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  • On the Istanbul Municipal Elections and Ekrem İmamoğlu’s Victory

    On the Istanbul Municipal Elections and Ekrem İmamoğlu’s Victory

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

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

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

    A Glance to History

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

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

    Turkey’s Economic Bastion

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

    Political Implications

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

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

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

    Conclusion

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

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

  • Climate Crisis – Worse Than We Think?

    Climate Crisis – Worse Than We Think?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    [4]    Nature, 7-13 June 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    [16]  Science 570, 275 (2019)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • What Defines Revolutionary Politics? A Response to Dan La Botz

    What Defines Revolutionary Politics? A Response to Dan La Botz

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Reviewing a Friend’s Book

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

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

    Social Democracy versus Democratic Socialism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    What About the State and Revolution?

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

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

    The German Civil War

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

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

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

    The Chilean Experience

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

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

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

    The French Model

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

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

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

    And in America Today?

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

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

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

    Why Does It Matter?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

  • Sudanese and Algerian Uprisings: Vantage Points for Global Solidarity

    Sudanese and Algerian Uprisings: Vantage Points for Global Solidarity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The New Features of the Sudanese and Algerian Uprisings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Vantage Points for Regional and Global Solidarity

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

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

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

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

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

    Suggested Readings/Audio links:

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

    http://youtu.be/71U70vPNHCE

    Sudan: Women at the Heart of Mobilizations

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

    Statement of Solidarity with the Sudanese and Algerian Uprisings

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

    Algeria in Revolt: What Makes This Movement Really Unique

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

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

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

    From Syria to Sudan: State Violence and Spectacle

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

  • Sanders’ “Socialism” Is Old-Fashioned Liberalism

    Sanders’ “Socialism” Is Old-Fashioned Liberalism

    Give Bernie Sanders props for popularizing the term “socialism.” It used to be a conversation stopper. Now it is a conversation starter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Socialism Means System Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Democracy Requires Socialism

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

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

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

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

    The Economic Bill of Rights as an Anti-Racist Program

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

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

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

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

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

  • Localism’s Contradictions in Hong Kong

    Localism’s Contradictions in Hong Kong

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

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

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

    **

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

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

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

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

    **

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    **

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

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

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

  • Theoretical Lies of the World Bank

    Theoretical Lies of the World Bank

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    An ethnocentric and conservative vision of the world

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

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

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

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

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


    The HOS model     (Heckscher – Ohlin – Samuelson)

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


    Insufficient savings and the need to resort to external funding

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

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

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

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

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


    Chenery and Strout’s double deficit model

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


    Priority on exports

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

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


    The trickle-down effect

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

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


    The question of inequality in the distribution of income

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

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

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

    Translated by Vicki Briault

    Footnotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    [26] Ibid.,p.118-119.

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

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

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

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

    [31] Ibid.,p. 218.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Ada Colau Remains Mayor of Barcelona

    Ada Colau Remains Mayor of Barcelona

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Originally posted at International Viewpoint.

  • South Africa: Something’s Got to Give

    South Africa: Something’s Got to Give

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

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

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

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

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

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

    ESKOM will be decisive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    It all begins with ESKOM.

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

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

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

    Originally posted at the Alternative Information & Development Centre website.

  • The Revolt of the Fearless Generation

    The Revolt of the Fearless Generation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    From the Black Decade to the Black Spring

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

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

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

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

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

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

    A New Generation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Next Stop: Demanding Bread?

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

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

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

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

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

    Originally posted at ROAR magazine.

  • Brazil: Success of the General Strike of June 14

    Brazil: Success of the General Strike of June 14

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The contradictions of the enemy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    A proposal for continuing mobilization

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

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

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

    Originally posted at International Viewpoint.

  • For Pride Month: Remembering Doug Ireland

    For Pride Month: Remembering Doug Ireland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Originally posted at the Jacobin website.

  • Behind the US-Iran Tension

    Behind the US-Iran Tension

    Clearly the attacks on Norwegian and Japanese tankers off the Gulf of Oman on Thursday 14 June increase the risk of a miscalculation leading to military clashes in the region. However, these attacks were probably not carried out by any of the Iranian regime’s armed forces, not even the Pasdaran or a section of the Pasdaran (though that can’t be completely ruled out).

    In order to assess them correctly we shouldn’t just zoom in on their level of sophistication but also follow up other factors, especially their political and diplomatic purpose. We have to ask: “Which state is going to benefit from delaying, or maybe even preventing, a deal?” That state is not the Iranian regime but one (or more) of US imperialism’s local allies. A regional power like Israel (although others can’t be ruled out) is probably behind them.

    Given the economic and social situation, it is highly unlikely that the Iranian regime would do this — no matter what US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo asserts. The attacks justify US imperialism sending even more troops to the region, including an extra 1000 soldiers announced earlier this week. They also justify the $110 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia and support for its military intervention in Yemen; building new Israeli settlements like Trump Heights in the Golan and carving up more of the West Bank; and repression by all US allies (like Egypt) in the region. The rising tension also keeps the price of oil above $60 a barrel, which helps not only the profits of the big oil companies but also of all sectors involved in facilitating this industry, like shipping, insurance and others.

    The main thing to remember is that the media excitement and focus on the military aspect of US imperialism’s relationship with the Iranian regime ignores the long-standing back-channels of diplomacy and mutually beneficial economic concessions — including, for example, allowing Iraq to import Iranian gas for another three months, the IMF delegation that went to Iran a few weeks ago, and so on.

    The economic pressure on the Iranian regime is constantly rising and the level of mass discontent, particularly among workers, keeps going up. Oil production has fallen below 227,000 barrels a month, the economy shrank by 4.9% last (Iranian) year, production of domestic appliances is at 25-30% of capacity, and so on.

    Following the repression of Haft Tappeh and other strikes, and the May Day arrests, there was a lull in strikes and protests. But these are picking up again, particularly by the Pensioners’ Unity Group, who will be demonstrating in front of the regime’s parliament on 18 June. They have had solidarity messages from teachers, Haft Tappeh workers, Vahed bus drivers and so on. It is important to step up our solidarity work, not only supporting workers’ struggles, but also campaigning for the release of all political prisoners and jailed workers in Iran. Especially those involved in the Haft Tappeh Sugar Cane workers’ strike, like Esmail Bakhshi and Sepideh Gholian.

    Originally posted at the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty website.

  • Stonewall and the Early Days

    Stonewall and the Early Days

    The “Stonewall riots”, which began on 28 June 1969 in New York, marked the start of the modern lesbian and gay rights movement.

    During the McCarthyite witch hunts in 1950s America it was believed that a homosexual underground existed as part of a “communist conspiracy”. It was sometimes called the Homintern (after the Comintern, the Stalinist Communist International). The fearful authorities went so far as to depict this threat to security as a contagious social disease. Despite the fact that it was completely illegal to be gay and despite rabid persecution by the FBI and other state agencies, some brave souls formed a “homophile” association called the Mattachine Society in 1950.

    Harry Hay, a longtime member of the Communist Party, was among the first to point out that homosexuals were a “cultural minority” and not just individuals. He and the Mattachine society had even begun to call for public protests for gay rights, thus pre-figuring later gay pride marches. Hay was expelled from the CP in 1951 as a “security risk”. The only left group to come vaguely close to supporting gay rights was the Young Socialists (then influenced by the “Shachtmanite” Independent Socialist League) which in 1952 published an article in the Young Socialist Review.

