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  • Lessons from the East Bay Democratic Socialists of America

    Lessons from the East Bay Democratic Socialists of America

    A recent article, written by Abigail Gutmann-Gonzalez and Keith Brower Brown, in the Bread and Roses caucus’s blog, The Call, asserts that the East Bay DSA’s campaigns have been a remarkable success. The title of this essay, “Lessons from The East Bay,” purports to dissect the chapter’s campaigns thus far.[1]The East Bay DSA (EBDSA)—a chapter that I am a part of—covers an expansive geography and has a number of barriers that are admittedly difficult to tackle. So far, the chapter has put most of its focus on difficult electoral work in which underdog candidates and electoral measures are pitted against a well-heeled opposition. Credit is due for EBDSA leadership for their dedication in these endeavors. However, in my view, Gutmann-Gonzalez and Brown’s essay does not sufficiently assess the chapter’s work.

    The piece in question neglects two important points that can allow us to derive lessons from the EBDSA experience. First, the analysis should have asked if the chapter, with and alongside the East Bay working class, have become materially empowered by the EBDSA’s campaigns. I will detail this below, but the article omits some obvious problems. Most troublesome is the Oakland Educational Association’s (OEA) teachers strike. The tentative agreement was bitterly contested by many leftward OEA members who ultimately were unsupported by EBDSA. Their concerns rightfully aligned with a general socialist perspective: the contract did not prevent 24 planned school closures[2], and that OEA pay raises might be given at the expense of essential school programs and other union classified staff. One day after the strike’s end, the school board implemented nearly 22 million dollars in cutbacks.[3]

    Second, given the deep problems with the particular campaigns, Gutmann-Gonzalez and Brown should have been compelled to critically assess the larger strategic presumptions that animated each. This is especially essential if the stated campaigns did not work as intended. Yet no strategic assessment appears in their essay. Instead, we are offered a ‘just-so’ story that renders the authors preferred strategic vision as the only alternative. Ossification of strategy is a problem that has dogged socialist and communist formations for some time. If we do not account for our strategic presumptions, they may quickly harden into doctrinaire principles that are divorced from the material reality, the kind of which Lenin famously refuted.[4]

    In conveying these criticisms, my hope is that a wider debate about the organizational work within, and outside of, the EBDSA chapter may ensue.

    A Critical Look at EBDSA Campaigns

    Gutmann-Gonzalez and Brown’s essay mostly focuses on the Jovanka Beckles campaign,[5]Proposition 10 for rent control,[6] and the Oakland Teachers Strike.[7] The authors praise these efforts as building the chapter, and for providing socialist-friendly information the public. Yet, the deeper meaning of these remains vague. Gutmann-Gonzalez and Brown’s piece lean on quantitative information—perhaps unintentionally stated as if they are ‘deliverables’—so as to evidence the effectiveness of our chapter’s work. Behind quantitative information—like the essay’s argument regarding how many people viewed EBDSA’s online videos—are deeper, qualitative questions. What is the relationship between a person who views an EBDSA video online, and that person’s organizational capacity and readiness to engage in struggle? Is the person who voted for Beckles in the primary now organized with many others within the broader working class? How do volunteer phone banks translate into lasting organizational power? Difficult questions like these are not found in the essay. In its place is a sustained acclaim for the chapter’s work done thus far. It is certainly important to praise our collective efforts; there’s no doubt that our chapter’s political organization takes a lot of time, effort, and resolve. However, to rest on one’s laurels is hardly the correct tool for deriving lessons from our actions. We must be able of being critical of what we have done so that we might not repeat the mistakes we have already made. In my view, such a critical look reveals significant problems with all of the EBDSA campaigns. It’s from this critical view that lessons are had.

    Oakland Public Teachers Strike. The teachers strike is treated by Gutmann-Gonzalez and Brown as a historical success. They write: “It was a victory, if not a resounding one.”[8] I am dismayed that the authors appear satisfied with what is, in reality, a troubling outcome that is not unrelated to the EBDSA’s strategic choices. The tentative agreement that was narrowly approved was highly compromised. The three-year contract does not ensure against school closures beyond the first five months.[9] What is perhaps more important is the contract’s impact on class organization in the long-term. On this topic, the contract appears detrimental because it potentially frays intra-class alliances. First, between local union workers, as OEA wage increases came at the expense of classified union workers.[10] Second, between parent-students and the teachers, as popular student services and afterschool programs in response to OEA wage increases.[11] Both of these problems were known in advance, well before the contract was voted on. It was for these reasons that the proposed contract faced stiff opposition by dissident OEA members. Yet, the EBDSA chapter did not effectively work against the contract by way of supporting the dissident teachers. Nor did the EBDSA widely promote that its premiere mutual-aid program—Bread for Ed—would continue alongside a protracted strike. This all signals a deep strategic blunder. To make this clear, it is necessary to briefly narrativize the strike.

    Set against the wider educational strike-wave, the Oakland strike was well-footed and highly popular. Students, some charter teachers, parents, informal left groups, formal leftist organizations and unaffiliated community members all coalesced in a way that strengthened practically all of the OEA’s picket lines. The strike’s power was also bolstered by the Bread for Ed mutual-aid initiative, which provided school lunches for students who relied on district-provided food. Here, credit is due to the EBDSA and the now-defunct International Socialist Organization (ISO) for building and facilitating the program.[12] The Bread for Ed program was important because it materially reinforced the idea that the strike was about wider community concerns. Thus, the reactionary description of the strike as harmful for precarious students, especially students of color, was short circuited. Furthermore, the Bread for Ed program brought an awareness of, and trust between, OEA strikers and local socialist organizations. This latter aspect was important because it granted EBDSA some potential legitimacy in supporting leftward dissident teachers. However, as we will see, this potential was squandered.

    Remarkably, as soon as the strike began to catch an ever more militant stride, a deeply compromised tentative agreement (TA) was announced. After five days of very successful pickets, the TA was haphazardly announced in the midst of a real demonstration of force. Early evening on Friday, over 1,000 people picketed and barricaded a school site with the intention of blocking a school board meeting from convening. Strikers swarmed school board members, fashioned doors with locks, and in one case fought off a school board member’s personal bodyguard. The participants exhibited a steeled resolve to carry the strike into the following week. Yet, the union leader’s announcement of the TA produced immediate confusion and contestation among the OEA membership regarding the day’s blockade and the tentative agreement. Was the union calling off the blockade? Was the strike over? And most importantly, were the school closures nixed? The TA was initially described as a no-concessions agreement, but as details flowed it became clear that the proposed contract paused closures for only 5 months, and that funding for other programs and services wasn’t guaranteed. Many teachers who were facing closure were clearly angry and refused to leave. Classified employees associated with another union, who were there in full force supporting the blockade, were also incensed because the contract meant potential layoffs for them. In short, the TA was immediately contested by members within the OEA, and by key allies outside of it.

