas and the possibility of a third intifada, the role of Palestinian citizens of Israel, Palestinian economic development, whether human rights are an effective weapon, whether apartheid is a useful comparison, whether Palestine still inspires the world, and what lessons can be drawn from the most relevant historical case of Israeli territorial withdrawal (featuring an extended essay by Norman Finkelstein on the Sinai pullback during the Carter administration).

The exchange on the settlements between Shaul Arieli and Gideon Levy was particularly thought-provoking. Levy, a one-state advocate, states: “The two-state solution was and remains the most reasonable, just, and sensible historic compromise. Two peoples fighting for one piece of land: justice mandates partition. There is only one problem with this solution: it can no longer be implemented.”

The reason it cannot be implemented, argues Levy, is the settlers: “The settlers have won. One needs to recognize this, however painful it may be. More than 600,000 settlers will not now or in the future be removed from their homes. Yet without such mass removal, there is no viable Palestinian state, and more important, there is no justice.”

Why no justice? To “leave a single settlement intact … would amount to rewarding those who have undermined international law and violated it so crudely.” After all, “[i]f the settlements are a violation of international law, as they are, then they should be undone, to the last one. Crimes are crimes. There is no retroactive legitimation—not for murder, not for rape, and not for land grab.”

But there is a major problem with Levy’s argument. Won’t the same injustice prevail under a one-state solution? If the settlers cannot be removed to achieve two states, how will they be removed for one state? And if they are left in place for one state, won’t that be inherently unjust?

Jessica Montell, former executive director of the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, in her chapter cites a report by the Palestinian human rights organization Al Haq arguing that any land swap in the context of a diplomatic agreement violates the international law of belligerent occupation. But would a democratic unitary state that permitted the settlers to remain be any more consistent with the law of belligerent occupation?

To be sure, some one-state advocates would urge expropriating the settlers once the single state has been established, just the way you would restore property taken by any other thief. But is it plausible that BDS and other pressure would not be strong enough to get Israel to remove 600,000 settlers, but would be strong enough to get Israelis to accept a solution that leads to the removal of the same 600,000 settlers, as well as giving up their state?

Under Arieli’s two-state scheme, fewer than 150,000 settlers would need to be removed; the rest would stay in place, with their land swapped for land of equal quality inside the Green line. This is obviously a more achievable goal than removing all the settlers. But there are two serious problems with his proposal.

First, while he calls for the evacuation of the Ariel settlement, which is far from the Green line and protrudes deeply into and renders unviable any Palestinian state, he retains Ma’ale Adumim, which wreaks similar havoc in the greater Jerusalem area, denying the Palestinian state contiguity in its most important urban area. (Jan de Jong’s essay emphasizes the importance of the urban core to a Palestinian state.)

Gershon Shafir, in his recent book A Half Century of Occupation, has suggested that Ma’ale Adumim could be retained, but without its hinterland and the Mishor Adumim industrial zone. This, he argues, would not require the evacuation of any more settlers than under Arieli’s plan, but would permit a contiguous Palestinian state.

The second problem with Arieli’s proposal is that he says he designed it by taking account of the positions of both sides and then seeking a compromise between them. But he judges the Palestinian position by what Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has accepted as if this reflects actual Palestinian sentiment. However, as Diana Buttu notes, “the president rules by decree; the prime minister has never received confirmation; the parliament has not met in a decade and has not passed a single piece of legislation in eleven years; and the terms of the president, parliament, and municipal councilors expired years ago.”

Nathan J. Brown comments that “few Palestinians regard the PA as anything more than a stale and slowly decaying administrative body.” Palestinian institutions “make little policy, pursue no coherent strategy, expound no compelling moral vision, are subject to no oversight, and inspire no collective spirit.” Basing a peace plan on the positions of such a compromised and unrepresentative leadership is not likely to result in a stable solution.

Of course, divided and autocratic leadership causes other problems for Palestinians as well. As Wendy Pearlman notes in her comment on the exchange over armed struggle versus nonviolent action, whichever approach one follows, it is necessary to have political structures that can support acting rationally, strategically, and effectively — structures that are currently absent.

The armed struggle debate is interesting in its own right. None of the disputants call for unilateral Palestinian disarmament in Gaza, agreeing that Hamas’s weapons do deter Israel to some degree. But several note that deterrence is not enough for Gaza, which needs to end the siege and the status quo. It remains hard to see how an armed strategy as recommended by As’ad Abukhalil — particularly one that eschews civilian targets, as he also urges — can pressure, let alone defeat, Israel.

Bashir Saade argues that nonviolence

can work only in very particular circumstances. It was effective in India because the British Empire had, by that point, a serious deficit of legitimacy both internationally and among certain sectors of British society, creating a moral climate that Gandhi understood and exploited. By contrast, Israel’s existence as a state enjoys broad international legitimacy. Even if nonviolent resistance had the potential to end the occupation and dismantle the settlements, therefore, it would not be able to secure a resolution of the conflict on terms which reflect the full spectrum of Palestinian demands, including the implementation of the Palestinian refugees’ right of return and an end to discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel. The only possible route to such a peace is armed struggle, which might force Israel to reconsider, albeit gradually and incrementally, its ambitions.

I don’t find this very persuasive. Saade says that successful nonviolence is exceptional, but has there ever been a case where outside military force from a vastly weaker party has caused a state to fundamentally modify its domestic structures? Would full-on guerrilla war from outside (or inside) lead Israel to “gradually and incrementally” end its discrimination against its Palestinian minority? South Africa, where the dominant group was less than 10 percent of the population, is not at all analogous.

This book was published before the weekly nonviolent marches to the Gaza fence. Some will argue that those actions prove the futility of nonviolent resistance. But even with very unfocused tactical leadership, the marches — and Israel’s barbaric response — have generated more sympathy for the Palestinian cause than has any military action.

Hamas continues to proclaim its commitment to armed struggle (though Gazan political scientist Usama Antar points out that “its support for armed struggle has for some time been merely rhetorical.” Challenged as to why the organization cracked down on the rocket fire of other groups, Ahmed Yousef, a leading Hamas official, explains:

Who fires the rockets is not important; the rockets’ technical and strategic effectiveness is. Hamas rockets are more technically advanced and fired at military targets in response to Israeli aggression or incursions. Salafist rockets are unsophisticated, and although rarely causing damage are recklessly fired without obvious cause or target, outside of the collective resistance strategy.

Given how few Israeli military targets were struck by Hamas’s rockets, however, it’s hard to see this as anything but an acknowledgment of the futility of all rocket fire from Gaza. That said, Nathan Thrall offers a compelling case that Hamas can be part of — indeed must be part of — any solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

The exchange between Daniel Seidemann and Yoaz Hendel on whether Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem is irreversible provides much useful information. But, as Rami Nasrallah and Lior Lehrs note in their contributions, attention should be focused on the “Open City” proposal, first advanced by Faisal Husseini in the 1980s and still the official Palestinian Liberation Organization position, under which, “notwithstanding the political division of the city, Jerusalem would remain a single entity under an ‘umbrella authority,’ with freedom of movement across the city.”

The various contributions on human rights explore the tension between political opposition to occupation and legal defense of human rights. It is interesting to see the evolution in the positions taken by Israeli human rights organizations, almost all of which today consider the occupation itself a human rights violation.

There’s much more one could say about the articles in this book, but these brief comments should give some idea of the rich material included here. By encouraging us to eschew glib analyses, the volume makes a real contribution to those working for justice in Israel-Palestine. It deserves a wide readership.

Originally posted at Jacobin.

The Enduring Importance of Arthur Miller: The Price and The Hook

By: October 21, 2018
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ImageSeventy-two years after his initial Broadway success with All My Sons and 14 years after his death, Arthur Miller continues to cast a long shadow over theater in the United States. His plays are staples of high school drama clubs, college and university theater departments and regional theaters around the country, and his best-known works – Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, All My Sons, A View From the Bridge and After the Fall – have been revived many times on Broadway.