    The sixties blew apart the repressive political climate and stifling conventions of the 1950s, with massive civil unrest throughout America. The Black Civil Rights Movement was on the march against racism, and then the more militant Black Panther Party, and Malcolm X’s uncompromising message of political and social revolution. Black communities rose up against social injustice and there were “race” riots in many US towns and cities, notably the Watts riots of 1965.

    There were huge demonstrations against the Vietnam war from about 1967. Students rebelled and demanded greater democracy and freedom in education. The “counter-culture” refused to conform to the dictates of bourgeois norms. The growth of the Women’s Liberation Movement began a journey towards self-determination and freedom from the straitjacket of oppression and second class citizenship.

    “We homosexuals plead with our people to please help maintain peaceful and quiet conduct on the streets of the village” — Mattachine, September 1969.

    This plea from the Mattachine Society, now much more conservative in outlook, was posted in a window of the Stonewall Inn three months after the riots. The MS had become a liberal lobby group trying to influence and educate the great and good heterosexuals towards more “tolerance” of homosexuality, and was clearly spooked by the spontaneous uprising of the oppressed. They sought to prove that gay people could be assimilated into bourgeois society and favoured a non-confrontational, conformist approach. The new Gay Liberation Movement would be different.

    Gay people living under conditions of complete illegality had become easy prey for police entrapment, blackmailers, queer-bashers, criminal gangs, homophobic employers and landlords and were refused entry to bars if their behaviour or appearance was “odd”.

    The Stonewall Inn gay bar is on Christopher Street, Greenwich Village. That was the centre of liberal/radical/artistic/bohemian life in New York. The bar was controlled by the Genovese crime family (Mafia). Almost all of the gay bars were controlled by organised crime and money was extorted through overpriced alcohol, watered down beer and blackmailing the richer gay clientele. The bar was also paying off the police to allow this to happen, in weekly envelopes of cash.

    The bar had no liquor licence, no running water, overflowing toilets, no fire exits, and drug dealing was rife. Customers were inspected through a “speakeasy” peep-hole by a bouncer and (to avoid undercover police entrapment) only allowed entry if they were known or “looked gay”. People rarely signed their real names in a book to gain entry. Only a few trans people or men in drag were allowed in by the bouncers. A few lesbians came to the bar, but it was 98% male. Homeless young men would try to get in for free drinks from customers. The age of the patrons ranged from late teens to early thirties, and there was an even racial mix between white, black and hispanic people. It was the only gay bar in New York where dancing was allowed. The patrons included drag queens, transgender people, effeminate young men, butch lesbians, male prostitutes, and homeless youth — some of the most oppressed sections of the working class.

    Police raids against gay venues were routine and frequent. The Stonewall was raided at least once a month and patrons were arrested, handcuffed and herded into police wagons. The management knew about the raids beforehand and they were early enough for them to re-stock the bar from hidden supplies to carry on serving once the police had gone. The mafia still wanted its cut of the profits.

    This was the modus operandi during the raids: “… the lights were turned on, and customers were lined up and their identification cards checked. Those without identification or dressed in full drag were arrested; others were allowed to leave. Some of the men, including those in drag, used their draft cards as identification.

    “Women were required to wear three pieces of feminine clothing, and would be arrested if found not wearing them. Employees and management of the bars were also typically arrested. The period immediately before June 28, 1969, was marked by frequent raids of local bars—including a raid at the Stonewall Inn on the Tuesday before the riots—and the closing of the Checkerboard, the Tele-Star, and two other clubs in Greenwich Village.”

    Things came to a head when, so it was rumoured, the police where no longer able to receive kickbacks from blackmail and payoffs, including the theft of negotiable bonds from threatened gay Wall Street employees. It was more than likely that the Public Morals or the Food and Drugs Administration had decided to close the Stonewall Inn permanently on alleged “health and safety” grounds, as had happened with other bars in the neighbourhood.

    People began to defy the police. They refused to show ID cards or be hustled into the bathroom so that police could verify their sexual identity. Men in drag were immediately arrested. Those not arrested congregated outside the bar and were joined by others in ever increasing numbers from the neighbourhood. Some people were rescued from the patrol wagons, and when a lesbian resisted arrest the police started to beat her and knocked others to the ground.

    The police were pelted with coins and bottles to begin with, by the crowd, and later bricks and stones from a nearby building site. Barricading themselves inside the Stonewall Inn, police were forced to call for assistance. From there on as crowds swelled in numbers over several successive nights, the whole thing escalated into a full blown riot. It took three days and nights before the Tactical Patrol Force, trained to deal with Vietnam war protests, could finally subdue the rioters.

    The rioting was not organised or orchestrated by any particular group. It was a spontaneous uprising and rebellion by people who had been beaten down to the lowest level of human existence by repressive anti-gay laws, corrupt police and officials in cahoots with criminal organisations. After years of unchecked oppression they had reached the end of the tether and vented their fury on the oppressors. However during the riots leaflets were distributed, one of them reading “Get the Mafia and Cops out of Gay Bars”.

    Others called for gays to own their own establishments, for a boycott of the Stonewall and other Mafia-owned bars, and for public pressure on the Mayor’s office to investigate the “intolerable situation”. Within days of the rioting groups did begin to spring up to demand equality, and the Gay Liberation Front was born. Within a year or two, GLF organisations had spread to many towns and cities throughout the USA, making radical, revolutionary demands in line with black and women’s liberation movements of the time.

    The establishment of the Gay Liberation Front in Britain was a much more subdued affair. It was founded at the London School of Economics, by two Maoists, Aubrey Walter and Bob Mellors, in October 1970, despite Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” in China killing thousands or millions and homosexuality being illegal in China until 1997 and classed as a “mental illness” until 2001.

    Walter and Mellors had visited America, and were mightily impressed. The GLF imported the radical politics of its sister organisations in the USA and the revolutionary demands of the movement are embodied in the Gay Liberation Manifesto of 1971. Almost in a parallel way to the GLF in America, groups sprouted up in many towns and cities in Britain, and practically every University had a GaySoc.

    The GLF experimented with consciousness-raising “think-ins”, alternative lifestyles to what was expected in bourgeois “straight” society. Many campaigns were enhanced through street theatre and direct action, challenging anti-gay moral crusades, repressive legislation, media censorship and social intolerance in general. Always with a clear anti-capitalist objective in mind.

    Feminist, academic, and lesbian Elizabeth Wilson later looked back on the achievements of the Gay Liberation Front: “The ‘Manifesto Group’ was one of many launched in the ferment of activity that was the Gay Liberation Front in 1970-71.

    “Today it seems incredible that so many young adults had the time and energy to devote themselves full time to political struggle (although incidentally many of us also had paid jobs – the workplace just wasn’t as demanding as it is today).

    “GLF is best understood as a fabulous political firework display. Demonstrations, sit-ins, drag events, consciousness raising groups, street theatre, night graffiti raids, workshops, rallies, dances and ‘think-ins’ were all included in the stellar spectacular that was GLF.

    “The Manifesto Group came from the ideological, intellectual side of the movement and debated the question: What was it about society that led to the oppression of lesbians and gay men? The Manifesto’s answer was what would now be termed a ‘functionalist’ one: that capitalism ‘needed’ gay oppression – to shore up the nuclear family (a big bugbear for radicals at the time) and to police citizens into conformity.

    “The Manifesto reads today as a fairly one-dimensional attempt to account for gender and sexual victimisation. However, it asked an important and still relevant question about the sources of prejudice and hatred. The group met in my basement living room throughout a rather hot summer.

    “The atmosphere was sometimes tense and febrile, but however black and white the answers we developed appear today, it seemed crucial at the time to understand better the nature of the society we lived and live in. If it seems both raw and over-simplified now, it did actually (along with the work of feminists) spark a way of thinking about human relations in society that has led to significant change.

