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  • New Film about the First Rainbow Coalition

    New Film about the First Rainbow Coalition

    Image result for first rainbow coalition chicago 1960s

    Many young people are unaware that the Black Panthers sought out and formed alliances among Black and white, Puerto Rican and Native American working people. The first “Rainbow Coalition” was created in the 1960s in Chicago and became an example to others across the country. There’s going to be film about it, but the makers need your help. Go here to see a trailer.

    At the urging of Fred Hampton, the Black Panthers, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, and the Young Patriots, made up of Appalachian migrants. Native Americans living in Chicago were also draw into the coalition. Soon there will be a film about this.

    Ray Santisteban has produced documentary films for over 26 years, exploring history, memory and transformation in films such as “Passin’ It On,” about Black Panther leader Dhoruba Bin Wahad, “Voices from Texas,” featuring Texas-based Chicano poets, and as Senior Producer of “Visiones: Latino Art and Culture in the U.S.,” a PBS series. His work has been broadcast nationally and featured in film festivals internationally. He is a Rockefeller Fellow, and a graduate of NYU’s film production program. Now he is making the film on the first Rainbow Coalition.

    Go here to see a trailer. And contribute.

     

     

     

  • Swedish Social Democrats Drift Further Right on Nuclear Ban and the Environment

    Swedish Social Democrats Drift Further Right on Nuclear Ban and the Environment

     

    On Friday, July 12, after almost two years of discussion, the Swedish minister of foreign affairs, Margot Wallström of the Social Democratic Party, announced that the government has decided to not sign the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Wallström gave two reasons why she decided to not sign it: 1) the treaty in its current form is unclear on some definitions such as what kind of weapons are concerned and how the disarmament shall happen, and 2) if she would take the treaty to the parliament, the most likely outcome is that a majority would vote against signing it.

    Currently Sweden is led by a government headed by the Social Democratic Party in coalition with the Center Party, the Greens, and the Liberals. The will to stay in power emerged after the last election in September 2018 and became the highest priority for the leadership of the Social Democrats, who found themselves facing the worst result in the whole history of the party with only 28.3% of the votes. Therefore, they decided to go into a coalition with the Green Party and the two right-wing parties, the Center Party and the Liberals.

    This coalition meant that Social Democrats had to accept the right-wing parties influence on politics, which has meant a deterioration of public welfare, loosening rent control, restrictions of the right for workers to go on strike, and more. Thus, there seems to be no end of how many of the traditional core values which previously used to define the Swedish Social Democratic Party that the current leadership are willing to negotiate away. A world free from nuclear weapons, a no-brainer for anyone on the left, is apparently now something the Social Democrats can put up for discussion.

    Instead of hiding behind excuses about technical formulations in the text of the treaty or the current parliamentary situation, the Minister of Defense Peter Hultqvist of the Social Democrats expressed more clearly why he thought that Sweden should not sign a treaty to ban nuclear weapons. The treaty, Hultqvist insisted, would hurt the military cooperation Sweden is involved in. Journalist Mikael Holmström in fact explained in Dagens Nyheter that both American, French, and British diplomats strongly warned Sweden against signing the treaty.

    Beatrice Fihn from ICAN, an international anti-nuclear weapons agency which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 for its work on banning nuclear weapons, also said in a discussion with Wallström on Swedish radio that the real reason why the Social Democrats decided to not sign the treaty was that the Americans and the other countries which have nuclear weapons strongly dissuaded Sweden from signing the treaty. They did so because Sweden signing could actually have made a real difference. Many other countries will in the near future decide whether they should also sign the treaty, and Sweden’s choice could have served as an important example for other countries to follow, Fihn explained.

    The politics of neutrality, which Sweden at least expressed outwardly during the Cold War, is now officially not a position Sweden holds anymore. Instead, Sweden openly cooperates in military exercises with other Western European countries and with NATO. Another important aspect of Sweden’s military involvement with other countries and NATO is the manufacture and selling of weapons. Earlier this week, it was announced that the US Army signed a five-year contract with SAAB, a Swedish gun manufacturer, to buy weapons for a total value of US$445 million. Whether that contract still would have been negotiated if Sweden had signed onto the UN treaty is something we probably will never know.

    Now, in times when the threat of nuclear war is the highest since the end of the Cold War, coming out against it would have been more important than ever. That is also the position among several of the fractions within the Social Democratic Party. For example, the youth section, SSU, and the women’s association within the party, S-kvinnor, both stated that they thought it was wrong by the party leadership to not sign the UN treaty.

    The Social Democrats giving up on many of their core values is a pattern which has been possible to witness more and more during the last decades. A similar case just a few months back occurred when Preem, a Swedish oil company, wanted to expand its refinery on the Swedish west coast. Preem’s investment would have meant that the plant would become the single biggest emitter of carbon dioxide in Sweden if it could be built according to their plans. Even when confronted, the Social Democrats have been refusing to say anything about the refinery other than the matter is a technical and juridical question for the local municipality and the regional agencies to decide upon.

    At the same time, a massive movement of youth against climate destruction is taking place in Sweden. Thousands of teenagers have, during the last year, gone on strike from their schools on Fridays in order to raise awareness about how much they care about the future of the environment. One of the teenagers who helped kick off the strike, sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg, is now internationally renowned. But still, even when there is a large public majority in favor of banning oil companies from building big refineries or in favor of signing a UN treaty to ban nuclear weapons, the Social Democratic leadership, instead of listening to the progressive voices and standing firmly for their core values, chooses to meet the will of the market. This signals to young people dreaming of a different world that politics is not about trying to create the world you want. Instead politics appears only as a kind of a technical administration of the forces of the market.

    By forming the massive, now international #Fridaysforfuture movement, the youth of Sweden have started to mobilize their frustration with the current political system’s inability to do anything meaningful against the destruction of the climate. How this movement will evolve is far from clear. But it certainly shows a promising sign of the great spontaneous creative capacity of young people dreaming of another future.

    Originally posted by The International Marxist-Humanist.

  • What’s Next In Puerto Rico’s Movement for Justice and Democracy

    What’s Next In Puerto Rico’s Movement for Justice and Democracy

    For 14 days this summer, Puerto Ricans engaged in nightly protests that resulted in the ousting of Governor Ricardo Rosselló. The protests—which amassed nearly one-third of the archipelago’s population—were sparked by a leaked chat in which the governor and members of his cabinet exchanged misogynistic, homophobic, and classist messages, including threats against political opponents.

    The event, now dubbed “RickyLeaks,” also revealed how the government manipulated media messaging to create a positive image of the administration and gain support for its efforts in privatizing the public sector. Perhaps most stunningly, the chat included jokes made by officials in regards to the 4,645 deaths that resulted from Hurricane Maria.

    However, the leaks were not the main reason people took to the streets in protest. They only revealed what most Puerto Ricans already suspected of their government: that it was engaged in deep-rooted corruption and led by people who did not heed the voices of ordinary Puerto Ricans. The leaks were the catalyst that compelled people to act, but the groundwork for the success of the resistance movement in Puerto Rico was laid well before people first took to the streets of San Juan.

    Puerto Ricans had many reasons to protest. In the last two years alone, austerity measures enacted under the U.S.-imposed Fiscal Control Board have resulted in the closure of more than 400 public schools, the privatization of the archipelago’s electrical company, and a severely slashed budget for the University of Puerto Rico. Such harsh austerity measures have led to a forced migration of Puerto Ricans to the U.S. mainland, weakening the communities they leave behind. The inefficient response to Hurricane Maria shook Puerto Rican confidence in its government.

    All of this, combined with generations of corruption—Ricardo Rosselló’s father was a former governor in the late 1990s, and is known to have systemized corruption in the government—contributed to a growing rage that overflowed into the streets this summer when the insult became too much to bare.

    Continuity of Civil Resistance in Puerto Rican History

    Civil resistance movements like the one taking place today are not new to Puerto Rico. In the 1930s, sugar workers led by Pedro Albizu Campus went on strike, paralyzing Puerto Rico’s economy and severely impacting the profits of U.S. absentee landowners. In 1998, more than 6,000 workers at the Puerto Rican Telephone Company called for a general strike, and thousands took to the streets to protest the privatization of the telephone company under Rossello’s father. A year later, coordinated acts of resistance against the U.S. Navy’s bombing range in Vieques (an island municipality in the west of Puerto Rico) gained the support of a diverse sector of Puerto Rican society. Activists set up camp on the bombing range, effectively halting military exercises for more than a year, and some 150,000 people flooded the streets of San Juan in the largest protest the archipelago had ever seen.

    The unprecedented protests that erupted in San Juan on July 22, 2019 have since solidified their place as the largest act of civil resistance in Puerto Rico’s history, with an estimated 1 million people (about 30% of the population) participating.

    Source: La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción Facebook

    Just as in Vieques, the unity shown in the recent protest marks a unique moment in Puerto Rican history. The events of recent weeks emerged organically with no clear leadership structure. Javier Smith Torres, a long-time activist who was arrested during the protests, said that “the people were self-mobilized through social media,” and that they were galvanized by their frustrations toward the government in the wake of Hurricane Maria. “After Hurricane Maria there was no government, and those who took responsibility for the communities were the people.”

    However, the role of long-established groups such as Colectiva Feminista en Construction (Feminist Collective in Construction),  Jornada: Se Acabaron las Promesas (Jornada: The Promises are Over), LGTTBQ organizations, the university student movement, and various sectors of the Puerto Rican independence movement, cannot be understated. For years, these groups have been at the forefront of denunciations against corruption, misogynistic leaders, and the Fiscal Control Board.

    The Activists: Who They Are, What They Want, and How They Protest

    Calls for the governor’s resignation came from all sectors of society: religious groups, artists, singers, politicians, banks, the construction sector, fishermen, teachers, students, and one police union (COPS), among others. Young people’s participation in the protest was significant. The unity that emerged during the 14-day protest circumvented political parties and status ideologies. The slogan, “Somos Más y No Tenemos Miedo” (“We Are More and We Are Not Afraid”), was repeatedly used in the streets that led to the governor’s residence, La Fortaleza, to demonstrate protesters’ unity and fearlessness.

    puerto rico woman protester

    Source: Colectiva Feminista en Construcción Facebook page

    The diversity and creativity of tactics that emerged throughout the protests were an expression of Puerto Rican heritage. Horse caravans, sky diving, blockading roads and major highways, a motorized caravan of more than 3,000 participants, pot banging, protest songs, prayer and mass, a 5k run, graffiti, street art, performing art, kite flying, removal of the governor’s portrait from government agencies, direct calls to La Fortaleza, singing patriotic songs, mass marches, yoga, and coffee art were all ways people registered their grievances against the government.

    Music also took a central role in the protest. Puerto Rican folk music (such as bomba and plena), long associated with resistance to slavery and colonial rule, were an integral part of the protests in front of La Fortaleza.

    The variety of tactics helped to engage different sectors of society that had previously been marginalized from participating in protest and marked the first time many had ever engaged in an act of civil resistance. Social media played a major part in the mobilization and dissemination of the protests. The hashtags #rickyrenuncia and #rickydictador became trending topics on platforms like Twitter and Instagram.

    The cases of violence that occurred during the protest were most often initiated by police, who were most likely to use violent force against protesters after midnight—as if constitutional protections had a curfew.

    What Happens Now?

    Several weeks have passed since the first people marched to the governor’s residence demanding his resignation and the movement shows no sign of dissipating. On August 4, thousands gathered in front of La Fortaleza for a protest organized by the Campamento en Contra de las Cenizas en Peñuelas (Camp Against the Deposit of Coal Ashes in Peñuelas) calling for Pedro Pierluisi to step down from his newly appointed office (first as secretary of state and then secretly sworn in as governor as Roselló made his exit). Before “Ricky Leaks,” Pierluisi was a lawyer for the Fiscal Control Board and a lobbyist for Applied Energy System (AES)—a group responsible for the contamination of aquifers in Puerto Rico by their coal plant. He is also known to have worked against the rights of women and LGTTBQ. On August 7, the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico ruled that Pierluisi was not the legitimate governor of the archipelago.

    Now, Puerto Ricans are demanding an accountable form of government, one that would end the corruption and listen to the people’s demands. The current political and economic system in Puerto Rico is experiencing what many are calling a “collapse of the colonial system.” Puerto Rico has been in an economic recession for 13 years. The people are clearly calling for a participatory democracy, as reflected by the People’s Assemblies that are currently taking place throughout the archipelago.

    “This is a fight for democracy and decolonization…The people are asking for respect, transparency, and a decolonization process,” Smith Torres said.

    The talk of revolution, a radical change to the entire system of government, is still afoot in Puerto Rico. What has already crystallized here this summer, though, is that ordinary people have become the protagonists in their political sphere. As Smith Torres put it, this summer in Puerto Rico has “vindicate[d] current social struggles and protests and shown us what we are capable of.”

    See also from Sara Vazquez Melendez: “From Local to Transnational: Puerto Ricans’ Struggle against Coal Ash Dumping,” Minds of the Movement, July 25, 2019.

    Originally posted at Minds of the Movement.

  • How Should the U.S. Left Think about China?

    How Should the U.S. Left Think about China?

    Editors’ note: This is the second of three articles providing analysis of what’s happening now in China – and why.

    [Interview with the author on Democracy Now.]

    On the U.S. left, China is treated for the most part as an afterthought, an important but distant country that has little bearing on what’s happening in the United States. For most socialists, the Chinese Revolution never held as much fascination as the Russian Revolution. If the Chinese Cultural Revolution inspired some in the New Left to take an interest in China, they were moved more by the revolutionary idealism of Maoism than a detailed analysis of Mao’s China. Since then China’s capitalist transformation since the 1980s has offered little sign of emancipatory politics.

    The new generation of activists in the United States, politicized successively by the anti-globalization movement, Occupy Wall Street and the democratic socialism of Bernie Sanders, has never really had China on its mind. However, at a time of growing conflict between the United States and China, it is an urgent political task for the Left to think seriously about China and U.S.-China relations. This thinking requires a collective and concerted effort to develop critical and progressive perspectives on the nature of China’s state and society, its increasingly prominent role and influence in the Asia-Pacific region and globally, and its conflict with the US.

    These perspectives should inform how the U.S. left builds solidarity with social movements in China, identifies shared struggles, explores possibilities for collaboration, and helps shape the public understanding of China in the United States. We should have as our goals: deescalating tensions between the U.S. and China; advancing social justice and equality in both countries; and tackling global challenges like climate change through cross-border solidarity and organizing.

    In the United States, these efforts must involve building alliances with social movement activists, progressive groups and unions, as well as with the Chinese-American community, Chinese international students, and whenever it is possible, with activists in China. These are immensely challenging tasks, and they necessitate a shift in the broad U.S. left to make such organizing one of its top priorities so that we can build left internationalism to stop what seems to be an ever intensifying conflict between Beijing and Washington.

    Critical Perspectives on China

    One of the foremost tasks is to develop and clarify our analysis on China and U.S.-China relations from critical and progressive perspectives, something we are woefully behind in doing. The absence of such analysis hampers the left’s ability to develop positions on China, and to shape how China is discussed in the United States. While we should not get bogged down in ideological debate about Mao’s China, we must start by recognizing that China today is not socialist.

    The reason to be clear about this is that if a country is socialist, the left would want to defend its government against capitalist countries. So, is China socialist? If socialism is understood as workers’ democracy—the democratic control over work and all of society—then China is not socialist. It is, in fact, an extremely unequal and deeply divided capitalist class society, regardless of the Chinese state’s claim to practice “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Moreover, China has transformed itself into a rising world power, exporting capital to developing countries, exploiting their natural resources, and exerting influence over many countries, especially in the Asia-Pacific region.

    While few on the Left believe China is socialist, some view it as an authoritarian state so repressive that they would support any democratic state against it. This is a mistaken viewpoint that we must also guard against. Of course, the left should be for democracy and all states that deny basic democratic rights We must avoid falling into the Cold War trap of supporting the “democratic” West against the “totalitarian” China.

    As anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the history of the United States knows, the U.S. government has fought against the expansion of democracy both at home and abroad whenever it interfered with its ruler’s power and profit. The United States  the rhetoric of human rights and democracy to advance its capitalist and imperialist interests against China, something the U.S. left should not support. Instead it should back popular and progressive movements for liberation and democracy within both countries, rather than taking sides with either state in this growing rivalry.