Miller’s influence also extends beyond the United States. Death of a Salesman, for example, serves as the backdrop to Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s acclaimed 2016 film The Salesman. And it has been said, perhaps apocryphally, perhaps not, that The Crucible has played continuously somewhere in the world since its debut performance in 1953.
Hardly a New York theater season goes by without the revival of one of Miller’s plays. Just last year, the prestigious Brooklyn Academy of Music featured a revival of Salesman while the Roundabout Theatre staged a three-month production of his 1968 drama The Price. Among many attributes, the Roundabout production featured a stellar cast with Mark Ruffalo, Tony Shaloub, Jessica Hecht and Danny Devito as the play’s four characters. While not as well-known as any number of Miller’s works, The Price has been revived on Broadway more times – four – than all of his plays except The Crucible, which has also had four revivals over a significantly longer period of time.
The Price
Like much of Miller’s work, The Price is mostly heavy going. As with Salesman and All My Sons in particular, its main theme is in some ways the lie of the American Dream. Also like those two, the primary conflict unfolds within a family, in this case between Victor Franz (Ruffalo) and his wife Esther (Hecht) and all the more between Victor and his brother Walter (Shaloub).
The specter of the Great Depression hovers over The Price throughout even as the action unfolds three decades later. This, too, is territory Miller has plumbed many times. For Miller, the Depression of the 1930s was only the most extreme expression of the dashing of misplaced hopes for the good life. Its casualty rate was higher and the destruction greater than other low points, but the tragedy of a society in which carving out a comfortable place for oneself through accumulating wealth is the end-all and be-all is the same in 1931, 1968 or 2018. There are always far more losers than winners, for one; and even winners who achieve what we might call upper middle class-dom lose a great deal including much that can never be re-gotten. Always tenuous, wealth obtained in a society premised on swindling somebody else can vanish very quickly. And as we see in The Price in the character of Walter, the psychological and personal costs are often enormous as well.
The 1930s
Miller was 14 when the stock market crashed in 1929 and the formative years of his life were those of breadlines, Hoovervilles and the rumblings of fascism and world war. Those years also marked widespread interest in revolutionary change including in the arts and Miller, who from the time he was a young man was of the Left, was blown away in particular by the early plays of Clifford Odets. Nonetheless, he mostly eschewed the socialist realism, proletarian literature and agit-prop genres that were popular in the 1930s.
Instead, Miller wrote plays one step removed from the battlefield of class struggle. There are no final scenes in his dramas of workers defiantly envisioning coming triumphs with cries of “Strike, strike, strike!” Yet it was he who dramatized the declaration in Awake and Sing by the old Marxist Jacob that “life shouldn’t be printed on dollar bills” better than anyone, Odets included.
Miller’s Influences
Miller’s primary influences go back to earlier traditions including Ibsen, whose An Enemy of the People he adapted on Broadway in 1950. Miller’s staging of Enemy was an indictment of the Red Scare and it featured in its cast the left-wing husband and wife team Frederic March and Florence Eldridge as well as the Communist and soon-to-be blacklisted Morris Carnovsky.
As in a number of Miller’s other plays, The Price includes Thomas Hardy-esque moments of coincidence or misunderstanding that sharply alter the course of events: a missed phone call, a misinterpreted bit of conversation. A good portion of the play is a sometimes harsh back and forth between Victor and Esther about what might have been. When Victor’s brother Walter arrives, the great depth of that might have been and why it never was is revealed.
The Price shares with Salesman and All My Sons the tensions that arise from living by illusions. As he did so expertly so often, perhaps especially in All My Sons, Miller blends the impact of big outside forces with the tensions that exist within every individual and family. That we don’t always know which ends where is one of the things that make his plays, The Price included, so powerful. For Victor, the destructive impact of the 1929 Crash cuts two ways: it ruined his future while also allowing him to keep at bay nagging thoughts that he, too, had some part in the unsatisfied life he has lived. The arrival of his brother midway upsets the structured explanation he has been telling himself for years, as he learns of heretofore unknown familial betrayal.
While we ache for both Loman in Salesman and Keller in Sons, we simultaneously look down on them to a degree for the illusions they harbor. In The Price, our sympathies for Victor are less mitigated. So it is with Esther, too, whose finest moment comes when she rallies to Victor’s side at the end after laying out his many mistakes for much of the play. All of the tensions and hard feelings are accentuated by Miller’s situating the entire play in the confined setting of an attic in an old Manhattan residence. Even with an intermission, the single locale serves to heighten a feeling of claustrophobia throughout as the brothers in particular bear down on each other. 
As The Price approaches its conclusion, anyone seeing or reading it for the first time (or the second or third for that matter) is likely to anticipate a possibly amicable resolution. There are several points where it seems the brothers may acknowledge the pain each has caused the other, shake hands and go forward as best as possible. Such a resolution, however, was largely alien to the world Miller strove to create, certainly the world of his best work, and while the conclusion in The Price is not on the scale of Salesman and Sons, the irreconcilability is final enough. 
The Hook       
In 1950, eighteen years before he wrote The Price, Miller wrote a screenplay about corruption on the Brooklyn docks and the impact it had on longshore workers titled The Hook. Much has been written about the genesis of The Hook including by Miller himself, and the story behind it is undoubtedly familiar to many readers. Writing in 2015, James Dacre, who was instrumental in staging The Hook in England that year to mark the centennial of Miller’s birth, said that the backstory “deserves a screenplay of its own.”
At the time Miller wrote The Hook, he was still very close with Elia Kazan and the two submitted the story to Columbia Pictures’ head honcho Harry Cohn. Miller had had two smash hits on Broadway by then and Kazan, with several recent Hollywood successes and the original staging of Tennessee Williams’ smash hit A Streetcar Named Desire to his credit, had agreed to direct. Cohn initially approved the project but soon insisted that Miller change the story so that the corrupt union leaders be clearly identified as Communists. Miller refused and the project was dropped. Within a few years, Kazan named names before HUAC, signed a lucrative contract with Columbia and went on to direct and win numerous awards for another drama set among longshore workers, On The Waterfront. Miller, meanwhile, told HUAC where to get off, had his passport revoked and kept working as best he could while contending with American Legion pickets at productions of his plays.
For 65 years, The Hook was stashed away where it was read primarily by scholars doing Miller-related research. Then in 2015, Dacre and the Royal & Derngate Theater adapted it for the stage in several major venues in England where it received international attention, garnered rave reviews and was subsequently broadcast as a radio play by the BBC. Despite the success across the Atlantic, there has yet to be a staging in the United States.
Pete Panto
While living in Brooklyn Heights in the 1940s, Miller would walk south along Columbia Street into Red Hook through what was then a thriving commercial waterfront. There he saw graffiti, usually in Sicilian, about a dockworker named Pete Panto: Dov e Panto? (Where is Panto?). An old-time Sicilian dockworker who was a contemporary of Panto’s and my landlord when I moved to that neighborhood in the early 1980s remembered additional graffiti that asked Che ha ucciso Panto? (Who Killed Panto?).
Panto was a member of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) and either a member or close ally of the Communist Party. In the late 1930s, he was organizing fellow workers around democratizing the ILA, doing away with corrupt practices such as the shape-up, and driving the racketeers out of the union. As many as 1,500 dockworkers attended open-air meetings organized by the Brooklyn Rank and File Committee, the group Panto helped form. One evening in 1939, Panto left his home in Brooklyn and disappeared. His body was found two years later in a New Jersey lime pit.
Albert Anastasia and others associated with Murder, Inc. were implicated but no one was ever charged with killing Panto. A hit man named Abe Reles who had turned government witness and helped convict several racketeers, was apparently ready to finger Murder, Inc., but he  went out a sixth floor window before he could do so, likely the victim of a hit ordered by Anastasia.
The mostly Italian-American dockworkers carried on bravely despite an atmosphere of intense intimidation that would fester for decades. They formed the Pete Panto Educational Circle (Il Circolo Educativo Pete Panto) to carry forward Panto’s legacy and associates of his kept the Brooklyn Rank and File Committee together as best they could. Their meetings were regularly broken up by goons, however, and within a few years organized rank and file activity had essentially ground to a halt.
A Play for The Screen
The Hook does not attempt to directly tell Panto’s story but it grounds itself firmly in the rough, unforgiving, often violent world of the Brooklyn waterfront of that time. Like so much of Miller’s work, The Hook is a world inhabited primarily by men. The Price, Salesman, Sons, and A View From the Bridge are all centered to a great extent around conflicts between fathers and sons, brother and brother and sometimes both. Even the extended and often riveting back and forth between Victor and his wife Esther in The Price feels like prelude to the struggle between Victor and his brother.
The relationships between Marty Ferrara, the main character, and the men in his world are central enough in The Hook just as in those other plays but there are also differences. There are no father-son or brother-brother tensions, for example, and Marty’s wife Therese is central to the drama within the Ferrara home to a degree greater than in Miller’s plays. Their relationship is rendered with great depth and reminiscent among other of his plays only of the love that blossoms between Chris and Ann in All My Sons. Their relationship grounds Marty, prompting him to do the right thing at several crucial junctures, and is one of the most effective and moving parts of the story.     
Much of the explanation for what makes The Hook different from other Miller works lies in the fact that it was written for the screen. There is a greater breadth of locales than is typical of Miller including scenes at work, on the streets and in the union hall, as well as any number in the many kinds of random spots that fill working class neighborhoods.
Miller seems to have been drawn to film because he regarded it as better-suited to stories that might include more action, faster pacing, outdoor locations and other devices more conducive to the kind of story he wanted to tell. Perhaps that is why he apparently never attempted to re-work The Hook for the stage. Perhaps, too, he knew that it would be virtually impossible in the 1950s to obtain financial backing for a play in which the villain is the profit system. Five years later, when Miller again dramatized Brooklyn Italian-American dockworkers in A View From the Bridge, he wrote a very different kind of story. In contrast to The Hook, most all of Viewtakes place in one location – the Carbone home – and workplace and union concerns are peripheral.
Miller’s Audience Today
It’s anybody’s guess what those who go to these many Miller revivals take away from his plays all these years later. With its obscene prices, Broadway skews toward the better-heeled and it’s easy (and true enough) to interpret any number of Miller’s plays, The Price included, as primarily about unfulfilled lives resulting from missed or stolen opportunities. But one of the great strengths of Broadway, the cost of tickets notwithstanding, is that it still provides a place where artists like Miller can lay bare the darkness at the heart of the profit system. The destruction of illusions can be a harrowing experience and one exits The Price, much as I recall exiting the 1984 Dustin Hoffman revival of Salesmen, as needing some time to recover. Yet the right questions are there and in the story one can uncover much more than troubled family members tearing at each other, a theme that is a great strength but also often a limitation in the work of both Eugene O’Neill and Miller’s great contemporary Tennessee Williams.
Even if those who can afford $150 a pop are not among those tottering on the brink of economic collapse, the parallels between the devastation Miller wrote about with such insight and the inescapable sense today of looming catastrophe is unmistakable. Whatever one can get from any number of modern dramas available every night on HBO and Showtime, one suspects that people return to Miller revivals and similar dramas of theater because there are few places where they can get such an unvarnished look at the modern world. That New Yorkers were able to see a splendid adaptation of The Hairy Ape, O’Neill’s most class-conscious play at the same time they were able to see The Price, is further indication that something unsettling is in the air.
Miller would likely be delighted The Price ran at the same time as Sweat, a new masterwork by Lynn Nottage that touches on important themes of economic collapse and which earned her a second Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Miller knew all too well of Broadway backers’ preference for the tried and true and the already familiar and famous, which today often means him. We can only imagine the number of plays like Sweat that have been pushed aside in favor of yet another revival, classics marketed as speaking to a specific time that has come and gone. Try as some undoubtedly have, pigeonholing Miller’s work in that  is virtually impossible. As much as anything being done today creatively, the best of his plays speak directly to the wreckage of a society in freefall.
What Next?
Going forward, perhaps someone will bankroll an American production of The Hook. That it was well-received in England and provides a fresh Miller work to stage provides hope. Pending that, revivals of a few of Miller’s excellent but somewhat overlooked plays are in order. A Memory of Two Mondays, first staged on Broadway in 1955 and not seen in New York since 1976, would be a terrific choice. Another of his plays where the aftermath of the 1929 Crash is front and center, A Memory of Two Mondays, shares with The Hook a focus on the workplace. Full of people stuck in jobs that barely pay the rent and that they hate but are afraid to leave, Memory is as good a story for the era of Trump as anything around today. It’s a short play, however, and thus would likely have to be paired with another work. Imagine if some enterprising soul got the bright idea to pair A Memory of Two Mondays with Odets’ Waiting for Lefty, which, incredibly, has not been seen on Broadway since its initial production in 1935.
Even better would be a revival of Miller’s wonderful full-length play The American Clock, another Depression-era tale that ran unsuccessfully for a mere three weeks in its 1980 Broadway debut. The American Clock could serve as a nice departure from the Miller people know best, with its many laughs and songs that greatly enhance the tragedies and the solidarity at the core of the story. A new staging would hopefully be based on the original and without the changes Miller was pressured to make, changes that seriously weakened the play. The original version has played successfully around the world as well as in an all too brief revival Off-Broadway in 1997 and is long overdue to be presented on Broadway as Miller intended.
Broadway notwithstanding, regional theaters and high school and college theater departments will likely remain the primary homes for Miller productions. There’s no reason to believe that will change any time soon. And as long as the Trump crowd, Rachel Maddow and the Washington Post smear anyone who challenges the myth that is the United States, The Crucible anyway is likely to remain a big favorite for years to come.
Thanks to William Mello and Jane LaTour for their assistance in securing a copy of The Hook.
Andy Piascik is an award-winning author whose most recent book is the novel In Motion. He can be reached at andypiascik@yahoo.com.

 

Howie Hawkins for Governor: A Step in the Left Direction

By: October 16, 2018
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I write this largely for my comrades in the Democratic Socialists of America but also for all who are interested in building a more democratic, egalitarian, and just society. I argue here for voting for Howie Hawkins for governor, the only progressive candidate for that office on the ballot in New York State, and the only open socialist.

I am convinced that any future mass working class or socialist party in the United States will arise largely out of developments in the Democratic Party.

The Democratic Party is after all the largest party in the country and still has the loyalty of a majority of working people, African Americans, Latinos, and women. While few Democratic Party legislators are leftists or even progressive, most people who consider themselves Democrats believe that the country should be more democratic, more equitable, and more egalitarian. And today a majority of millennial Democrats consider themselves socialist. So Democratic voters are in the long run absolutely key to our future.

At the same time, virtually none of us on the left would deny that, like the Republicans, the Democrats are a capitalist party, that is, a party of, by, and for the class of bankers, corporate executives and the vast army of businesspeople that surround that capitalist core. At the very top, the Democrats remain connected not only to the banks, but to the generals and admirals, and to the professional politicians, and to apparatchiks, mostly lawyers, who rotate between business and government. Few on the left any more harbor any illusions about taking over the core apparatus of the Democratic Party, dominated as it is by various fundraising committees and the advertising groups that work with them, as well as by corrupt politicians. While many on the left may still hope to pressure and influence the Democratic Party and push it to the left, there is also pretty widespread recognition that we have hardly had any influence over the years in doing so. And even lately the results have been—while sometimes quite stirring for those on the left—still pretty modest (as a variety of publications from Brookings, Atlantic, Huffington Post, and NPR have suggested). The Democratic establishment remains stronger than the progressives, and it is not clear that the latter are gaining much ground.

Many argue that with Donald J. Trump in the presidency we must vote the straight Democratic Party ticket in the general election, voting not only for socialists and progressives, but for mainstream Democrats and even for conservative Democrats. They argue that we need every possible Democrats in office to stop Trump. Yet we know that it was the Democrats—the Clintons and Barack Obama—who bear responsibility for delivering us into the hands of Trump and the Republicans. We know that the Democratic Party has become a party of neoliberalism and austerity. And we know that despite many fine people in the Democratic Party—some legislators, some government officials, and many lawyers—who are resisting, we are being defeated. We are being defeated because the Democratic Party establishment which remains in control does not have a strategy to mobilize the American people to defeat the Republicans, nor can they be expected to come up with such a strategy since a mass movement from below would threaten to rock their boat and even knock them out of it.  

Yet, under enough pressure, and the pressure is building, the Democratic Party will one day split and there will emerge from it a mass labor or left party. The question is what will it take to make that happen? And what can we do to contribute to it? As socialists, our job is both to encourage and to contribute to the breakup of the Democratic Party and to help to establish an alternative pole of attraction to its ideology and its politics. So that means in part being willing to support genuine socialists and some more radical progressives who run as candidates in the Democratic Party, thus breaking the stranglehold of the financial and political establishment over their party. But at the same time we need to support independent candidates to the left of the Democrats who put forth the kind of socialist working class ideology and politics that represent an alternative direction for the country.

Where Will Change Come From?

The big changes in American society and for that matter in any society always come about as a result of powerful forces that shake the tectonic plates of the nation: economic or political crisis, and war. Such events have the potential to set millions in motion. Social movements in the past brought about all of the progressive developments of the previous generations: the labor upheaval of the 1930s, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the anti-war movement of the same era, the women’s and LGBT movements that followed. All of those movements—often locked in struggle with the Democratic Party as in the cases of the civil rights and anti-war movements—had the social power to force political change. But they failed either to rupture the Democratic Party or to create a major split to build a viable independent party (though there were some interesting experiments such as Peace & Freedom and La Raza Unida).

We recently saw other examples of crisis leading to social movements and political change. The economic crisis of 2008 created both the Tea Party movement, attacking President Barack Obama as a “socialist,” and the Occupy Wall Street movement, arguing that “We are the 99%” facing off against the 1% who put their money into controlling politics. Out of those movement came both the leftwing populism of Bernie Sanders, a self-declared “democratic socialist” (though really a New Deal liberal) and the rightwing populism of now-President Donald J. Trump (really an authoritarian, racist, and misogynist). What we did not get as a result of the 2008 crisis was a working class prepared to engage in class struggle. We have had a slew of impressive moments: immigrants (2006), Occupy (2011), #BlackLivesMatter (2014), taking a knee (2016-17), teachers’ strikes (2017), and #MeToo (2017), and most of those were either working-class or took up working-class issues, but we still have the lowest level of unionization, strikes, and consciously working-class activity in decades. Only a higher level of class struggle can bring about the break-up of the Democratic Party that we wish and also begin to give substance to the independent candidacies of the left that represent the future we desire. We cannot create such a working-class upsurge, but we must encourage and support all developments in that direction.