    “Like all pioneers, we sometimes got it wrong, but we believed in what we were doing. We believed in our power to change society. And that is surely a good thing.”

    Elizabeth Wilson has captured the political zeitgeist of the 1970s that affected the GLF. Scarcely a day would go by without some form of struggle going on, whether it be strikes, demonstrations, sit ins or pickets. Not just in the labour movement but right across the board including School Students’ strikes, anti Vietnam war demonstrations, Troops out of Ireland, anti-apartheid movement, Anti-Nazi League, the burgeoning Women’s Liberation and Black power movements, the start of the Environmental-Green Movement, continuing counter-cultural influences, the student movement sparking educational reforms and prompting the labour movement to engage with political issues beyond the workplace, the squatters’ movement for housing and alternative lifestyles and so on.

    Despite all that there was very little connection between the GLF and the labour movement — hostility and distrust on both sides. Despite some Marxist and socialist individuals, the GLFers hitched their wagon mostly to the Women’s Liberation Movement and to a lesser extent to the Black movement (macho posturing and aversion to gay people got in the way there. Huey Newton, a leading member of the Black Panthers, in a very strong statement urged solidarity with the gay movement. But others accused Black gay men of being traitors to their race for not producing black children).

    The lack of connectedness to the labour movement considerably diminished the GLF’s (I could write “our”, since I was active then) understanding of working-class consciousness and why that is important. Patriarchy and male privilege were the enemies and many gay radicals felt that ridding the world of male power and chauvinism and throwing in our lot with oppressed women was sufficient to bring about equality and freedom. Even today it is still a big task to stop LGBT+ people from being exiled from our class and raise awareness that as part of the working-class struggle for emancipation we can share in the potential to overthrow capitalism.

    Originally posted at the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty website. Be sure to also take a look at NP’s 2008 symposium on “Gays and the Left.”

  • “Is the New Deal Socialism?” by Norman Thomas

    “Is the New Deal Socialism?” by Norman Thomas

    Norman Thomas was the most prominent spokesperson for the Socialist Party of America in the 1930s and 1940s. He ran six times for president on the SP ballot line. Recently, an article by Seth Ackerman of Jacobin magazine argued that Thomas acknowledged that President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs had socialist aspects and this, essentially, is why Bernie Sanders isn’t wrong to invoke the New Deal legacy when he uses the term “democratic socialism.” Nevertheless, the pamphlet from 1936 that we partially reproduce here makes it clear that Thomas didn’t think that the New Deal equaled socialism and that Roosevelt was no socialist. 

    Special thanks to Louis Proyect for bringing Thomas’s pamphlet to our attention.

    Mr. Roosevelt and his followers assume that prosperity is coming back because of the New Deal. Al Smith and the rest of Roosevelt’s assorted critics assume that it is in spite of the New Deal and perhaps because of the Supreme Court. Mr. Hoover plaintively protests that the catastrophic depression of January – February, 1933, was due merely to the shudders of the body politic anticipating the economic horrors of the New Deal.

    As a Socialist, I view the Smith – Roosevelt controversy with complete impartiality. I am little concerned to point out the inconsistencies in Al Smith’s record, or to remind him that in 1924 and 1928, when I happened to be the Socialist candidate for high office against him, more than one of his close political friends came to me to urge me as a Socialist not to attack him too severely since he really stood for so many of the things that Socialists and other progressive workers wanted.

    But I am concerned to point out how false is the charge that Roosevelt and the New Deal represent socialism. What is at state is not prestige or sentimental devotion to a particular name. What is at state is a clear understanding of the issues on which the peace and prosperity of generations — perhaps centuries — depend. A nation which misunderstands socialism as completely as Al Smith misunderstands it is a nation which weakens its defense against the coming of war and fascism.

    But, some of you will say, isn’t it true, as Alfred E. Smith and a host of others before him have charged, that Roosevelt carried out most of the demands of the Socialist platform?

    This charge is by no means peculiar to Mr. Smith. I am told that a Republican speaker alleged that Norman Thomas rather than Franklin D. Roosevelt has been President of the United States. I deny the allegation and defy the allegator, and I suspect I have Mr. Roosevelt’s support in this denial. Matthew Woll, leader of the forces of reaction in the American Federation of Labor, is among the latest to make the same sort of charge.

    Roosevelt Not Socialist

    Emphatically, Mr. Roosevelt did not carry out the Socialist platform, unless he carried it out on a stretcher. What is true is that when Mr. Roosevelt took office he had to act vigorously.

    We had demanded Federal relief for unemployment. Hence any attempts Mr. Roosevelt made at Federal relief could perhaps be called by his enemies an imitation of the Socialists platform. It was an extraordinarily poor imitation. We demanded Federal unemployment insurance. Hence any attempt to get Federal security legislation could be regarded as an imitation of the Socialist platform. It was an amazingly bad imitation.

    Indeed, at various times Mr. Roosevelt has taken particular and rather unnecessary pains to explain that he was not a Socialist, that he was trying to support the profit system, which by the way, he defined incorrectly. In his last message to Congress his attack was not upon the profit system but on the sins of big business.

    His slogan was not the Socialist cry: “Workers of the world, workers with hand and brain, in town and country, unite!” His cry was: “Workers and small stockholders unite, clean up Wall Street.” That cry is at least as old as Andrew Jackson.

    What Mr. Roosevelt and his brain trust and practical political advisers did to such of the Socialist immediate demands as he copied at all merely illustrates the principle that if you want a child brought up right you had better leave the child with his parents and not farm him out to strangers.

    Reformism

    Some of it was good reformism, but there is nothing Socialist about trying to regulate or reform Wall Street. Socialism wants to abolish the system of which Wall Street is an appropriate expression. There is nothing Socialist about trying to break up great holding companies. We Socialists would prefer to acquire holding companies in order to socialize the utilities now subject to them.

    There is no socialism at all about taking over all the banks which fell in Uncle Sam’s lap, putting them on their feet again, and turning them back to the bankers to see if they can bring them once more to ruin. There was no socialism at all about putting in a Coordinator to see if he could make the bankrupt railroad systems profitable so they would be more expensive for the government to acquire as sooner or later the government, even a Republican party government, under capitalism must.

    Mr. Roosevelt torpedoed the London Economic Conference; he went blindly rushing in to a big army and navy program; he maintained, as he still maintains, an Ambassador to Cuba who, as the agent of American financial interests, supports the brutal reaction in Cuba. While professing friendship for China, he blithely supported a silver purchase policy of no meaning for America except the enrichment of silver mine owners which nearly ruined the Chinese Government in the face of Japanese imperialism. These things which Al Smith or Alf Landon might also have done are anything but Socialist.

    Mr. Smith presumably feels that the President’s Security Bill, so-called, was socialism. Let us see. We Socialists have long advocated unemployment insurance or unemployment indemnity by which honest men who cannot find work are indemnified by a society so brutal or so stupid that it denies them the opportunity to work. This insurance or indemnification should be on a prearranged basis which will take account of the size of the family. It should be Federal because only the national government can act uniformly, consistently and effectively.

    What did Mr. Roosevelt give us? In the name of security, he gave us a bill where in order to get security the unemployed workers will first have to get a job, then lose a job. He will have to be surge that he gets the job and loses the job in a State which has an unemployment insurance law.

    He will then have to be sure that the State which has the law will have the funds and the zeal to get the money to fulfill the terms of the law. This will largely depend upon whether it proves to be practical and constitutional for the Federal Government to collect a sufficient tax on payrolls so that 90 percent of it when rebated to employers to turn over to the State officers will be sufficient to give some kind of security to those who are unemployed!