    There is another version of this mistaken state-centric position. Some in the United States argue that supporting the trade war with China will advance the interests of the American working class. There is no evidence, however, that the trade war will benefit workers in either the United States or China. Even worse, siding with the American government’s protectionism will weaken the international labor solidarity that is necessary today to fight global capitalism.

    International Solidarity Without Allegiance to Either State

    The key in all this work is establishing an independent position for the U.S. left that does not align it with either state. This can be a challenge. Sometimes we will share the same concerns as those with vastly different politics and aims, for instance, on human rights issues in China. These issues are often manipulated by U.S. conservatives and hawkish liberals alike.

    But this fact should not diminish the importance of these issues. Just because others have raised these issues does not mean that the left should refrain taking its own independent stand on them. If anything, the left should be more proactive, for the absence of a left perspective and engagement will have profoundly negative consequences.

    Abstaining on such issues, or even worse denying they exist, violates the left’s commitment to solidarity with the exploited and oppressed in China and throughout the world. Doing so will discredit the left in the eyes of those impacted. Even worse, in the absence of solidarity from the Left, conservatives and hawkish liberals will take the opportunity to co-opt oppressed people and their issues.

    That’s why the left has an obligation to chart a its own perspective and build solidarity with these movements. Such efforts do not mean unthinking support, but critical support precisely because the left has ideas, strategies, and tactics to help liberation struggles avoid traps and succeed in their aims.

    Take the recent demonstrations in Hong Kong as an example. A small minority on the U.S. left thinks that because some political parties and activists in Hong Kong are supported by sections of the American government or elements of the Democratic or Republican parties, then the recent massive demonstrations against the Extradition Bill are therefore illegitimate or a conspiracy to promote a so-called “color revolution,” that is, a political maneuver by some elite group or bourgeois party.

    This conspiratorial view – parroting the Chinese government slander against the Hong Kong protesters – fails embarrassingly to understand the dynamics of social change. Such mass movements cannot be instigated by a few individuals or even political groups from the outside. In particular, we have seen that the protesters today have categorically rejected the more traditional opposition leaders such as the pan-democrats as well as the younger generation of leaders that emerged after the Umbrella Movement.

    The protests of tens of thousands of ordinary Hong Kong citizens reflects their frustration with the undemocratic practices of their government exemplified by the government’s attempt to push through the Extradition Bill early this year. The protests have evolved into a more generalized movement that intersects with social and class grievances, leading not only to mass demonstrations but also to a general strike. This deserves our solidarity, and failing to show solidarity deeply damages to the ability of the left to forge international bonds and to build a global struggle for socialism.

    This does not mean uncritically supporting everything in the movement and ignoring problematic tendencies within it. For instance, we should be critical of those who are xenophobic or outright racists toward immigrants from mainland China and mainland Chinese people more generally, or of those who showed nostalgia for Hong Kong’s British colonial past or who expressed a desire for support from the United States. In fact, those forces have already been condemned by others in the movement.

    We have to recognize that in any mass movement, a variety of people and organizations, some progressive and others with problematic politics, will be present and bring their different viewpoints to the struggle. This is a fact that does not discredit the movement as a whole when it is an expression of genuine and legitimate concerns of a large part of the population. Our role should be to support the movement, especially its best elements and to criticize others. We should use the same approach toward struggles against oppression, for example, in Xinjiang, Uygher Autonomous Region, and in Tibet.

    Building Solidarity and Forging Shared Struggles

    With these perspectives and methods, the U.S. Left should build solidarity with progressive social movements in China. Workers’ strikes, feminist and LGBTQ protests, the environmental movement, and movements for human rights have come a long way in the last twenty years. They have made significant gains but have also suffered from severe repression in recent years.

    Understanding these struggles on their own terms is surely necessary. But learning about them is not enough; the US Left must express solidarity with them and find ways to collaborate with activists and organizations. Organizing and expressing solidarity is a useful way to raise public awareness of these issues and advance internationalism as an alternative to national chauvinism.

    Take the labor struggle in China. In the past twenty years, Chinese workers – first state-sector workers before mid-2000s and then rural migrant workers after mid-2000s – organized collective resistance against exploitation, while worker centers and networks of labor activists emerged to support these struggles. On average, thousands of strikes and protests take place in China each year. And, in part because of workers’ struggles, rural migrant workers have secured not insignificant improvements in their pay and working conditions.

    In the last several years, however, the labor movement in China suffered one of the most sustained assaults by the state in recent history. It started with a coordinated crackdown in late 2015 on a network of worker centers in the southern manufacturing hub of Guangzhou. The government imprisoned three workers and shutdown several organizations. In 2017, three labor activists were detained for conducting undercover investigations into working conditions at factories manufacturing for global brands. In 2018, a unionizing effort by workers and labor activists in Shenzhen sparked a wide crackdown that has led to the detention of more than one hundred labor activists and college student supporters.

    Progressives often ask what we can do to provide solidarity to labor activists in China. There are always opportunities to organize petitions, issue statements, and even participate in demonstrations. Doing all these whenever one can is certainly important. But offering solidarity to workers and labor activists both when they are engaged in labor struggle and under repression could be more creative and targeted.

    For instance, the solidarity letter organized by tech workers at Microsoft in support of Chinese tech workers’ mobilization against lengthy working hours targeted Microsoft, demanding no censorship of the Chinese tech workers’ advocacy on GitHub. Another example is the Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations’ suspension of exchange programs with Remin University after the university cooperated with the Chinese authorities in disciplining students who supported workers in the Jasic labor activism.

    However, we should recognize the limits of such efforts. Because of its growing strength, China has been largely ignored by international solidarity actions. We will have to develop much more powerful networks to have an impact.

    One important way to strengthen movements in China is to build struggle here in the U.S. to combat American international aggression and fight for domestic change. Stronger movements in the United States are in the best position to build connections between movements such as labor, feminism and environmental justice, and to collaborate on advocacy efforts on behalf of these shared struggles. This approach moves us beyond one-sided solidarity efforts and could strengthen movements in both countries.

    This works well when there are existing movements that are already international. For example, the feminist movement in China is among the more internationalized movements with links to activists elsewhere and attuned to global events such as the #metoo movement. The Chinese feminist activists have also established ties to networks in the United States. However, collaboration will not be automatic but will have to be organized through purposeful engagement.

    Another example is Uyghur’s struggle against China’s internment in camps and restrictions of their religious freedom. While shining light on any American companies profiting from forced labor in the camps or companies that developed surveillance technology used in the Uyghur province of Xinjiang are no doubt useful, a deeper engagement in shared struggle could be forged on the basis of fighting Islamophobia by groups working on this issue in the United States.

    While direct engagement with activists in China is ideal, it has become extremely challenging. Language difficulties aside, it is highly risky for Chinese activists to engage in international collaboration because they face constant surveillance by the Chinese government. This is why it is crucial to work with people already in the United States, such as Chinese social movement activists, American activists and academics who work on China, Chinese-American communities and Chinese international students, to name a few.

    Engaging “China” in the United States

    Beyond developing perspectives and building solidarity, we should think about how we can shape public discussion of China in the United States. The absence of progressive voices has given space for the American government to frame the issues around trade, intellectual property rights, and national security.

    To shape how China is discussed in the United States requires informed analyses, public meetings and work with community groups, academics, unions and other progressive organizations. In particular, engaging with American unions around the question of US-China relations is critical but also very challenging because of many unions’ acceptance of the myth that Chinese workers are stealing American jobs.

    Furthermore, we have yet to develop a strategy to engage with and organize international students from China. They are often ignored, and their voices either caricatured or missing from U.S.-China discussions. They are too often assumed to be supporters of the Chinese government at best, and agents of the Chinese government at worst. And there is often an unstated presupposition that because these students may come from middle class families, they are necessarily conservative in their politics. Such vast generalizations serve more as excuses not to engage than any useful guide to engagement.

    The U.S. left should begin engaging with Chinese students on political questions. We should begin meeting without assumptions and with patience. We have to meet them where they are at and not dismiss them for expressing different or even offensive political opinions which are in part the result of lack of space in China for open political discussion. Chinese students like everyone else will have mixed ideas, some radical, others uninformed, and often both of these combined together. They may also be fearful of expressing their opinions in the United States, which should not be mistaken for not having an opinion. But not engaging with them is likely to ensure they are more receptive to nationalistic messages.

    The U.S. left should also work to build solidarity with Chinese students and academics in the United States who are now facing increasing restrictions, discrimination and surveillance by the U.S. government. Moreover, U.S. graduate students have a direct interest in working with Chinese graduate students, who make up a significant percentage of those pursuing advanced degrees, in order build graduate student unions. Neglecting such work could lead to the defeat of such organizing efforts.

    More Analysis, More Solidarity and More Organizing

    There are no shortcuts to developing more informed analyses of China, more efforts to build solidarity and more organizing to strengthen social movements in both countries. I have merely touched upon a few issues in these challenging tasks, much of which need to be worked out by activists engaged in these initiatives. I hope to at least raise these issues so that we can continue these conversations collectively so that China and U.S.-China relations become an integral part of U.S. left’s thinking and strategy.

     

     

  • Boston’s Straight Pride: Reflections on Fighting the Right

    Boston’s Straight Pride: Reflections on Fighting the Right

    Protesting the “alt-right” in Boston, MA has become a back-to-school routine for the New England left, but this year’s “straight pride” event marked a qualitative and quantitative shift in the dynamics and forces present in The City on a Hill. Much like Seattle, WA and Berkeley, CA, over the past several years, the right has targeted Boston to stage its provocative rallies and base building efforts under the guise of defending free (conservative) speech. However, compared to 2017, which brought over 40,000 counter-protesters to halt the alt-right’s display of nationalism and bigotry, and 2018, which brought several thousand demonstrators, to drown out its anti-immigrant propaganda, this weekend’s event drew a significantly smaller and less organized crowd—a set-back for the left. If the left is to defeat the far-right and the creeping influence of fascist ideology, an honest assessment of this is necessary.

    The straight pride event, hosted by Super Happy Fun America (SHFA), was composed of many of the same groups and figures from years past including the Proud Boys and individuals with ties to Resist Marxism, but unlike 2017 and 2018, the alt-right was able to successfully march and hold a rally for several hours on August 31.  The alt-right crowd was modestly larger but significantly more racially diverse and sophisticated in its messaging than years past. The anti-LGBTQ focus cut across racial divisions and featured Latinx, African American, and even LGBTQ speakers.

    Contrary to 2017 and 2018, the right’s 2019’s event sought to legitimize its ideological position by casting queer rights as an identity politick that the political establishment had catered to at the expense of others. At the straight pride event, Marvina Case, of Moms for America and Texans United for America, argued for a return to traditional values. Identifying herself as a survivor of sexual assault, Case, a Black woman, urged listeners to embrace traditional gender roles and reject identity politics. Railing against accusations of “toxic masculinity” Case argued that “effeminate weak men are destroying the [country’s] balance” and a lack of strong masculine role models has led to the rise of mass shooters. Another speaker criticized the push to include LGBTQ curriculum in schools. Referencing the educational inequities that plague the American public-school system, she emphasized the need for curricular focus on reading and math, not the inclusion of LGBTQ history. These examples demonstrate the growing sophistication of the right’s messaging and its ability to temporarily align itself with constituencies it generally opposes. The right has no interest in the well-being of marginalized communities nor in the adequate funding of public services such as education. Still, its messaging acknowledges contemporary social ills while insisting the antidote is a rejection of identity politics and a return to rigid gender-based hierarchies.

    As reported in the Guardian and elsewhere, the counter-protesters outnumbered the right substantially; nevertheless, this was a significantly smaller ratio compared to years prior. At its height, the counter-protest swelled to about a thousand, while the straight pride event counted two to three hundred. Both crowds thinned out once the march reached its rally point. A smaller organized left presence meant a weaker political messaging among counter-protesters. During the march, several small but energetic organized contingents countered the right’s pro-Trump, anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ messages with political chants, but by the time the counter-protesters reached the right’s rally point, the organized contingents had loosened or dissipated completely. This left an ideological vacuum that was filled with underdeveloped and sometimes sophomoric politics (i.e. chanting “find the clit” and “Boston hates you”) and created an opening for provocateurs inside the counter-protest crowd.

    Related, the smaller size of the counter-protests and the weakness in politics allowed for the police to take a significantly more violent position than years past. Antifa identified activists bravely attempted to occupy the streets for brief periods, but were grossly outnumbered by an aggressive police presence. Buses filled with riot-police, pepper-ball guns, and military-grade equipment and tactical gear made clear that the State held the real power. In the end, thirty-six counter-protesters were arrested, but many more were clubbed, and pepper sprayed as the police sought to clear the streets near the conclusion of the straight pride event.

    The legitimization of the far-right and the creeping influence of fascist ideology is a genuine threat that the left must contend with. The alt-right (including the far-right elements within it) uses these street battles as recruitment tools and with the already pitched tension of the 2020 election season as well as the looming economic downturn, it is essential that the growth of these forces be taken seriously. The right’s ability to re-brand itself and mobilize greater numbers indicates that these forces cannot simply be ignored. In a statement that noted the white supremacist underpinnings of the SHFA event, Boston Pride discouraged individuals from attending the counter-protest, arguing that straight pride is “a trolling event, designed to get a rise out of vulnerable communities.” This is the exact opposite position the left should take. As one activist and Democratic Socialists of America member, Na K Jagan, put it, writing on Facebook, “Yesterday in Boston the fascist alt-right was able to successfully hold its straight pride march and rally and the violence was entirely turned over to the police state. There was no street battle between the alt-right and Antifa. The cops did the fighting for them. Intentionally breaking their own lines to smash heads and pepper spray people, charging medics trying to help people, a procession of motorcycles thundering through running into protesters…. The fascist movement today is re-branding itself to have a mainstream appeal while the traditional violence to attack the left, migrants, and workers are carried out by the state with support from the middle class.”

    While we cannot discount the spontaneity that led to the enormous counter-protest in 2017 following the far-right event in Charlottesville and the murder of Heather Heyer, the left must more effectively mobilize for confrontations with the far right. This means creating broader regional and national coalitions that can come together across political disagreements to oppose the right. It also means prioritizing movement work over electoral work and finding synergy between the two. At their recent convention, the 56,000-member Democratic Socialists of America voted to establish an anti-fascist working group; however, there appeared to be very little regional coordination to build for this important event. An organization of this size has the resources to initiate the kinds of broad coalitions necessary to build a larger and more politically coherent opposition to the right. A counter-protest composed of liberals and leftists with clear delineated contingents could have prevented the right’s event (as it has in years past) and been a boon to DSA’s efforts to canvas for Bernie Sander’s 2020 election bid.

    The right has a response to the on-going social crisis: scapegoating immigrants, LGBT people, women, and workers. Trump’s threats to brand Antifa as a terrorist organization while legitimizing the voices of the right show the state’s willingness to tolerate far-right politics in an era that seeks to expand the profit-making capabilities of the ruling class through the increased precarity and exploitation of segments working people. The left needs its own response, which may include electoral expression but also requires deep organizing and broad coalition-building to defeat the right and advance a more just vision for society.

  • Review: The Permanent Guillotine

    Review: The Permanent Guillotine

    Mitchell Abidor, ed. and trans. The Permanent Guillotine: Writings of the Sans-Culottes. Oakland: PM Press, 2018.

    The French Revolution (1789-1795) is generally recorded in world history as having been led by Maximillien Robespierre and the Jacobins, whom are assumed to be in most standard textbooks, the most radical political group, those whom instituted the reign of terror. The reign of terror if we are not careful mystifies that after the first republic was established there were class struggles in the French Revolution whose meaning must be reconsidered.

    While Robespierre and the Jacobins can be seen as proto-socialists on some level, a forerunner of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, most critical historical studies of the French Revolution see them as forces from above, primarily professionals and parliamentarians. To view the Jacobins as radical democrats is a stretch. They were enemies of the old politics of aristocratic rule but advocates of a new authoritarian regime. In fact, there were political actors from below society that more profoundly shaped this social revolution, and expressed a more direct democracy.

    The sans-culottes, those who did not wear silk knee breeches but pantaloons or trousers, were the commoners who stormed the Bastille, freed those imprisoned, killed its superintendent, and carried off his head on a pike. It was this social class, that self-mobilized in often insurgent fashion in their sections (or the neighborhoods of Paris districts), that questioned the economic system and the legitimacy of religion.