The Great Historical Example

The great historical example of the kind of process that leads to an actual political realignment was the struggle over slavery in the nineteenth century. The radical abolitionists of the 1830s, divided into many small organizations, experimented with a variety of strategies and tactics that gradually created important organizations and a regional anti-slavery consciousness in the North and Midwest. While many abolitionists opposed any form of political action, a section of the American Anti-Slavery Society broke away in 1840 to form the Liberty Party, absolutely opposed to slavery at the federal and the state level. The Liberty Party, which won virtually no offices, used elections to educate people about the evils of slavery and the necessity of its abolition.

When the U.S.-Mexican War of 1846-48 ended with the United States taking half of all Mexican territory and incorporating it as new U.S. territories, the question was, would those territories be slave or free. That debate intensified the struggle over the issue of slavery. In 1848 a group of Liberty Party abolitionists joined forces with people who opposed slavery in the U.S. territories seized from Mexico but did not necessarily call for its abolition. Both the Liberty and Free Soil parties ran candidates in educational campaigns in the late 1840s and early 1850s, winning only a small proportion of the vote. The abolitionist and broader anti-slavery movements, nevertheless, provoked a crisis in the Whig Party and forced its breakup in 1854. Soon after, former Whigs and even some Democrats joined with the Free Soil and Liberty parties to create the Republican Party, which nominated Abraham Lincoln who won the presidency, leading to the secession of the southern pro-slavery states. That in turn triggered the Civil War, a mass exodus of slaves from southern plantations toward Union lines, emancipation without compensation, and finally the outright abolition of slavery.

When we look at this most important of all American political developments, we can see that a political crisis over slavery led to the creation of the Republican Party as a result of two developments. First, the abolitionist movement contributed to the split of the Whig Party, and second the existing Free Soil and Liberty parties joined with former Whigs to create the new Republican Party. Without the breakup of the Whigs, the Liberty and Free Soil Parties would have remained small, unsuccessful third parties. But without the Liberty and Free Soil Parties, the Republican Party would not have taken such uncompromising positions on the limitation of slavery or prosecuted the war towards its abolitionist conclusion.

Lessons for Today: Vote Howie Hawkins

Virtually everyone writing about the current economic situation agrees that we are heading for another economic recession, and perhaps even another depression like that of 2008. An economic crisis will lead to an even deeper political crisis than the one we face now with Trump and the Republicans dominating the federal government and a majority of state governments.

We are the abolitionists of today, standing for the abolition of racism, sexism, and capitalism, for reversing climate change and ending imperialist wars. Through our social movements and our support for socialist and radical progressive candidates in the Democratic Party, we contribute to dividing that party and eventually breaking it up so that its left can become free. At the same time, we must support candidates outside the Democrats who represent our socialist alternative. We need to do both of these at once. And that’s where Howie Hawkins of the Green Party comes in.

Howie Hawkins, for many years a truck driver and Teamsters union member, is an open socialist running for governor against Andrew Cuomo on the Green Party ticket. Howie has run for governor before, winning 5 percent of the vote in 2012, an achievement that maintained the Green Party ballot line. While the Green Party remains a small, progressive party that receives only a small percentage of the vote in national elections, its party platform—focused on the environment, peace, democracy and economic justice—is far to the left of the Democrats. Howie himself, a member of the socialist group Solidarity, stands for the abolition of capitalism and the creation of a democratic socialist society.

Andrew Cuomo represents the worst of the Democratic Party establishment, having worked for years to frustrate many progressive developments in the state legislature, including supporting a group of independent Democrats who have collaborated with the Republicans. Cuomo’s insistence on a 2% cap on the growth of the budget frustrates all who seek to improve the lives of working people throughout the state. Many on the left who despise Cuomo’s politics supported Cynthia Nixon, the progressive candidate who was defeated in the primary. Some expected to be able to vote for her in the general election on another ballot line, but the Working Families Party, which is oriented to strengthening the Democratic Party, has scratched Nixon from its ballot line and replaced her with Cuomo. Hawkins remains the only progressive on the ballot and he is an outspoken socialist.

Let’s continue to support every candidate on the left in the Democratic Party who will really fight against the establishment and thus contribute to the break-up of the party, and at the same time, let’s vote for Hawkins and his running mate Jia Lee to bring to the public debate the socialist alternative in which we believe.

 

 

Nicaraguan Government Attacks and Arrests Opposition Leaders; Nicaraguans in U.S. Demand Their Release; Call for General Strike

By: October 15, 2018
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The following statement was issued by Nicaraguans living in the United States.

On the morning of October 14, 2018, Nicaraguan citizens in use of their constitution rights gathered to march peacefully and protest the Ortega regime and to demand the release of all political prisoners. Protestors were met with violent repression and an assault by the police.

Over 30 leaders and civilians were detained in an effort to silence the opposition. Among the people arrested are long-time feminist activists and human rights defenders Marlen Chow, Ana Lucia Alvarez, Tamara Davila, Alejandra Blandon, as well as Suyen Barahona, the President of the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS), Ana Margarita Vijil, the former president of the MRS, and many members of civil society protesting the arbitrary measures of the Ortega regime.

The protestors were taken to the infamous “El Chipote,” a prison known for widespread violation of human rights. Haydee Castillo a long-time human rights activist and Dr. Lottie Cunningham attorney and founder of the Center for Justice and Human Rights of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua were removed from an American Airline flight out of Managua and arbitrarily arrested.

During the last 6 months, Nicaragua has faced the worst repression and violation of human rights of the last 40 years. Daniel Ortega’s regime strategy has been to kill, capture, torture and disappear protestors in hopes of silencing the opposition. Ortega has demonstrated no will to dialogue despite demands from the international community including the Organization of American States, the United Nations and the European Union.

Since April, one thousand three hundred citizens (1300) are missing, close to 500 dead, over 3,000 injured and 400 illegally prosecuted. Approximately 400,000 people have lost their jobs and over 30,000 have fled the country. While the Nicaraguan landscape of today paints a dramatic picture, the opposition is convinced that the only pathway forward is peaceful and non-violence protest. Ortega’s firepower is contrasted with the people’s conviction for a free and just Nicaragua. A national strike is being called for in the coming days.

NICARAGUA CALLS ON THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY TO DEMAND THAT ORTEGA STOP THE REPRESSION, RESPECT HUMAN RIGHTS AND RELEASE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS.

Following is a preliminary list of those captured today: Alba Aragón, Alejandra Machado, Allan Cordero Ocón, Ana Lucía Álvarez, Ana Margarita Vijil, Andrés Reyes Monté, Ángel Miranda, Francisco Ortega, Freddy Ramírez, Geisel Solís, Gustavo Adolfo Vargas, Gustavo Argüello, Haydee Castillo, Irving Dávila García, José Antonio Peraza, José Dolores Blandino Arana, Lídice Sotomayor, Lottie Cunningham, Marcela Martínez, María de los Ángeles Gutiérrez, María Dolores Monge Aguilar, Marlen Chow, Marvin Reyes, Mauricio Ríos, Orlando Rafael, Ramiro Lacayo, Salvador Berríos, Sandra Cuadra, Suyen Barahona, Tamara Dávila.

Statement by Nicaraguans living in the United States

 

 

Solidarity with Nicaragua: The Long View from Canada

By: October 15, 2018
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The essay below was originally delivered as an oral presentation on the panel “Solidarity in the 21st Century” as part of a conference on The Future of the Left in Latin America held on October 5-6 at the New School in New York City. The conference was sponsored by Dissent, The New School, NACLA, and the Open Society Foundation. 

Canadian Solidarity with Nicaragua in the 21st century.

Thank you to the conference organizers.  It has been a fascinating couple of days… I’m approaching this session topic from the perspective of one kind of Canadian solidarity with one country, Nicaragua.

But first, by way of self-introduction: Academically my home is in the Department of Community Health and Epidemiology at the University of Saskatchewan, in Canada. I am not an historian of or expert in Latin American studies, but I’ve worked in solidarity with Nicaragua for almost 40 years both in and outside of the country.

This presentation is based on political organizing experience, a visit to Nicaragua in May, a recent review of 15 meters of archival data on the 1980s Nicaraguan solidarity movement, and on discussions with union leaders, other solidarity activists, Nicaraguan comrades, and folks in the Nicaraguan diaspora.

In these ten minutes I’ll try to give you a snapshot of Canadian solidarity with Nicaragua from efforts in the 1980s to those of today. I’ll then name some current political challenges for the Canadian Left in doing this kind of solidarity work, and if time allows will offer a couple of thoughts on how we might move forward. 

First, a snapshot of Canadian solidarity with Nicaragua in the 1980s and 90s:

The Sandinista revolution – with its mysticism, hope and anti-Reagan sentiment – was an easy sell for the Canadian Left and people joined the Nicaragua solidarity movement by the thousands. One aspect of it, Tools for Peace, was in fact the biggest mobilization of Canadian international solidarity in the 20th century. The movement included workers, professionals, students and farmers; it was multi-sectoral and politically pluralist. The Stalinist Left, the non-Stalinist Left, social democrats and liberals all supported the FSLN political program – even while holding divergent opinions on certain aspects, such as the party’s stance vis-à-vis independent labour unions. In the 1980s it was easy to name the common enemy – US military intervention – and to agree on strategies, which were mainly: material aid to break the blockade, political education and mobilization, and lobbying for an independent position for Canadian foreign policy vis-à-vis the US.  

But when the FSLN lost the 1990 election, it took only a few years until the entire movement disbanded. A few individuals and organizations hung on, turning their support to the new NGOs that were absorbing the Sandinista cadres expelled from government jobs. But the vast networks of solidarity died – leaving a lot of people with a case of permanent nostalgia. We who identified with Canadian Left or social democratic positions and who have continued to work in solidarity with Nicaragua ever since became a very, very small group. 

In the 1990s the challenges of working in solidarity grew as the context changed and the contradictions deepened. We watched the rise of neoliberalism in the country with disdain and we supported struggles to defy it; but we also saw the piñata, the pacts, the FSLN’s anti-democratic tendency and a growing discontent with its centralized power structure. We cringed at the neoliberal extractivist and clientelist model that Ortega concocted in his 16 years in opposition and then enacted once back in government in 2007. We fumed at the ongoing attacks on feminists and feminism, and we watched as the governing party decimated the opposition, concentrated the media, and consolidated its control over all major institutions. However, we also saw the Sandinistas become a less than homogeneous group. And most of that small group of still engaged Canadians from critical Left and feminist positions supported Sandinistas critical of Ortega who, together with others from oppositional groups, were working in the feminist, anti-mining, health, maquiladora and anti-canal movements now targeted by the government.

Importantly, while there were political party manipulations – of all stripes – within those movements, they were clearly expressions of democratic organizing and mobilization, whether they were communities that rose up against Canadian mining companies, women who organized International women’s day celebrations, or others who supported maquila workers organizing in the absence of non-party-affiliated labour unions. And the government repression of their dissent was well known, though largely ignored by the international mainstream, and only sporadically covered by the Left alternative press before April of this year.

What matters here is that critical Sandinistas, feminists, anti-mining environmental activists and many in their very reduced international critical Left support base had indeed been supporting myriad oppositional movements and organizations – BECAUSE they were the most progressive forces in the country. Most had been doing so despite Ortega’s growing control over their dissent – long before the April uprising. These facts have been massively manipulated ever since.

So, then the April uprising happens.

The simmering discontent clashes head-on with the forces of repression — and a new phase of international solidarity in Canada is born. 

But it’s a birth full of complications.  

First, you have the few small groups of primarily Nicaraguan diaspora that have emerged in Canada as elsewhere under the hashtag #SOSNicaragua. In these groups, you have the odd combination of Left, social democrats, liberals – and anti-communists – all protesting the repression and the human rights abuses together. They’ve united for humanitarian reasons, and out of shared anger at Ortega and his wife, who is also his Vice-President. They want to end the violence and seek a return to an imagined era of democratic rule of law. But at least in Canada, these SOS groups neither have their own, nor seek to support any particular political platform. In fact, their discourse is bereft of political analysis; several leaders told me that Left and right were meaningless categories to them. Debates do occur as to their strategies – and this indicates perhaps incipient political positions – but for now, the simplistic messages of these groups leaves the pseudo-anti-imperialist Left and a nostalgic 1980s Left room to denounce their solidarity with Nicaraguan students as being part of an imperialist plot. 

Loud voices like Max Blumenthal, Camilo Mejía and Kevin Zeese find echo among 1980s nostalgics, and get traction in Counterpunch, Truthdig and Gray Zone. Mejía for example finds no fault in the recent rescinding of the right to assembly – in fact, he posted a comment last week to the effect of “Well in Miami you need permits – what’s the problem…” And Blumenthal’s support for Ortega in Nicaragua is as uncritical and vehement as his support for Assad in Syria.

Rohini Hensman, author of Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-revolution and the Rhetoric of Anti-imperialism suggests that there are three overlapping categories of such pseudo-anti-imperialists: 1) those who are unable to deal with complexity, who see Western imperialism as the only oppressor in ALL situations; who seek and use information that proves only their thesis; and who are oblivious to the fact that people in other parts of the world have agency; 2) those who are neo-Stalinists following a narrow sectarian dogma; and 3) those who are tyrants with well-funded state media who “claim that they are being criticized because they are anti-imperialists.”