    The whole proceeding is so complicated, the danger of forty-eight competing State laws — competing, by the way, for minimum, not for maximum benefits– is so dangerous that the President’s bill can justly be called an in-Security bill.

    “Billions of Words”

    If Mr. Smith means that the programs of public works either under PWA or WPA is Socialist, again he is mistaken. We do not tolerate the standards of pay set on much WPA work — $19 a month, for instance, in some States in the South. We do insist not upon talk but upon action to re-house the third of America which lives in houses unfit for human habitation, which is possible given the present state of the mechanic arts in a nation of builders.

    The administration, having spent billions of words, not dollars, on housing with little result, is now turning the job over to private mortgage companies. Would not Al Smith or Alf Landon do the same?

    But even if Mr. Roosevelt and the New Deal had far more closely approximated Socialist immediate demands in their legislation, they would not have been Socialists, not unless Mr. Smith is willing to argue that every reform, every attempt to curb rampant and arrogant capitalism, every attempt to do for the farmers something like what the tariff has done for business interests, is socialism.

    Not only is it not socialism, but in large degree this State capitalism, this use of bread and circuses to keep the people quiet, is so much a necessary development of a dying social order that neither Mr. Smith nor Mr. Hoover in office in 1937 could substantially change the present picture or bring back the days of Andrew Jackson, Grover Cleveland or Calvin Coolidge.

    What Roosevelt has given us, and what Republicans cannot and will not substantially change, is not the socialism of the cooperative commonwealth. It is a State capitalism which the Fascist demagogues of Europe have used when they came to power. The thing, Mr. Smith, that you ought to fear is not that the party of Jefferson and Jackson is marching in step with Socialists toward a Socialist goal; it is that, unwittingly, it may be marching in step with Fascists toward a Fascist goal.

    I do not mean that Mr. Roosevelt himself is a Fascist or likely to become a Fascist. I credit him with as liberal intentions as capitalism and his Democratic colleagues of the South permit. I call attention to the solemn fact that in spite of his circumspect liberalism, repression, the denial of civil liberty, a Fascist kind of military law, stark terrorism have been increasing under Democratic Governors for the most part — in Indiana, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas and, of course, in California, where Mr. Roosevelt did not even come to the aid of an ex-Socialist, Upton Sinclair, against the candidate of the reactionaries.

    I repeat that what Mr. Roosevelt has given us is State capitalism: that is to say, a system under which the State steps in to regulate and in many cases to own, not for the purpose of establishing production for use but rather for the purpose of maintaining in so far as may be possible the profit system with its immense rewards of private ownership and its grossly unfair division of the national income.

    Today Mr. Roosevelt does not want fascism; Mr. Hoover does not want fascism; not even Mr. Smith and his friends of the Liberty League want fascism. The last-named gentlemen want an impossible thing: the return to the unchecked private monopoly power of the Coolidge epoch.

    Must Abolish the Profit System

    All the gentlemen whom I have named want somehow to keep the profit system. Socialism means to abolish that system. Those who want to keep it will soon find that out of war or out of the fresh economic collapse inevitable when business prosperity is so spotty, so temporary, so insecure as it is today, will come the confusion to which capitalism’s final answer must be the Fascist dictator.

    In America that dictator will probably not call himself Fascist. He, like Mr. Roosevelt in his address to Congress, will thank God that we are not like other nations. But privately he will rejoice in the weakness of our opposition to tyranny. Under the forms of democracy we have not preserved liberty. It has not taken black shirts to make us docile.

    Given the crisis of war or economic collapse we, unless we awake, will accept dictatorship by violence to perpetuate a while longer the class division of income. We shall acknowledge the religion of the totalitarian state and become hypnotized by the emotional appeal of a blind jingoistic nationalism. Against this Fascist peril and its Siamese twin, the menace of war, there is no protection in the New Deal, no protection in the Republican party, less than no protection in the Liberty League.

    Who of them all is waging a real battle even for such civil liberties and such democratic rights as ostensibly are possible in a bourgeois democracy? When Al Smith appeals to the Constitution is he thinking of the liberties of the Bill of Rights or is he thinking of the protection the Constitution has given to property?

    As a Socialist, I was no lover of the NRA or AAA. NRA, at least temporarily, did give the workers some encouragement to organize, but at bottom it was an elaborate scheme for the stabilization of capitalism under associations of industries which could regulate production in order to maintain profit. AAA was perhaps some relative help to many classes of farmers. It was no help at all to the most exploited agricultural workers and share-croppers, but rather the opposite. And it was, as indeed it had to be under capitalism, primarily a scheme for subsidizing scarcity.

    This was not primarily the fault of the AAA. It was the fault of the capitalist system which Roosevelt and Smith alike accept; that system which makes private profit its god, which uses planning, in so far as it uses planning at all, to stabilize and maintain the profits of private owners, not the well being of the masses. In the last analysis the profit system inevitably depends upon relative scarcity. Without this relative scarcity there is no profit and there is no planning for abundance which accepts the kingship of private profit.

    When the world went in for great machinery operated by power it went in for specialization and integration of work. It doomed the old order of pioneers. The one chance of using machinery for life, not death, is that we should plan to use it for the common good. There is no planned production for use rather than for the private profit of an owning class which does not involve social ownership. This is the gospel of socialism.

    Abundance Possible

    We can have abundance. In 1929, according to the Brookings Institute — and that, remember, was our most prosperous year — a decent use of our capacity to produce would have enabled us to raise the income of 16,400,000 families with less than $2,000 a year to that modest level without even cutting any at the top.

    Instead, without any interference from workers, without any pressure from agitators, the capitalist system so dear to Al Smith and his Liberty League friends went into a nose-spin. The earned income dropped from $83,000,000,000 to something like $38,000,000,000 in 1932, and the temporary recovery, of which the New Deal administration boasts, has probably not yet raised that income to the $50,000,000,000 level. It has, moreover, burdened us with an intolerable load of debt.

    What we must have is a society where we can use our natural resources and machinery so that the children of the share-croppers who raise cotton will no longer lack the cotton necessary for underclothes. What we must have is a society which can use our resources and our mechanical skill so that the children of builders will not live in shacks and slums.

    It is not that Socialists want less private property. We want more private property in the good things of life. We do not mean to take the carpenter’s kit away from the carpenter or Fritz Kreisler’s violin away from Fritz Kreisler, or the home or the farm in which any man lives and works away from him.

    We do intend to end private landlordism, and to take the great natural resources — oil, copper, coal, iron; the great public utilities, power, transportation; the banking system, the distributive agencies like the dairy trust, the basic monopolies and essential manufacturing enterprises — out of the hands of private owners, most of them absentee owners, for whose profits workers with hand and brain are alike exploited. And we intend to put these things into the hands of society.

    Tax Private Wealth

    We intend to make this change to social ownership in orderly fashion. In the meantime we can avert fresh economic collapse by the road of crazy inflation or cruel deflation only by an orderly process of taxing wealth in private hands, by a graduated tax, approaching expropriation of unearned millions, in order to wipe out debt and to help in the socialization of industry.

    We do not mean to turn socialized industries over to political bureaucrats, to Socialist Jim Farleys, so to speak. The adjective doesn’t redeem the noun. For instance, we intend that a socialized steel industry shall be managed under a directorate representing the workers, including, of course, the technicians in that industry, and the consumers.

    We can do it without conscription and without rationing our people. We ought not to pay the price Russia has paid because we are far more industrially advanced than was Russia and should learn from Russia’s mistakes as well as her successes.