    But the sans-culottes, whose names are often obscure, could also be contradictory and inconsistent. While expressing in embryo the communist, anarchist, and socialist conceptions that would emerge later in history, they also could express a national-patriotism and an adherence to a progressive ruling elite, which the Jacobins embodied for a time. The sans-culottes fell short in their perspective of redistributing property though they did believe there should be price controls on the necessities of life such as food. The sans-culottes were really the mass social force that pushed from behind Robespierre’s Jacobins and exposed ultimately their basic authoritarian character.

    Mitchell Abidor’s The Permanent Guillotine does a great service to the scholar of radical history and political thought who has little facility in French by translating into English a selection of the writings of the sans-culottes and their spokespeople, particularly Jacques Roux (1752-1794), Anacharsis Cloots (1755-1794), and Jacques Hebert (1757-1794). The book is organized with an introductory essay by Abidor that surveys deftly the historiography of the French Revolution, particularly those scholars who have recognized popular forces from below society. These include insightful readings of the perspectives of French Revolution historians Albert Soboul, Daniel Guerin, and Peter Kropotkin.

    Abidor’s selection and interpretation may suggest a slight shift in the recording of the sans-culottes heritage. It leads with a collection of mostly unsigned pamphlets, which appear largely in an open letter or dialogic style. It is striking how the sans-culotte critiques, animated by an Enlightenment conception of reason, don’t totally leave religion behind. Neither does their tendency toward a direct democracy discard for all time a republic or social contract with checks and balances that are in reality among a hierarchy.

    It seems that among the miscellany, Jacques-Francois Varlet, associated with Roux, as co-leader of the Enrages, middle class spokesmen for these commoners, and who was arrested with Hebert in May 1793, only to be released after three days and prepare an insurrection, is absent from this collection – but it is difficult to tell because some of this political literature was unsigned.

    Cloots, a Prussian nobleman who was a notable radical internationalist present in France during the revolution, and who was repressed by Robespierre’s Jacobins for his partnership with the radical activities of Hebert, and executed with him at the guillotine, was clearly sympathetic to the popular forces of the social revolution. But as far as I am aware, Cloots has never been previously linked in the past to the sans-culottes.

    Hebert is a compelling figure. Our awareness of his significance in the French Revolution seems to have grown as Jean Varlet’s has declined. Hebert is a type of bridge figure between the Cordeliers Club, Marat’s agitation against the Girondins, the killing of Jean-Paul Marat by Charlotte Corday, a Girdonin sympathizer, and the Enrages. Hebert seems to have superseded Varlet.

    As a journalist Hebert re-created a character or archetype Pere Duchesne, also the name of his newspaper, that transformed what had been a comic stove-merchant into a patriotic rough and witty old man who wore a liberty cap, smoked a pipe, and dressed like the sans-culottes. “Father Duchesne” or “Old Man Duchesne” became the angry voice of ordinary people. He embodied the voice of the toiler against the aristocracy but also the new bourgeoisie or middle class. Those familiar with the historian Morris Slavin, who made his mark late in life re-shaping what we understand of the left and the French Revolution, will wonder if Slavin influenced Abidor’s perspective on placing Hebert deeper in conversation with the sans-culottes.

    Abidor includes a couple of texts by Sylvain Marechal (1750-1803), a French Revolution journalist who was a forerunner of utopian socialism or utopian anarchism based on an outlook of a future Golden Age where all resources would be shared. Marechal was not involved in the conflict between Girondins and Jacobins but later emerges as an ally of Gracchus Babeuf, in the revolt against Thermidorian reaction and the Directory. Marechal’s play celebrating reason may have been a success in his time but too much crime in the name of reason has unfolded since. But I find his lampooning of the Catholic clergy and its rituals still timely (and we must remember he was substantially thrashing ruling authority of his time as embodied in the church not one denomination).

    While these sans-culottes clearly express anger and denounce not just the aristocrats but “moderates” in the midst of a social revolution, whom we must not forget would be deemed “progressive” today, especially in the dialogic pamphlets there is an ambiguity of taking responsibility for militant underground acts that authorities of course wish to criminalize. This will make for a many contoured conversation on what the sans-culottes and their spokespeople actually did.

    Readers of these fugitive tracts that have found their way into the English language will think back to the turn of phrase “Pardon my French” that suggests foul language, and see that long before the Black Panther Party popularized the word “fuck” as an accompaniment to radical politics in the 1960s, the popular language of the sans-culottes of 1790s France used the f-bomb to denounce those that betrayed but also to accentuate an affirmation of those who were most militant, and uncompromisingly heroic, in their actions for a new kind of freedom.

    If the instinct to popular self-management of the sans-culottes did not reveal a programmatic consistency in the 1790s, the truth is the idea of “a people’s republic,” a contradiction in terms to be sure, is still a false premise to be overcome in our own place in time. Further, the ambiguity of such a regime, that it can be a socialist state, capitalist state, or fascist state, cannot allow a mystification that all can only be discarded by ordinary people permanently arriving on their own authority.

  • Why Hindu Nationalists are Intensifying the Occupation of Kashmir

    Why Hindu Nationalists are Intensifying the Occupation of Kashmir

    The irony of India celebrating its 72nd year of national independence as it orchestrates a coup and military lock-down on the occupied territory of Kashmir was apparently lost on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

    Modi used the occasion of an annual independence day celebration in Delhi to champion the abrogation of Kashmir’s constitutional rights as a decisive step in rooting out terrorism and corruption, promising a new dawn for “development” in the Himalayan region.

    An extensive fact-finding report by a team of Indian activists and academics described the alarming military blockade put into place at the beginning of the month. The free movement of people is being curtailed, and some are being prevented from reaching hospitals and obtaining critical medical care. Food and basic commodities are in short supply.

    Perhaps most unnerving is the veritable communications black-out which has kept the Kashmiri population in the dark, as well as Kashmiris abroad who desperately attempt to connect with their families back home.

    Despite the blockade thousands of people have poured out onto the streets of Srinagar in protest of the Indian government; they are demonstrating to their world their “steadfastness: how to hold on, through lies, murder, brutal repression, breathtaking theft, unbearable despair” (to borrow the words of Alice Walker in her 2011 essay on Palestine).

    This time the Kashmiris “held on” through a hailstorm of teargas, chili grenades and pellet-gun fire, with over 150 of them sustaining injuries. In the Soura neighborhood of Srinagar, protestors have even erected a ramshackle barricade to keep out the Indian security forces.

    “They can only enter Soura over our bodies. We won’t give even an inch of land to India,” Mufeed, a resident said in an interview with AFP. He also went on to compare the Kashmiri freedom struggle to that of the Palestinians.

    Notwithstanding the government’s announcement last week that “normalcy” has been restored to the valley, civil society groups are still scrambling to track down the 4,000 Kashmiri’s who in the preceding weeks were arrested under the Public Safety Act, which allows for the preventative detention of people against whom there may be no recorded criminal offence.

    It is reported that most of the detainees—many of whom were picked up in warrantless midnight raids—have been “flown out” of Kashmir and are being housed in various prisons in Uttar Pradesh.

    The BJP’s recent move in Kashmir can be seen as one key moment in the longer arc of Hindu authoritarianism (Hindutva). For decades the BJP’s parent organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), has been campaigning for the repeal of Article 370, which allowed Kashmir to have its own constitution and legislature; and subclause 35A, which barred non-Kashmiris from settling in the valley. Populating the Muslim-majority valley with Hindu settlers is a central plank of the RSS’s vision for a unified, Hindu-only nation.

    A Long History of Betrayals

    At the close of colonial rule the former Princely States (ruled only indirectly by the British Raj) were given the option to secede to India or Pakistan. With 77 percent of its population Muslim, Kashmir was expected to join Pakistan.

    But a crisis of legitimacy ensued when Kashmiri Muslims—eager to overturn the oppressive order of the Hindu princely ruler, Maharaja Hari Singh, and increasingly subject to communal brutality sparked by the Partition of the Punjab—initiated an uprising across at least three districts of Kashmir. Shortly thereafter, a Pakistan-backed Pushtoon incursion entered Kashmir from the North-West Frontier. As the militants approached the gates of Srinagar, the Maharaja hurriedly acceded to India in exchange for military assistance in crushing the multiple rebellions.

    Often downplayed by India’s ruling class in this episode is the fact the Maharaja’s declaration of accession was “provisional”; once the invaders were overcome the Kashmiri people were to be granted the right to determine their own fate (i.e. whether it would remain within the Indian Union, join Pakistan or remain independent) through a plebiscite.

    Nehru and all of the succeeding Congress governments have betrayed this promise. (To be sure, Pakistan, by trying to usurp and infuse an Islamist fundamentalist hue into the Kashmir revolt has also had a major part in frustrating self-determination efforts).

    Over the years India’s Congress Party cynically painted an image of “winning hearts and minds”. As Kavita Krishnan put it, the Congress attempted to “convince the international community that elections and Article 370 prove that Kashmiris are with the Indian Government,” while installing successive puppet governments through fraudulent elections.

    Deepening Militarization

    The 1989 uprising demanding “azaadi” (freedom) from Indian occupation marked a turning point for Indian state repression in Kashmir.

    Draconian laws were passed such as the extension of the Armed Forces Special Powers (AFSPA) which grants soldiers executive powers to search and arrest without a warrant and use lethal force against any person who is “acting against the law.”

    With an estimated 500,000-strong occupying army—more troops than were deployed during the entire second Iraq War by the US and its coalition partners—Kashmir was permanently transformed into the most militarized place on earth.

    Since 1990 more than 70,000 people have died in the conflict. Tens of thousands have been tortured, thousands more have been “disappeared,” and hundreds have been blinded or otherwise injured by pellet gun fire.

    A shocking 2009 report by International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Kashmir documented the presence of 2,700 mass graves across 55 villages in Kashmir. Out of the 2943 cadavers discovered, 89.7% of them were unidentified.

    A separate term, “half-widows”, was invented to describe the women who were left behind after their husbands were “disappeared” mostly by the security forces. They are only “half” widows because they have no way of knowing whether their husbands are dead or alive.

    Since the 1989 uprising the anti-Indian resistance has ebbed and flowed. A flash point was the 2016 murder of the beloved Kashmiri leader, Burhan Wani, by the Indian security forces. The massive protests which ensued were met with brutal repression including the death of 30 civilians. Since then violence has been escalating, the last twelve months being the deadliest in a decade.

    Pulwama: The Lynchpin of Modi’s Reelection 

    While Modi’s pro-development rhetoric may have worked to get him elected in 2014, the country’s economic record at the end of this term did not bode well for the BJP’s re-election bid.

    Belying Modi’s promise of 10 million new jobs, unemployment stood at four-decade high of 6.1 percent from 2017-18. The 2016 demonetization initiative, rather than curbing the flow of black money, led to a crushing currency shortage and devastated the already precarious incomes and employment of small farmers, traders, vendors, and casual workers.

    Combined with the midterm election results, which saw the BJP lose its stronghold over three key states, the saffron party’s prospects seemed imperiled.

    Enter Pulwama. On February 14th Adil Ahad Dhar, a 20-year-old Kashmiri and member of the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Muhammad, rammed a car with explosives into convoy of 2,500 Indian paramilitary soldiers in Kashmir’s district of Pulwama. 40 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel plus Dhar perished in the explosion.

    Modi could not have hoped for anything more auspicious.

    Less than two weeks later, India ordered “preemptive surgical strikes” on what was alleged to be a terrorist camp in Balakot, Pakistan. Pakistan then shot down two of the Indian Air Force (IAF) jets and captured one of the Indian pilots.

    Interestingly on the day of the IAF attack the Indian media broadcast that about 300 militants had been killed. India’s Foreign Secretary, Vijay Gokhale, told reporters that the strike killed “a very large number of Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorists, trainers, senior commanders, and groups of jihadis who were being trained for Fidayeen action [suicide missions] were eliminated.”

    However, a Reuters investigation revealed that not a single person had died in the attack and the only damage done was to a few pine trees. The surgical strike appeared to have missed its target. But this finding was virtually ignored by the Indian press who went on parroting the government’s story.

    Nor did the media seem preoccupied with asking why or how the alleged intelligence tip off from Jammu and Kashmir about the attack was not acted upon by the Indian government. It took no notice of the immense restraint with which Pakistan acted and its relatively humane treatment and quick return of the captured pilot.

    All that mattered in that moment and later during the lead up to the national elections was that Modi had taken a “bold,” “Prime Minister-like” action against the enemy. His move had restored “faith and confidence in the Indian Army and the armed forces.”

    Modi’s landslide electoral victory in May of this year had in part Pulwama (and the media’s jingoistic coverage of it) to thank.

    The Far Right

    To be sure, the unabashed “Make Kashmir Great Again” rhetoric spewing not only from the most rabid Sanghis (shorthand for an RSS member) but also from Bollywood, the Indian press and a host of political parties (including the “lower caste” BSP) is a chilling indication of just how far and wide Hindutva has spread.

    A quick look at the numbers suffices to grasp the magnitude of their forces. The RSS—which draws its inspiration directly from Nazi Germany—currently has an official membership of 5-6 million spread across 56,859 units (shakhas). It is the largest voluntary organization in the world. Its registered trade union Bhartiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) is the largest trade union in India with over 6 million members. And the BJP, with 148 million members, is the largest political party in the world.

    The Hindutva movement has also established its superiority in the electoral field. In 18 of India’s 29 states the BJP either directly or through an alliance currently governs.

    Further, in 2017 the BJP installed a Hindu fundamentalist priest, Yogi Adityaanath, as the Chief Minister of the most populous state in India.

    Adityanath is widely known for his uninhibited anti-Muslim hate speech—which in at least one instance was found to have ignited a communal riot.

    Unsurprisingly it is in his state, Uttar Pradesh, where the sanghis have most aggressively run amok in recent years.

    In 2018 alone—the year after Adityanath came to power—five deaths and 21 mob attacks were recorded. 70 of these cases were in the name of “cow-protection” and 75% of those who were targeted belonged to the Muslim community.

    The national picture is not any less disquieting. According to a new hate crime tracker called Citizen’s Religious Hate Crime Watch 90% of religious hate crimes in the past decade have occurred after the BJP assumed power at the national level in 2014. Muslims who comprise 14% of India’s population were the victims in 62% of these cases.

    As Harsh Mander reports, “The permissive environment for hate attacks created by frequent hate speeches by senior leaders of the party, and Modi’s refusal to criticise these attacks…means that communal and vigilante formations feel emboldened and encouraged to attack people of minority identities with impunity.”

    In the same period Hindutva forces also advanced a unified cultural agenda by modifying educational text books to, for example, erase mention of Hindu caste oppression and installing its sympathizers in university administrative positions.

    As Modi did in Gujarat during the 2002 anti-Muslim programs when he was the Chief Minister of that state, the PM masterfully kept an arm’s length from the most brazen acts of religious violence—leaving the dirty work to his closest aids.

    Instead during his first term Modi appealed to middle class voters through the promise of increased FDI and market liberalization. To woo India’s poor he championed new government schemes on housing, electricity and sanitation.

    Now, by no coincidence, the same idiom of development is being employed by the BJP to cover up the Indian state’s atrocities in the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir.

    Islamophobic Feminism

    In the same independence day speech promising development in Kashmir, Modi also vowed that the Indian nation would freely impart “rights” to Kashmiri women. With the repeal of Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status, Muslim women there would enjoy the same rights of their Indian counterparts.

    But this fairy tale has not been so easily fed to the oppressed in India nor in Kashmir. In fact the euphemistically named “Muslim Women Bill” which criminalizes the custom of a Muslim husband divorcing his wife by repeating the word “talaq” (divorce) three times faced strong pushback from Indian civil society.

    While some women’s organizations have long campaigned within their own communities against the triple talaq, many have questioned whether the new Bill would actually facilitate justice for the aggrieved.

    The proposed punishment of imprisonment of the husband for three years, for example, could leave the aggrieved complainant without financial security and/or “at the mercy of her matrimonial family, [which is] liable to turn vengeful towards the wife for putting [her husband] behind bars,” reads a statement issued by the Beeback Collective.