The dangerous position of those pseudo-anti-imperialists obscures the dense and layered reality within Nicaragua, allows the state-sponsored human rights abuses to continue, and makes the work of those of us in Canada who are trying to rally solidarity and support for the Left in Nicaragua very difficult.  They are solidarity’s nemesis and bear some responsibility both for what is unfolding and for the slow solidarity response from the organized Left in Canada.

We see this clearly in the response of the Canadian unions. Incredibly, to my knowledge, there have been virtually NO public statements issued about the uprising from Canadian unions. On a phone call last week with the international solidarity office of CUPE – our largest public sector union – I was told the union was “being cautious”, that it “hasn’t been that clear” that “we are grappling with it.” But again, their paralysis is largely explainable by an examination of the Facebook pages of those members of the union that they rely on for advice – whose support for Ortega is unwavering. There we see the 1980s nostalgia and Blumenthal’s version of the world converge. And we hear a deafening silence for the maquila workers that the unions theoretically support through the Maria Elena Cuadra movement – whose leader is in hiding.

Overall, I would say, sadly, this new Canadian solidarity movement, if we can even call it that, is not currently very effective in supporting the future of Nicaragua’s Left.  How could it be? The national and global opposition to Ortega is a mind-fuck of diverse actors, with incredibly opposing political perspectives – a fact the pseudo-left is exploiting. And while there are signs it is reemerging, it is difficult to even locate a coherent democratic Left organization in Nicaragua to support. But Ortega’s state-sponsored abuses, illegal detentions, extrajudicial killings, and quashing of the right to assembly need to be denounced – and our solidarity cannot vacillate as we await the perfect new revolutionary forces to gel. 

So what is to be done?

Some direction on how to support Nicaraguan progressives and an alternative critical Left in formation is offered by two voices to whom I now turn.

A Marxist friend of mine related to me how after the defeat of the Paris Commune, Marx declared that two tasks were at hand: critical journalism and support for political refugees.  Critical journalism on Nicaragua today must include rigorous debunking of the myths propagated by the dangerously anti-democratic pseudo-anti-imperialist rhetoric of the Blumenthals of the world. 

Rohini Hensman adds that the task of complicating the narrative and supporting Left democratic movements must include calling out the neo-Stalinist, neo-orientalist, simplistic recipes that are relied on by these indefensible ideologues. And for her, that task necessarily means pursuing the truth and telling it, bringing morality back into Left politics, and fighting for democracy. Eyes wide open.

 

 

The Collected Writings of Stanley Heller

By: October 11, 2018
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ImageStanley Heller, The Uprising We Need. Amazon Digital Services LLC, 2017. 332pp. $5.99 on Kindle.

Apart from the many valuable insights contained inside The Uprising We Need, Stanley Heller’s collection of articles published over the period between 2003 and 2017, the book is a fascinating look back through that fourteen-year span in which so much has happened. There is a tendency in our isolated, consumer-disciplined culture to focus on the shiniest thing out there right now with little reference for how that particular thing got there in the first place.

From Mondoweiss to The Nation to Truthdig to Counterpunch, the articles—a good balance of analysis and polemic—in these various venues cover everything from Palestine to movies to nuclear power to the unfortunate sections of the left that threw their weight behind the murderous regime of Bashar al-Assad. This latter subject is perhaps what was most edifying for this reader because I was once the captive of that kind of enemy-of-my-enemy distortion. That Heller was not captured by it speaks well for him, because those leftists who threw in with Assadists have crippled their own credibility and that of the left for anyone—including Syrians—who actually understood what happened during the Syrian catastrophe. Almost equally satisfying is the critique of nuclear power, long a favorite of the more Promethean left that is unsettled by the implications of the Second Law of Thermodynamics for their pet technocratic utopian fantasies.

Heller’s articles, more than eighty of them here, are heavily researched, so in addition to the clarity of his arguments, there is considerable grist for future public debates in the form of many, many well-cited facts in support of those debates. All in all, a book well-worth the price of admission.

My one quibble, and one that is not restricted to Stanley Heller by a long shot, is the lack of any real attention to questions of gendered power and how they are inflected not only in, for example, the militant misogyny of the Saudi regime, but in the ways we Westerners generally, and even the Western left, are still the captive of an essentially masculine discourse.

***

Stan Goff is the author of Hideous Dream—A Soldier’s Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti, Full Spectrum Disorder—The Military in the New American Century, Borderline—Reflections on Sex, War, and Church, Mammon’s Ecology—The Metaphysic of the Empty Sign, and the novel, Smitten Gate. His upcoming book is Caeneus—Violent Women in Film as Honorary Males (Wipf and Stock).

How NGOisation Provides Cover for the Murder of Shack Dwellers

By: October 9, 2018
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In South Africa ten members of a militant shack dwellers organisation have been assassinated in the past six years. Yet many progressive organisations have distanced themselves from these militants. Jared Sacks exposes the complicity of a mainstream NGO that could have played an important role defending the movement against these political assassinations. Sacks argues that when movements refuse co-optation, repression, including assassination, become necessary to maintain power.

On 12 June this year, at an Executive Committee meeting of the eThekwini Municipality (Durban, South Africa), the Mayor and Chief Whip made a number of veiled threats against the South African shack dweller movement Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM). The threats included references to a conspiratorial ‘third hand’ controlling the movement, harkening back to apartheid intelligence services patronage of the right-wing nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party in what effectively turned KwaZulu Natal (KZN) into a war zone. After vilifying the movement, these African National Congress politicians also made it clear that it was now open seasons against Abahlali: ‘we will deal with them’, they said.

This was not the first time the movement had been directly threatened by politicians acting in their official capacity. Ten members have now been assassinated in the past six years. As recently as 22 May 2018, hitmen murdered S’fiso Ngcobo, the chairperson in their eKukhanyeni branch. Then, on 29 May, the movement’s president, S’bu Zikode, was nearly killed when he lost control of his car; mechanics later found that the vehicle was sabotaged in a clear attempt on his life. Zikode has now been forced to go underground to protect himself and his family after intelligence services warned that an attempted assassination was imminent.

One would think that civil society organisations and media outlets would come out in numbers to collectively condemn the continued targeting of Abahlali members. Indeed, given that the sector share a desire to target former president Jacob Zuma’s ANC for corruption and abuse of power, verbalising support for the basic rights of the largest independent social movement in the country should not be a controversial stance. However, beyond a handful of sympathetic organisations, such as the Right 2 Know Campaign and the Social Justice Coalition, most organisations have maintained an eerie silence.

There is a long history behind progressive organisations distancing themselves from Abahlali.

However, beyond left sectarianism, there is one significant mainstream NGO that could have played an important role defending the movement against these political assassinations: Shack Dwellers International. SDI is a top-structure NGO that funds a network of community-based organisations as well as various civil-society support and finance organisations. It claims a progressive politics that employs grassroots development strategies to fight poverty and upgrade shack settlements.

It is a shock to some, then, that when KZN politicians have refused to engage with Abahlali, even threatening its leaders, they have also made a point to foreground SDI and its collection of support organisations as a reasonable alternative ‘movement’ of shack dwellers. In 2007, the provincial housing department ordered Abahlali members to join SDI or be arrested. Within days of refusing, beatings and arrests of members began. And on 12 June this year, while vilifying Abahlali, Mayor Zandile Gumede said that the municipality would work instead with SDI. Recent press statements by AbM have made clear that they expect violence against the movement to increase.

For its part, SDI has been more than happy to steer clear of this ‘conflict’; their approach is overwhelmingly technocratic, seeing it as necessary to circumvent politics and act as a conduit for dialogue and collaboration with government. Indeed, their idea of community participation in the development process is contingent on maintaining a positive working relationship with politicians and officials, rather than mobilising the collective political power of shack dwellers and other workers through protest and resistance. It is not surprising, then, that their board of directors have often featured government officials such as former Minister of Human Settlements Lindiwe Sisulu. This is also why they’re so willing to promote their partnerships with government rather than stand in solidarity with movements facing repression.

Reblocking and its discontents

Emblematic of SDI’s approach is a process called ‘reblocking, which it sees as a bottom-up in-situ development scheme that rearranges informal homes into a more ordered and institutionally legible formation. Reblocking, for them, is only possible with buy-in from community-based organisations. It is meant to provide significant benefits such as improved access to services, prevention of shack fires and flooding, while enabling the passage of emergency vehicles – all with minimal disturbance to residents.

However, this process has become contentious in shack settlements across the country. If reblocking is as participatory as SDI claims, why is it frustrating residents who stand to benefit from it?

In Estineni shack settlement in Tembisa near Johannesburg, hundreds of shack dwellers have been up in arms in response to the Ekurhuleni municipality’s attempts at reblocking. The effects on residents has been anything but beneficial.

Happy Ndebele’s home, for instance, was one of the nicer ones you might find – beautifully decorated with 6 small bedrooms, nice furniture, ceramic tiled floors and self-connected electricity. Their flush toilet stood out to me since the municipality had previously claimed that, without reblocking, plumbing was impossible to install in the settlement. Apparently, some families had gotten together and collectively installed their own sewage system.

After police and demolition crews arrived on 12 March, Ndebele’s home was completely demolished and her flush toilet uprooted to make way for another family as part of the municipality’s attempts at densifying the already over-crowded shack settlement. At the age of 59, she spent seven days sleeping outside in the rain until she was able to put together enough money to rebuild.

This is what reblocking often looks like to the poor; development as its antipode.

The problem with ‘participation’

SDI may very well respond that Estineni is a textbook case of top-down development and the pitfalls of failing to consult the community – something that is core to their development methodology. Yet a closer analysis shows that their concept of ‘participation’ is itself insufficient.

Resident Themba Nxumalo, a former member of the city councillor’s Ward Committee task team on upgrading the settlement, insists that consultation did in fact take place. He paints a more complicated picture of what seemed like an authentic participatory process until community members began opposing certain aspects of the reblocking. Fearing their control over the process would be undermined, the task team began to hide certain details from the community; eventually the councillor removed Nxumalo from the committee for asking too many questions. In other words, participation was only seen as a way to co-opt residents. This points to a much larger problem: SDI’s role as a conduit for government power.

In February and March of this year, reblocking went ahead until protests forced the police and construction crews to withdraw. If the Estineni community had the authority to direct the development process, they would have sought alternatives to reblocking. As community leader and Abahlali member, Melidah Ngcobo put it, ‘rebolocking was not needed.’ The problem, according to her, is the difference between ‘participation’ and ‘ownership.’ Mam’Ngcobo quipped that ‘they say we are undereducated; we don’t know anything about civilisation.’ The rise of a small Abahlali baseMjondolo branch in Estineni is indicative of resident’s refusal to participate in the ‘development game’ any longer.

Providing a cover for repression

The link might seem tenuous at first; what could SDI possibly have to do with the assassination of Abahlali members over the past ten years? The organisation certainly is not directly involved in attacks on the movement. It even released a press statement in 2009 condemning the armed gangs which attacked the movement in Kennedy Road (though they have kept quiet since then). So, they are unlikely to approve of the repression AbM continues to face.

Rather, it is in the role that SDI plays as a more amenable and amenable alternative to Abahlali, that we can comprehend its role in exonerating government repression. This is linked to a trend under neoliberal capitalism which social theorists refer to as the NGOization of social movement struggles.

Over the years, the NGO has worked to co-opt communities into a top-down planning process using strategies such as reblocking; a process which has divided communities which might otherwise be sympathetic to Abahlali’s more antagonistic method of resistance. SDI has therefore helped isolate the movement both at the grassroots level as well as amongst potential supporters in civil society. This is made manifest in their recent well-publicised memorandum of understanding with the eThekwini municipality that has explicitly excluded Abahlali.

But just as significantly, SDI also allows politicians and officials to make a binary distinction between good and bad communities – those with whom they can engage versus those that they accuse of being unreasonable, uncivil, and ‘against development.’ Shack dwellers aligned to SDI are then positioned against those encumbered by retrogressive and even manipulative leaders that want to make the city ‘ungovernable.’ Within this theoretical framework shack dwellers become the new colonised population: violent, barbaric and irrational in the case of Abahlali, and the naive noble savage in the case of those affiliated to SDI.

Any resistance is unjustifiable because SDI – through ostensibly grassroots development strategies such as reblocking – corroborates the government’s argument that a reasonable, democratic, and participatory approach is realisable.

The very emergence of Abahlali as an uncivil political actor therefore constitutes what Lewis Gordon calls an illicit appearance; within this binary worldview, they are deemed violent, immediately inviting (and justifying) a belligerent counter-response. This reply takes the form of authoritative means of repression: the use of demolition crews, armed private security and police repression – as in the case of Estineni.

However, direct repression is rarely sufficient because it tends to have the effect of uniting grassroots structures; hence it becomes necessary to also divide communities through violent populist appeals as well targeted hits on community leaders. In the case of Abahlali we have seen the former in the tribalisation of housing delivery that lead to the 2009 attack on the movement in Kennedy Road. The latter has taken the form of political assassinations of movement leaders, such as S’fiso Ngcobo, Thuli Ndlovu, Nkululeko Gwala, and Sibonelo Mpeku.

In other words, when movements refuse co-optation, repression through various para-state means, including assassination, become necessary to maintain power. It is precisely this role of ‘good shack dwellers’ that SDI aims to inculcate on the one hand which justifies such violent responses on the other.