    Goal Is True Democracy

    Our goal, Mr. Smith, is true democracy. It is we who lead in the fight for liberty and justice which you in recent years have sadly ignored. It is we who seek to make freedom and democracy constitutional by advocating a Workers Rights Amendment in the interest of farmers, workers and consumers, giving to Congress power to adopt all needful social and economic legislation, but leaving to the courts their present power to help protect civil and religious liberty.

    Our present judicial power of legislation is as undemocratic as it is in the long run dangerous to peace. Remember the Dred Scott decision! Congress rather than the States must act because these issues are national. The religion of the Constitution with the Supreme Court as the high priests and the Liberty League as its preacher will never satisfy human hunger for freedom, peace and plenty.

    The Constitution was made for man and not man for the Constitution. We Socialists seek now its orderly amendment. We seek now genuine social security, real unemployment insurance. We seek now a policy which will make it a little harder for American business interests to involve us in war as a result of a mad chase after the profits of war.

    These, gentlemen who quarrel over the way to save capitalism, are the things of our immediate desire. But deepest of all is our desire for a federation of cooperative Commonwealths. Some of you may like this far less than you like the New Deal, but will you not agree that it is not the New Deal?

    You said, Mr. Smith, in a peroration worthy of your old enemy, William Randolph Hearst, that there can be only one victory, of the Constitution.

    And this is our reply: There is only one victory worth the seeking by the heirs of the American Revolution. It is the victory of a fellowship of free men, using government as their servant, to harness our marvelous machinery for abundance, not poverty; peace, not war; freedom, not exploitation.

    This is the victory in which alone is practicable deliverance from the house of our bondage. This is the victory to which we dedicate ourselves.

  • To Whoever Is Still Willing to Listen

    To Whoever Is Still Willing to Listen

    President André Manuel López Obador has deployed several thousand troops of the newly created National Guard to the state of Chiapas to deter Central American immigrants from entering Mexico from Guatemala and in that way to please U.S. President Donald J. Trump. There is fear that not only will the National Guard repress the Central Americans but that it will also be used against the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, its communities, and other indigenous peoples. The following statement, which we have translated here, has been issued by Mexican and international individuals and organizations. – Dan La Botz

    This is a message of concern for life and for dignity. Those of us who are signing this letter are worried about what is happening once again in the forgotten corner of southeast Mexico that became transformed into hope and rebellion, Chiapas.

    This is neither an ideological manifesto nor a declaration taking a position regarding the political changes that are taking place in Mexico. It is a message of genuine concern for what is felt to be developing down there after 25 years, after 500 years of resisting extermination and oblivion. We are worried about those who for a quarter of a century have fought for their autonomy, who have put their dignity above political pragmatism, and who have been an example of freedom in a world in world shackled by fear. We are worried about the Zapatistas.

    We are concerned to learn about the growing military activity in the territories of the Zapatista communities. We see that in the midst of the complex security situation that Mexico is experiencing, the movement toward the militarization of the country is gaining speed. It is a warning sign that under the very questionable strategy regarding the National Guard, just as has occurred so many times before, there is a “security” force that doesn’t distinguish between crime and resistance, between cruelty and legitimate rebellion. It is contradictory that when the statistics of the Government of Mexico itself indicate that the Zapatiasta zone has among the lowest crime rates, the security strategy is directed in a threatening way to these zones that are some of the few sanctuaries of liberty and safety for the Mexico of the underdogs.

    This appears to be a strategy of war rather than a strategy of security.

    We who sign this letter are a diverse group of people, some of whom perceive the administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador with hope and others with skepticism, still we are all people who dream of a different and better world. Those of us who support this statement believe that change in Mexico cannot take place under the shadow of political pragmatism, giving into pressures that lead toward authoritarianism, exploitation, and violence on behalf of the 1%, nor can it change with the disqualification of critical voices that with their authenticity and consistency have won the respect of the world.

    We see a growing process of hostility toward authentic, historic and legitimate projects of resistance that oppose the Maya Train, the Transisthmian Corridor, and the Integral Morelos Plan, among others. We are concerned to learn about the recent homicides of members of the National Indigenous Governing Congress. We are concerned with the possibility that this government, with its liberal and conservative predecessors, will once again marginalize the indigenous people on the verge of extermination.

    The world is watching with its eyes and its heart what is happening in Mexico and in Chiapas.

    Stop the war against the Zapatistas and the indigenous peoples of Mexico!

    INTERNATIONAL SIGNATORIES

    Noam Chomsky

    Arundhati Roy

    Boaventura de Souza Santos

    Raúl Zibechi

    Yvon Le Bot

    Michael Hardt

    Oscar Olivera

    Hugo Blanco Galdós

    Jasmin Hristov

    Joe Foweraker

    Eric Toussaint

    Michael Löwy

    Carlos Taibo

    Pedro Brieger

    Manuel Rozental

    Mauricio Acosta

    Vilma Almendra

    Nicolás Falcoff

    Guillermina Acosta

    Iosu Perales

    Philippe Corcuff (profesor de ciencia política, Lyon, Francia)

    Enzo Traverso

    (Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities, Cornell University)

    Mikel Noval (Eusko Langileen Alkartasuna-Solidaridad de los Trabajadores Vascos – ELA)

    Manuel Gari Ramos (miembro de la Coordinadora Confederal de Anticapitalistas)

    Francisco Louçã (Economista, miembro del Consejo de Estado, Portugal)

    Leo Gabriel (Miembro del Consejo Internacional del Foro Social Mundial)

    Pierre Galand (Senador honorario, ex-secrétario general de Oxfam Belgica)

    Alberto Acosta (Ex-presidente de la Asamblea Constituyente, Ecuador)

    Miguel Urbán (eurodiputado)

    Raúl Camargo (ex diputado de la Asamblea de la Comunidad de Madrid)

    José María González “Kichi” (Alcalde de la ciudad de Cádiz)

    José Luis Cano (diputado del Parlamento de Andalucía)

    Marco Bersani (porta voz de ATTAC ITALIA)

    Tomas Astelarra (periodista, Argentina)

    Derly Constanza Cuetia Dagua (Indígena Nasa, Pueblos en Camino)

    Antonio Moscato (Universidad del Salento Lecce -Italia)

    Jaime Pastor (editor de Viento Sur)

    Aldo Zanchetta (periodista free lance Lucca -Italia)

    Miren Odriozola Uzcudun (País Vasco)

    Kepa Bilbao Ariztimuño (profesor)

    Rogério Haesbaert (geógrafo y profesor universidades Federal Fluminense y de Buenos Aires)

    Gilbert Achcar (Profesor en la SOAS, Universidad de Londres)

    Antonio Moscato (Italia)

    Virginia Vargas Valente (Perú)

    Rommy Arce (ex concejala del Ayuntamiento de Madrid)

    Josu Egireun (Redacción Viento Sur)

    Mariana Sanchez (sindicalista, Francia)

    Jorge Costa (diputado del Bloco de Esquerda en el parlamento de Portugal)

    Franck Gaudichaud (Catedrático, Universidad Toulouse Jean Jaurés, Francia / Miembro del colectivo editorial de Rebelion.org)

    Arturo Escobar (Prof de antropologia emerito, U de Carolina del Norte, Chapel Hill)

    Olga Luisa Salanueva (Directora Maestría en Sociología Jurídica UNLP, Argentina)