    The protest statement also pointed to the hypocrisy of the Hindu majoritarian government claiming to save Muslim women while fanning the flames of communalism. The Bill is simply one of many ways in which the BJP government is attempting to “criminalize Muslim men in the guise of protecting Muslim women.”

    Modi’s claim to liberate Kashmiri women through a more extensive Indian domination over Kashmir rings hollow in light of this context.

    The Left Must Break with Nationalism

    Rather than unequivocally condemning the occupation and putting forth the case for self-determination, the Indian parliamentary left has historically assumed a series of contradictory positions on Kashmir.

    As detailed in the late Praful Bidwai’s The Phoenix Moment: Challenges Confronting the Left the Communist Party of India (CPI) initially welcomed Kashmir’s accession to India.

    In retrospect, it reversed its position, claiming the party’s position had been based on the “false presumption that India is ‘progressive’, and Pakistan is ‘reactionary’” (12). Nehru’s policy on Kashmir, the party argued, was primarily aimed to “grab and exploit Kashmir’s rich territory”. And the circumstances surrounding accession were “treacherous.”

    But by 1953 the CPI took another sharp turn, deeming the Maharaja’s accession “legitimate.” It went on to pledge its commitment to abide by parliamentary democracy and the newly minted Indian Constitution” and affirm “its support to India’s territorial claims over Jammu and Kashmir” (13).

    This position of the CPI has more or less held and is also reflected in positions of the other largest parliamentary left party, the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M). Most recently, in the aftermath of the Indian government’s surgical strikes, the CPI-M-led legislature in the state of Kerala passed a resolution congratulating “the Army for taking steps to protect the country and people.”

    Any new Left project must part ways with “war on terror” rhetoric and unequivocally fight for the withdrawal of the Indian army from Kashmir (and from the other militarized areas of the subcontinent such as the North East and Bastar). The left must adopt an uncompromising position in favor of self-determination.

    The CPI/M’s follies aside, there are many on the left including various Marxist-Leninist and Trotskyist organizations which have forged genuine solidarity with the people of Kashmir and affirmed its fundamental right to self-determination.

    The international left must build links with and support these various forces, while mounting pressure within our own countries to end the occupation. Additionally, a longer-term project for the left requires the development of a truly internationalist consciousness on Kashmir.

    A recent statement issued by the Palestinian Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement is a good starting point. It points to the fact that India regularly draws ideology, technology and weapons from Israel to better control Kashmir. “Our oppressors are united, and our struggles will be stronger if we too unite.”

    This cogent statement helps illustrate the fact that international solidarity is not just a moral imperative, but it is also a practical one if we are to effectively challenge the well-coordinated and transnational imperialist onslaught.

     

  • The Amazon Burns and the Politics of Death: Resisting the Commodification of Our Future

    The Amazon Burns and the Politics of Death: Resisting the Commodification of Our Future

    Ceaseless shootings, extrajudicial executions, houses invaded both by the military police and by militias, schools closed, firearms being discharged from the sky, and a country burning: it could be a war scenario, but this has been the day-to-day experience of the poorest Black and Indigenous sections of the Brazilian working class under the Bolsonaro government. The blame – the president states – lies with the NGOs and human rights defenders.

    The same lie is told by Rio de Janeiro’s governor while he pushes forward his politics of death in public security, and he is responsible for the direct execution of at least 1075 human beings in six months.[1] Eleven days ago, the country was touched by the stories of six black teenagers murdered in less than 80 hours, as a consequence of this politics. One of them, a 17-year-old mother, was in her way to church carrying her one-year-old baby and was hit by ten shots.[2]  Although none of them had connections with criminal activities, Governor Wilson Witzel, a former judge and a Bolsonaro supporter, blamed NGOs who allegedly support organized crime, since they defend human rights. With the highest unemployment rate in the country – a record 1.3 million individuals – Rio was filled with resistance to state violence and with riots led by women in the favelas in the first weeks of August, but with little media attention and even less support from the traditional left.

    In the middle of this chaos, on August 13, the traditional left, guided by students and teachers’ unions, organized massive national demonstrations to defend public higher education from threats of privatization, represented by the new federal government program Future-se. This program aims to radically transform the logic of public universities, reducing public funding and opening them to private enterprise, i.e., commodifying teaching, research and extension activities. The universities are also facing several budget cuts that especially target the student scholarships that might gradually reconfigure their elite character. Affirmative action policies that since 2004 have been guaranteeing access for Blacks, poor people, and Indigenous peoples to universities are also under constant attack by Bolsonaro supporters at the state and federal levels.

    At the same time, indigenous women from approximately 115 different ethnic groups from all regions of the country were marching on Brasilia, ending a five-day mobilization to declare that they will not accept the genocidal policies of the Bolsonaro government. They stand against Bolsonaro’s measures to dismantle Indigenous education and health, his neglect of the environment and of the demarcation of traditional territories, and his insistent attempts to free up mining in Indigenous lands, including already demarcated areas. On August 14th, the march encountered the traditional Marcha das Margaridas (“March of the Daisies”), in a historical act. Marcha das Margaridas, a mobilization that has occurred since 2000, seeks to gather peasants, rural workers, quilombolas (descendants of free hinterland communities of escaped African slaves), riverside, and landless women and this year advocated a country “with Popular Sovereignty, Democracy, Justice, Equality and Freedom from Violence”.

    Right after this historical meeting that united thousands of women of color, Indigenous peoples from various ethnic groups led a week of mobilization to stop the approval of two constitutional amendments (PEC 187 and PEC 283) which intended to attack their lands by opening them for market production. This process culminated in a day of demonstrations in Brasília on August 21st, and gained a victory, succeeding in postponing the scrutiny of PEC 187. It guaranteed an agreement between parliamentarians to detach it from its worst counterpart, PEC 283. The latter carries out the worst attacks, such as the opening of already demarcated lands for exploitation by farmers and miners.

    Through these attempts in Congress, the ruralist caucus seeks to insert Indigenous lands into the capitalist marketplace, in an agribusiness production model. It is important to say that most of the ruralist congressmen’s lands are concentrated in the country’s last agricultural frontier, Amazônia Legal, the Legal Amazon region, a protected area. This is connected to an ongoing increase in the raising of crops for export like soybeans and cattle.[3] It’s also shocking that in less than six months, the government has approved the use of 250 new agrotoxins, many of them prohibited in other countries. This is a huge danger for rivers, water reserves and human health, arriving without any public debate or consultation. Considering these moves, the recent declarations of Bolsonaro and his Environment Minister, Ricardo Salles, about their interests in developing the Amazon by monetizing it, are not surprising.[4]

    Thus, by the time São Paulo’s sky was taken over by a suffocating darkness on the afternoon of August 19, the Bolsonaro government had been ignoring grassroots voices for weeks – including the voices of the forest peoples who denounced the upsurge in attacks on nature reserves and Indigenous lands via illegal economic activities. The black smoke that came from the Amazon was already the result of a 10-day fire, with no action taken to stop it. When experts linked the darkness to the fires in the Amazon, the Minister of Environment said this was nothing but fake news.[5]

    On August 10th, the number of fire outbreaks suddenly increased in the Amazon. Evidence shows that the wildfires were the result of intentional human activity. A current investigation by the Federal Public Prosecutors Office in Para State has attempted to uncover those responsible for “Fire Day” – a “protest” by farmers that resulted in an increase in the number of fire outbreaks in several municipalities. Para State leads the country in the number of fires and the rate of deforestation[6], and have some of the agricultural lands most disputed by farmers (not to mention that it is also a great focus for illegal gold mining).

    It is already known that more than 70 individuals, among them rural trade unionists, farmers, traders and land grabbers, combined through a WhatsApp group to set fire to the edges of BR-163, the highway that connects this region of Pará to the ports of the Tapajós River and the state of Mato Grosso. Their intent was to show Bolsonaro that they support his ideas about “loosening” IBAMA’s[7] oversight and perhaps getting their fines for environmental violations rescinded.[8] There is evidence that the same group also spread fake news saying that IBAMA and ICM-Bio[9] were intentionally provoking the fire – endorsing the president’s narrative. It is evident that this group was encouraged by the public declarations and the overall environmental politics of the Bolsonaro government, going back to his election campaign. It is important to note that the government also hinted that it would regularize illegally occupied areas, diminishing or even abolishing the mandatory legal reserve area in these regions. In a country with the history of grilagem (land grabbing) that Brazil has, this is a clear instigation for this kind of action.

    In Novo Progresso city (PA), “Fire Day” was reported by a local newspaper even before it happened. The local prosecutor questioned IBAMA and their answer was that they knew about the event, but could do nothing to avoid it since “the inspection actions are hampered by the lack of support from the Military Police, which endangers the safety of the teams on the field”[10]. Here, it is important to highlight that deforestation in the Amazon in July grew by 278% over the same month last year[11]. The data, of which the precision is over 90%, is from Deter (Detection of Real Time Deforestation) a mechanism that belongs to INPE (National Institute for Space Research), an institution that since 2004 helps IBAMA to combat deforestation. This data, uncovered in late July, has opened a crisis between IMPE and Bolsonaro’s Social Liberal Party (PSL), which culminated on August 2 with the dismissal of INPE Director Ricardo Galvão. Bolsonaro declared that “Bad Brazilians” had released “lying numbers” about deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. He replaced Galvão by a military officer and called for the hiring of a private company to do the satellite monitoring of the Amazon.[12] INPE is an internationally recognized institute for scientific research, whose data is collected from satellite images daily and released monthly on its website. Bolsonaro is also threatening to curtail the publication of this data.

    If it is true that fires in Brazilian Amazon increased by 82%[13] this year compared to the same period last year, this story is rooted in a longer-term politics guided by the supremacy of production for profit that undermines human life. Brazil reduced the rate of deforestation from 24,000 km² per year to 4,000 km² between 2004 and 2012, but from 2013 this rate has increased again (now rising to 10,000 km²). Since 2016, IBAMA and ICM-Bio are facing a process of criminalization and their functions have been under constant attack. Investment in environmental protection have been continually cut since 2013 and both institutions have been working with lower budgets than needed to carry out their work for a long time now.[14] But in the first six months of the Bolsonaro government, we have seen a drastic deactivation of deforestation prevention policies and the acceleration of the intentional dismantling of the environmental legislation and its enforcement structure. This large legal and administrative structure was built as the result of hard struggles over the last 30 years, and the damage Bolsonaro is carrying out could take decades to repair. In April, Environment Minister Ricardo Salles ordered a 24% cut in IBAMA’s annual budget, a figure below its operating costs.

    Moreover, the fall in the number of fines applied to environmental offenders coincided with an increase in deforestation and the record outbreaks of forest fires of 2019. Considering all types of environmental infractions throughout the country, IBAMA sanctions decreased by 29.4%[15] compared to the last year. According to civil servants, former civil servants, experts, and environmentalists, the drop in the number of fines is linked to pressure by the federal government since the beginning of the year against allegedly excessive oversight – a promise of Bolsonaro’s electoral campaign – and the transfers of professionals at key positions inside the institution. Its scandalous that of IBAMA’s 27 superintendencies across Brazil,19 are currently vacant – that is, without a permanent head. In the nine states of the Legal Amazon, only one – that of Mato Grosso – already has a definitive head. Experts say that if the current rate of dismantling of the enforcement structure and environmental legislation carried out during the first six months of this government is maintained, forest destruction could reach an irreversible limit in 4 to 8 years.

    In June 2019, in an interview for BBC News Brazil, Environment Minister Salles revealed the main intentions of the Bolsonaro government toward the Amazon region: to attract private sector investment and foreign companies in order to expand economic activities in the rainforest. He argued that the way to reduce illegal deforestation, lodging, and mining in the Amazon is to generate “economic dynamism” and income for those living in forested areas. This reinforces the recent statements by Bolsonaro after a visit to the United States, to the effect that he intends to propose partnerships to “economically exploit” the Amazon in league with Donald Trump. Salles said his policy for the environment focuses mainly on raising foreign funds for paying for environmental services, that is, remunerating preservation, by paying the landowner an additional fee per hectare to carry out environmental preservation. He wants to allow protected areas in the Amazon and elsewhere to develop ecotourism projects and biotechnology research sites.[16]

    Likewise, and recently approved in the Senate, Provisional Measure 881 – the so-called Economic Freedom Act –, whose mission is to establish the “Declaration of the Rights of Economic Freedom,” would allow deforestation by private entities to proceed automatically if environmental agencies delay the issuing of environmental licenses. License applications are also waived completely in so-called “low impact” cases. The impacts on the environment contained in the Measure are irreversible and of huge dimensions, besides violating the Brazilian Constitution, which prohibits the automatic approval of actions that affect the environment. Also, the measure excludes consideration of indirect impacts stemming from environmental licensing processes: only those regions directly affected by a project would be included in the environmental compensation process. In approving a hydroelectric dam, for example, only sites that had their areas covered by a reservoir would be included in the process. The other neighboring municipalities might suffer from the impact of the dam but would not have the power to mitigate them. This is a big attack on the environment. Thinking about the Amazon like this also recalls our struggle against the construction of the Belo Monte dam in the heart of the forest. It is ironic that this same Measure loosens labor safeguards even more than environmental ones.[17]

    Hardly anything seems to stop Brazilian capitalists… perhaps only the fear of external economic sanctions. After the threat of an economic boycott from French President Emmanuel Macron (provoked, it’s important to say, by the demonstrations that took place in many cities in Europe), Bolsonaro felt compelled to give an official statement on Brazilian TV on August 21, addressing the situation in Amazon. Afterwards, Bolsonaro for the first time expressed concern about Amazon and announced that measures would be taken to fight the fires. The measure: enacting a decree of exception and sending the military into the region.[18]  We also must be attentive to the motives of the G7. Although it does not represent the same forces that support Bolsonaro, it embodies a different fraction of global capital and thus a different imperialist agenda.

    Predatory capitalism, accumulation by dispossession, necropolitics… each of these has explanatory strength. But no theoretical category can summarize what we have been experiencing these days and its real impacts on the future of humanity. The Amazon fires are an outrageous sign to the world about what is happening behind the scenes in Brazil. Of how neoliberalism has been connecting together expropriation, exploitation and oppression, carrying out coordinated attacks on all aspects of our existence as human beings. And we all know it can become worse, since this is nothing but the ultimate consequence of capitalism. Bolsonaro’s economic policy is moving us toward returning the focus of the Brazilian economy to the supply of primary agricultural and natural resources to the world economy, carried out through an accelerated accumulation mechanism and an expansion of the agro-industrial complex, pushed forward by financial markets. This is a project that is undermining human life for capital accumulation. Thus, we have a new the possibility to unite several fractions of international working class: Suddenly, demonstrations for the Amazon and against this politics took place in more than 70 cities around the country and in at least in 30 other countries worldwide starting on August 23. These united both the traditional left and the so-called new social movements.

    To confront this, the Brazilian left needs more than ever to develop international connections and to unite around a program that can offer a humanist alternative to this system. Such a program would need to grasp that at the current stage of our social and economic development, we cannot retrogress to a developmentalist, fossil-fuel-centered industrialization. Such a program needs to be guided by a view from below:  from women, Blacks, Indigenous people, and the peoples of the forest.

     

    [1] Last year, during the same semester, we had 899 executions comitted by the police. Official data from Public Security Institute (ISP). Deaths by the intervention of state officers. Available at: http://www.ispvisualizacao.rj.gov.br/  These statistics do not count forced disappearances, a brutal reality in Brazil. Social movements like Fórum Grita baixada, have counted around 3.000 deaths within the same period.

    [2] Her baby was also hit and is still in hospital. See: https://noticias.uol.com.br/cotidiano/ultimas-noticias/2019/08/14/jovem-morta-no-rj-sonhava-ser-pm-e-teve-10-perfuracoes-no-corpo.htm

    [3] See: https://deolhonosruralistas.com.br/2019/05/12/mapa-das-terras-dos-parlamentares-mostra-que-congressistas-acumulam-fazendas-na-amazonia-e-no-matopiba/?fbclid=IwAR2et4vf9_KzxgdRoeVUb_dB0As6nVHepGbaOZpmlM59J-RvAizpzgRrgLQ

    [4] Amid growing global mobilization over forest fires and deforestation in the Amazon forest,  Brazil’s Environment Minister Ricardo Salles said that the solution to illegal logging in the Amazon is to “monetize it” by opening up more areas for commercial development. See  https://oglobo.globo.com/sociedade/solucao-para-salvar-amazonia-monetiza-la-afirma-ricardo-salles-23897720

    [5] See https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ambiente/2019/08/salles-diz-que-relacionar-ceu-escuro-em-sp-a-queimadas-na-amazonia-e-fake-news.shtml

    [6] Four states recorded the highest rates of burns increase in these months of Bolsonaro rule. Mato Grosso do Sul saw the number of fires increase 260% compared to last year and leads the list, followed by Rondônia (198%), Pará (188%) and Acre (176%). Those are also the states with the higher rates of conflict over lands and homicide of Indigenous Peoples.