    Outcome aside, there were strong strategic reasons for opposing the TA. The proposed contract compromised the relationships that empowered the strike to being with: between teachers and students, by funding wages with cuts to programs that students wanted; between teachers and classified employees, by funding wages through layoffs that affected another important local union; and, damningly, within the OEA membership itself, by allowing school closures to continue after a very brief moratorium. The strike thus had—and will likely continue to have—organizational and political implications well into the future.

    Few will disagree that our strategic orientation must center on rebuilding durable class power, as an antidote to the dissolution of class organization wrenched from decades of counter-revolution. Yet, proletarian power is not reducible to economic concessions. Proletarian power is instead a product of lasting social patterns—material capacities, organic solidarities, mass institutions and a collective sense of belonging—that are byproducts of class struggle. Understanding this, Marx argues in The Communist Manifesto that the task of communists is to advance the interests of the entire proletariat.[13] Inasmuch as Marx’s perspective rings true, socialist groups like the EBDSA had a responsibility to support dissident teachers whose active opposition to the contract pivoted on wider concerns of the class.

    Certainly, struggle cannot be forced, but supporting a substantial group of dissident teachers is far from voluntarist. Four site representatives told me that the representative council (a rank-and-file council that coordinated strike activities)[14] were largely against the contract. This was an uphill battle. Powerful entities stood against them. With significant pressure from leadership to accept the deal, and with no strong allies to counteract this institutional pressure, the 120-person site-rep council narrowly voted in favor of the TA by 3 votes. Eventually, the TA was accepted, but by a narrow margin: 42% voted against it.[15] By contrast, 81% of the LA Teachers Union voted to ratify their contract.[16] If dissident teachers had strong and well-organized allies, the strike might have continued.

    The EBDSA was unable or unwilling to assist dissident teachers. Room to assist dissident teachers clearly existed. Instead, my chapter remained neutral. Neutrality is hardly possible under conditions of political contestation. As a former member has elsewhere argued, the terrain upon which the TA vote took place was far from neutral; the political pretensions of the strike—to challenge closures and characterization—were deeply unpopular with the union’s state and national echelons.[17] Practically every aspect of today’s bourgeois reality works against militant action: institutional pressures from national and state-wide bureaucracies that move locals to moderate their activity; the legal system’s restriction of what strike’s may address; the repressive apparatus of the state that haunts our collective actions with clubs and jailhouses; the deeply-felt social relations of property and ownership; and, the liberal sociality of comprise we are all embedded within. There’s no neutrality in the class struggle. My chapter—the EBDSA—simply failed to act decisively.

    Proposition 10 & Jovanka Beckles. The campaign for proposition 10 resulted in significant demobilization and did not establish a base of organizational activity around housing after its electoral defeat. The East Bay is in the throes of an intense housing crisis, with surges in rental costs, homelessness and evictions.[18] These tendencies make Gutmann-Gonzalez and Brown’s omission of the medium-term impact of the Proposition 10 campaign all the more troublesome.

    Proposition 10 was a statewide ballot initiative that, if passed, would have allowed municipalities to set up their own rent control measures. The bulk of the EBDSA’s Proposition 10 activity consisted of canvassing, often alongside organizations like Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment. Here, door-knockers implored persons to vote for the measure. The most obvious, but superficial, problem with the campaign is that it failed. Proposition 10 lost, with nearly 60% against it.[19] More importantly, the campaign did not build independent organization outside of the election itself. This is because the campaign was manifestly electoral rather than housing-based. Proposition 10 canvassers were not attempting to forget long-term links with tenants. Long-term links could have been accomplished in a number of ways. For example, canvassers could have included inquiries regarding the tenancy-related problems of those they interfaced with. This could have been the basis of medium to long-term building-level housing organizing. Instead, the passing of the election season washed away the campaign’s basis for existing.

    Proposition 10’s ultimate demise is not what is important here—winning is not always key—what’s key is what we get out of losing, and what takes root beyond the loss. The Proposition 10 campaign did not adequately organize working class people in a manner that could outlast the electoral season. Gutmann-Gonzalez and Brown argue that many conversations about housing occurred through the campaign effort. Yet, materially speaking, the EBDSA is left with very little to show after Proposition 10’s defeat.

    Although the content of the Beckles campaign is different than Proposition 10, its form was very similar. Beckles—who is a member of the Richmond Progressive Alliance—challenged neoliberal Democrat Buffy Wicks for the California Assembly 15th district seat, which covers the cities of Berkeley, Emeryville and Richmond. This campaign was an uphill battle, as Wick’s held a significant advantage fiscally, and also by way of support of her campaign by prestigious persons like Barack Obama.[20] Yet, what is important here is not the act of “winning,” but rather the production of organized class power that comes about in the campaign’s process. Unfortunately, Gutmann-Gonzalez and Brown’s accounting does not specify what material organization did outlast this campaign, likely because the campaign did not have a lasting organizational impact.

    Similar to Proposition 10, the most obvious problem with the campaign is that it ultimately failed. Ultimately, Wicks defeated Beckles with 56% of the vote.[21] The campaign’s less facile problem is its lack of enduring organizational capacity beyond the electoral season. Strikingly, since the close of the campaign, practically no EBDSA organizing efforts have taken place in Emeryville and Richmond. Additionally, it does not appear at all evident that socialist activity has been augmented by the Beckles campaign in Berkeley, as a vast majority of our chapter’s activity still takes place in the city of Oakland.[22] The closure of the campaign season was, in a sense, final—it did not produce any meaningful material or organizational change for the chapter or the class.