    José Murillo Mateos

    Hilda Imas

    Jorge Ignacio Smokvina

    Hernan Parra Castro Presidente Comité Ejecutivo Nacional FENASIBANCOL

    William Gaviria Ocampo Fiscal Comité Ejecutivo NACIONAL FENASIBANCOL

    César Augusto Cárdenas Ávila Secretario General C.E.N. FENASIBANCOL Detlef R. Kehrmann Camille Chalmers (PAPDA – Haïti)

    José Angel Quintero Weir (Organización Wainjirawa para la Educación Propia-Venezuela)

    Vanda Ianowski (Docente Universidad Nacional del Comahue, Río Negro Argentina)

    Maria Adele Cozzi – camminardomandando (Italia)

    Luis Martínez Andrade (chercheur post-doctoral Collège d’études mondiales/Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’homme) Roberto Bugliani (Italia)

    Juanca Giles Macedo (Perú)

    Joxe iriarte “Bikila” (Escritor y militante de Alternativa y EHBILDU, Euskal Herria- estado Español)

     

    MEXICAN SIGNATORIES

    Juan Villoro

    Ely Guerra

    Oscar Chávez

    Francisco Barrios “El Mastuerzo”

    Márgara Millán

    Juan Carlos Rulfo

    Jean Robert

    Javier Sicilia

    Luis de Tavira

    Gilberto López y Rivas

    Jorge Alonso

    Paulina Fernández Christlieb

    Eduardo Matos Moctezuma

    Isolda Osorio

    Raúl Delgado  Wise

    Alicia Castellanos Guerrero

    Sylvia Marcos

    Carolina Coppel Mercedes Olivera (CESMECA-UNICACH)

    Carlos López Beltrán

    Magdalena Gómez

    Rosalva Aída Hernández

    Bárbara Zamora

    Beatriz Aurora

    Néstor Quiñones

    Fernanda Navarro

    Alejando Varas

    Raúl Romero (Sociólogo, UNAM)

    Marta De Cea

    Servando Gajá

    Rosa Albina Garavito Elías

    Eduardo Almeida Acosta

    Ma. Eugenia Sánchez Díaz de Rivera

    Ana Lidya Flores Marín

    John Holloway

    Sergio Tischler

    Fernando Matamoros

    Gustavo Esteva

    José Luis San Miguel

    Lucía Linsalatta

    Paulino Alvarado

    Peter Joseph Winkel Ninteman

    Isis Samaniego Mayra I Terrones Medina (Posgrado en Desarrollo Rural, Profesora investigadora, UAM Xochimilco)

    Carolina Concepcion González González (profesora-investigadora de la Universidad Autónoma de Baja California Sur)

    José Javier Contreras Vizcaino (Estudiante Doctorado en Sociología ICSyH-BUAP)

    Mayleth Alejandra Zamora Echegollen (Estudiante Doctorado en Sociología ICSyH-BUAP)

    MAYLETH ECHEGOLLEN GUZMÁN.- PROFRA-INVEST.- BUAP.

    Rene Olvera Salinas (profesor de la UPN y UAQ ,Querétaro, México).

    Rogelio Regalado Mujica (Instituto de Ciencias Jurídicas de Puebla)

    Edgard Sánchez (miembro de la dirección del Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores)

    Karla Sánchez Félix (filósofa)

    Estefania Avalos Palacios (antropóloga)

    Francisco Javier Gómez Carpinteiro

    Ana María Verá Smith

    Rodolfo Suáres Molnar (UAM- Cuajimalpa)

    Álvaro J. Peláez Cedrés (UAM-Cuajimalpa)

    Mara Muñoz Galván (Observatorio de Justicia y Derechos Humanos de Mujeres y Niñas)

    Aline Zárate Santiago (Colectivo Liberación Ixtepecana)

    Alejandra Ramìrez Gaytán (Desempleada y en ocupación alternativa)

    Ita del Cielo (socióloga)

    Gabriela Di Lauro

    David Rodríguez Altamirano Byron

    Eduardo Lechuga Arriaga

    Carolina Martínez de la Peña

    María del Pilar Muñoz Lozano

    Juan Jerónimo Lemus

    Cecilia Zeledón

    Ana Laura Suárez Lima

    Lilia García Torres

    Iliana Vázquez López

    Silvia Coca Katia Rodríguez

    Pilar Salazar

    Miguel López Girón

    Rogelio Mascorro

    Alexia Dosal

    Edith González

    Priscila Tercero

    David Hernández

    Roberto Giordano Longoni Martínez

    Renata Carvajal Bretón

    Beleguí Rasgado Malo

    Mario Hernández Pedroza

    Monserrat Rueda Becerril

    Erika Sánchez Cruz Jannú

    Ricardo Casanova Moreno

    Marisol Delgado

    Alejandro Gracida Rodríguez

    Ariadna Flores Hernández

    Tamara San Miguel

    Eduardo Almeida Sánchez

     

    ORGANIZACIONES 

    Red Europa Zapatista

    Confederación General del Trabajo (Estado Español)

    Union syndicale Solidaires, Francia

    txiapasEKIN (Euskal Herria – País Vasco)

    Centro de Documentación sobre Zapatismo (CEDOZ) (Estado Español)

    Asamblea de Solidaridad con México (País Valencia, Estado Español)

    Humanrights – Chiapas (Zurich, Suiza)

    Comitato Chiapas “Maribel” (Bergamo, Italia)

    Y Retiemble! Espacio de apoyo al Congreso Nacional Indígena desde Madrid (Estado Español)

    Mutz vitz 13 (Marsella, Francia)

    Associació solidaria Cafè Rebeldía-Infoespai (Barcelona-Catalunya)

    Adherentes a la sexta (Barcelona, Catalunya)

    Ya Basta! Moltitudia Roma” (Italia)

    Cooperazione Rebelde (Napoli, Italia)

    Espoir Chiapas – Esperanza Chiapas (Francia)

    Manchester Zapatista Collective (Reino Unido)

    ASSI (Acción Social Sindical Internacionalista)

    Pueblos en Camino (Colombia)

    La Insurgencia del Caracol (Argentina)

    FM La Tribu (Buenos Aires, Argentina)

    Radio El grito (Córdoba, Argentina)

    Red de Solidaridad con Chiapas de Buenos Aires (Argentina)

    Federación Nacional de Sindicatos Bancarios Colombianos “FENASIBANCOL” (Colombia)

    Red Contra la Represión y por la Solidaridad (México)

    Unidad Obrera y Socialista – ¡UNÍOS! (México)

    Unión de Vecinos y Damnificados “19 de septiembre” (México)

    Editorial Redez (México)

    Desarrollo y Aprendizaje Solidario (México)

    Colectivo Detonacción Puebla (México)

    Editorial En cortito que´s pa´largo (Querétaro, México).

    Unitierra Puebla (México)

    Universidad de la Tierra en Oaxaca (México)

    Centro de Encuentros y Diálogos Interculturales (México)

    Tianguis Alternativo de Puebla (México)

    Comisión Takachiualis de Derechos Humanos (México)

    Nodo de Derechos Humanos (México)

     

     

  • On Being An Organizer

    On Being An Organizer

    There prevailed among the twentieth-century left a barbarous tradition of settling political differences by use of the most monstrous methods. The worst aberrations were the aggressions that Stalinism naturalized. But those who suffered the most from this violence were not themselves immune.

    Trotskyists valorized theoretical debates. And although we took up ideas as our weapons, we became specialists in cruel polemics, even heartless ones. Perhaps others were as devastating in their internal discussions, but Trotskyists elevated political masochism to another level, to a new form of dramatic art, almost a new genre of literature.