In post-Apartheid South Africa, Frantz Fanon’s colonial city has been redefined. When Mam’Ngcobo asserts that there ‘is no freedom in South Africa for the shack dwellers’, she is describing a bifurcated city that corresponds to this civil/uncivil binary. Here, the rule of law applies only to a portion of the population. SDI’s role here is to co-opt the ‘noble’ shack dwellers into believing they can operate within the conventions of civil society to which they have historically been excluded. In the process, their potential threat to the status quo is removed while their more subversive counterparts are delegitimised and therefore vulnerable to attack.

Yet, people like Ngcobo realise that they, as a subaltern underclass, are subjugated according to different rules of existence because of the very way in which society is structured. Because they are simultaneously marginalised while being subject to extra-legal means of repression, they have been forced to spurn the disciplinary power of NGOs like SDI and employ more uncivil means of resistance.

Jared Sacks is a PhD candidate in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University.

Originially posted at ROAPE (Review of African Political Economy).

 

 

MST Open Letter on Brazil Election

By: October 9, 2018
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Comrades and Friends of MST () around the World,

We would like to share some of our views on this delicate moment of Brazilian politics in the last week of the election campaign:

1. This election is very special because it can mean the victory or defeat of the coup against democracy started in 2014, which continued with the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, extended into the illegitimate government of Michel Temer. For us, the coup is not just the moment of impeachment. The coup is the project that the elites and the financial capital did not have the strength to conquer in the elections and that needed to use the force and the illegality of other apparatuses like the media and the judiciary to execute. Thus, the coup is also the reforms of withdrawal of rights, the promotion of unemployment and, mainly, the political imprisonment of president Lula, without evidence and at a fast pace, to prevent that the favorite candidate of the population disputed the elections.

2. We further understand that the coup is a symptom of the profound economic, social and political crisis that affects not only Brazil, but the whole world, as a result of the hegemony of international financial capital and the accelerated destruction of natural assets, social rights and State around the world. It is important to have this understanding, because the elections will not solve this crisis and probably, even with the victory of the popular forces, we will have the continuity of the crisis and the confrontations that marked this period.

3. The Brazilian population understood that there was a coup and that it was necessary to defeat it. But it did not choose the path of the streets and mobilizations. With the exception of the victorious general strike that blocked the pension reform. In this way, the people chose in Lula’s candidacy the way to express its discontent and desire for change. The MST defended Lula’s candidacy as far as possible. We made a beautiful march to register his candidacy and with other popular movements we made a hunger strike that lasted 26 days and denounced the manipulations of the Judiciary System. And we have kept the Camp Lula Livre in front of the Federal Police’s jail in Curitiba as a living testimony of our conviction of the president’s innocence. Despite protests from the UN and a large civic movement by Lula Livre, the judiciary prevented President Lula from running for the elections. Faced with this, the Workers’ Party chose to launch the former Education Minister and former Sao Paulo mayor Fernando Hadadd as a candidate. And we, like the other democratic forces, decided to support his candidacy, because it represents the defeat of the coup, Lula’s freedom and the possibility of overcoming the serious economic and political crisis and resuming a path of development of the country.

4. On the other hand, in these four years of the coup, the Brazilian right has used numerous tools: fabricated social movements, active militancy of the judiciary and the media against democracy … One of the fronts of these attacks was the encouragement of leaders with fascist speech like Jair Bolsonaro, a federal deputy for three decades (but presenting himself as an anti-system), former army captain, defender of the military dictatorship and torture, and the withdrawal of countless social rights. Bolsonaro is advised by military and foreign-funded funds economists. Bolsonaro’s speech of violence, homophobia and radicalism grew with the support of the media, who hoped that in the polarization between him and the left, the traditional right might present itself as “moderate” or “center.” However, the population decided to punish the parties that carried out the coup, such as the PSDB of Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Aécio Neves (whose candidate Geraldo Alckmin is expected to be fourth or fifth) and Michel Temer’s MDB (whose candidate Henrique Meirelles should not be among the top six). And the creation fled from the control of the creators, taking the vows of the old right.

5. We understand, therefore, that in this election there is a clear dispute between two antagonistic projects: the continuity of the coup and its reforms, represented by its more radical and authoritarian version, Jair Bolsonaro, and the reconstruction of democracy and rights, represented by Fernando Haddad. It is, therefore, an election marked by the class struggle. For a project that combines the most conservative sectors of our society and international capital against the workers’ project.

6. From the point of view of foreign policy, this dispute of projects is represented on the one hand by Bolsonaro’s project, a more aligned U.S. policy, non-recognition of Palestine, and attacks on Venezuela and the progressive governments of Latin America. On the other hand, by Hadadd’s project, of resumption of Latin American integration and of strengthening relations with the countries of the Global South.

7. Therefore, this will be a difficult election, disputed both at the polls and on the streets, as demonstrated by the gigantic women’s movement #EleNão (#NotHim) this past weekend. We also know that the results of this election will decisively influence the direction of Latin America and can signal a new progressive offensive throughout the world. For our part, we will continue to fight for popular agrarian reform and for a popular project for Brazil, and we ask our friends on all continents to remain attentive to developments in Brazil and to denounce both the conservative offensive and the political imprisonment of President Lula. •

MST National Board
Sao Paulo, October 05, 2018

Originally posted at The Bullet.

Marx Turns 200: A Mixed Gift

By: October 8, 2018
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A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx
By Sven-Eric Liedman
Translated by Jeffrey N. Skinner
Part of the Marx 200 series
Verso Books, 2018, 768 pages, $40 hardcover.

Amid an outpouring of discussion and new works marking the bicentennial of Karl Marx, Sven-Eric Liedman’s imposing A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx is a mixed offering. The “life” part is a success; the “works” portion is not.

The author is professor emeritus of the History of Ideas at Gothenberg University. Marx emerges from Liedman’s presentation as an intellectual giant deeply committed to social justice, whose need to ground his conclusions in thoroughgoing research made him the “master of the unfinished work.”

A fine journalist, a fierce polemicist and a piercing pamphleteer, Marx also loved life, which in spite of many hardships he managed to enjoy with family and friends.

Marx was no armchair revolutionary. He edited the Rheinische Zeitung in 1843 until it was closed by the censors; led the Communist League between 1845 and 1850; directed the Neue Rheinische Zeitung during the revolutions of 1848. He was a leader of the First International between 1864 and 1872, years that included the end of the American Civil War and the Paris Commune, events that he followed closely.

Strong Points

Liedman makes many good points. He underlines the importance of Marx’s articles for the New York Tribune. He unearths a letter in which Marx, as volume one of Capital neared publication, seems to compare himself to the painter Frenhofer in Balzac’s story “The Unknown Masterpiece.” In his desire to portray his model not statically, but in her living, ever-shifting reality, Frenhofer creates an image which others find incomprehensible.

Marx’s desire to present capitalist laws of motion, his identifica-tion with the artist seeking to portray reality dynamically, his anxiety regarding the public’s reaction, plus the fact the story has been described as an anticipation of modernist art, makes this a delightfully intriguing anecdote.

Liedman addresses the debate on alienation. For some it was an early term, abandoned by the mature Marx. For others it remained a key concept. Yet others feel he did abandon it, mistakenly; for them his early works are more interesting than his later writings.

According to Liedman, Marx retained the concept but redefined it. Alienation became not the separation from an unchanging human essence, but a situation that inhibits the realization of historically generated human potentials. This seems correct, as long as it does not erase fundamental material aspects of our humanity, regardless of historical context (the need for water, food, shelter, for example).(1)

Liedman draws our attention to the term “association,” used in International Workingmen’s Association (the official name of the First International), for example. For Marx, “association” designated the free coming together of individuals. Thus it stood against both the isolation of individuals and inherited communities. (Liedman, 537. All page references are to this book except where indicated.)

Capital’s destruction of the latter creates a painfully atomized society. But this also opens the possibility of a freely and consciously reconstituted community. Liedman’s comment should remind us that Marx often described communism as a society of free associated producers or individuals.

Liedman addresses the accusation of eurocentrism directed at Marx, notably by Edward W. Said in his classic Orientalism. He correctly points out that Marx’s blunter endorsements of capitalism’s progressive impact on non-western societies were no different from his description of how capitalism constituted an advance, at a terrible human cost, over pre-capitalist societies in Europe.

This corresponded to his assessment, not of non-western but of pre-capitalist societies in general. Liedman could have emphasized that Marx abandoned his initial notion of Asia as a static society, while underlining the destructiveness of colonialism.(2) He could have explored Marx’s writings on Ireland, which pioneered the study of capitalist underdevelopment and its consequences (one-sided specialization, surplus extraction, mass unemployment, labor migration, superexploitation in the metropolis of workers migrating from the colonies).(3)

Ireland was a case in which Marx reversed his views: from thinking that Irish liberation depended on revolution in England to the conviction that the former could not wait for the latter and could even be a precondition for it.

Liedman underlines that Capital is not about “economics.” It is as much a book about history (struggle over the working day, evolution of technology and industrial organization, emergence of capitalism); politics (enclosures, labor legislation) and ideology (commodity fetishism; veiling of exploitation by the wage-form.

Yet he should have rejected more forcefully the oft-repeated notion that Capital does not address the issue of class, since its concluding chapter titled “Social Classes” was unfinished. (423) This is hardly tenable: How can one write about surplus value, the drive to intensify exploitation and the resistance to it, the expropriation of the peasantry and the creation of the working class without dealing with class and class struggle?

The famous chapter should be taken not as the start of the discussion, but as an incomplete summary of what came before.

Important Omissions

Some turning points are examined too rapidly. Liedman’s discussion of the description of religion as “opium of the people” omits an aspect of Marx’s perspective: religion can be both opium and protest.(4)

While not renouncing his materialism, Marx suggested a nuanced approach, which recognized religion’s capacity to be not only an accommodation to, but an indictment of oppression.

Liedman’s discussion of this same text misses a landmark in Marx’s evolution: the proletariat appears for the first time as the agent of the revolution to which Marx aspires. Not only this: Regarding Germany, the proletariat emerges as the protagonist, in the young Marx’s terminology, of both “political” and “human” emancipation, a logic that anticipates the concept of permanent revolution, fleshed out by Leon Trotsky after the Russian revolution of 1905.

Marx in 1843 argued that England, France and the United States had largely attained their “political emancipation,” which included equality before the law and thus the separation of church and state. Germany had not done so, due to the lack of revolutionary fervor of its bourgeoisie. Unable to join the present in practice, it was capable only of matching it in thought.

But by examining political emancipation in the advanced countries, “German thought” could discover its limits in leaving oppression and alienation largely intact. Religious alienation did not disappear; it merely became a private matter. German thought, Marx argued, ought to aspire to both political and human emancipation: If political emancipation had been impossible due to the timidity of its bourgeoisie, German thought had to link up with the proletariat, as the bearer of human emancipation.

Liedman misses this. Worse: he incorrectly attributes to Marx the opposite notion that Germany would first have to carry out its political emancipation.(5)

No biographer of Marx can avoid the “Theses on Feuerbach,” a brief text that includes the well-known declaration that philosophers have interpreted world but the point is to change it. Here Liedman overlooks Marx’s embrace of a perspective of self-emancipation, linked to a consistently materialist perspective.

Previous materialists, Marx explained, argued that people were shaped by the material conditions in which they lived. To change people, those circumstances had to be transformed. But if people were shaped by existing conditions, where could the ideas for change and the people promoting them come from?

Faced with this problem, past materialists had to allow for ideas and enlightened minorities that somehow escaped determination by the present conditions; they would change the world for the benefit of all. Against such elitist and  inconsistently materialist notions, Marx argued that a contradictory social reality could bring forth people capable rebelling against it and that, in the process of transforming reality, they would transform themselves.

That Liedman overlooks this aspect of the “Theses” is surprising: elsewhere, his book correctly underlines Marx’s perspective of working-class self-emancipation.(6)

Regarding the 1848 revolutions, Liedman notes the failure of Marx’s attempts to find liberal allies. But he fails to mention the conclusions of his 1850 circular to the Communist League. There Marx advised staying one step ahead of any political conquest, until the anti-landlord, republican struggle had become an anti-capitalist revolution, a perspective he referred to as “permanent revolution.”(7)

Exploring Marx’s views of the future, Liedman comments that a famous passage in Capital envisaged a “realm of freedom,” which “assumed” the realm of necessity, but freed people from the “dictates” of others. Liedman adds: “The reader is not allowed further details.” (441)

Here is part of Marx’s text: “The realm of freedom… begins only where labor which is determined by necessity… ceases; … Freedom in this field can only consist in… the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature… and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favorable to… their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom… The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.”

In other words, under socialism people would still work to satisfy their needs. This is the “realm of necessity” that can never be abolished completely. In this sphere, humanity, argued Marx, must aspire to rationally organize its exchange with nature (a detail that has an ecological edge we should not overlook) and to reduce disagreeable, dull, repetitive work.

Yet even at its most humanized, toil remains toil, imposed by necessity. The “realm of freedom” begins beyond it, not only because we are freed from the dictates of others, but rather because it is the realm of freely chosen activities, performed not out of necessity, but for their own sake. The basis for this is the reduction of working time, which is one of the key demands of the labor movement from its birth. While we could wish for more details, there is more here than Liedman’s account suggests.