    CA Single Payer: The ‘Forgotten’ Original Campaign. Sometimes what has been forgotten is more telling than the easily recalled. Such is the case with the EBDSA’s long-lost 2017 campaign for single payer in California (SB 562). What makes the SB 562 campaign striking is not merely that its failure has never been accounted for, but that its operational form[23] has been replicated in the official DSA Medicare for All organizing document[24] that was written by many of the same people. According to the EBDSA’s website, in 2017 many canvassers were trained to knock on doors and discuss the policy.[25] Like the Proposition 10 efforts and the Beckles campaign, the SB 562 campaign sought to educate voters who, in turn, would pressure their representatives to move on legislation. Despite its being in one of the “bluest” states in the US, SB 562 was shelved by a Democratic assembly person.[26] I was a new member at that time, but it was obvious that the chapter had no meaningful mechanisms for pressuring the state. The campaign had not built the class’s capacity to engage in coercive action. What was needed then was an openness to reassess strategic parameters. But a reassessment did not take place. Rather than interrogating a presumed theory of power, it appears that this strategic view has become elevated from the state-level to the national stage.

    The California Single-Payer effort are like the Beckles and Proposition 10 campaigns in that they resulted in obtaining volunteer’s information and spread awareness of a set of policy positions. Speaking of Proposition 10 and the Beckles campaign, Gutmann-Gonzalez and Brown imply that the important outcomes were that contact made with volunteers, and that consciousness was raised. For them, a key lesson is that the chapter needed to learn to communicate more widely. They tell us this: “we had barely begun to make full use of social media, textbanking, and transit station canvassing to reach a bigger audience.”[27] Propaganda certainly has an important role to play. However, propaganda is not sufficient for solidifying class consciousness, let alone producing class organization. The most important element for building class power are the socially-functional relationships built between groups of people as they continue to act together over time.[28] This is why workplace organizing has often become a central part of communist and socialist organizing—workplace organizing leverages the fact that proletarian subjects are forced to work alongside one another almost every day. Another example is the neighborhood and building-level organizing done by groups like the LA Tenants Union, among others.[29] Or we may look to the history of class organization; for example, the sharecroppers union, which was built by the 1930s Communist Party USA.[30] Checking a box in a booth or volunteering during an election cycle both end in participants returning to their private life, believing, as it were, that the political deed has been done. Unfortunately, this strategic dynamic hardly augments the organizational and political capacities of our class to become a historical agent.

    Herein lies a strategic quagmire. At its core is the idea that actually-existing “democratic institutions” are sufficient for building socialist organization. All evidence appears to make a different case.

    Critically Assessing Strategic Presumptions

    Behind these faltering campaigns is a larger strategic vision, with a particular ideal if what political power is. To “fix” the EBDSA also means to rethink some of the core strategic assertions that have animated the EBDSA chapter for nearly two years.

    EBDSA’s three electoral campaigns were centered on a specific vision of how to do politics. What the Proposition 10, Jovanka Beckles and the SB540 campaigns share is the presupposition that organized voter blocs can make effective demands through the state’s electoral organs. All orient towards an electoral issue, and then deploy canvassing groups whose objective is to compel people to vote in the EBDSA’s favor. Beyond getting out the vote, canvassing is said to raise consciousness and awareness of alternative policies and candidates that relate to socialism. This orientation contradicts the view—well accepted, even among liberal political scientists—that the U.S.’s democratic institutions are deeply anti-democratic.[31] The electoral organ of the state, and its ideology of “representation” couldn’t be farther from true; as it stands, the electoral state is the product of decades of counter-revolutionary tinkering to prevent leftward changes from happening.

    This misinterpretation of liberal democratic mechanisms under the capitalist state as somehow neutral—perhaps similar to what Nicos Poulantzas called “power fetishism”[32]—is the root problem of the EBDSA’s campaigns thus far. Poulantzas argues that individuals who are not forced to regularly encounter the state’s repressive apparatus often believe that the state is a neutral force that can arbitrate between groups with different interests. While the rhetoric of my chapter appears to align with Poulantzas, the structure of our campaigns does not. Each campaign has taken for granted the “democratic” story that the capitalist state provides us: that real representative mechanisms are in place that can transmit popular desires into actionable policy. This thinking “naturalizes” the electoral sphere, despite that this sphere is predicated on ensuring capitalist domination.

    A similar form of fetishism is implied with regards to the Oakland Teachers Strike. Here, the EBDSA’s discourse of “neutrality” out of “respect for union democracy” see today’s union structures as neutral. Yet, this entire view is founded on a faulty perception for how the internal “democratic” mechanisms of today’s union’s actually work. It’s a view that demonstrates misunderstanding for how today’s institutionalized, bureaucratic union formations tend to pressure members to act conservatively. Taking undue risks—like making demands that are beyond the scope of negotiations, like ending charterization—is a significant risk for those who inhabit the greater union’s institutional and bureaucratic layers. It is not difficult to imagine the institutional pressure, from the California Teachers Association and the National Education Association, who want to avoid a potentially illegal strike. These are the conditions that produce “business unionism,” rather than a handful of bad union officials occupying leadership posts. What is important is the historical form that many contemporary unions have grown into—largely depoliticized legalistic and bureaucratic institutions.[33] No local—however reformed—is entirely free from these historic shifts.

    What is needed, from a broad perspective, are independent bases of power from which socialist organization can stage itself. Today’s working class is highly unorganized. Most are not part of unions. A great many of the U.S. proletarians do not vote, either. If we are going to organize them—locally, even—we need to have a sufficient plan takes the real limits to the electoral system and union structures seriously.

    Conclusions

    When it comes to strategic orientation, the stakes are high. Yet another U.S. presidential election looms. Whatever the outcome, a sound strategy will ensure that the end of the election season does not preclude enduring working-class organization. The electoral campaign of Bernie Sanders may have added some dynamism to the Democratic Socialists of America, but as with most spurts of vitality, it also contains an inherent barrier to the course of socialist political development. Here, the electoral endeavors that my chapter has engaged in are deeply instructive for outlining the contours of this barrier. By consistently speeding headlong into very similar campaigns, the DSA risks the perennial leftist problem of organizational sclerosis. This may be avoided, but only if we are willing to critically reassess our work.

    Amidst our turbulent moment is room for maneuver and space for political growth. But we can’t treat this opportunity mechanistically. The outcome of our actions, from how to organize daily, to the tactics we deploy, are all subject to intense contingency and they must be evaluated on this basis. The U.S. socialist and communist left has been insignificant for some time. Yet, the growth of the DSA suggests that we may have been down, but not out. If we are to build a working-class movement that outlasts this political sequence, we must become willing and able to change our strategic course.

    [1] Abigail Gutmann-Gonzalez and Keith Brower Brown, “Lessons from the East Bay,” The Call(blog), May 14, 2019, https://socialistcall.com/2019/05/14/lessons-from-the-east-bay/.