    We developed a reputation. We became known as selfless organizers, but arrogant ones. Well-trained, but sectarian. This fragility has a history. Whomever swims against the current long enough, struggling as a minority, will sooner or later inevitably develop sectarian reflexes. There’s an old Trotskyist joke we tell amongst ourselves that there those of us who are of us are so sectarian, they don’t even realize it.

    Here’s hoping that the new generation will be capable of overcoming our habits. A little revolutionary passion is welcome because it can be exciting. Yet excessive enthusiasm in a debate over ideas rests, almost always, on exaggerations.

    There are different types of polemics: frontal, lateral, and rearguard. Frontal polemics are arguments with our class enemies. Lateral ones are those conducted within the left between distinct currents. And rearguard polemics take place within a collective. In general, they all go on simultaneously. But they should not be made in the same manner, nor with the same intensity, because the rules are different and excessive pride is childish.

    All polemics have their place and time. Some are resolved very quickly, others go on for years and require patience. Much depends on the course of events and reality does not always operate within hasty deadlines. Hypotheses must be proven by the facts and every debate must have beginning, middle, and end. Each discussion has its own tone as well. The tone of a debate, be it amicable and fraternal, or harsh and bitter, is comprehensible within its own limits. What are these limits? Respect.

    We on the Brazilian left are too tolerant of “disproportion.” Of course, rigor is very important, but rigor should not be funerary. Rigor means being accurate, succinct, precise. In other words, calibration is a good measure of maturity. We are a fraternity of fighters, we do not need pomp, we need balance.

    The heat of any debate ought to depend more on the magnitude of the differences than on the personality of the activists. We should not let a debate over ideas become emotionally contaminated. We should cultivate self-control, self-discipline, and self-restraint. Differences over tactics, nuances, and nuances should be routine and experimental. Strategic differences are by their nature intense and programmatic, but any serious polemic deserves respectful treatment.

    There can be no collective elaboration of ideas without a struggle. Every argument contains a criticism and, therefore, a polemic. But freedom of discussion always means freedom for those who think differently from us and we should not be afraid of having differences. We should be wary of making mistakes because errors come at a high price. However, if there is no internal democracy in an organization, there can be no mutual development of ideas and without this collective elaboration we will make more mistakes. It’s unavoidable.

    Furthermore, there is no point organizing in a collective without the genuine right to participate in developing its views. Any such activism is incomplete, stunted, mutilated. Organizing is a gift, but it must be understood as a complete package. We must think together and act together. If only a few people exercise the democratic right to think, while others have the obligation to act, something is very wrong.

    Everyone should have the right to say what they think. But they also have a duty to listen to what they would rather not hear. Learning to listen takes time. After all, it is very common for an idea to be presented clearly but not be understood. And it is not uncommon for ideas to be presented without clarity, with even worse results. Knowing how to listen, and to understand what was said, is as important as knowing how to speak.

    Of course, the right to participate cannot be limited to that because we must designate the manner in which decisions are made. Who gets to decide, and what they get to decide, is very important, too. These rules may change over time, but whatever they are, they must be clear.

    At the same time, the right to participate should not be interpreted as a duty to agree. No one should feel uncomfortable, embarrassed, or constrained because they disagree with anyone else. There shouldn’t be pressure for unanimity. If the cohesion of an organization rests solely on the authority of leaders, then it is really very fragile. It may look like an impregnable castle, but all it is, in reality, is a sand castle.

    Of course, all this means that emotional or psychological education and training is necessary in order to conduct real debates. To participate fully in a discussion, it takes maturity to avoid interpreting a disagreement as a personal offense. This kind of quiet, adult, and balanced attitude is learned, meaning that there is a subjective dimension in our political relations. And this subjective dimension means we must take care not to hurt each other.

    A socialist collective is a very intense sort of school where we are not only educated as organizers, but we grow to become more complete, more responsible, well-rounded people. Training and educating leaders for popular struggles is the core task of any serious Marxist organization.

    Certainly, there is the danger that activists may get upset during an argument, but polemics are only destructive when they become simply ad hominem attacks. A sure sign of such ad hominem attacks are arguments that seek to diminish, exclude, or demoralize the person who thinks differently from us. Wonderful and long-term comrades, who have undergone many tests, can end up defending mistaken ideas, even absurdities, nonsense, and aberrations. And sometimes confused or dubious people, or people of doubtful character, may be right. The guiding rule in the struggle of ideas is respect for those with whom you disagree, in other words, intellectual honesty. Conflicts over ideas must be understood as a swordplay of arguments.

    The most dangerous symptom of sectarianism is factionalism. On the one hand, factionalism is not the same as the formation of a trend. A trend can be a temporary union of activists around a platform on one or more issues. The same with a faction. A faction is an internal grouping who wants to run for office or leadership positions and asks for the right to proportional representation. During a debate, those who espouse the same ideas and organize themselves along those lines have the right to do so. Trends or factions like this are legitimate and, to a large extent, unavoidable. On the other hand, factionalism is the formation of a faction united on bonds of personal trust, even if their members have different ideas, that is, a clique. And the worst factionalism is secret factionalism.

    There are two types of factionalism, that of the majority and that of the minority. The majority kind is much more serious. This factionalism is a political disease, and its most common symptom is intolerance of plurality of thought, that is, the ideas of others. Along these lines, constructing a conspiracy theory is a common feature of majority factionalism.

    But this is only one symptom. Factionalism is distinguished by clique behavior and the inexorable consequence is fragmentation. When the disease of factionalism sets in, then distrust and suspicion sets in as well. What are the hidden intentions of those who disagree with me? It is not difficult to construct an imaginary narrative from a few grains of truth.

    When confronted with such a situation, honesty and respect are indivisible. Honesty is respecting others and their ideas, but also admitting mistakes when they happen. A willingness to be self-critical is essential. Anyone incapable of self-reflection is untrustworthy. Admitting a mistake never diminished anyone, and activists and organizations that do not critically examine the balance sheet of their ideas have no future.

    Being consistent does not mean being obtuse. Consistency means coherently defending of a program of ideas. Coherency does not mean not making mistakes. Consistency means being able to admit the need to correct oneself. Only obtuse people never admit to mistakes, and such an attitude is base, crude, primitive.

    Respecting the positions of others is not only the mark of a good political education and good character, it constitutes the most basic humility. Every socialist organization, due to the Balkanized context in which we are immersed, is only one embryo amongst others. Any self-aggrandizing conception of its own past, however important, imposing, or grandiose, is substitutionist and incorrigibly divisive.

    The process of reorganizing the left will be expansive and slow and we will have many discussions. But in a good discussion, there are no winners or losers.

    Originally published at www.EsquerdaOnLine.com.br, translated from the Portuguese by Todd Chretien.

  • Review: We Need To Talk About Putin

    Review: We Need To Talk About Putin

    This week a fabricated case against Russian anti-corruption journalist Ivan Golunov was dropped, following a campaign by colleagues and the public. It presents an embarrassing setback for president Vladimir Putin, who in response has called for the heads of top Moscow police officials. However many of those who protested in support of Golunov have been arrested. In this context Mark Galeotti’s alternate perspective on Putin, as presented in his recent book We Need to Talk About Putin, provides an interesting read.

     

    Mark Galeotti, We Need to Talk About Putin: How the West Gets Him Wrong (London: Ebury Press, 2019). 160 pp.

    ***

    The BBC announced their new satirical chat show, Tonight With Vladimir Putin, shortly after Mark Galeotti’s We Need To Talk About Putin was published, but I imagine he will dislike it almost as much as the Kremlin, albeit for different reasons. The 3D animated version of the Russian President looks set to embody many of the lazy assumptions about Vladimir Putin – as a Machiavellian, publicity-hungry control freak – that Galeotti tries to discredit in his pithy Putin primer.