An Erratic Discussion

Marx’s Grundrisse, as Liedman points out, is a brilliant text. But a discussion of this draft manuscript should be preceded by a basic presentation of Marx’s economic theory. One does not begin a study of Darwin’s theory of evolution or Einstein’s relativity by reading their preparatory notebooks. Only the consideration of the more complete theory can make the discontinuous, tentative, incomplete earlier notes understandable.

But Liedman plunges the reader into a discussion of Marx’s draft without a previous consideration of value, money or surplus value, to name some key concepts.

Nor is the discussion centered on Marx’s theory of capital, which after all, is the focus of this work. Liedman employs more than half the chapter examining methodological questions, such as the relation between concrete reality and abstraction, or the interpenetration of categories such as production, consumption and distribution.(8)

At times it seems that for Liedman the settling of accounts with Hegel is the central concern, not only of The German Ideology but of the Grundrisse as well. Liedman focuses on Marx’s considerations on pre-capitalist formations and the Asiatic Mode of Production, but makes little use of Kevin Anderson’s Marx at the Margins, which traces Marx’s shifts from an unilinear historical perspective and a partially (never fully) favorable view of the impact of colonialism, to a multilinear conception and a growing emphasis on the destructive aspects of colonial rule.(9)

Liedman refers to Roman Rosdolsky’s study of the Grundrisse, but does not incorporate his elucidations.(10) Visionary passages in which Marx anticipates automation and the replacement of direct labor by science and technology as the fundamental source of wealth; how this process generated by capital’s pursuit of profit undermines it as a system dependent on the appropriation of surplus labor; how it makes the measure of wealth by the amount of labor it contains increasingly irrational; and the possibilities for human development (reduced working time, generalization of general scientific labor, etc.) that the collective appropriation of these forces of production would open — all these passages go unmentioned, or are discussed in passing and with little enthusiasm.

The same occurs with Marx’s notion that capitalism develops humanity’s productive forces to an unprecedented degree, but at the expense of an increasingly empty existence (subordination to an impersonal economic mechanism, alienated labor, the narrow pursuit of monetary wealth); that this alienated development, this mixed generation and blockage of possibilities, can and does produce both celebrations of capitalist progress and romantic yearnings for the past, an opposition that, according to Marx, will accompany capitalism to its grave; how we should refuse both the apology of capital and romantic nostalgia for a third option, the future collective realization of the wider possibilities created but blocked by capitalist relations.

Again, the brilliant passages containing this vision are referred to in passing, if at all.

Capital Problems

The problems increase as we move to Capital. Liedman correctly writes that the element that all commodities share is the fact that “they cost labour.” They are the product of different concrete labors, but they still have something in common. That something, he argues “is what Marx called labour power.” (409)

But for Marx what commodities have in common is abstract labor, not labor power. This is not pedantic nitpicking. The difference between labor (be it abstract or concrete) and labor power is central for Marx’s theory of surplus value. Surplus value is the difference between the value of labor power, sold by the workers and bought and paid by the capitalists, and the larger amount of labor they perform and value they create while laboring for the capitalist.

Liedman writes that labor power, which according to him is what commodities have in common, is sold “against time,” and he adds “it is time that determines the compensation.” Here he mixes the determination of the value of commodities (the socially necessary amount of labor their production requires) with the determination of the labor power’s compensation (wage), and seems to suggest that the worker’s compensation is equal to the amount of labor time performed.

For Marx, the value of labor power is determined not by the labor it performs but by the value of the products required for its reproduction. The fact that workers produce more value than the value of their labor power is the source of the surplus value appropriated by the capitalist.

All of Marx’s theory hinges on the clear distinction between labor (the value-creating activity) and labor power (which the worker sells) as well as the determination of the value of the commodity labor power by the amount of value required for its reproduction and not by the amount of labor it performs.

The least that can be said is that in many passages these concepts are presented in a confused and confusing fashion. Let us take another example:

“Even labour has its use and exchange value. The use value is the concrete labour necessary to transform raw materials… into products… The exchange value is the power that the workers sell to the capitalist… Concrete labour produces concrete products… Labour in its abstract form — labour power — is a commodity that the workers sell to the capitalist…” (438)

This passage states that labor power is the exchange value of labor, which is also labor in its abstract form. But this is not Marx’s conception. For Marx, under capitalism it is labor power and not labor, or abstract labor, as Liedman writes, that becomes a commodity.

Not labor, as Liedman writes, but labor power (the ability to work) has a use value and value. Its value is determined by the commodities that go into its reproduction; its use value (for the capitalist that buys it) is its capacity to create new value.

Labor power cannot be equated to labor or abstract labor, as Liedman does. Workers sell their labor power, not abstract labor, and then perform both concrete and abstract labor for the capitalist; they create new use values and new value. All of these are well-known concepts and relationships. It is all the more surprising this text gets them wrong in so many passages.

Liedman seems to reduce commodity fetishism to the fact that people appear to each other as representatives of commodities and “array themselves in their character masks as capitalists, workers, or something else.” (412)

This may be so, but leaving aside the fact that in Capital Marx introduces this concept before writing about workers and capitalists, we must ask: Why use the term fetishism? Marx’s discussion explores the consequences of the fact that commodities seem to have value independent of the labor that goes into their production.

The value of gold seems to flow from its shining materiality. Social relations — the distribution of labor time — present themselves as objects or properties of objects, their values and prices, whose interactions and movements rule the life of the producers. Nowadays we are ruled by “markets,” an impersonal force with a will of its own.

Commodity producers are part of a social division of labor, but their relations become an impersonal mechanism beyond their understanding or control. We are not only victims of inverted perceptions; we live in an inverted world. It reminds Marx of the world of religion and fetishes in which the creations of the human mind are perceived as independent of and ruling over it: humans find themselves subordinated to their own creations.

Of course there are other, probably better and clearer ways of explaining this — the point is that this biography misses it entirely.

Referring to the much-debated transformation (of value into price) problem, Liedman argues that Marx criticized Ricardo for “confusing labour value with production prices, and the very concept of the transformation problem has its origin in this critique.” (445)

Leaving aside the issue of how Marx got to the problem, what are production prices? Liedman does not tell us. Nor does he explain the formation of an average rate of profit, which is required to understand Marx’s notion of the price of production (composed of the cost of production plus the average rate of profit).

Not having posed the problem clearly, the subsequent discussion is both confused and confusing. The issue is complex, but Andrew Kliman, to take an author mentioned by Liedman, manages to present it clearly. So could Marx’s biographer.

A final example: “One important concept is the rate of surplus value, or the relationship between constant capital… and variable capital.”(11) Wrong: Marx’s notion of rate of surplus values is not the ratio of constant to variable capital, but rather the ratio of surplus value to variable capital (S/V). The ratio of constant to variable capital (C/V), mentioned by Liedman, is one way of representing the organic composition of capital.

This may be sloppy writing, translating or editing, but it is a problem. Not all passages are this confusing, but many are. They can only misdirect the reader, particularly those seeking a gateway into Marx’s works.(12)

Beyond Marx

A biography of Marx need not go into the works of his continuators, but Liedman’s does. We take some prominent examples. Lenin fares badly. He is presented as “dogmatic,” a “pure politician,” as the leader of a party seeking to substitute itself for the working-class. (515, 623, 294)

To refute Lenin’s dogmatism many examples, some actually mentioned by Liedman, could be given of how he changed his tactical, strategic and theoretical views: his reading of Hegel in 1914 and his conclusion that his generation had missed many aspects of Marx’s work; similar conclusions regarding Marx’s views on the state and the nature of revolution, summarized in State and Revolution; most spectacularly his jettisoning of the “old Bolshevik” perspective of a “democratic dictatorship” for that of socialist revolution in Russia in 1917, to the surprise of his closest collaborators.

His pamphlet Left-wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder is largely warning against the dogmatic conclusions from the Russian experience. If Lenin often presented his rectifications as a return to Marx, he also was undogmatically reconsidering his past views.

The description of Lenin as a “pure politician” contrasts him with Marx’s wide interests and research. Marx was exceptional, true, but Lenin was still the author of The Development of Capitalism in Russia, “The Agrarian Program of Russian Social Democracy,” of studies on the development of capitalist agriculture in the United States, of Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, of articles on the national question, among other texts requiring ample documentation and detailed statistical research.

A reader could get the impression that after Marx the story of Marxism was all downhill. Liedman notes that the Russian Revolution is often described as a coup. He does not distance himself from this. In fact, he seems to argue that it was a revolution only because of the changes unleashed after the Bolsheviks grabbed power by taking advantage of a power vacuum. Then he trivializes the issue by writing that the taking of the Winter Palace proved useful as an occasion for future commemorations. (600)

In 1906, Leon Trotsky had argued that a future upsurge of the anti-tsarist revolution would provoke the re-emergence of soviets, an event that would drive the liberal bourgeoisie fully into the hands of reaction. Peasants, reaching for the land, would find a leader in the workers’ organizations, which could not avoid going over from anti-landlord to frankly anti-capitalist measures.

The anti-Tsarist revolution in backward Russia would therefore be driven to become a socialist revolution. Trotsky thus predicted with uncanny accuracy what occurred in 1917. This is surely a brilliant achievement of Marxist method by one of Marx continuators, but it remains beyond Liedman’s radar.

Indeed, Liedman’s overview of Marxist debates is curious. Twice he mentions a debate between Lezek Kolakowski and Adam Schaff, each passage referring to the other without either explaining its content or significance. (134, 608) Meanwhile the book refers to the problems of the transition to capitalism, but makes no mention of the important debates provoked by Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism in the 1950s or the “Brenner debate” in recent decades.(13)

Actualizing Marx: An Example

Let us take an example to conclude, if only because it is easy to document. Liedman mentions “Belgian Trotskyist Ernest Mandel” to indicate that late capitalism, a term he adopted, is probably outdated. (453)

This may or may not be the case. In fact, Mandel’s work can be criticized from different angles.(14)But let us take a closer look. Mandel wrote substantial introductions to a widely read English edition of Capital. In 1962 he published a restatement of Marx’s theory (Marxist Economic Theory) and in the 1967, a study of Marx’s economic thought (The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx).

Mandel rejected both the notion that there were no new features to post-1945 capitalism and the idea that they required a rejection of Marxist theory. Against both, he sought to explain the concrete evolution of capitalism as a playing out of the tendencies discovered by Marx.

Late Capitalism, published in 1972, traced the structure of the world economy through the different stages of capitalist development.(15) It linked industrial cycles with longer waves: expansive waves, launched by significant upsurges in the rate of profit and characterized by technological revolutions, which eventually led to periods of slower growth.

While the transition from boom to a depressive wave was due to the operation of the contradictions of capitalism (in the end, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall), the launching of a new expansive wave was contingent on the results of state and class conflicts.

As he developed this conception through the 1960s, Mandel argued that neither monopoly surplus profits, nor Keynesian deficit spending, indicative planning, welfare state provisions or international monetary regulation abolished capital’s tendency toward over-accumulation and overproduction. The postwar boom, he insisted, would end by the late 1960s, which would lead to a new attack on the working classes, as capital sought to redress the fall in profitability.

In the period bookended by Marxist Economic Theory and Late Capitalism, Mandel traced the confirmation of this thesis, analyzing inflation’s shift from a stimulant to an obstacle for capitalist expansion, the cracks in the international monetary system, the aggravation of inter-imperialist competition, among other tendencies.

The fact that the capitalist offensive he predicted was not matched by the level of labor resistance, indeed the breakthrough to socialist revolution that he hoped for, does not diminish the effort behind this attempt to actualize Marx’s work.(16) Surely any balanced account of Marx’s successors must at least mention it, among other figures. Liedman ignores it completely.

Readers will enjoy Liedman’s narration of Marx’s life. They will be frustrated by his discussion of Marx’s works and hardly enlightened by his overview of his continuators. For that they must turn elsewhere.

Notes

  1. Nor is it completely original. See for example “From the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts to Grundresse: From an Anthropological to a Historical Conception of Alienation,” Chapter 10 of Ernest Mandel, The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx (New York: Monthly Review, 1971).
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  2. See Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins (Chicago-London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010).
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  3. Marx letter to Engels, December 10, 1869.
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  4. The “opium” reference is in Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Introduction (1843-44).
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  5. Liedman: “For Germany’s part, it was not yet a question of total liberation … but only a political revolution…” (100) But Marx argued precisely that in Germany it was a matter of total liberation: “It is not … the general human emancipation which is a utopian dream for Germany, but rather… the merely political revolution.” He adds: “In Germany no form of bondage can be broken without breaking all forms of bondage. Germany… renowned for its thoroughness, cannot make a revolution unless it’s a thorough one. The emancipation of Germany is the emancipation of man.”
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  6. Michael Löwy’s The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx [1970] studies his evolution from the initial “philosophical” encounter with the working class as the agent of “critical thought” to the perspective of working-class self-emancipation. Liedman ignores this useful work.
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  7. “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League” (1850).
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  8. Liedman’s methodological discussion would have benefited from Mandel’s six-point summary of Marx’s method: (1) Comprehensive appropriation of empirical material; (2) Its analysis into constituent abstract elements (from the concrete to the abstract); (3) Exploration of the connections between those elements; (4) Discovery of the relationship of those elements with appearances (from the abstract to the concrete); (5) Empirical verification of this analysis (2-4); (6) Discovery of new empirical data. Late Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1975) 16-17.
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  9. Unilinear means that all societies can expect to go through the same historical stages. Multinear denies this. See Anderson, Marx at the Margins.
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  10. The Making of Marx’s Capital.
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  11. Liedman, 444-45. This mistake is repeated in the index, 748.
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  12. There is a correct explanation of surplus value in page 413.
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  13. Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood’s approach is often labeled “political Marxism,” which was not a term they chose. This strikes us a misnomer, since its alternative would be “economic Marxism.” But they do not deny the importance of the economy. A more adequate name would be “class struggle Marxism” since they do emphasize the centrality of the outcome of class struggles in the direction of social development. It also indicates how this approach is aligned with Marx’s perspective, as registered in the first line of The Communist Manifesto.
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  14. Daniel Tanuro, “Marx, Mandel et le limites naturelles.”
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  15. Complemented by The Second Slump (London: New Left Books, 1978) and Long Waves of Capitalist Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
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  16. We leave aside his participation in the Cuban debate on market and plan, his contributions to the question of socialist democracy and the problem of bureaucratization, and the Marxist analysis of the Second World War among other topics.
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Originally posted at Against the Current.