    [2] Julia McEvoy, “Oakland’s School Closure Plans Off to a Rough Start for Some Parents,” KQED, January 10, 2019, https://www.kqed.org/news/11716967/oaklands-school-closure-plans-off-to-a-rough-start-for-some-parents.

    [3] Matthew Green and Vanessa Rancaño, “A Day After Teachers Strike Ends, Oakland School Board Approves Nearly $22 Million in Cuts,” KQED, March 5, 2019, https://www.kqed.org/news/11730554/one-day-after-teachers-strike-ends-oakland-school-board-approves-nearly-22-million-in-cuts.

    [4] Vladimir Lenin. “‘Left-Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder,” 1920.  https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/.

    [5] “Elect Jovanka Beckles for State Assembly,” accessed May 16, 2019, https://www.eastbaydsa.org/campaigns/electoral/.

    [6] “DSA Endorses California’s Proposition 10,” Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), October 2018, https://www.dsausa.org/news/dsa-endorses-california-proposition-10/.

    [7] “East Bay DSA Stands with Oakland Teachers,” accessed May 16, 2019, https://www.eastbaydsa.org/news/2018/12/12/east-bay-dsa-stands-with-oakland-teachers/.

    [8] Abigail Gutmann-Gonzalez and Keith Brower Brown, “Lessons from the East Bay,” The Call(blog), May 14, 2019, https://socialistcall.com/2019/05/14/lessons-from-the-east-bay/.

    [9] “After Seven-Day Strike, Oakland Teachers Approve New Contract | EdSource,” accessed May 17, 2019, https://edsource.org/2019/tentative-agreement-reached-in-oakland-unified-teachers-strike/609342; “Oakland Education Association and Oakland Unified School District TENTATIVE AGREEMENT 2018-2021” (Oakland Educatinal Association and the Oakland Schoolboard, March 1, 2019), 2018–21, https://oaklandea.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/OEA-Tentative-Agreement-with-OUSD-March-1-2019-2.pdf.

    [10] Wyatt Kroopf, “Oakland Unified School District Plans to Eliminate 100 Classified Workers’ Positions,” Oakland North, accessed May 17, 2019, https://oaklandnorth.net/2019/04/24/ousd-plans-to-eliminate-100-classified-workers-positions/.

    [11] When the TA was announced, I sat in on a student-teacher discussion about the contract. Students were immediately concerned and upset with the prospect of these programs being cut. When the TA was accepted, hundreds of students posted angry messages on OEA’s social media posts.

    [12] “Bread for Ed,” East Bay DSA Democratic Socialists of America, accessed April 19, 2019, https://www.eastbaydsa.org/campaigns/bread-for-ed/.

    [13] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition, Pbk. ed (London: Verso, 2012).

    [14] Daniel Roland, “Did the Teachers Win? • Commune,” Commune (blog), March 8, 2019, https://communemag.com/did-the-teachers-win/; “Site Reps,” Oakland Education Association(blog), accessed May 17, 2019, https://oaklandea.org/site-reps/.

    [15] “Oakland Education Association Members Voted to Ratify Our Contract,” Oakland Education Association (blog), accessed May 16, 2019, https://oaklandea.org/updates/oakland-education-association-members-voted-to-ratify-our-contract/.

    [16] “Members Pass TA | UTLA,” accessed May 16, 2019, https://www.utla.net/news/members-pass-ta.

    [17] Jack Gerson, “Oakland Teachers’ Strike: Balance Sheet, Lessons, and What Next?,” New Politics, accessed April 19, 2019, https://newpol.org/oakland-teachers-strike-balance-sheet-lessons-and-what-next/.

    [18] Terra Graziani et al., “Alameda County Eviction Report” (Anti-Eviction Mapping Project), accessed May 24, 2019, https://antievictionmapd.maps.arcgis.com/apps/StorytellingSwipe/index.html?appid=d70c5b933be04c669bde2c1df6fc8266.

    [19] Liam Dillon, “Voters Reject Proposition 10, Halting Effort to Expand Rent Control across the State,” latimes.com, accessed May 16, 2019, https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-proposition-10-rent-control-20181106-story.html.

    [20] “Obama Endorses East Bay Assembly Candidate Buffy Wicks,” East Bay Times (blog), August 3, 2018, https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2018/08/03/obama-endorses-east-bay-assembly-candidate-buffy-wicks/.

    [21] Guy Marzorati, “Buffy Wicks Defeats Jovanka Beckles in East Bay Assembly Race,” KQED, November 7, 2018, https://www.kqed.org/news/11702200/buffy-wicks-opens-up-early-lead-over-jovanka-beckles-in-east-bay-assembly-race.

    [22] Since my joining in 2017, the geographic scope of our chapters work does not appear to have significantly altered. A quick count of the EBDSA’s facebook events shows that a vast majority of events are held in specific areas of Oakland and some parts of Berkeley. Some events have taken place recently in Hayward (six out of 40+ in the last year). Unfortunately, many cities in the East Bay appear to have no EBDSA presence to date.

    [23] “Single-Payer Campaign Kickoff: Building Power to Win Big,” March 1, 2017, https://www.eastbaydsa.org/news/2017/2/27/single-payer-campaign-kickoff/.

    [24] “Launching a Medicare for All Campaign: A DSA Organizing Guide,” accessed May 16, 2019, https://medicareforall.dsausa.org.

    [25] “Single-Payer Healthcare,” accessed May 16, 2019, https://www.eastbaydsa.org/campaigns/healthcare/.

    [26] Melanie Mason, “California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon Shelves Single-Payer Healthcare Bill, Calling It ‘Woefully Incomplete,’” latimes.com, accessed May 16, 2019, https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-sac-single-payer-shelved-20170623-story.html.

    [27] Gutmann-Gonzalez and Brown, “Lessons from the East Bay.”

    [28] See, for example, Thompson’s Marxist history on how the English proletariat built itself into a class that could act in its own interest. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966).

    [29] Armando Aparicio and David Zlutnick, “These Tenants Are Leading the Largest Rent Strike in LA History,” August 20, 2018, https://www.thenation.com/article/these-tenants-are-leading-the-largest-rent-strike-in-la-history/.

    [30] Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression, The Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).

    [31] Yascha Mounk, “America Is Not a Democracy,” The Atlantic, March 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/america-is-not-a-democracy/550931/.