    Putin occupies a similar space for many Western liberals as George Soros does for alt-right anti-Semites – a shadowy puppet-master behind, according to some, ‘Donald Trump’s election, Brexit, the rise of populism in Europe, the migrant crisis and even football hooliganism’. Galeotti makes a convincing case that Putin is less the master chess player of popular metaphor, more a reactive judoka (judo practitioner), opportunistically seizing the advantage created by the mistakes of his enemies.

    He is aided in this effort by an army of smaller judokas – politicians, generals, entrepreneurs, media bosses – looking to exploit opportunities in the direction of policy that Putin, a much less detail-focused leader than state propaganda maintains, has broadly outlined. Galeotti compares this method to that of tsarism, an ‘adhocracy’ of courtiers aiming for advancement by pleasing the Boss. Galeotti rhetorically asks, ‘did Russia back Brexit?’ He concludes that, though the news channel Russia Today, news agency Sputnik, many Russian commentators, diplomats and social media ‘troll farms’ certainly did, ‘it is hard to say whether or not Putin or the Kremlin specifically backed the campaign. They certainly did nothing to stop it, but a consequence of this bottom-up system is that it can often be hard to know where a specific initiative originated.’

    At the risk of opening the door to spurious ‘Putin is a Nazi’ comparisons, it also reminded this reader of Ian Kershaw’s description of Hitler’s underlings ‘Working Toward the Fuhrer’. Galeotti is right to insist that Russia’s authoritarianism is of a different breed, but when he balances the brutal repression of ‘traitors’ such as Chechan rebels, off-message oligarchs and LGBTQ+ people against, for example, the existence of women’s rights, he at times underplays the extent to which these are under attack. For example, in March 2017 the government decriminalised some forms of domestic violence, and Moscow’s mayor denied authorisation for protests in response. There is perhaps a more selective approach to dominating the social sphere when compared to fascism. Galeotti argues that local independent pressure groups are able to effect change as long as they are not seen to threaten the state, and points to a multi-party system filled with sock-puppet candidates and managed dissent instead of openly one-party rule. There is no internet parallel with the ‘Great Fire Wall’ of China, with self-censorship largely serving the same purpose. However these nuances will be of little consolation to those attracting the ire of the security services, such as the anarchists and anti-fascist students from Penza and St Petersburg tortured into confessions of supposed terrorist activity.

    Putin’s own paranoia ironically mirrors that with which he is so often viewed. His ascent up the KGB involved little active espionage, with the late 1980s spent filing reports in East Germany and getting plump on German beer rather than acting as a Russian James Bond. But perhaps because his career was not very distinguished, he places inordinate trust in an overlapping web of spy and security services, who compete for favour by increasingly dubious briefings.

    Putin is immensely rich – Galeotti estimates his wealth at £156 billion – as much as Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Bill Gates of Microsoft put together. As detailed in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, policies initially driven by Yeltsin and the oligarchs with the full connivance of American neoliberals have caused income inequality to rocket since the fall of the Soviet Union, with about 65% of Russia’s net wealth now belonging to the top 10%, and Russian wealth stratification the worst of any of the major economies analysed in the World Inequality Database. Putin’s introduction of a massively regressive 13% flat rate tax in 2001 has exacerbated this trend. But Galeotti is not primarily interested in this large scale larceny, focusing his argument on the contention that Putin is primarily motivated by power, both as an individual (hence the ludicrous topless hunting pictures) and for Russia. His nationalism glorifies tsars and Stalin alike, as strong leaders in whose tradition he sees himself. He bridled at Obama’s description of Russia as a ‘regional power’, and much Russian foreign policy can be seen as asserting militarily a stronger presence than its economy merits (though the same is also true of the USA).

    Galeotti argues that Putin ‘is aware that overall and when united, the West is so much more powerful than Russia, with twenty times its gross domestic product, six times the population, and more than three times as many troops’. And yet, it’s by failing to emphasise the lack of Western unity that Galeotti’s analysis is most limited. He considers Putin to be practising a 19th century imperialism, unlike the 21st century foreign policy of the West, but though the form may have altered the essence of inter-imperialist rivalry persists. As a consultant to ‘governments and commercial and law-enforcement agencies’ Galeotti must understand this, but this book instead posits advice to a monolithic ‘West’ in which we, the readers, are assumed to share the perspectives and interests of an alliance of Western governments.

    This book does not aim to be a panoramic evaluation of Russian society, so perhaps should not be judged for what it is not. There are a range of useful examples deployed as Galeotti responds to a succession of Putin myths, most of which he successfully challenges. But Russia’s support for Bashar al-Assad’s murderous war in Syria gets only a cursory mention, a weakness that is hard to explain given the tenor of the rest of the book. We needed to talk about that as well.

    Originally posted at rs21.

  • The Latest Charter School Scandal

    The Latest Charter School Scandal

    Charter schools are big business opportunities and lax oversight rules make them ripe for financial manipulation and outright theft. The latest charter school scandal just broke in California where two business operatives are accused of siphoning over $50 million in public dollars into companies they owned or controlled in a multi-year-long charter school scam.

    Sean McManus, an Australian national, and Jason Schrock, his Long Beach business partner, the CEO and president of something called A3 Education, and nine others were just indicted in San Diego County. A3 is accused of enlisting small school districts in creating nineteen bogus online charter schools in order to obtain additional state funds.

    A3 Education claims to provide a “wide variety of start-up services to aid school developers prior to and during launch. Working with school leaders and governing boards during the application and petition stages, A3 Education can assist with creating budgets, staff, marketing, financial, and strategic plans. Our dedicated team can review applications to ensure the mission and vision of the school is clearly portrayed throughout.”

    However, according to San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan,“These defendants engaged in a devious, systematic public corruption scheme on the backs of students, their parents and the public that over time diverted millions of taxpayer dollars into their own pockets. Our team of investigators and prosecutors uncovered widespread misappropriation of public funds that extends across the state.” Charges include conspiracy, misappropriation of public funds, paying for student information, and conflict of interest. A3 “enrolled” about 40,000 students across California without providing them with any services. Among other scams, McManus and Schrock are accused of paying youth programs for student information and then listed the students as enrolled into their summer charter school programs. They received $2,000 for each student whose name appeared on their books. If convicted, McManus and Schrock face more than forty years in prison.

    A Los Angeles Times report found that at least $8.18 million in state money went into McManus and Schrock’s personal bank accounts. Another $1.6 million was spent purchasing a private residence for McManus.

    The Dehesa Elementary School District east of San Diego is one of the districts accused of conspiring with A3 Education. While the school district has only about 150 students, its authorized online charter schools that supposedly served 20,000 students. The district superintendent is one of the people charged in the case.

    Even the charter school industry is outraged by A3, but it is also trying to protect itself. The California Charter Schools Association, which lobbies for charter schools, raised concerns about illegal activity by A3 Education with the California state education department in February 2018 and urged that allegations against A3 Education be investigated. Charter schools have every reason to worry as the industry sets up independent school “accrediting agencies” to circumvent legitimate oversight. A3’s Valiant schools, Valiant Academy of Southern California and Valiant Academy of Los Angeles were “accredited” by an organization called AdvancED, which also accredits online schools operated by K12, Inc., Pearson’s Connections Education, and Responsive Education Solutions. In its recent annual report, Pearson told stockholders that its online schools offered the company “high growth potential” in a market valued at $1.5 billion with a “5% annual market growth potential.”

    Originally posted at Daily Kos.