    [7] The Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama) was created in 1989 and is the federal agency responsible for applying the National Environment Policy – which guides the government actions for the area. Ibama is linked to the Ministry of Environment (MMA) and has police power in the environmental area, even acting in private areas. Ibama is the branch of the Union responsible for combating environmental crimes, but Brazilian law requires that environmental protection be shared between the federal government, states and municipalities. The obligations of each are outlined in the Environmental Crimes Act of 1998, and also by a 2011 Complementary Law.

    [8] See; https://revistagloborural.globo.com/Noticias/noticia/2019/08/grupo-usou-whatsapp-para-convocar-dia-do-fogo-no-para.html?fbclid=IwAR14kpnqKnJBN2B99UkSUdHnp6JQ6muEoirpKpNn_ptCFwt4jXrmYABPm2w

    [9] The Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio) was created in 2007 and its function is to take care of federal conservation units (UCs). Within them, ICMBio exercises environmental police power.

    [10] See https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ambiente/2019/08/queimadas-disparam-mas-multas-do-ibama-despencam-sob-bolsonaro.shtml

    [11] See https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ambiente/2019/08/desmatamento-na-amazonia-em-julho-cresce-278-em-relacao-ao-mesmo-mes-em-2018.shtml

    [12]  See https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ambiente/2019/08/governo-bolsonaro-abre-edital-para-empresa-privada-monitorar-amazonia.shtml

    [13] There were more than 70,000 outbreaks of fire between January and August recorded by INPE in the country. Mato Grosso is the state that leads the list, with over 13,000 fires.

    [14] See https://www.wwf.org.br/informacoes/noticias_meio_ambiente_e_natureza/?63822/uniao-estados-municipios-orcamento-meio-ambiente

    [15] See https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/brasil-49430376?fbclid=IwAR0_GRjiGLe_xsdIkeSFB1tTV-tFkzFjIHRbt1ThVpteFIZsJck9ncd2KWw

    [16] See https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/brasil-48642486

    [17] See https://www.congressonacional.leg.br/materias/medidas-provisorias/-/mpv/136531

    [18] See https://epocanegocios.globo.com/Brasil/noticia/2019/08/o-que-e-glo-que-bolsonaro-decretou-para-combater-queimadas-na-amazonia.html

  • A Second Look at the Workplace Democracy Plan

    A Second Look at the Workplace Democracy Plan

    The Bernie Sanders presidential campaign presents socialists with an unprecedented opening for explicitly socialist politics. And Sanders’ Workplace Democracy Plan (WDP) represents a coherent set of policies through which to examine that opportunity. In a recent Jacobin article, Barry Eidlin calls the plan the “most serious, comprehensive, and equitable plan for promoting workers’ rights ever proposed by a major US presidential candidate.” If the Sanders campaign and the WDP does represent such an opportunity, then surely socialists should use it for maximum effect. With that in mind, let’s talk about the ways that the WDP could be pushed in a more socialist and rank-and-file direction.

    Let’s be honest: Sanders’ WDP is in part aimed at securing endorsements from union officials. Whether that’s a good or bad thing depends on your opinion about the possibility of a Sanders presidency—something I won’t address here. Despite their reduced numbers, unions still have the ability to generate votes. Union households turned away from Hillary Clinton in 2016, helping deliver the White House to Trump. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has said, “We’re setting the bar high—higher than it’s ever been.” Trumka continued, “If you want our endorsement … show us that you’re unambiguously pro-worker and pro-union.” Securing union endorsements would represent no small step toward putting Bernie Sanders in the White House.

    At the same time, a fundamental tenant of the “rank-and-file strategy” is to build the “militant minority” on the shop floor, not to “permeate” the upper echelons of the union officialdom. This strategy recognizes that, although the union leaders should represent their members’ interests, bureaucratic organization and imperatives often create a divergence between the interests of leaders and “the ranks.” Since the WPD is pitched in part to the union leadership, this warrants us taking a bit more critical eye toward it.

    Recently, I wrote an essay for Catalyst about how socialists should approach the issue of labor law reform. That essay provides the framework by which we can evaluate the WDP through a socialist lens. The bottom line is that we have to pay attention to the form, not just the content, of labor law. For example, specific provisions establishing rights protective of workers have been used, in statute and case law, to deprive workers of the freedom to engage in a variety of strike actions. My conclusion was that we should be wary about labor rights. This is because rights are claims people can make upon the state to take action. This means labor rights involve substituting state power for worker power. Instead of rights, socialists should focus more on expanding labor freedoms. This does not mean that we should categorically eschew all labor rights—something that would impossible as well as self-defeating under capitalism—nor that we can somehow free ourselves from the confines of labor law under actually existing capitalism. Rather, in concrete, it means we should prioritize the elimination the various bans on strikes that exist under current labor law, and that stifle autonomous working-class organization and formation. This perspective is applied to the WDP in what follows.

    The Good

    Let’s start with the good of the WDP. At the top of the list are the provisions that expand workers’ freedom to strike. The best idea of the whole proposal is the elimination of the ban on secondary boycotts. Federal law currently outlaws actions and even speech by workers’ and unions’ that pressure clients or suppliers—“secondary” actors—of companies with whom there is a “primary” dispute. Perhaps no other provision of US labor law has done more to inhibit coordinated action by workers across companies and to create a fractured and weak labor movement. The WDP would also legalize the right to strike for federal workers.

    More complicated is the WDP’s promise to ban the permanent replacement of striking workers. There is no doubt that the use of permanent replacements has substantially weakened the power of the strike. But the real problem is not so much the employer’s right to hire permanent replacements. It’s the labor law’s effective banning of mass strikes and mass picketing that hinders workers efforts to picket and demonstrate against strikebreakers. Section 8(b)(1) of the National Labor Relations Act prohibits workers from interfering with other workers’ rights not to join or assist labor unions. While on its face this language is neutral, in practice it essentially guarantees that employers get a police escort for scabs. A better proposal to rebuild direct, worker power would be to repeal Section 8(b)(1) rather than to ban permanent replacements. This would limit the ability of the state to step in on an employer’s side in a labor dispute.

    Another notable positive is the plan’s call to “work with the trade union movement to establish a sectoral collective bargaining system that will work to set wages, benefits and hours across entire industries, not just employer-by-employer.” The current, dominant practice of firm-level or workplace-level collective bargaining is another chief source of labor’s strategic weakness, and is the result of a long and tortured trade-union and government-policy history. Countries with sectoral, or broader-based, bargaining have lower wage inequality and often (although this isn’t guaranteed) stronger labor movements. Sectoral bargaining prevents a “race to the bottom” in union standards and pay, which is not only good for workers but also builds solidarity and a broader, class-based consciousness. A plan to move collective bargaining to a sectoral level would be a very good thing.

    On the other hand, the WDP is extraordinarily vague about what its vision of sectoral bargaining looks like. The bullet point says the plan will “[c]reate a sectoral collective bargaining system with wage boards to set minimum standards across industries.” It’s not clear if wage boards are the sectoral collective bargaining system or if they will come in addition to it, as a “minimum” backstop. The main concern here is that wage boards are less sectoral collective bargaining and more sectoral government wage setting. We should be skeptical of any proposal that further distances the determination of working conditions from workers themselves or the organizations that are closest to them, i.e., unions.

    Other very good parts of the WDP include the more directly economic proposals, such as those to protect pensions and provide a fair transition to Medicare for All. I will not say more about these here, except to point out that Sanders is, very savvily, seeking to avoid that conflicts with unions that arose under the Affordable Care Act with the so-called “Cadillac” health-care plans.

    The Bad

    Now let’s turn to the bad. The first two bullet points of the Sanders’ plan are a replay of the Obama-abandoned Employee Free Choice Act, and represents the union leadership’s preferred model of labor law reform. The first point would permit union “certification” by the government conditioned on the union’s obtaining a majority of signed authorization cards. Current practice requires a union to receive a majority of votes in a National Labor Relations Board-supervised election, a process fraught with employer interference and legal-bureaucratic delay. But the more fundamental problem is the government’s supervision of this process, not the method by which unions are selected by workers. Because a government-controlled process for union recognition exists, labor law bans (in Section 8(b)(7)) the use of strikes by employees where the objective is to organize, demand recognition, or bargain with an employer. This puts workers at the mercy of a bureaucratic process outside their control. The existence of any such process should be objectionable to socialists. Simply changing the specifics of the bureaucratic method of selecting (or not) the union will do little to alter this relation of dependency. It would be better to remove the ban on strikes to organize or demand recognition so that workers could control the process themselves.

    The plan’s second provision calls for a guaranteed “first contract” through compulsory mediation or, failing that, binding arbitration. This too was a central feature of the EFCA, and, like so much else in current labor law and many common proposals for labor law reform, it contemplates substituting government action for worker action. Current labor law goes out of its way to substitute bureaucratic process for worker power, as just illustrated with the union recognition process. That substitution is the fundamental reason why it is so difficult for unions to achieve a first contract, even after workers have voted in favor of a union. Since rank-and-file action plays so little role in the recognition stage of union formation, it’s no wonder that employers are so willing to resist unions at the collective bargaining stage. Compulsory mediation and binding arbitration won’t fix any of this. These proposals are fantastic, however, for a union leadership that wants to free itself from being dependent on a source of power that flows from workers themselves. If workers are free to strike for union recognition, they will also have the power to strike for a first contract.

    The Ugly

    And then there’s the ugly. A number of provisions are even harder to characterize as either “bad” or “good.” Companies that merge should absolutely be required to honor existing collective agreements, but this problem will largely be solved if we move to a genuine system of sectoral bargaining which will require all firms in an industry to abide by the sector agreement, regardless of a contractual relationship or history between a specific union and a firm, and especially if that agreement was backed up by the power to strike. The same goes for employers using franchising and subcontracting to avoid responsibility and liability. The provision to provide for termination only for “just cause” is likewise ambiguous. “Just cause” was the practice for decades (and still is) under the US tradition of workplace-level bargaining. Although it provides some security to the worker, it does so by binding the workers’ fortunes with those of the firm, splintering working-class consciousness. “Just cause” also tends to favor labor market “insiders” over “outsiders,” those with the means and ability to enforce such provisions, further stratifying the labor market, often along lines of race, gender, and other oppressed identities. A federal job guarantee and more adequate funding for unemployment insurance would be a better way to provide security in the labor market. The WDP also calls for extending labor rights to historically excluded workers, like domestic workers. Whether this is a good thing depends on whether the above-mentioned changes are made. For example, excluded or misclassified workers do not receive the protections of the NLRA, but they are also not subject to the secondary-boycott ban. Finally, I also have misgivings about the elimination of “right to work.” There is no doubt that the assault on union security is meant to crush what remains of the labor movement. But unions in most other parts of the world, including virtually all of Europe, long ago abandoned union-security agreements. In fact, union-security is part-and-parcel of the US’s narrow and self-defeating model of workplace-level bargaining.

    Conclusion

    Sanders’ Workplace Democracy Plan represents a bold break with past labor law. Instituting sectoral bargaining, eliminating the ban on secondary boycotts, pushing back against the use of permanent replacements (in whatever form)—these would be solid, concrete, and crucially important steps forward, remarkable in the context of contemporary US politics if ever implemented, even partially. But if we truly want to analyze labor law reform through a socialist perspective, we also need to think beyond whether this or that labor law rule favors workers or not. We also need to think about how and by whom those rules are enacted, administered, interpreted, and enforced: by the capitalist state or by workers and their institutions themselves? Thus, Eidlin only gets it half right when he says that Sanders’ plan, by being unambiguously pro-worker, goes beyond the view of the “state as an ostensibly ‘neutral’ arbiter to balance labor and management’s competing interests.” The illusion of state neutrality lies not in the fact that the state always takes one side or the other when it comes to the class struggle. Rather, the illusion is that the state, on balance, will not systematically favor the interests of capitalists: “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” Unless that principle is adhered to, we may get labor rights, and these may benefit the working class in material ways, but they will be fundamentally limited because they will be rights interpreted and enforced by the capitalist state, unable to transcend the logic of capitalism itself. We need to allow workers as much space as possible to create, interpret, and enforce their own version of labor relations, and this can be done by emphasizing and going beyond the best parts of the WPD: give back workers the freedom to strike.

    This essay was also posted, in slightly different form, on the Jacobin website.

  • U.S. and China Conflict: The 21st Century’s Central Inter-Imperial Rivalry

    U.S. and China Conflict: The 21st Century’s Central Inter-Imperial Rivalry

    The rivalry between the U.S. and China is the central inter-imperial rivalry of our epoch. Trump has made this abundantly clear in his administration’s National Security Strategy documents, calling for a shift from a focus on the so-called “War on Terror” to “Great Power Rivalry,” and naming China and Russia as “revisionist powers” that pose a threat to Washington’s hegemony. Trump has confronted China over everything from trade to currency valuation to 5G technology and Beijing’s claims to the waterways of the Asia-Pacific.

    While his administration has raised all of this to a fever pitch, the roots of the conflict between the U.S. and China are deeper than Trump and his gang of hawks, protectionists, and white nationalists. The conflict is the product of developments in global capitalism, the relative decline of U.S. imperialism, and the rise of China as an imperialist power. This explains the growing consensus in the U.S. ruling class about the need to confront and contain Beijing.

    Whatever their strategic and tactical differences, business owners, state managers, and politicians from Joe Biden to Bernie Sanders agree on this. Trump’s solution to the strategic challenge posed by China is what some have called “illiberal hegemony”—a commitment to maintaining U.S. domination while abandoning multilateral cooperation for “America First” nationalism and launching a New Cold War against China.

    The Relative Decline of U.S. Imperialism

    Such inter-rivalry is exactly what the U.S. had hoped to avoid after the end of its Cold War with Russia. The entire strategy Washington pursued after the fall of Moscow’s empire was to prevent the rise of an imperial rival that would challenge its hegemony. Its strategy was to superintend a neoliberal world order as the system’s only superpower. It aimed to incorporate the rest of the world’s states into that order by enticement, pressure, or if need be, force. Successive administrations used military interventions to crush so-called “rogue states” like Iraq and contain crises in various states wrecked by neoliberalism. Throughout their overriding goal was to prevent the rise of a peer competitor, a new rival.

    Three developments undermined this grand strategy. First, the neoliberal boom from the early 1980s to 2008 restructured global capitalism. It produced new centers of capital accumulation, most importantly China. The economic development of these states enabled them to become more geopolitically assertive. Second, the U.S. suffered what General William Odom called the greatest strategic disaster in its history with its invasion and occupation of Iraq, which bogged it down in counter-insurgency warfare. That compromised its ambition to lock the Middle East and its strategic energy reserves under its thumb, and in doing so position it to bully its potential rivals like China, which depend on the region for oil and natural gas. Third, the Great Recession disproportionately hammered the US economy. The ruling class did manage to drag the economy back from the brink of collapse with a combination of austerity and stimulus, but it has not been able trigger a new boom. Indeed, the system and the U.S. and EU in particular are locked in what David McNally has called a global slump characterized by sluggish expansions alternating with deep recessions.

    China, by contrast, managed to sustain its massive expansion with an enormous stimulus package of its own. Indeed, its ongoing boom sustained the economies of numerous countries from Australia to Brazil that export raw materials to feed China’s manufacturing industries. Of course, China isn’t immune from the crisis tendencies of the capitalist system; its stimulus project has only worsened its problem of debt, overcapacity, and overproduction, and these problems, compounded by Trump’s tariffs, have begun to curtail growth to 6.2 percent, the lowest since the early 2000s.