    [32] Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes, 2nd edition (London: Verso, 1982).

    [33] Holly J. McCammon, “Legal Limits on Labor Militancy: U. S. Labor Law and the Right to Strike since the New Deal,” Social Problems 37, no. 2 (May 1990): 206–29, https://doi.org/10.2307/800649; Michael Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).

  • It’s Profitability: A Response to “Why Stagnation?”

    It’s Profitability: A Response to “Why Stagnation?”

    Recently in the Marxist Sociology blog, David Kotz, Professor Emeritus of Economics and Sheridan Scholar at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Distinguished Professor in the School of Economics at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics offered an explanation as to why over the last ten years since the end of the Great Recession in mid-2009, the U.S. economy (and I would argue, all the major economies) “has been stuck in stagnation.”

    Professor Kotz said that the reason could not be due to low profitability in the U.S. capitalist sector keeping investment low. Indeed, profits have never been higher for large U.S. corporations; instead they have sat on their cash or just bought back their own shares to drive up stock prices.

    Professor Kotz’s explanation is that there is a social structure of accumulation (SSA) currently in operation that “throws up obstacles to plowing profit back into accumulation.” Apparently, the neoliberal SSA that began in the early 1980s, which aimed to drive up profitability through deregulation, privatization and attacks on labour rights, has turned into its opposite in the last ten years with an institutional structure that obstructs accumulation.

    What is the explanation for this change in the neoliberal SSA offered by Professor Kotz? Well, the global financial crash generated a massive slump which has led to “stagnating demand” so “corporate decision-makers have little incentive to expand.” At the same time, “big capital has been facing growing challenges to its primacy, from workers demanding a living wage and from citizens demanding a growing role for government in provision of essential services.”

    Really? Neither of these explanations seem convincing to me. First, has there been “stagnating demand”? There has not been if we mean by that, consumer demand. The swing factor in every slump in the U.S. economy since 1945 has been investment demand, not consumer demand. Indeed, one year before the start of the Great Recession (January 2009), personal consumption in the U.S. fell only 2.4%, while private sector investment fell 30%. And within one year after the end of the slump in mid-2009, real personal consumption returned to its pre-crisis level. In contrast, business investment did not return to its pre-crisis level until the end of 2011.

    In his paper with Professor Basu, Kotz’s stats also reveal that the major contribution to the recovery after the end of the Great Recession was business investment, contributing 53.3% of GDP growth, almost as large as the 61.8% contribution from consumer spending growth, even though the latter constitutes 60-70% of GDP and business investment only 10-15%. After 2013, consumer spending became more important as investment tailed off, leading to the mini-recession of 2014-16. Stagnating demand is down to stagnating investment, not consumption.

    And is it really true that companies are not investing as much as before because they face challenges over wages from labour? Wage growth, until very recently, in the U.S. has been pitiful in the last ten years and corporate profit margins have reached post-war highs. Corporate taxation has never been lower.

    Surely, there is another explanation for lower and weak business investment in productive assets? In my view, the causal connection between profitability and capitalist investment in productive capital, first argued by Karl Marx over 150 years ago, remains at the heart of the explanation for low investment growth and the consequent stagnation (I call it a ‘long depression’ in my book) in the U.S. economy since 2009.

    Professor Kotz shows in his paper that this causal connection was valid throughout the post-war period. “Our analysis found that the rate of profit had a strong and statistically significant stimulatory effect on the rate of capital accumulation during 1948-73 when regulated capitalism was working effectively and also during the crisis phase of 1973-79. We found the same effect in the neoliberal era from 1979-2007. The size of the effect was almost identical in the three periods.” But apparently, this connection was “not statistically significant” in the period since 2007”.

    Well, I have to say that there are several studies that show this connection is still strong. I cite the work of Jose Tapia, Cleveland Federal Reserve and for that matter, JP Morgan.  Moreover, my own empirical work shows that, while U.S. corporate profitability recovered somewhat after 2009, it is still no higher than in 2007 (depending on how you measure it) and is actually below where it was in the late 1990s.

    Low profitability is still the best explanation of poor productive investment, low productivity growth and low real wage growth since 2009.  Indeed, Professor Kotz’s own paper shows that the modest fall in US profitability from 2014-2016 was accompanied by a mini-recession. Fixed investment plummeted in 2016 to near zero, as Professor Kotz also shows. So the connect between profits and investment and growth is still there after 2007.

    It is easy to be fooled by the high profits of the big multi-national tech companies, the so-called FAANGS. But they are not representative of the broad swathe of U.S. companies. Most do not have huge cash stocks and a sizable minority are increasingly ‘zombie companies’, making just enough to cover costs and debt servicing but with little to invest productively. With profitability (not profits) near historic lows, the move into financial speculation by companies as a counteracting factor is explicable. Indeed, recent research by Australian Marxist economist, Peter Jones, shows that when profits from financial speculation (buying back shares, etc.) is stripped out, non-fictitious (to use Marx’s term) profitability is very low.

    Professor Kotz may not agree but I think what his analysis tells us is that business investment is still the driver of growth under capitalism, while consumption is the dependent variable in aggregate demand. It’s the same story in the neoliberal period as in the “regulated period.” What happens to profitability and investment is thus the crucial indicator of the future, not the emergence of any “new institutional structure.”

    Contrary to Professor Kotz’s view that “the usual profit mechanism that drives accumulation no longer works in the normal fashion,” it is doing just that. The solution for capital will not be some as yet unclear new “institutional change” but the inevitable one of the “profit mechanism,” another slump in investment and production, designed to restore the profitability of “restructured” capital, in order to start to whole accumulation process again.

    Originally posted at the Marxist Sociology Blog.

  • It’s Time For a People’s Court

    It’s Time For a People’s Court

    Draconian legislative attacks on abortion access in Georgia, Ohio and Alabama require a renewed defense of women’s and trans men’s bodily autonomy. The Supreme Court cannot be relied on to provide this defense under any circumstances. The American left should hear the call to defend Roe v. Wade and come back with a more radical demand: abolish the Supreme Court.

    Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the conservative majority in the Supreme Court decision overturning the court’s commitment to precedent set by previous Supreme Court majorities, wrote that “stare decisis is not an inexorable command and we have held that it is at its weakest when we interpret the Constitution.” A majority may rule as it likes; the until-now-sacred adherence to precedent is a matter of convenience. Justice Stephen Breyer, writing for the minority on the court, wrote that “today’s decision can only cause one to wonder which cases the court will overrule next.” The majority’s new prerogative to ignore stare decisis poses a renewed roadblock for all progressive efforts and threatens to strip women and trans men of bodily autonomy. We must entrust defense and advancement of rights to popular power, not to a historically conservative institution.