Wars In The Middle East Since Trump

By: October 6, 2018
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Following his new sanctions instituted against Iran, the dismissal by Donald Trump of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal is the continuation of the capitalist logic of militarization of the Middle East that was escalated by the last Bush administration and which has brought genocide and disastrous humanitarian crises to the region.

The US-led wars in the Middle East, US threats against the reactionary Iranian government, divided Iranian Marxists and other Iranian leftists regarding questions of the best tactics and strategy with which to confront both Western imperialism and their own reactionary government. These questions persist for the revolutionary and progressive forces in Iran to this day. The failure and crisis of the left, due both to the rise of an unexpected counterrevolution within the revolution of 1979 and to the failure of the Marxist left at that time to grasp soon enough just how reactionary the Khomeini forces were, has led to a loss of trust in the value of Marxist theory and in the value of Marxism to inform emancipatory practice. In 1979-80, some wanted to work with the Islamists because they thought they were allies against imperialism. Today, some tendencies are asking whether we should oppose Trump and the sanctions, or whether we should instead “stay on the winning side’ by not condemning the sanctions and — like the ex-revolutionary Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) — hope for the overthrow of the reactionary government with the help of imperialism. This is what so-called radical Iranian organizations are proposing.

Unfortunately, the tragic history of the Iranian left uniting with reactionary and fanatical Islamic forces in the 1979 revolution in a misguided and ultimately unsuccessful struggle against the imperialist forces is repeating itself today at a higher stage as the farcical idea of the left uniting with Trump against the reactionary and fundamentalist Islamic government to bring MEK to power.

One thing that is clear is that sanctions alone have never led to the overthrow of any government or changed any authoritarian state to a democratic society. Instead, past experiences in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan show that sanctions have only brought more militarization, poverty, and destruction, further harming both the working class and other poor layers of the people.

Recent and current US policies are viewed by many experts as themselves important factors in the rise of anti-American sentiment and as causing violent actions in support of repressive regimes. Further, US policies are appropriately seen as being biased in favor of Israel and against the Palestinian people, as dramatically exemplified by Trump’s decision to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, accepting Israel’s declaration of Jerusalem as its capital; these policies and actions should be considered in the context of escalating the conflict between the US and Iran and in promoting more potential violence throughout the Middle East.

A 2017 US State Department memo, recently leaked, advised the Trump administration to push for an “Islamic Reformation,” a policy advocated by very reactionary Islamophobic forces in the US, who want to target not only jihadist or actually violent “extremists,” but mainstream Islam as a whole. They actually think that US pressure can force a “Reformation” as they call it. This advocacy for such a form of “Islamic Reformation” is part of a dual ideological counterattack against both Iran and the Islamic State, “which should be discussed at the highest levels of State Department and National Security Council as the official policy of the US in the Middle East.” Rex Tillerson distanced himself from Trump’s anti-Islamic rhetoric. He was then replaced by Mike Pompeo in April, who has a track record as an anti-Muslim ideologue and of being willing, if not eager, to push for a direct US confrontation with Iran. The right-wing ex-Muslim Ayan Ali Hirsi also supports this language of “Islamic Reformation.” (See the document submitted to the White House National Security Council by the State Department Policy Planning Staff in the summer of 2017 — a period in which the NSC was drafting the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy.) General Jim Mattis was worried about Trump’s anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric. General H.R. McMaster also tried on multiple occasions to convince Trump to resist using language portraying Islam as intrinsically terrorist. The president fired McMaster in March and replaced him with hawkish neoconservative John Bolton, who is the former chair of an anti-Muslim think tank.

Trump warned Iran’s president of “consequences the likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered before” in response to Iranian President Rouhani’s earlier declaration that war with Iran would be “the mother of all wars.” Trump’s words could have no meaning other than that he is ready to initiate a nuclear attack, which would leave no winning side in a war in the Middle East.

The senior Iranian military commander, Qassem Suleimani, who is in charge of the Quds force, the external arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, has responded to Trump’s tweeted threats against Tehran in hostile and colorful language: “The Quds force and I are your match… the Iranian nation has gone through tough events.  Go ask your predecessors about it. So stop threatening us. We are ready to stand up against you.” This response could not have happened without the implicit, anticipated, or explicit backing of Iran by Russia and its new ally Turkey.

In his first 18 months in office, Trump has indulged in hate speech, dehumanizing immigrants, sticking up for Nazis in Charlottesville, and saying that Africa is full of “shithole countries.” Trump has also amplified the racism that has long been deeply embedded in both the domestic and foreign policy of the United States. He has put the interests of white supremacists first in a country that is shifting demographically away from having a white majority. For the most part, people of color see Trump for who he is, but do white Americans do so as well?  Trump tapped into the widespread anger at Wall Street and corporate corruption but redirected that well-founded anger towards immigration, at a putative immigration issue and a putative “problem of borders,” and used the fear of terrorism to try to link immigration to people’s experience of economic problems.

A lot of supporters of Trump think that the root cause of violence is Islam itself, or immigrants, or people of color in general. For those who still believe that fascism could never come to the United States, these beliefs, claims and the actions that flow from them, are important warning signs and I have to say we are at the threshold of a turn to fascist tendencies or full-blown fascism that one way or another will bring more dehumanization, brutalization, and incarceration of people of color. The historical facts show that the first “concentration camps” were not in Germany, or even in Poland. They emerged over a century ago in Cuba, Africa and the Philippines – built by colonial regimes to control the colonized populations who had the audacity to resist. African newspapers were filled with talk of fascism in the 1930s, while anti-imperialist figures like India’s Jawaharlal Nehru saw the colonial and fascist regimes as the same tyranny wearing different uniforms.

The most recent fascistic outrage being committed by the Trump administration has been the separation of children from their families at the border. The New York Times reported in April 2018 that authorities had separated 700 children from their parents since October 2017. In a two-week period in May, an additional 658 children were separated from their parents, according to Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA).

But do not forget that Trump and Trumpism are not about just religion and racism.  There are other reasons underlying the regressive, repressive and fascist tendencies in Trumpism such as furthering the economic interests of US-based corporations and elites in the Middle East. That Trump wants to wage a war against Iran has much to do with its rich oil reserves and the strategic geopolitical reshaping of the Middle East in support of the US and the interests it supports, in opposition to other imperialist forces such as Russia and China.

Trump wants to end all oil exports from Iran in order to starve the country of foreign currency. Iran’s biggest customers are the European Union, India and China. The big European oil companies have already folded under Trump’s pressure. China has still to decide if it wants to follow the US stand against Iran or to find its own imperialist ways of benefiting from the situation by making its own deals with Iran.

Trump is pressing Saudi Arabia to increase its oil supplies to replace the Iranian oil that can no longer reach the world market. That is why Iranian President Rouhani said in response to Trump that if we don’t sell our oil, we will make sure that nobody else would either, threatening the Persian Gulf oil shipping lanes. Within the Trump administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton are the biggest proponents of regime change in Tehran. They favor organizations and people with ties to far-right anti-Muslim groups, which push for “Reformation” in Islamic countries in the Middle East regardless of the likelihood that such actions could provoke a backlash in Muslim communities across the world.

One of these people is the billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who backed Newt Gingrich against the putatively “anti-Israel” Obama in 2012 election and spent $80 million supporting the Republican party in 2016. Adelson not only has ties with the far right in the US, but also with the Israeli state, supporting Benjamin Netanyahu and his goal of preventing the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. Adelson is now a key driving force behind Trump’s Middle East policy and some of his recent controversial decisions, including moving the American embassy to Jerusalem, thus tacitly if not overtly recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, appointing the ultra-hawkish John Bolton as the National Security Adviser, and violating the Iran nuclear agreement.

According to the Guardian, “Adelson is no less active in Israel where he owns the country’s largest newspaper, a publication so closely linked with Netanyahu’s administration that people call it ‘Bibipaper’ after the prime minister’s nickname.”

Nobody in the Middle East believes Trump’s good Muslim/bad Muslim narrative and the threat of nuclear war is present today more than ever.  Some people think because Trump, despite his initial bellicose rhetoric, was willing to engage in negotiations with North Korea, that Trump’s threats against Iran are also merely rhetoric and that there is a chance that the US will also engage in negotiations with Iran, perhaps with Oman as mediator. However, I see the actions of the Trump’s administration as a tactical maneuver to divide Iran and North Korea in order to put more pressure on Iran.

A year ago, the CIA created a mission center with the goal of regime change in Iran including analysts, covert action, personnel and specialists from across the CIA. Mr. Pompeo picked a veteran intelligence officer, Michael D’Andrea, a former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, to lead the new group; D’Andrea is well known for his aggressive stance toward Iran. Part of this operation includes using the MEK, which leads a terror cult that had fought alongside Saddam Hussein’s Iraq against Iran and which is despised by the Iranian people. They are supposedly also talking to the Iranian-armed Kurdish Peshmerga KDP (Kurdish Democratic Party) and one of the factions of the Marxist organization Komala, which has a similar history of turning to the right after the crisis of the left.

Recently, Trump announced he could meet President Hassan Rouhani with “no preconditions” at “any time.” Immediately, Iranian officials spoke out against Trump’s offer.  One hour after Trump’s comments, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appeared to contradict on CNBC his boss’s statements about meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani without preconditions: “If the Iranians demonstrate a commitment to make fundamental changes in how they treat their own people, reduce their malign behavior, can agree that it’s worthwhile to enter in a nuclear agreement that actually prevents proliferation, then the president said he’s prepared to sit down and have a conversation with him.”

The Middle East since Trump’s presidency  

  1. Saudi Arabia and Iran

The Middle East has been torn by a polarizing feud between predominantly Sunni Saudi Arabia and predominantly Shiite Iran. Regardless of the religious rhetoric exchanged between the two, the truth is that sectarianism is not the root of the conflict between these two Muslim majority nations.  This hostility goes back to the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war in which the Saudis, with US support, both backed Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq and urged other Gulf nations to do so. After the war, Iran considered Saudi Arabia as an enemy and tried to organize and boost support for Sunni jihadist actions against the Saudi government.

In recent years, we have seen an increase in Iranian regional power, especially in Iraq, with the nuclear deal during the Obama presidency, and its gains in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon. The Saudi-Iran feud became antagonistic in recent months, with a regional US-Saudi war against Yemen, with the blessing of Israel.

In addition, Trump’s accession to the Israeli notion of Jerusalem as its capital has drawn the ire of many US allies, along with 120 other countries, which warned of the dramatic consequences of that.  And Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan said, “This could lead us to break off our diplomatic relations with Israel.”

The status of Jerusalem is one of the most contested issues in the Middle East. Palestinians see East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state. Through the move of accepting Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, the Trump administration is accepting Israel’s claimed control of Jerusalem, which will, as it is designed to do, cut the northern part of the West Bank off from the southern part. That is the kind of thing that could make a Palestinian state completely impossible. This is leading Iran to have more influence on Palestinian groups and to pit them against Saudi Arabia.

On November 16, 2017, Israeli military leader Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot gave an unprecedented interview to a Saudi newspaper underlining the ways in which the two countries could unite to counter Iran’s influence in the region. For Saudi Arabia, the Islamic Revolution marked an attempt at dethroning its hegemonic role in the region, especially as Tehran attempted to export its revolution.

Saudi Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s so-called “reform,” his recent purge and extortion of other princes, and broad domestic repression, and the misleading coverage of Western media gave him concealed the true motive and nature of these putative “reforms”: the centralization of the government to prepare for war with Iran and actions against Lebanon and Yemen. The misleading media coverage also obscured the role of the United States and Israel in promoting these warmongering policies as seen in the extensive involvement of Saudi Arabia in the war in Yemen.

  1. What’s Happening in Yemen?

The war in Yemen has created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, in which 22 million people urgently need humanitarian aid according to a United Nation’s estimate. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) began bombing Yemen in March 2015, with the aim of restoring the former Saudi-backed President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi to power. Hadi was deposed after a Shiite rebel group, the Houthis, stormed the capital in 2014; he eventually fled the country.  Saudi Arabia has spent more than three years bombing Yemen and creating a humanitarian crisis. But aid groups claim the worst attack was when the US-backed forces organized by the UAE launched an assault on the rebel-held port of Hodeidah, the entry point for 70 percent of the food, medicine, and other crucial supplies entering Yemen. The war has already killed 15,000 civilians. Most information people see or read in the Western mainstream media, such as the Washington Post, CNN, or Fox news comes from the Saudi media, diplomats, or military officers.