    The result of all these developments taken together has been the relative decline of U.S. imperialism. It no longer oversees a unipolar world order as it did in the 1990s and early 2000s. Instead, an asymmetric multipolar world order has emerged. The U.S. remains the dominant state power with the largest economy, military and geopolitical influence, but it now faces an imperial rival in the form of China and a host of regional powers from Russia to Iran, all of which are jockeying for advantage in an increasingly conflict ridden state system.

    The Rise of China

    In this new order, Beijing has asserted itself as a world power. President Xi Jinping, who came to power in 2012, abandoned his predecessors’ cautious grand strategy, which Deng Xiaoping described as “hiding your strength, biding your time.” Instead XI announced that his regime would pursue a “Chinese Dream” of reasserting China’s rightful place as a world power after its “century of humiliation” at the hands of U.S., European, and Japanese imperialism. Since this announcement, Xi has focused on turning China’s economic might into geopolitical muscle. He launched the $1 trillion One Belt and One Road infrastructure project. Beijing is exporting its industrial overcapacity to construct overland and oversea transit routes throughout Eurasia. Its aim is to establish itself as an economic hub for the world economy.

    Xi has also is determined to lead his economy’s long march up the capitalist value chain through another initiative called China 2025. It will fund new national champions in high tech, especially 5G, to compete with rivals in the U.S., Europe and Japan, who until now have dominated that sphere of the system. All these powers are now locked in competition in high tech not only for profit but also for its increasingly significant military role in cyberwarfare. Xi has also begun to project China’s military strength in the Asia Pacific. He has built up its Navy, deployed ships, established militarized islands in the South and East China Seas to control shipping lanes, claim undersea oil and natural gas reserves, and assert rights to fisheries. Finally, China has become much more assertive in geopolitics, in issues from climate change to trade disputes.

    The Quandary of U.S. Imperialism

    China’s rise and the relative decline of the U.S. has thrown Washington’s imperial strategy into a quandary. It is faced with a geopolitical rival that it is deeply integrated with economically. Its multinational use it as an export processing platform and they covet the enormous Chinese market. On top of that, the U.S. state is deeply in debt to Beijing, which holds vast reserves of treasury bonds. This financial dependency, drove Hillary Clinton to complain “how do you deal toughly with your banker?”

    Before Xi’s turn to imperial assertiveness, the U.S. policy toward China had been a combination of containment and engagement or what some policy analysts call “congagement.” The U.S. tried to incorporate and pressure China to abandon its state capitalist organization of its economy and adopt free market capitalism. At the same time, it remained vigilant because of Beijing’s reluctance to fully follow these dictates. As a result, the U.S. shifted back and forth between emphasizing the two poles of the “congagement” policy. Bill Clinton, during his honeymoon with China in the 1990s, called it a “strategic partner.” Bush tilted in the opposite direction, naming it a “strategic competitor” at the start of his presidency. But, regardless of these different emphases, the U.S. tried to lure Beijing deeper into the neoliberal order of free trade globalization.

    Obama was really the last gasp of “congagement.” He emphasized the containment side of the strategy with his so-called Pivot to Asia. His play was to extract the US from its occupations in the Middle East and reorient US imperialism to contain China. He promised to integrate Asia economically into its neoliberal order through the ratification of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement and thereby pressure China to abandon its state ownership and state intervention into its economy. He aimed to shift 60 percent of the U.S. Navy to the Asia Pacific to deter Beijing’s military expansion. Finally, he planned to shore up and expand Washington’s historic alliances forged over decades of hegemony in Asia and establish new ones like Vietnam.

    Despite Obama’s best efforts, the Pivot failed. The U.S. remained bogged down in the Middle East, the TPP never even came up for a ratification vote, its alliances frayed as states doubted Washington commitment to the region and they opted for balancing between the two rivals. Thus, US imperial strategy foundered in confusion over what to do about China’s new assertiveness.

    Trump’s America First Nationalism

     The Trump administration however erratically has attempted to implement a new strategy of illiberal hegemony to solve Washington’s imperial puzzle over how confront China. It has four dimensions. First, Trump wants to strengthen the security state by policing its borders, surveilling oppressed people especially immigrants and Muslims, but also Chinese students in US universities. Second, he promises to onshore manufacturing and shift U.S. supply chains away from China. Third, he is shifting away from his predecessors focus on the so-called “War on Terror” to “Great Power Rivalry” specifically against China. He has reoriented defense plans on a new buildup with that confrontation in mind. Fourth, he wants to put “America First” and establish a transactional relationship with both U.S. allies and adversaries.

    Applied to China, this new imperial strategy is moving the U.S. into a New Cold War with Beijing. In economics, Trump is trying to batter down China through a trade war. He wants to stop forced technology transfer between U.S. and Chinese companies, force privatization on Beijing’s state capitalist industry, open the country markets even more to U.S. multinationals, and stop its state support for national champions in high tech like Huawei. In geopolitics, Trump has tried to pressure U.S. allies to ban Huawei from their 5G infrastructure as national security threat. And he is trying to shore up alliance state by state against China. All of this is designed to prevent China from using its economic might to draw Eurasia under its influence. To buttress all of this, the U.S. is building up its defense forces to prepare for war with China, increasing its naval patrols in the Asia Pacific, and selling more weapons to its allies including Taiwan. All of this is escalating tension with Beijing, particularly over trade.

    Neither Washington, Nor Beijing, But International Socialism

    The two powers may end up cutting a deal to resolve the tariff war, but no one should be under the illusion that this will resolve their underlying inter-imperial rivalry. It is deeply rooted in Washington’s determination to retain its hegemony and Beijing’s commitment to establishing itself as a world power. At the same time, there are two counter-tendencies that cut against their rivalry exploding into open conflict: the two states’ deep economic integration means they have interest in preserving the current set up of free trade, and both powers possess nuclear weapons, leading both to try and avoid the risk of mutually assured destruction.

    Despite these counter-tendencies, though, the trajectory of this rivalry escalating in the coming years is unmistakable. This conflict between the U.S. and China will test the international left’s ability to take a clear and independent stand against both imperial powers and for international solidarity from below. In the U.S., the left’s first and foremost obligation is, to paraphrase the great German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht, to oppose main enemy, our own imperialist state.

    But that is not our only task. We also must oppose China as a capitalist state that exploits its own working class and peasantry, oppresses nations and national minorities like the Tibetans and Uighurs, and projects its imperial power against the US and throughout the developing world. We must not fall for the foolish, faux anti-imperialist politics of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend,” but instead oppose both the U.S. and China.

    To challenge both, we must build international solidarity between workers and oppressed groups in each state. In the U.S., we must win workers away from the siren song of economic nationalism sung by both the right wing nationalist and the liberal protectionist that will only bind us to our bosses and their state by painting Chinese workers as the main threat to jobs and wages. In a global economy, we have no choice but organization from below across borders against both imperialist states; that is, the politics of international socialist anti-imperialism.

  • ‘A New Generation Rises’: Eyewitness to Hong Kong Revolt

    ‘A New Generation Rises’: Eyewitness to Hong Kong Revolt

    Hong Kong Teachers in Protest

    The people of Hong Kong are in the fight of their lives against their own government and the Chinese Communist Party. Carrie Lam, the enclave’s chief executive, appointed by Beijing, earlier this year attempted to rush through an extradition bill that would allow Hong Kong citizens to be taken to mainland China to face charges for breaking Chinese laws that don’t apply in Hong Kong.

    Since 1997, when it was formally handed over by the British, the enclave has been a Special Administrative Region of China, with its own protected freedoms and a separate legal system. The extradition bill threatens this. Since June it has provoked waves of protests. While Lam insists that the bill is dead in the water, millions of Hong Kongers continue to mobilise. They have five demands: withdraw the extradition bill, Carrie Lam resign, an inquiry into police brutality, all arrested protesters to be released and universal suffrage.

    The following is an edited transcript of a speech given by Hong Kong socialist Au Loong Yu, via video link, at Perth’s annual Socialism conference on 18 August. Au is a socialist and writer. His latest book is China’s Rise: Strength and Fragility.

    ———-

    The movement in Hong Kong has gone through three stages: the first was in June when millions of people took to the streets. The legislative assembly was besieged and there was violence. There was a radicalisation and the protests became a mass movement. Then Carrie Lam’s administration conceded by announcing that the extradition bill would be temporarily suspended. But discontent persisted. The Lam administration now has zero legitimacy. The labour movement should be mentioned: on 17 June, the confederation of trade unions, one of two, and the more democratic, called for a strike. It was not successful.

    The second stage was characterised by demonstrations and the besieging of the legislature, with the radical youth then breaking into the legislature building. This was in July. It was a hugely radical action – if you did the same in Australia there would be a lot of casualties. But the July protest resulted in zero casualties. This was because the legislature was evacuated by police, which was probably to lure the radicals to break in in the first place and bring on a confrontation. Either way, this action pushed the movement to a higher level. But what followed was horrible: the police collaborated with the mafia in the Yuen Long region [right near the border with China] to carry out indiscriminate attacks in the train station to terrify residents and demonstrators. This antagonised people and even the most moderate liberals became angry.

    So we saw a further radicalisation. There were also 16 or 17 demonstrations in different districts. We saw a broadening of the movement to the community level, which we have never seen before in Hong Kong. This was driven by the attack from the mafia. Hundreds of thousands of people took part. The 27 July protest was even more significant. Until then, the demonstrations were legal. But on 27 July, the police refused a licence for the first time. Hong Kong people are very moderate – or have been for many years. Ordinarily, they would have accepted this. Instead, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in defiance. This was the first time since the current movement started that there has been civil disobedience in such large numbers. This laid the groundwork for August.

    August marked the third stage, which we are now in. Importantly, on 5 August, there was a second strike. This time it was successful. One sector of the Hong Kong economy defined the strike movement: the airport and flight industry employees. The Communist Party is now asking for the list of Cathay Pacific employees who went on strike. The union won’t release the list. It’s estimated that 300,000 or 400,000 people took part in the strike. Later in August, there were victory marches every two or three days. More people marched than did in July. So the mobilisations are continuing.

    On 12 August, there were more huge occupations of the airport. This triggered a very angry response from the Communist Party. It sent armed police to the border, about 10,000 of them. This was just a show – there is a huge regiment already stationed in Hong Kong, consisting of nearly 8,000 Chinese troops, just next door to the Hong Kong government. If Beijing wants to crack down, it will use what is available.

    ********

    In terms of the composition of the movement, it is notable that the political parties have played no leading role. They only play a logistical role, providing legal expertise and cohering a united civil front. The front involves unions and NGOs as well as political parties. The front has hosted the marches over the past two months. Without it, the radical youth would find themselves very isolated. We should not underestimate the role of the civil front, but it has offered no political leadership. It always waits for the radical youth to escalate things to a higher level.

    The next component is the young people, especially the radical youth. There are roughly 5,000 to 10,000 young people, mainly students, who are ready to fight the police. It is hard to ascertain correct figures, but there are thousands prepared to use force. And many more thousands of youngsters are not ready to be at the front but are ready to support the radicals. This makes the movement dynamic. Supportive young people provide the visors, helmets, water and so on. Their political inclinations are varied and it is rare for them to join political organisations. They are young – high school and college aged. They genuinely believe in democracy but have a rudimentary understanding of politics. They can be xenophobic towards mainland Chinese, but this has not yet hardened into a program or perspective. At the same time many young people think it is important to win over mainland Chinese and to convince them of the five demands. So there are contradictory positions.

    The third component is the xenophobic localists, who predate the Umbrella Movement of 2014. This current has been weakened since 2016. The Western media love these people, but their organisations are small, not more than two or three dozen, or at most below 100. But their politics are still dangerous because Hong Kong society has always been right wing, and people can take up the idea that mainlanders are the problem and should be expelled.

    The fourth component is labour: labour organisation is not big in Hong Kong. It was good that 5 August was a relatively successful strike, especially since it was not well organised. Hong Kong unions don’t usually organise political strikes, but there is now talk of a third strike in early September.

    Finally, the issue of so-called foreign intervention. If you look at the movement on the ground, you can see that accusations it is controlled or funded by the US government is plain silly. You have two million people taking to the streets. You have people abusing police, calling them pigs. It is silly to say they are controlled by any foreign power.

    **********

    The situation has now entered a deadlock. It is very clear Beijing doesn’t want to lose face and will remain hard line. The Lam government has lost all autonomy but will not retreat either. At the same time, the people are constantly being antagonised by more crackdowns. It might turn into a revolutionary situation. It can, if hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens and workers merge with the radical youth and fight the police at the same time. We would then enter a revolutionary situation. But this is not easy. Hong Kong is too small to fight Beijing and many people know this. And the movement is not well organised at all and consciousness is very raw.

    Nevertheless, the movement is significant for a number of reasons. First, it represents the rise of a new generation. A new generation that has grown up after the Chinese government took over Hong Kong. It gives a new energy to Hong Kong politics. The new generation is more radical. That they use the word “revolution” is very interesting. My generation fears revolution, which is why our generation stands no chance at all. But now we see a generation welcoming revolution. And they are young and throwing stones at the police for this revolution. This is very good even though also chaotic. It’s both a chance and a challenge.

    The second reason is that this movement represents a clash between two visions of Hong Kong. One is the vision of Beijing and the other is those of the common people. The Beijing government has always treated Hong Kong as an entirely economic city. They have wanted to rob Hong Kong of its political identity and for Hong Kong to play no role in politics. This is understandable, given that Hong Kong is the only city in China with freedom of speech and freedom of political parties. But what is contradictory is that it is precisely this that has politicised the initially apolitical Hong Kong population. The huge politicisation of Hong Kong is not because of foreign intervention; the Communist Party has helped drive it.

    Third, there is a clash of two visions inside Hong Kong – the common people’s and that of the upper class and tycoons. Thirty years ago, the middle class shared the same vision as the tycoons. Counterposed to the Beijing vision, the Hong Kong middle class aspired to a liberal form of capitalism for the island. For the past 30 years, the tycoons have not been committed to this vision. They have been proponents of Beijing’s view of totalitarian capitalism. So there is a conflict.

    Finally, the Hong Kong crisis symbolises the strains of China’s rise. In my book, China’s Rise: Strength and Fragility, I argue that China contains contradictions: it is strong but also carries huge weaknesses. Hong Kong exposes China’s weakness. China is a 1984 type society. It is really difficult to make change there because the society is so harsh. But Hong Kong is different and is an important weakness.

    This article was originally published in Red Flag.

  • A GI Rebellion: When Soldiers Said No to War

    A GI Rebellion: When Soldiers Said No to War

    Fifty years ago this fall, a campus upsurge turned opposition to the Vietnam War into a genuine mass movement.

    On October 15, 1969, several million students, along with community-based activists, participated in anti-war events under the banner of the “Vietnam Moratorium.” A month later, 500,000 people came to a Washington, D.C. demonstration of then-unprecedented size, organized by the “New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.”

    As we approach the 50th anniversary of both the Moratorium and Mobilization, it’s worth recalling one critical anti-war constituency whose role was less visible then and remains little acknowledged today.

    While student demonstrators and draft resisters drew more mass media attention at the time, many military draftees, reservists and recently returned veterans also protested the Vietnam War—with equal fervor and often greater impact.

    Fortunately, three Vietnam-era activists have just published Waging Peace in Vietnam (New Village Press, 2019), which gives long overdue credit to anti-war organizing by men and women in uniform, and their civilian allies and funders.

    Labor organizer Ron Carver, Notre Dame professor David Cortright, and writer/editor Barbara Doherty have crafted a beautifully-illustrated 240-page tribute to the GI anti-war movement. Waging Peace includes fifty first-person accounts by grassroots builders of that movement, plus photo documentation of their work by William Short, a Vietnam combat veteran.

    As Cortright notes in the book’s introduction, social science researchers hired by the military (and later academic experts) concluded that one-quarter of all “low-ranking service members participated in Vietnam-era antiwar activity.”

    This percentage is “roughly equivalent to the proportion of activists among students at the peak of the anti-war movement.” In the rural and conservative communities which surround most military bases, then and now, “the proportion of anti-war activists among soldiers was actually higher than in the local youth population.”

    The Anti-Warriors Today

    Now in their late 60s and 70s, many anti-warriors profiled in Waging Peace are long-distance runners in the field. Some remain active in Veterans for Peace (VFP), which held its national convention last weekend in Spokane. One highlight of that annual gathering was the unveiling of archival material and photos which appear in Waging Peace.