    The Supreme Court is undemocratic and reactionary in its history and design. The court has a long record of taking decades to swing towards social justice, meanwhile handing down decisions that make real progress difficult. Landmark shifts in civil rights are marked by Supreme Court cases not because the court reliably decides in favor of protecting and extending social rights but because it is often the last thing in the way after public opinion and even legislators have climbed aboard the engine of social change driven by mass movements. At best, the court is ineffective, unable to enforce Brown v. Board or the decision meant to stop the horrific Indian Removal Act. Most often, it is a bastion of reaction, stymieing efforts to build a more just world. Recent—and, given the court’s history, relatively mild—examples: the court gutted the voting rights act, which led to renewed voter repression in the black belt; removed the Affordable Care Act’s mandate, effectively hobbling any chance that legislation had at lowering insurance premiums; took the brakes off bourgeois political spending with the Citizens United decision; crippled public sector unions in the Janus decision; narrowed the protections afforded to whistle-blowers by Dodd-Frank; and on and on. This historical unreliability is enough to make us rethink the wisdom of entrusting political judgment to a handful of judges whose legal careers invariably cement them in the hegemonic order. The court has never reflected the will of the people. This is by design. The court’s function is to enslave the living to the dead, binding us to the will of the slave owners and reactionaries who chartered the court. The court has and will continue to protect capital at all costs, and can only be used to advance social justice within that impossible confine. If we want to protect hard-won progressive victories, we must give the people the power to judge our laws.

    A call to abolish the Supreme Court is not a call to abolish judicial review. No socialist, nor any progressive with common sense, should trust in a bourgeois legislature. Rather, the Supreme Court should be replaced with a people’s court, selected by lot with a requirement of residency and not citizenship. The court would sit for a year and participants would be given a salary during that time. A people’s court should have 150 seats. 150 persons is the upper limit for a deliberative body. Beyond that number and the difficulty of deliberation increases. In choosing the upper limit, we ensure the maximum number of people get to practice political judgment at a given time. This maximizes the transformative impact of that practice, encouraging the widespread an awareness of and use of world-building power among American residents. We already entrust to the people decision-making in our criminal courts, where they have little control over the norms they are asked to enforce. We should expand the people’s power of judgment and entrust judicial review to the masses.

    Drawing lots was and is the way of democracy. Historically, partisans of democracy have considered elections aristocratic. Elections are meant to select the “best” of a class of eligible governors—as David Van Reybrouck writes, “a government led by the best—did that not mean aristokratia in Greek?” Sortition, or drawing lots, is the truly democratic practice. Lots eliminate the influence of personality and family as well as oligarchic tendencies. Selection by lot gets rid of the fundamentally aristocratic notion that some people are better than others and more deserving of a say, whatever the guise in which that notion comes to us. Drawing lots prevents the sorting of people into classes of decision-makers and subjects. Continuing in that same vein, drawing lots from the total pool of residents instead of citizens ensures that distinction is not smuggled through customs by excluding marginalized communities from citizenship. An elected court only gives us illusory power—the power to constitute another class to rule over us. As Rousseau wrote in 1762, the people “deceive themselves when they fancy they are free; they are so, in fact, only during the elections of Members of Parliament: for, as soon as a new one is elected, they are again in chains, and are nothing.” We must not turn over political judgment to the people only to have elected representatives steal it from them as legislative power has been stolen.

    Drawing lots to establish a popular court is not enough to ensure just political judgment, especially not in a state built on slavery and genocide. The lot should be weighted to ensure the new court is liberatory. The lot should be weighted according to the following idea: identity populations are personalities. An identity community constitutes a fictive person, a “species of man” as Frantz Fanon might put it. Each community is itself heterogeneous, but shares basic constitutive experiences. These personalities all must make decisions together in order for any judgment to be actually democratic. Each personality, each community with its own set of common experiences and its own perspective and voice, must have an equal say. This is the truly progressive and liberatory interpretation of “one person one vote”. We must apply that principle at both the individual and social-historical level. We should weight the lot so that each gender, sexual and racialized community is represented in equal proportion. This would be simple enough math that all could understand it and be sure of its fairness. If we fail to do so, we will not be able to overcome Rousseau’s problem of interest groups. The hegemonic identity will institute tyranny of the majority, and democracy will be suffocating rather than liberating. As Rousseau rightly noted, we could never ask any person to accept such a body as legitimately expressing the general will, let alone their own will.

    Establishing a people’s court along these or similar lines disproportionately represents marginalized communities who historically and presently don’t have access to the means of world-building and who are always disproportionately subjected to the current norms of political judgment. The court would be dominated by workers and caregivers since the overwhelming majority of American residents are both those things. The class interests involved in political judgment would change overnight as housewives, sex workers, day laborers, service and office workers, and the unemployed replaced lawyers and political appointees. Judicial review would be transformed from a conservative force to an organ of considerate popular power. Women and trans men would not have to rely on political appointees to protect Roe; black people would not have to place their faith in a White court to uphold voting rights; workers would not have to trust in lawyers to protect collective bargaining; those affected by disability and chronic illness would not have to count on the able bodied to defend their right to care and accommodation. Prisoners and their loved ones would decide cases on criminal justice reform; trans folks would judge transphobic laws; immigrants and the children of immigrants would write opinions on nativist policy; indigenous people would rule on betrayals of their traditional sovereignty. The people’s court would be a place where civil rights are protected and expanded by those to whom they matter most.

    We all share in the labor of making a social world, but the political boundaries around that social world are drawn by bourgeois elites. Political judgment, even more than legislation or executive authority, is responsible for defining the norms that bound the political world. Devolving the power of political judgment to the people would be a real measure of democracy for the first time since colonization. To demand a people’s court is to demand a vast redistribution of power from bourgeois elites to the masses of people. A people’s court is the first step to creating genuinely public political space, a space for popular politics that is not cordoned off and divided up ahead of time by the people wielding actual power. A people’s court will give the people an institution where they can constitute their will for themselves. The people’s court could constitute a counter-hegemony to the bourgeois state. It would, speaking with the late Mark Fischer, “subordinate the state to the general will.”

