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  • Climate Change is Growing the Fossil Fuel Industry

    Climate Change is Growing the Fossil Fuel Industry

    “The problem with Americans is they think something is better than nothing.”

    – Alfred Stieglitz

    “Carbon capture is total bullshit.”  – Michael Bloomberg

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    …Right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    [9] ibid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Boris Johnson and Cynical Optimism

    Boris Johnson and Cynical Optimism

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

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

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

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

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

    Originally posted at All That is Solid…

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

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

    The Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists is hosting a panel to discuss these questions:

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

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

    Speakers:

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

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

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

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

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

    Moderator:

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

    To find the Facebook link, go to:

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

  • The Ruling Class Does Rule

    The Ruling Class Does Rule

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Originally posted at the Marxist Sociology Blog. 

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

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

    Comrades, students and youth of Hong Kong and Mainland China:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    For international solidarity against authoritarian capitalism everywhere!

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

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

  • An Eco-Socialist Electoral Politics Strategy for 2020

    An Eco-Socialist Electoral Politics Strategy for 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Is this a viable electoral strategy for socialists?

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

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

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

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

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

  • From Classroom to Underclass

    From Classroom to Underclass

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Originally posted at Inside Higher Ed.

  • Declaration of Solidarity with the People of Puerto Rico

    Declaration of Solidarity with the People of Puerto Rico

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Luis Bonilla-Molina, Coordinador Portal Otra voces en Educación

    Stalin Pérez, LUCHAS, Venezuela.

    Olmedo Beluche, Panamá.

    Edgard Sánchez, México.

    Josie Chávez, México

    Luis Rangel, México

    José Martínez, México

     Alicia Mendoza, México

    Mafer Arellanes, México

    Melisa Morán, México

    Luz Mayorga, Venezuela

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Originally posted at the Indypendent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    A Revolutionary Organization and a Popular Rebellion

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

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

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

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

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

    The FSLN in Power

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

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

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

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

    Counter-Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Protest and Popular Uprising

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

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

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

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

  • The Protests in Puerto Rico Are About Life and Death

    The Protests in Puerto Rico Are About Life and Death

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Photograph by José Fuentes. 

    Originally posted at the NACLA website.

  • A Possible Road to Independent Leftist Electoral Action

    A Possible Road to Independent Leftist Electoral Action

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    After Realignment – What? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Conclusion

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

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

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

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

  • A Plant Closing War, Viewed From Inside

    A Plant Closing War, Viewed From Inside

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Road Warriors

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

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

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

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

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

    A “Quality Dialogue?”

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

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

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

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

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

    Upcoming Screenings

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

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

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

    Originally posted at Labor Notes.

  • Climate Change and Capitalism: A Political Marxist View

    Climate Change and Capitalism: A Political Marxist View

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Coal, the great divergence and the origins of capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

    Political Marxism and the Fossil Economy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Capitalist Markets and the Pressures to Grow

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

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

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

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

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

    No decarbonisation under capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

    So, where do we go from here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Originally posted at New Socialist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Against the GrayZone Slanders

    Against the GrayZone Slanders

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

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

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

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

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

    Socialism from Below 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    My Involvement with Nicaragua

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

     

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

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

    The Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists is hosting a panel to discuss these questions:

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

    Speakers:

    Simon Rodriguez

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

    Eva Maria

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

    Yasser Munif

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

    Joseph Daher

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

    Frieda Afary

    Philosophy M.A. and a librarian, translator, producer of Iranian Progressives in Translation (www.iranianprogressives.org) and member of the Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists. She has published articles in English and Persian on the Middle East, Marx’s Capital, Marxist Feminism, and Marxist critiques of state capitalism. She has also taught community classes on the 150th Anniversary of Marx’s Capital and on Socialist Feminism.

    Sina Zekavat

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

    Moderator:

    Sara Dehkordi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

    Further Readings and Resources for Action

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Originally posted at The International Marxist-Humanist. 

  • Reactionary Populism, meet Great Britain

    Reactionary Populism, meet Great Britain

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

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

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

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

    Does Fox News know better than the British public?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • DSA 2019 Convention Breakdown

    DSA 2019 Convention Breakdown

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

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

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

    Background: Nuts and Bolts of the National Organization

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

    For staffing, the Resolutions & Amendments Committee notes:

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

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

    The Players: Caucuses and “Not-Caucus” Caucuses

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Resolutions at a Glance

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

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

     

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

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

    Overview of Resolutions by Topic

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

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

    Labor

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Elections

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

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

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

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

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

    Financial

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

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

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

    Organizational

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

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

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

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

    Conclusions: What Kind of DSA?

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

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

     

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