    This hotel ballroom exhibit included many striking examples of underground press work–mimeographed newspapers for GIs with names like Last Harass, Up Against the Bulkhead, Attitude Check, or Fun, Travel and Adventure (whose acronymic double message was “Fuck the Army!”).

    Among those viewing younger portraits of themselves in Spokane—along with documentation of their own anti-war activity—were ex-Marine Paul Cox, Army veteran Skip Delano, and former Navy nurse Susan Schnall. In Waging Peace, each one shares a memorable tale of personal transformation, due to war-time experiences at home or abroad.

    A native of Oklahoma, Cox served as a platoon leader in Vietnam’s Quang Nam Province in 1969. There, he witnessed a massacre of civilians, “smaller scale but no less barbaric” than the mass killings at My Lai which occurred a year earlier.

    After completing his combat tour, Cox was assigned to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. He and several Maine buddies decided it was “our duty to put out a newspaper and print the truth about ‘Nam.”

    Over a two-year period, they and later recruits produced thousands of copies of a clandestine publication called RAGE. As Cox says today, “RAGE was definitely not an example of great journalism.” But it did allow him to redirect his own anger and disillusionment into an effort “to warn others who were about to be deployed.”

    In Vietnam, Skip Delano was assigned to a chemical unit attached to the 101st Airborne Division. After his return to Fort McClellan in Alabama, he believed he had earned the right “to comment on the war to other people”—an opinion not shared by his base commander.

    Delano helped write and edit a GI newsletter called Left Face, whose distributors faced six-months in the stockade if they were caught with bulk copies. In October of 1969 he and 30 others bravely signed a petition supporting the Mobilization scheduled for the following month in Washington, DC. This deep South expression of solidarity with civilian protesters up north triggered Military Intelligence investigations and interrogations, loss of security clearances, and threats of further discipline.

    Protesting in Uniform

    A year before Delano’s dissent, Susan Schnall’s dramatic acts of Bay Area resistance drew heavy military discipline. She was court-martialed, sentenced to six months of hard labor, and dismissed from the Navy for “conduct unbecoming an officer.”

    Schnall grew up in a Gold Star family; her father, who she never knew, was a Marine killed in Guam during World War II. As a Navy nurse in 1967, she toiled among “night time screams of pain and fear” that came from patients badly wounded and recently returned from Vietnam.

    In October, 1968, Schnall became involved in a planned “GI and Veterans March for Peace” in San Francisco. To publicize that event, she and a pilot friend rented a single engine plane, filled it with thousands of leaflets, and dropped them over local military facilities like the Presidio, Treasure Island, the Alameda Naval Station, and her own workplace, Oak Knoll hospital in Oakland.

    Then, in full dress uniform, she joined 500 other active duty service people, in a march from Market St. in San Francisco to its Civic Center, where they were cheered by thousands of civilian protesters.

    Fifty years after Cox, Delano and Schnall rallied their uniformed comrades against the Vietnam war, all three are still engaged in causes like defending veterans’ healthcare against privatization by the Trump Administration. (See https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/06/07/under-guise-of-choice-trump-launches-assault-on-veterans-care/.)

    Later this fall, they and other VFP members are helping to bring the Waging Peace exhibit to Amherst and New Bedford, Mass, New York City and Washington, DC. Next Spring, this book-based display will reach campus or community audiences in Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. (For schedule details, see https://wagingpeaceinvietnam.com/exhibit.)

    Red State Resistance

    Activists today, particularly those involved in working class organizing, should buy this book or see the exhibit based on it. Local-level leaders of the GI movement displayed courage, creativity, and audacity when rallying their own “fellow workers” who had been conscripted by the hundreds of thousands.

    Much rank-and-file education and agitation about Vietnam occurred on or near heavily guarded military bases located in what are now called “red states.” They became unexpected incubators for homegrown (and imported) radicalism.

    Some forms of GI resistance, referenced in the book, involved sabotage of equipment, small and larger scale mutinies, rioting in military stockades, and deadly assaults on unpopular officers (the grenade-assisted retribution known as “fragging.”)

    The national network of GI coffee houses described in Waging Peace became places where active duty military personnel could relax, socialize, listen to music, read what they wanted, and have fun with each other and their civilian supporters.  This helped break down the military vs civil society divide that is far wider today—due, in part, to the post-Vietnam creation of a “professional army” to replace the rebellious conscripts of fifty years ago.

    Thanks to their low morale—and heroic Vietnamese resistance to foreign aggression—U.S. ground forces were no longer “an effective fighting force by 1970,” according to Cortright. “To save the Army,” he says,” it became necessary to withdraw troops and end the war. Their dissent and defiance played a decisive role in limiting the ability of the U.S. to continue the war…”

    In an era of “forever wars,” it may be hard to imagine such impactful organizing among active duty military personnel or newly-minted veterans. Let’s hope that the many examples of grassroots activism in Waging Peace prove inspirational and instructive for younger progressives today.

    This valuable book might even stimulate some new thinking about how the left can better relate to the 22 million Americans who have served in the military or continue to do so–to their own detriment and that of people throughout the world.

  • Puerto Rico: The Organic Crisis and the Alternatives

    Puerto Rico: The Organic Crisis and the Alternatives

    The discredit attained by the dominant parties, by the legislature, by the “politicians” and even “politics” itself, defined inaccurately, but viscerally despised by many people, recalls the concept of “organic crisis” advanced by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Authors such as Stathis Kouvelakis have used it to analyse the movement of the gilets jaunes in France. An organic crisis involves a breakdown of the ability of the ruling class to “maintain its leading role”. One of its “most visible symptoms” is the “collapse of support for traditional parties”.

    The discredit attained by the dominant parties, by the legislature, by the “politicians” and even “politics” itself, defined inaccurately, but viscerally despised by many people, recalls the concept of “organic crisis” advanced by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Authors such as Stathis Kouvelakis have used it to analyse the movement of the gilets jaunes in France. An organic crisis involves a breakdown of the ability of the ruling class to “maintain its leading role”. One of its “most visible symptoms” is the “collapse of support for traditional parties”.

    This crisis is distinguished from a situation of radical change by the absence of a social force capable of replacing the order in crisis. It is an unstable, precarious situation, full of opportunities and dangers. The ruling class tries to regain its ability to lead. For this, despite discredit, it has large reserves. Thus, the organic crisis “unleashes a recomposition of political personnel”, including the struggle between leaders and parties and the emergence of new ones, constitutional reforms and so on.

    Since the resignation of Rosselló (Puerto Rico’s governor until August 2, 2019) the slogan has been to return to “normality”. But that is not achieved by decree, as evidenced by the episode of Pierluisi and the internal struggle of the PNP around the governorate. [1] The ruling class wants stability but does not agree on how to achieve it. Everyone, from Rivera Schatz to the Nuevo Día newspaper, from the leadership of the PPD to the radio commentators, from the Chamber of Commerce to the employers’ offices, has different ideas on how to achieve it. Each tries to bring the charcoal to their sardine.

    Given this process it is useful to review some ideas. Puerto Rico does not live under a “partyocracy”, as is sometimes said. It is not dominated by parties. It is dominated by those who dominate through the parties. To put it bluntly: it is dominated by plutocracy. The owners of money, wealth and capital. The employer class. The rich. Give it whatever name you want.

    But this ruling class is not homogeneous, nor does it act as a unit. It does not meet somewhere and decide what its policy will be. It depends on structures that allow it to elaborate positions: its press, analysts, think tanks, organizations (Industrial Association, Chamber of Commerce and so on) and its parties (the PPD and the PNP).

    The relationship between this class and its parties is not simple. Under an elected government they are subject to different pressures. Elected officials are supposed to serve the ruling class, on the one hand, and gain and maintain the support of the electors on the other. Otherwise, they would be of little use to the ruling class. But that electoral support is not achieved with beautiful smiles and phrases only. It often requires making real concessions to people or not giving way to the most voracious employers’ demands.

    This was the case with Law 80, which the employer class wanted to eliminate, something that some of its politicians considered would have an unacceptable electoral effect. [2] The employer class has always had this problem with its elected representatives: the latter are more subject to electoral pressure and therefore do not implement the entire anti-worker agenda of the former. Hence also the sympathy of the employer class for the Board: by not being elected, nor having to worry about re-election, the Board would dare to act without fear where the “politicians” falter (Law 80 is also an example of this). The employer class, of course, also loves to criticize the “politicians”, presenting themselves as part of the people, outraged by corruption and so on, even though that is the other side of corruption: a “politician” can only sell themselves if there is someone to buy them.

    Thus we have a double hypocrisy inherent in our employer democracy: employers’ politicians despise the people, but they have to present themselves as friends and servants of the people (which sometimes implies real conflicts with the employers they represent) and the employers sometimes distance themselves from corrupt politicians who remain at their service. The publication of the “chat” altered the operation of this machine. It exposed the first hypocrisy: the contempt of politicians for the people was exposed. [3]

    But the “chat” was the trigger, not the cause of the summer of 2019. An “organic crisis” is not forged in three days: it was prepared for a little over a decade. Since 2006 our economy has been sinking into an increasingly serious crisis. 250,000 jobs have been lost. Hundreds of thousands have had to emigrate. Young people find no future in their country. Faced with this depression, the government first became indebted, imposing new sacrifices (the Sales and Use Tax in 2006). When the debt became part of the crisis, it imposed austerity measures to try to pay it off: law 7, law 66, budget cuts, attacks on pensions, school closures, increases in the Sales and Use Tax. Meanwhile, corruption continued, uncovered by some scandals, such as Anaudi Hernández. [4]

    The discrediting of traditional parties was already reflected in 2016 with the victory of Rosselló with 42% of the votes. Then the Board came to impose increasingly severe austerity measures. On top of this reality came the blow of Hurricane Maria: more than 4,000 dead, $90 billion in losses. The response of the colonial and imperial governments was inept and corrupt (remember Trump throwing paper towels and the Whitefish contract). [5] Frustration with all this broke out in July 2019.

    The crisis will be long precisely because our ruling class has no project. They love to blame the government, but they haven’t articulated a coherent plan to get us out of depression. As a candidate for the governorship, I proposed to their organizations to recover profits that are now fleeing to reinvest them here: they were the first to reject these measures, which would benefit them. They prefer to be harmed rather than touching the privileges of external capital. They are a dependent bourgeoisie, with no vision of the country or the future.

    But they will continue to rule until we build our alternative. Their goal now is normalization. Several strategies will be used: the crisis will be attributed to Rosselló’s excesses. Once that is resolved, things must return to normal. They thought Pierluisi was the man to achieve this. For two days GFR Media sold him as the man of stability. But the crisis was too serious. With the manoeuvre being repudiated by the Supreme Court, they detached themselves from Pierluisi and attributed everything to his mistakes.

    Now a more insidious manoeuvre will come: we will be asked, what was the use of the struggle, the mobilization, the protest if, after all, everything remains the same? That is, they will try to turn the limits of victory into an argument against struggle. We cannot allow it. While those above try to rebuild their domain, we have to build our alternative. The perspective cannot be to make a new constitution for the colonial regime, but to unleash decolonization accompanied by the fight against the Board and bipartisanship. That means remaining on the streets and also preparing for the polls: we took down Rosselló in 2019, let’s finish cleaning the house in 2020.

     

    [1] Pedro Pierluisi was sworn in as Rosselló’s successor but Puerto Rico’s senate and Supreme Court rejected this as illegitimate and he was forced to resign.

    [2] https://www.natlawreview.com/article/puerto-rico-heading-towards-will-employment.

    [3] Governor Rosselló was forced to resign after the leaking of hundreds of derisive and offensive private chat messages between him and members of his inner circle.

    [4] https://nacla.org/article/puerto-rico-crisis-government-workers-battle-neoliberal-reformhttps://harvardlawreview.org/2015/02/puerto-rico-public-corporation-debt-enforcement-and-recovery-act/https://www.telemundopr.com/noticias/destacados/Anaudi-Hernandez-detalla-esquema-de-corrupcion-391649911.html.

    [5] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/15/16648924/puerto-rico-whitefish-contract-congress-investigation.

    Originally posted at International Viewpoint.

  • Moving Targets: DSA’s 2019 Convention

    Moving Targets: DSA’s 2019 Convention

    Earlier this month, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) held its 2019 National Convention. I wrote a piece for Jacobin giving an overview of the major decisions that came out of the convention, but there’s a larger conversation to be had about the experience at the convention in Atlanta.

    Immediately following the convention, several accounts addressed the problems of convention: the numerous points of privilege, posturing and procedural maneuvering. Allison Geroi sums up the sentiment in her piece Democracy Beyond the Debate Floor when she writes, “DSA’s 2019 convention was chaotic and often divisive. All major proposals inspired heated emotional debates, and every day featured equally contentious procedural motions.” To DSA’s left, Tatiana Cozzarelli writes for the orthodox Trotskyist Left Voice that the “procedural problems of the DSA convention was an expression of its reformist orientation.” The New York Times’ Marc Tracy more charitably explains, “But if most delegates would have admitted that the emphasis on procedure lapsed into self-parody, some argued that it stemmed from an authentic desire to accomplish things.”

    Clearly things did not go as smooth as they should have; nearly the entire first day was taken up with procedural motions to decide on the rules of convention, rearrange the agenda, extend and un-extend times and disruptive points of privilege. The convention continued to lag behind schedule, and as the body approached its final time limit numerous motions were packaged together to try and pass them as quickly as possible, without the debate the motions deserved. How do we make sense of this complicated, often frustrating experience? Is our hoaxster comrade Archie Carter correct that “DSA is Doomed”? Is it, as Left Voice argues, a symptom of reformism? Was this just factional bickering that held the convention hostage?

    In what follows, I’d like to examine the convention process and offer some thoughts about why there were problems with the convention, interrogate how serious those problems are and offer some thoughts on the democratic tasks for DSA.

    Lead Up to Convention

    Let’s start by revisiting the timeline of convention. Most accounts have focused on the weekend of convention itself, but we should start by looking at how DSA prepared in order to understand how the months leading up to it set the stage for the convention.[i]

    In mid-December 2018, DSA National Director Maria Svart announced the National Convention would be held in Atlanta, Georgia, from August 2nd through 4th. To prepare for this, the national organization would organize a series of pre-convention conferences to be held from February to April of 2019 across the United States. Nine regional pre-conventions were held in the late winter and early spring with a program designed to discuss the priority areas of DSA’s work since 2017 (elections, labor, Medicare for All) and Bernie Sanders and the 2020 election. The pre-conventions also had nuts and bolts workshops on how to write proposals for convention, how to use Robert’s Rules of Order and an explanation of the logistics of convention.

    After the last of the pre-conventions in April, most activity was centered on chapter elections of their respective delegations to convention and on the formulation of proposals for the convention, though both of those tasks were seemingly isolated; chapters turned inward to decide who they would send to Atlanta, and as I’ve written about previously most of the proposals were written by caucuses. The compendium of eighty-five (85) resolutions and twenty-eight (28) constitution/bylaw amendments were released at the end of June, which left a little under five weeks to read over 260 pages of proposals and 138 pages of candidate statements. Immediately following the release of proposals, there were approximately two weeks to submit amendments to the proposals, which led to a kind of mad scramble to draft amendments.

    Delegates were then asked to vote in two straw polls in advance of the convention. The first straw poll on July 15th, 2019, was to decide on a “consent agenda,” a package of proposals with enough approval whereby we would agree to forgo debate and vote on them as a bundle in order to save time at the convention. A second straw poll sent a week later then asked delegates to vote on which proposals they wanted to prioritize for debate on the convention floor, as there were far too many to be able to address them all. (We’ll return to these in more detail below.)

    It might not be immediately evident, but the regional pre-conventions and the Atlanta convention were in effect two separate events with little relation to one another. Because the first round of proposals hadn’t been submitted until June, two months after the last pre-convention, DSA did not actually use the pre-conventions to begin the conversations about proposals for convention that could have led to clarification, revision, or just better debate. The pre-conventions instead worked as regional conferences that were useful in building connections between chapters but didn’t prepare DSA for what would happen in Atlanta. Many delegates had only a passing familiarity with the resolutions and amendments and the body spent precious time in Atlanta introducing and explaining the proposals, clarifying their intent and effect, rather than debating their political impacts.