  • Mexico’s President Knuckles Under to Trump, Woos Mexico’s Business Class

    Mexico’s President Knuckles Under to Trump, Woos Mexico’s Business Class

    Mexico’s president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), a left-of-center populist in office for only six months, finds himself under enormous pressure from the United States—and he is yielding. U.S. President Donald Trump has demanded that AMLO’s government do more to stop the flow of Central American migrants fleeing poverty and violence in their own countries and passing through Mexico and to seek asylum in the United States, threatening Mexico’s government with a tariff of 5 percent and possibly rising to 25 percent. Such a a tariff would be devastating to the Mexican economy, and, in fact, to the U.S. economy as well.

    Trump’s threat of increased tariffs has led the Republican Party to take its strongest stand so far against the Republican president, while U.S. industrialists, especially auto industry CEOs, have also opposed the tariff. Yet Trump has refused to back down, no doubt seeing his battle with AMLO as a demonstration to the white working class part of his base of his commitment to protect American jobs from foreign workers. Vice-President Pence is now meeting with Marcelo Ebrard in an attempt to reach an agreement on Trump’s terms. Trump wants Mexico to hold asylum seekers in its territory while the U.S. processes their requests.

    While AMLO speaks sympathetically about the Central Americans who “migrate because of necessity, because of hunger, poverty, and violence” and says his government will not use force, in fact the police and army have been mobilized along Mexico’s southern border and leading figures of the migration movement have been arrested. AMLO called at his June 6 press conference for all Mexican political leaders, government officials, church leaders, and business figures, and Mexican people in general to join him in Tijuana for a national unity rally for “Mexico’s dignity” on Saturday, June 8.

    Populist Politics—Ambivalent Policies

    Disgusted with the corruption of Mexico’s historic ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party and of the conservative and pro-business National Action Party, a year ago the Mexican people voted for change. AMLO won the July 1, 2018 presidential election with 53 percent of the vote and carried 31 of 32 states. It was a landslide.

    The party that he himself founded and led, the Movement for National Regeneration (MORENA), also won a majority in the Senate and a large plurality in the lower house, representing a complete break with Mexico’s recent political party history. Shortly after he took office, AMLO’s popularity reached an astounding 85 precent approval, and today he remains incredibly popular, with an 80 percent approval rating. He took office promising to restore democracy, to end corruption, and to improve the lives of the Mexican people, but does he really intend to do so? And will he be able to do so?

    Since taking office he has pursued policies that are at best ambivalent and at worst a capitulation to the powerful foreign and domestic banks and corporations that rule Mexico. And, his attempts to deal with the country’s most important problems—the economy and criminal violence—have not proven successful, at least in his first six months in office. While his election has encouraged some progressive social struggles, for example among maquiladora workers and the union at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, there is not yet any major shift in social power toward the country’s underdogs.

    A Friend of the Banks—But a Stumbling Economy

    As The Wall Street Journal recently wrote, “Mexico’s Leftist President Emerges as Unlikely Friend to Big Banks.” He meets regularly with the bankers and he calls for reductions in banking regulations, while working with the banks to reduce customers’ fees. Many of Mexico’s banks are foreign owned, among them U.S. banks such as Citigroup. In a recent speech to bankers, he said that the banks should regulate themselves just like the press regulates itself. Need I say that the bankers applauded?

    While he AMLO has been favoring the banks, so far his friendship with the financiers has not resulted in any improvement in the Mexican economy. On the contrary, the most recent economic reports indicate that Mexico’s economy grew by only 1.3 percent in the first quarter of this year, compared to 1.7 percent in the fourth quarter of last year. AMLO initially called for a growth rate of 4 percent, has now reduced his hopes to 2 percent, though most national and international financial institutions suggest that growth will be 1.6 percent.

    AMLO is being friendly to finance, but the financiers don’t necessarily return the favor. The credit rating agencies Fitch Ratings and Moody’s both reduced ratings on Mexico’s PEMEX oil company on June 5, Fitch from BBB+ down to BBB and Moody’s changed its outlook from A3 to negative. They did so because they believe AMLO’s government doesn’t have the money to carry out his plan to overhaul the company, and the change in ratings means that Mexico will find it more expensive to borrow money.

    And the Violence Continues—and Worsens

    Since former Mexican President Felipe Calderón initiated Mexico’s drug war in 2006, something like 200,000 Mexicans have been killed and tens of thousands more have disappeared, let’s say a quarter of a million people, and nearly everyday someone stumbles on a previously undiscovered mass grave. Thousands of women have been killed, enough that the systematic and widespread murder of women has its own name, “femicide.” Many Central American migrants have also been among the victims. AMLO recently said that the violence was under control and that homicides were down, but in fact some 33,000 were killed in 2018, and in the first three months of 2019 another 8,493 were murdered, a 9.6 percent increase.

    AMLO’s plan to deal with the violence is a new National Guard, approved by the Mexican Congress in May. The National Guard will initially have 50,000 members going up to 80,000 within a year or so, most of them recruited from the Federal police, the army, and the navy. They will have greater police powers and be heavily armed and may stay for longer.

    Why this new police force—especially made up as it is of other armed forces—should be any different than other Mexican police forces is unclear. Since the drug war that began in 2006, according to Mexican international human rights organizations, the Mexican Army committed many human rights violations, including extra-judicial killers. Mexican police forces are notorious for the routine torture of suspects, robbery, kidnapping, and murder.

    AMLO’s Government Uses Violence against Migrants

    While AMLO was talking about Mexico’s sympathy and solidarity with the migrants, his government was taking a harder line against undocumented migrants in Mexico, mobilizing both the police and the Army to stop the migrants at the Mexican border, and arresting migrant movement leaders. AMLO’s government has tripled the arrest of migrants, deporting 15,654 in May, which will rise to an annual total of some 800,000 people.

    On June 5, Central American migrants crossing the border were met by both police and soldiers who blocked their entry. And on June 6 the Mexican authorizes arrested two leading figures in the migrant caravan movement, Ireneo Mujica of Pueblos sin Fronteras and Cristobal Sanchez who was leading a migrant caravan.

    AMLO’s government’s repressive policies toward the migrants are motivated by a desire to stop Trump’s threats, and to do so, it appears that AMLO is prepared to do Trump’s work. AMLO may have a sincere desire to carry out, from the top, progressive policies to benefit those at the bottom, but he believes he needs to buy time by placating Mexican and foreign bankers and the U.S. government. His strategy for reform is a problematic one that risks giving up his country’s national sovereignty, which has never been very secure, and the humanitarian ideals he has expressed, even while failing to carry them out.