But many believe that US-Saudi coalition warplanes deliberately target the civilian infrastructure, including homes, farms, factories, schools, buses, gas stations, government buildings, and water treatment facilities. In the past four years, there have been 13,000 civilians killed and over 21,000 injured, mostly women and children; this had been recorded by the Yemeni monitoring group the Legal Center for Rights and Development.

Saudi Arabia uses cholera as the weapon of choice, since it is a known and expected consequence of the blockade and the targeting of infrastructure like water treatment facilities, further exacerbated by the fact that Yemen imports nearly 80 percent of the food and almost all the medication it needs. From April 2017-April 2018 over 1 million people became infected with this very preventable, very treatable, and highly lethal disease. Thousands died because they were not able to receive medical care in time. This created the largest cholera outbreak in the world.

  1. The New Power Bloc of Russia, Iran, and Turkey

The Turkish lira is in total meltdown.  It has lost 40% of its value against the dollar in the last six months and fell nearly 20% in the last week. Turkey’s fast economic growth of the last half-decade was built on credit and foreign borrowing, without ensuring a balance between exports and imports. Then, with the rise of the dollar and of global interest rates, Turkish currency markets fell sharply.

  1. The Iranian Uprising

There was universal recognition that the spontaneous protests from below last winter were triggered by the worsening economy and the economic hardships caused by the country’s surging prices for the basic foods consumed by low-income families, such as bread and eggs. Inflation was estimated at 10% annually by a government report, and according to outside experts, inflation may be between 100-150%.

The February uprising in Iran pushed beyond political change and mere reform; it put on the agenda an end to the legitimacy of the fanatical Principalist (conservative) and the Reformist leaders and of the illusion that nonviolent reforms would lead to fundamental change. It highlighted that fundamental internal and bottom-up regime change should be considered, beginning with the action of an independent working-class movement against the totality of the current regressive regime. It is the intensity of these endogenous stirrings that might prompt the Iranian regime to make a deal with Trump to keep in power.

Since most of the women and labor activists are in prison, it is clear that this movement was spontaneous and that neither leftists, nor the MEK, nor monarchists could claim its leadership. But the danger of this movement for the regime was not its spontaneous nature, but the fact that the regime can no longer fully prevent women, workers, the poor, as well as ethnic and religious minorities and young students from pushing back against the current government. Every day, workers are going on strike, from factory workers to truck drivers and unionized teachers, mostly for improvements of living conditions, for better wages, and against rising inflation and the declining value of the currency.

Unlike the 2009 Green Movement for civil reform under the leadership of the Reformists, this past February’s uprising was a potentially revolutionary movement that could have truly revolutionary implications, getting the working class involved at a time when more than half of the population subsists under the poverty line, in a setting of endemic government corruption and abuse of vast amounts of taxpayer money spent on the mullahs’ foundations.

The reformers were clearly on the opposite side of this revolt, condemning violence and protest slogans like “Down with the dictator” and “eslah talab, osolgra, ineh tamom majara” (Principalists and Reformists are all equally responsible), which aim at the destruction of totality of the regime.

This revolt included the participation of the unemployed, women, students and youth, mostly under the age of thirty.

The prominent women’s protests against the compulsory chador, enforced through an Islamic anti-women law, were especially notable.

Iran has had non-stop workers’ demonstrations during the past three decades and the current protests are ceaseless. This is seen in the recent environmental crisis in central regions like Isfahan and southern regions like Khuzestan province, Kazeron, and now in major cities like Khorramshahr, Abadan and recently in Kharaj a couple of months ago. There is a lack of proper drinking water, while the regime is selling drinking water to Iraq and has destroyed the Iranian agricultural system and in some places has dried land beyond use. This has forced millions of villagers into cities, where they cannot get jobs and proper housing. A majority of the people demonstrating also were upset at the regime’s sub-imperialist adventurist political actions, especially in support of the murderous Assad regime and its confrontation with the Saudis in Yemen in support of the Houthis.

Iran has a lot of unfinished democratic tasks in order to build democratic institutions, such as combining class conflict with a civil society agenda or the women’s rights and gender issues. This shows some of the difficulties of combining democracy and socialism after the revolution.

America’s unsavory record of violent interventions in the Middle East is little known to the American people yet well known to the Iranian people, who remember the CIA coup plots in Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt. This is the bloody history that modern interventionists like George W. Bush and Trump do not want the American people to remember. The CIA began its active meddling in Syria in 1949,   barely a year after the agency’s creation. They pumped secret American military aid to tyrants in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon, sometimes favoring puppets who promulgated conservative jihadist ideologies that the US regarded as a reliable antidote to Soviet Marxism. In 1953, Kermit Roosevelt orchestrated a CIA coup in Iran against the democratically elected President Mohammed Mosaddegh, after Mosaddegh tried to renegotiate the terms of Iran’s lopsided contracts with the giant Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP). Mosaddegh was the first elected leader in Iran’s 4,000-year history and a popular champion for democracy across the developing world. Mosaddegh expelled all British diplomats after uncovering a coup attempt by U.K. intelligence officers working with BP.

Mosaddegh, however, made the fatal mistake of resisting his advisers’ pleas to also expel the CIA, which, they correctly suspected, was complicit in the British plot. Mosaddegh idealized the US as a role model for Iran’s new democracy and considered it incapable of such perfidies. President Harry Truman had forbidden the CIA from actively joining the British in their attempts to topple Mosaddegh. But when President Dwight Eisenhower took office in January 1953, he gave the CIA a green light. After ousting Mosaddegh in “Operation Ajax,” Rocky Stone and Kermit Roosevelt installed Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who favored US oil companies, but whose two decades of CIA-sponsored savagery toward his own people from the Peacock throne would finally ignite the 1979 Islamic revolution that has bedeviled US foreign policy for nearly forty years.

War and climate destruction tragically uproot millions from their home countries. We need to open the borders to refugees, and meet their needs for health, safety and human dignity. We challenge the racism and Islamophobia used to justify wars and occupations and the denial of human rights to refugees.

The militarism and authoritarianism that the US promotes abroad is reflected in the militarism and attacks on civil liberties in our communities at home. We stand in solidarity with those such as Black Lives Matter who are advocating the demilitarization of police forces. We stand in solidarity with those who seek liberation, social and economic justice, and democracy in all countries, including the United States.

The Iranian people still remember the CIA coup. They therefore reject any outside intervention aimed at “helping” them, as they remember the results of both the US overthrow of Mosaddegh and the US toppling of Saddam in Iraq. They remember how the US claims to support Iranian people but denies them visas.

How can we oppose imperialism/Islamophobia on the one hand, and the Iranian regime on the other? This is a task for the truly revolutionary and humanist left for today. Another world, a humanist alternative to capitalism, is possible, free of militarism, war, and poverty.

Originally posted at the International Marxist-Humanist.

Cancel Kavanaugh – Walkout October 4th

By: Jason SchulmanOctober 1, 2018
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CANCEL KAVANAUGH. WALK OUT AGAINST PATRIARCHY.
WE ARE SURVIVORS, BELIEVE US.

Join a National Walkout from all work, waged and unwaged, on Thursday, October 4 at 4:00 pm to protest the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.  

In the wake of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination and confirmation process to the Supreme Court of the United States, we have listened with distress to the women who have so bravely come forward to make public his assaults against them.  

We have watched with mounting alarm the Senate hearing where Dr. Christine Blasey Ford shared her traumatic account of assault at the hands of Brett Kavanaugh and the dismissal of her suffering by those who are bent on moving forward with a lifetime appointment of Kavanaugh to the highest court in the land.

The outrageous response to Dr. Ford and other assault victims who have come forward have reminded us of our own assaults and brutalization and we have found solace and hope in the bravery of the survivors who have spoken up.

But the condescension and disrespect with which Dr. Ford and other survivors have been treated by politicians underscores for us what we have known all along: that the current political system, far from promoting the welfare of women, tries actively to harm us.

This is not a ‘partisan’ issue in the terms the Democrats and Republicans are framing it: as a struggle for power in the electoral arena. This is a universal issue as it regards hearing the voices of those who speak out against gender violence, investigating charges against abusers, and holding them accountable for their actions. Most importantly, the issue involves challenging and undoing the power structures that systematically keep most women at the bottom so they can be over-exploited, underpaid, easily abused, raped and deported. The system is designed such that that their testimonies can never challenge the claims of innocence and ‘good name’ of powerful men.

This is a critical issue for political equality and full freedom for women at a moment when women, youth, lgbtq+ people, workers both waged and unwaged, all people of color and immigrant communities are saying “Enough is enough!” This is a key issue for  all  of us in the US, and around the world, who are daily oppressed, humiliated and dismissed, whose suffering and pain often doesn’t matter, all these millions of people who can relate to Dr. Ford’s testimony, and have responded with narratives of solidarity.

This appointment must not happen. It jeopardizes the future of countless women, our reproductive rights, civil rights, and even the most basic sense of safety that all women, and people, ought to be entitled to.

On October 4 we call on all women, and those who believe our stories, to walk out of work, school and housework at 4:00 pm and show the world that since our labour runs the world, when we are denied dignity and safety, we can stop the world from running.

ENDORSING ORGANIZATIONS – [ List will be updated manually ]

International Women’s Strike US
International Socialist Organization
Kanawha Valley DSA (West Virginia)
Socialist Alternative
Democratic Socialists of America
Women’s March San Francisco
Worker’s Voice/La Voz de los Trabajadores
Organization for a Free Society
Red Bloom Communist Collective
Party for Socialism and Liberation
National Women's Liberation
Socialist Workers Alliance of Guyana
Viewpoint Magazine
The Woman Project
Minnesota State University
Rally Cry Screenprinting
EBDSA Socialist Feminist Caucus
CUNY Struggle
Bucknell University, History Alumni
Women's March Oakland
The Women's Building San Francisco
Economics for Everyone
Red Wedge Magazine
Local Sprouts Cooperative – Portland, Maine
San Francisco Women's Political Committee
March for Black Women
Black Women Blueprint
YDSA UW – Madison
National Lawyers Guild
NARAL Pro-Choice California
Campus Antifascist Network
Dept of Anthropology, UC Berkeley
Council on American-Islamic Relations, San Francisco Bay Area (CAIR-SFBA)
Socialist Viewpoint
East Bay Sanctuary Covenant
International Marxist-Humanist Organization
Cuba Cultural Center, Inc.
Younger Womxn's Task Force of Greater Lafayette
BuxMont DSA
New Politics
Boston Democratic Socialists of America
Worcester Socialist Alternative
Socialist Rifle Association
Syracuse DSA

Trump Administration Declares Me an Anti-Semite

By: September 30, 2018
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I was born a Jew, had a bris and Bar Mitzvah and attended Hebrew school afternoons and Sundays from the age of 7 to 13. I went to schul with my grandfather on holidays and in 1967 I volunteered to defend Israel in the Six-Day War. But I never got to go to Israel then and since the early 1970s, I have refused to visit because of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

I am not a “self-hating” Jew. This summer I toured two concentration camps in Eastern Europe and said Kaddish at an eight-hundred-year-old synagogue in Prague for the six million, including family members, who were killed by the Nazis.

But I continue to oppose the occupation and support efforts to boycott Israel as a way to pressure it to allow the creation of a fully independent Palestinian state. My support for the boycott intensified this spring and summer when Israeli troops used live ammunition to push back and murder protestors at the Gaza-Israel border and when the government declared that only Jews had full rights in the State of Israel.

Because of my opposition to the Israeli occupation, the assistant secretary of education for civil rights in the Trump Administration has now declared me an anti-Semite.

I have no problem with redefining Judaism as an ethnicity rather than as a religion, a ploy used by the Trump education department to justify reopening an investigation of supposed anti-Semitism at Rutgers University in 2011. In fact, many secular Jews like myself identify as ethnic, rather than religious Jews.

But I do object to being labeled an anti-Semite because I believe Israeli treatment of Arabs in Israel proper and in the occupied territories constitutes racism or because I apply what Trump officials believe is a “double standard” by holding Israel accountable for “behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” Arab activists with whom I agree accuse the United States government of declaring the Palestinian cause itself and its demand for an independent state inherently anti-Semitic.

I do not hold Israel to a double standard. I also oppose racism in the United States and I have participated in Black Lives Matter marches and organized for the removal of statues commemorating champions of slavery.

The redefinition of anti-Semitism as a political weapon against the Palestinian cause is not an isolated action by the Trump Administration. It moved the United States embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, a symbolic act in support of the rightwing Netanyahu regime and an open insult to Palestinians who also claim Jerusalem as a national capital and Israeli and American Jews demanding fairer treatment of Arabs and respect for their human and civil rights. The Trump Administration also recently cut humanitarian aid that supported Palestinian schools and medical facilities.

My father was a strong supporter of Israel who visited the country many times. Just before he died we were talking about the Israeli treatment of Arabs on the West Bank and Gaza. My father pleaded that Jews would never do such things. Unfortunately, they are. I am an ethnic Jew opposed to Israeli and Trump Administration policies and that does not make me an anti-Semite.

This article was originally published in the Daily Kos on Sept. 27, 2018.

Follow Alan J. Singer at: https://twitter.com/ReecesPieces8

 

 

 

 

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