    What we saw in Atlanta was the result of a compressed convention: the basic tasks of becoming familiar with proposals, beginning debate, clarifying and refining, were all waived in the pre-convention period. Negotiations that should have begun at the pre-conventions about the priority of the schedule, norms for debate and specific language that required change all got lumped into the convention weekend in Atlanta, putting tremendous pressure on delegates to get through everything on the agenda, ensure that their positions were heard and respected, and fight to correct problems in the process that they didn’t think they had a way to resolve before the convention. No organization could meaningfully work through all these needs in the span of three days, and many of the problems with convention stem from these constraints.

    The Role of Caucuses

    Another popular reflection from convention was that it was simply the result of factional positioning. In this narrative, the proceduralism and decisions made were basically a slugfest between organized national tendencies. Indeed, I wrote pieces explaining the influence of caucuses in producing the resolutions and amendments for convention, and in deciding who would stand for election to the NPC. But viewing the entire convention as just a feud between caucuses oversimplifies.

    First, its worth noting that there was generally a high level of political agreement, which crossed factional lines. The convention debated approximately thirty-six (36) proposals[1], passing twenty-five (25) of those and referring three (3) to committee; when we consider only the political resolutions, nineteen (19) of twenty-one (21) were passed (91%). Most of these resolutions passed with a supermajority. Three passed narrowly (Anti-Fascist Working Group, package of Cuba Solidarity, Decolonization and BDS Working Group, and Rank and File Strategy), each with their own logic.

    The proposal on anti-fascism was not so much a debate about whether DSA should declare itself anti-fascist, but on the tactical decision to form a national working group within the organization. Antifa has developed more as a decentralized movement rather than an organization, so discussing a national working group was about assessing the effectiveness of Antifa and whether it should be more coordinated. To my knowledge, this was the first discussion of an approach to antifascism in DSA and the split vote reflected our uncertainty.

    The bundle of proposals on Decolonization, Cuba Solidarity and a BDS Working Group caught many by surprise, and many delegates voted against the resolution out of frustration with the procedural move to immediately place the resolutions at the top of the agenda; because they knew very little about the politics of the groups DSA would attach itself to with regards to Cuba; or because two of the proposals were not on the schedule and delegates were simply unfamiliar with them and voting them down was the safer bet.

    The Rank and File Strategy (RFS) proposal was the most fraught, and this could be more factionally aligned than other proposals in that it was advanced by Bread and Roses (B&R). However, there are three important qualifiers: 1) this resolution immediately followed another “Towards a Clear, Multifaceted Strategy for Labor” (advanced by Collective Power Network), which led some to believe that the proposal was redundant; 2) the RFS proposal asked DSA to take a more nuanced position on how to build the labor movement and orient towards the labor bureaucracy, which was beyond the lived experience of many delegates – given the historically low levels of union organization in the United States, it is not surprising that many delegates are unfamiliar with of labor politics; 3) whereas most of the factional alignments had been along organizational lines (coordination vs decentralization), this vote did not follow that pattern. Bread and Roses advanced the RFS proposal, which was endorsed by the Libertarian Socialist Caucus (LSC) (who are normally antagonistic towards positions taken by B&R); Collective Power Network (CPN) opposed the resolution, where they had typically been allied with B&R on organizational questions. Socialist Majority (SMC) split their votes, with some members supporting and others opposing.

    This suggests that while caucuses played a role, their alignment was not static but malleable/flexible once they departed organizational questions. That isn’t to say that caucuses played no role, but it would be wrong to broad brush the convention simply as LSC-Build vs. B&R/SMC/CPN.

    The Straw Polls and the Organization Question

    A major question leading up to the convention was about what would happen to the national organization. As DSA has grown dramatically, two competing visions of the organization were put forward: one for a well-funded, national organization that could better coordinate the activity of members; another that wanted to redistribute resources and function as a network of locals. Prior to the convention, it was difficult to know how the membership felt about these issues. Without some objective metric, the only way of gauging the debate was through the arguments put out on the internet (Twitter, social media, DSA discussion board and occasionally written articles). Going into the convention, there was anxiety about this unknown element: where would DSA fall on the organization question? It was interesting then to review the straw poll data for the consent agenda and convention schedule, because they gave us a way to measure the opinions in DSA.

    The poll on the consent agenda gave us a first look at how delegates might position themselves. 605 delegates voted in this straw poll, roughly two-thirds of the delegates. The data needs some interpretation because there are multiple reasons why a person would decide not to vote for putting something in the consent agenda (disagreement with the resolution, agreement but desire to have it debated, lack of understanding but general support), but we can be confident that if a person voted FOR something to be in the consent agenda that they were affirming the proposal politically.

    The results of the straw poll showed that none of the constitutional amendments were sufficiently popular to make it into the consent agenda, and in fact only one amendment (CB 32 Assert Our Commitment to Ecosocialism) reached over 50% approval; the average was 30% approval. The resolutions had a much wider spread, with the lowest support for R27 Proposed Priorities for DSA at 4.8% and the highest support for R6 Orienting Towards Latinx Communities at 88%. The resolutions that made it into the consent agenda commonly focused on immigration, ecosocialism/fighting the climate crisis, and gender justice. These reflected the collective anger and anxiety about major national issues in this political moment: ICE raids, concentration camps, abortion bans and looming climate chaos. This first poll seemingly confirms my thesis that there is political agreement in DSA but less unity on organizational questions.

    The second poll on what should make it to the convention floor had a similar number of participants (676). The system for deciding what would make it into the agenda attempted to create a “weighted” system, which allowed for a mix of broad and deep support for a proposal. Delegates voted for their Top 20 resolutions they wanted to debate at convention, and then also for a Top 3 that were most important to them, which received a greater “weight.” The combination of rankings was then calculated to decide what would go to the convention floor. Proposals that made it into the agenda had to satisfy one of three conditions: very broad support (many people voting in their Top 20), very deep support (many people ranking in Top 3), or a high enough mix of the two[2].

    Of the top thirty-nine (39) scoring proposals that went to the floor for debate, the average Top 20 score was 239; the median Top 3 score was only 15 (mean of 45). A delegate could vote for a proposal in both their Top 20 and their Top 3, and the average ratio of Top 3 per Top 20 (where a delegate ranked a proposal both in their Top 20 and Top 3) was 19% (median: 9%). While the metrics look technical, what’s important is that it gives us an impression of what kinds of support delegates had for the proposals.

    The top scoring proposal, R34 Ecosocialist Green New Deal had far and away the most Top 20 Votes (555) and demonstrably wide support; the next highest Top 20 value was for R33 Invest in Political Education (364). The second highest scoring proposal, CB2 Require that National Pays Stipends to the Locals (“Pass the Hat”), was only ranked in the Top 20 by 38% of delegates (258), but of the delegates who voted for it, it had fanatical support: 211 of the 258 who voted to put it in the Top 20 also put it in their Top 3 (82%). This is particularly noteworthy when you consider that the average frequency delegates ranked both Top 3 and Top 20 was only 19%. Calculating a mix of broad and deep support was useful in bringing a conversation to the fore that was passionately felt by a strong minority of members, but when it came to the vote it carried roughly the same amount of support on the convention floor; Pass the Hat failed, seemingly without even a simple majority.

    The data also suggest that while the charge of being a highly disciplined faction has been levied against Bread & Roses, Build was actually the tendency that whipped their votes the most; at 82%, I cannot see another explanation other than a deliberate, coordinated push to secure support for that proposal. To further support that notion, Build’s other proposal, R60 Reassert Our Commitment to Training, had the second highest alignment of Top 3 per Top 20, at 62%.

    The two polls give us different insights into DSA. The first poll on the consent agenda measured the overall attitude expressed by the delegates and showed our opinions on political questions. The second poll gives us different information, and arguably it showed us the priorities of the organized tendencies/caucuses. The ten highest scoring proposals (not including ecosocialism) were all sponsored by national tendencies and had higher than average Top 3 per Top 20 support at 30% or above (average of 47%), carrying the highest share of weighted Top 3 votes. Every other proposal that made it to convention did so only by having broad support (Top 20 rankings).

    Does this run counter to my supposition that the convention was not as factional as otherwise stated? Yes and no. There is evidence to show that the agenda was set in large part by the national formations, but the votes on resolutions themselves were not simple reflections of caucus power.

    Looking at this data we also could have predicted much of how the convention decisions landed. The straw poll showed that there was not broad support for any of the constitutional amendments, and in turn almost none of them were passed. The two amendments that did pass (close amendment loophole, remove gendered language) did not fundamentally change DSA’s structure but brought the organization in line with where the membership believed it should have been[3]. While there was a very vocal group advocating for more localist approaches, the data showed them to be an intense minority but a minority all the same.

    Three groups (SMC, CPN and LSC) proposed three separate models of regional organization. Each of them scored relatively well in the second straw poll, but each of them in turn failed, either by being referred to the NPC (SMC, CPN) or killed outright (LSC). There doesn’t appear to be a single determining factor for why the convention did not approve the regional proposals so we have to take a wider view.

    • The proposals were not well understood by most delegates. Other than CPN, there wasn’t a very public effort to educate about regional organizational forms.
    • They competed against each other rather than present a united model.
    • They were highly prefigurative and did not reflect the experience of most members.
    • They were placed at the end of the agenda and were pressed for time and, after a process-heavy weekend, there might have been a conceptual push back against the models as more bureaucracy.

    Whatever the case, when it comes to restructuring the organization there wasn’t enough momentum to carry them forward.

    Conclusion: We Need a Theory of Democracy

    Where does this leave of post-convention? Three things stand out.

    First, the convention missed its opportunity to have full democratic debate in the construction of the preconvention conferences. Typically, a preconvention period is an extended period that allows the membership to raise political questions, advance perspectives, review resolutions and debate them over a longer timeframe. When the body finally meets, they do so with a functional understanding of the issues at play and the votes can then reflect the culmination of the debate. Because the preconventions all took place before resolutions were available, members weren’t able to use those conferences to prepare for the convention in Atlanta. We should be forgiving of the convention, since 2017 was essentially the founding convention of our DSA and 2019 was in turn the first convention to assess the organization we are building together. There are bound to be problems, and now we have collective experience to inform future gatherings.

    Second, DSA needs to address caucusing and organized tendencies. Clearly, caucuses are playing an increasingly large role in the life of the organization, at least at the national level. This is to be expected in a growing organization with thousands of members and shouldn’t be viewed as innately negative. Especially in a multi-tendency organization, political perspectives can be reduced to the lowest common denominator. For members who elect to join them, caucuses can provide greater political coherence and training without demanding that the rest of the organization submit to these as norms. This supports the “big tent” character of DSA and is common in socialist parties around the world.

    Yet one of the holdovers of old DSA is that the structure was not designed with caucusing in mind; if anything, old DSA wanted to discourage caucuses and never formalized any rules related to members organizing internally. The NPC candidates, for example, were presented as a collection of individuals with no relation to one another; resolutions were also presented as by individual authors. In a DSA where there are organized groups with standing perspectives, this becomes important information for members to be able to weigh in the decision-making process. DSA will need to consider how to navigate standing tendencies alongside those who do not wish to affiliate with a group so that there isn’t a major imbalance in the ability to participate in the organization.

    Finally, DSA needs a theory of democracy beyond simply voting. Socialism is at its core the extension of democracy into every facet of life. In capitalism, we do not live in a democracy, and so we must experiment and learn to develop democratic practices. Insofar as DSA strives to be a democratic organization, we need to have a better concept of what democracy means. The convention performed admirably given its limitations but certainly left much to be desired. What were the democratic deficits? For one, democracy requires that information is dispersed. We cannot make meaningful decisions without access to the information that informs our choices. But it doesn’t work to flood the membership with raw data; we also must have a grasp of the constraints placed on us by capitalism and our social positions to understand the varying levels of participation. As working people in a voluntary organization, the structures and norms developed cannot assume an infinite amount of time – in order to embrace the differing needs, DSA needs to offer multiple levels of engagement.

    Democracy will require a commitment to educating ourselves and each other about the issues; it is not enough to “win the vote” if we did not move anyone in the process. The biggest casualty of the convention was the debate: DSA voted up important positions prioritizing immigration, abortion access and sex workers’ rights, but forewent the debates that would have planted these struggles more firmly among the membership. In the proposals on organization, DSA maintained its structure but the debate is far from over. In order to have a strong, dynamic organization we will have to consider how to accommodate the minority positions in order to maintain our unity for the struggles to come.

    There is no magic formula for how to get it right. Democracy is a moving target, and as we grow and change the requirements for democracy will shift as well. It is a grand experiment, and we are sure to get much of it wrong, but we are up to the task.

    [1] This figure does not count the Consent Agenda, which was voted up but not debated, nor does it consider “amendments” to be proposals in themselves; it also individually counts the resolutions voted up in as packaged items (three housing resolutions, three international resolutions and three criminal justice reform resolutions).

    [2] Note: Delegates had to fill our their ballots completely for both Top 20 and Top 3 to be accepted. If 676 delegates votes, there were a total of 13,520 votes allocated in the Top 20 and 2028 in the Top 3.

    [3] The former stands out for political reasons: CB 29 Equity for Amendments was written in response to a political maneuver to lower the threshold of votes needed to pass CB 2 “Pass the Hat.” The intervention of an author of “Pass the Hat” in favor of closing this loophole certainly helped put CB 29 over the edge. However, in substance all this did was remove an arcane rule that most had come to view as illegitimate.

    • [i] 12/14/18 – Maria Svart announces of National Convention in Atlanta, George August 2nd to 4th.
    • 12/21/18 – Announcement of regional preconvention conferences.
    • 1/4/19 – Spring caucus announces formation
    • 2/2/19 — Socialist Majority announces formation
    • 2/9/19 – First Regional Preconvention Conferences held
    • 2/19/19 – Bernie Sanders announces campaign for 2020 Presidency
    • 2/22/19 – Collective Power Network announces formation
    • 2/27/19 – National Convention Planning Committee announces it is accepting volunteers for sub-committees.
    • 3/1/19 – 5/10/19 – Nominations for At Large delegates opened
    • 3/5/19 National advisory poll to endorse Bernie Sanders for President sent to membership
    • 4/2/19 – Submissions opened for resolutions for convention.
      • Nominations opened for NPC candidates
      • Chapter delegate elections opened
    • 4/11/19 – Spring caucus reforms as Bread & Roses caucus
    • 4/14/19 – Last of Regional Preconvention conferences held.
    • 5/1/19 – Convention Committee releases preliminary report
    • 5/3/19 – Maria Svart announces Democratic Socialist Labor Commission (DSLC) endorsement of Labor for Bernie.
      • Members of Subcommittees announced:
    • 5/12/19 to 6/2/19 – Elections for at-large delegates held
    • 6/2/19 –
      • Resolutions and constitution/bylaw submissions period closed.
      • National at-large delegate elections closed.
    • 6/16/19 – NPC nomination period closes
    • 6/18/19 – Local delegate elections deadline
    • 6/27/19 – Compendium of resolutions and constitutional/bylaw amendments released
      • Amendments period opened for resolutions and constitution/bylaw changes
    • 6/30/19 – NPC candidates list and questionnaire released
    • 7/15/19 – Straw poll for consent agenda released
    • 7/16/19 – Deadline for amendments to resolutions and constitutional/bylaw changes
    • 7/23/19 – Second straw poll released to decide convention agenda
    • 7/26/19
      • Deadline for second straw poll on convention agenda
      • Convention program/agenda released
    • 8/2/19 to 8/4/19 – Atlanta National Convention
  • On India’s Revocation of Jammu & Kashmir’s Autonomous Status

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists

    August 12, 2019

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

  • “We’re All Hong Kongers Now”

    “We’re All Hong Kongers Now”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    ————-

    Related readings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Originally posted at System Change not Climate Change. 
  • Prominent Centrists and the Fiction of the White Working Class

    Prominent Centrists and the Fiction of the White Working Class

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Originally posted at New Socialist.

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

    Greece’s Struggle Over Academic Asylum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    PRIVATIZATION AND THE CRACKDOWN ON ASYLUM

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

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

    Originally posted at TeacherSolidarity.com.

  • Reflections on El Paso

    Reflections on El Paso

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Originally posted at rs21.

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

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

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

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

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

    The Nature of the Convention

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

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

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

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

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

    The Great Divide and the Political Significance of the Convention

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

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

    What the Convention Says about DSA’s Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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