  • The Road to Prison Abolition: A Practical Solution

    The Road to Prison Abolition: A Practical Solution

    Seemingly overnight, politicians are tripping over themselves as they clamor for prison reform in a climate where cases of police murder and prison abuses have drawn thousands in protests onto the streets. Today, few would doubt that America’s criminal justice system is racist and unfair. Moreover, many now point to the hypocrisy of mass incarceration in a country that touts itself as a global leader and standard bearer of democracy in the “free” world. It is within this climate that prison abolitionists need to challenge the piecemeal reforms and link up with criminal justice activists to build a movement to abolish America’s prisons.

    Far from some pie in the sky idea as some critics would maintain, the road to prison abolition is the only humane and practical alternative to a system that locks people in cages as a solution to poverty and mental illness. American political icon, academic and author Angela Davis asks a fundamental question: “why do we take prisons for granted?” in her book Are Prisons Obsolete?”[1]

    Davis asks that we put prison abolition in the same context as the movement to abolish the death penalty, Jim Crow, and Slavery, arguing that there was a time when abolition of those racist institutions seemed insurmountable. Key to any argument for prison abolition is a greater awareness of the perpetuation of systematic racism that Black Lives Matter activists have argued is at the root of the murder of thousands of Black men and women in the last few years.

    As author Khalil Gibran Muhammad points out in Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America, the criminalization of African Americans reaches back to the end of Reconstruction. Over the last four decades, systematic racism has been a key mechanism in the build-up of America’s carceral state in order to divert workers attention away from growing socio-economic disparities. As Mike Davis exclaims in his book City of Quartz, nowhere have we seen such a growing gap between rich and poor without a revolution.

    It is, therefore, a shock that even the racist demagogue President Trump, who ran a tough on crime campaign, has introduced what he calls “groundbreaking criminal justice reform,” in the First Step Act. The act is not in isolation but in the context of politicians of all stripes introducing laws aimed at reducing the prison population.[2] More significantly, because the expansion of the carceral state has not improved workers living standards or seen any reduction in crime, and has actually been met with increasing class polarization and rising recidivism rates,[3] many are questioning the legitimacy of mass incarceration and calling for genuine reform.

    Two decades ago, few would have predicted that politicians from both sides of the isle would use the rhetoric of prison reform to garner votes. President Bill Clinton had doubled the rate of incarceration, created stricter sentencing, and expanded possible death penalty convictions by 50 percent. The Three Strikes Law was introduced in California and spread to other states.[4]

    Hillary Clinton had coined the phrase “the Black Predator” to stir up white voters by blaming Blacks and Latinos for crime, and Senator Phil Gramm was calling prisons country clubs. The racist rhetoric fueled the largest prison construction in world history and decimated communities of color. Today, of the 2.2 million in prison, over half are Black or Latino.

    Bill Clinton didn’t invent the use of racism to build up the criminal justice system he just expanded it. Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater used “law and order” as a centerpiece for his 1964 campaign against Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson admired the strategy enough to incorporate it into his “war on crime.” Nixon also used the law-and-order theme as a way to distract people’s attention from issues, such as the rapidly deteriorating economy and the failing war in Vietnam. Nixon appealed to voters’ fears of social unrest, especially on white fears of Black street crime. By the late 1970s, nearly half of all Americans were afraid to walk home at night, and 90 percent responded in surveys that the US criminal justice system wasn’t harsh enough.[5]

    But it was Ronald Reagan who “became a master of linking the law-and-order theme with covert, and sometimes not so covert, racial messages,” writes author and activist Phil Gasper. Reagan described the Black ghetto rebellions of the 1960s as “riots of the law breakers and the mad dogs against the people.” On a radio commercial in the same period Reagan warned: “[E]very day the jungle draws a little closer. Our city streets are jungle paths after dark…. The man with the badge holds it back.[6]

    After California governor Jerry Brown signed into law a new statute in 1976 abolishing parole—which read in part, “The purpose of imprisonment is punishment”—a series of states followed suit with similar laws, including some that lengthened prison sentences. New York state passed stringent mandatory sentencing laws, known as the Rockefeller Drug Laws. Thirty-six other states enacted similar “reforms.”

    The tough-on-crime juggernaut gained momentum under President Reagan—accelerated qualitatively by a new campaign against illegal drugs, in particular, crack cocaine. Spending for the war on drugs skyrocketed. In 1980, the federal budget for this war was $1 billion. Today, it’s more than $17 billion.[7] In the Reagan and Bush years, spending on employment programs was slashed in half, while spending on corrections increased by 521 percent. In this same period, the chances of being arrested for a drug offense increased by 447 percent—even though statistics showed a considerable decline in drug use.[8]

    In 1984, Congress enacted the Sentencing Reform Act, eliminating parole for all federal crimes committed after November 1, 1987, and curtailing the discretion of judges to set sentences. Federal mandatory minimum sentences for drugs came in 1986 and 1988, with the Anti-Drug Abuse Act and the Anti-Drug Abuse Amendment Act respectively. The 1986 act was passed by a vote of 378 to 16 by a Democratic-controlled House. The act established mandatory six- and ten-year prison terms for drug dealing, as well as the now-famous 100-to-1 crack-to-cocaine ratio, in which possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine triggered the same prison sentence as possession of 500 grams of powder cocaine. A life sentence now requires the sale of just 3.3 pounds of crack. “By 1995…the average federal prison term served for selling crack cocaine was nearly eleven years. For homicide, by comparison, the national average was barely six.”[9]

    These drug laws led to a massive increase in the U.S. prison population. Federal prosecutions for non-drug offenses increased by 4 percent from 1982 to 1988. For drug offenses, federal prosecutions increased by 99 percent.

    The majority of those held in federal prison for immigration and drug offenses are people of color. Black men have a 1 in 3 chance of being incarcerated and for Latinx males it is 1 in 6, compared to white males at 1 in 17, Black women are a startling 1 in 18 and for white women the ratio is 1 in 111. The targeting of Black youths by the police has been met with a drastic increase in incarceration rates.

    The human toll on Black and Latinx lives from the incarceration of 1.2 million people of color, the decimation of Black and Brown communities, and the murderous assaults by police of Black and Latinx men and women is incalculable. A smaller minority of incarcerated people are Native American and Asian, the rest are mainly white and working class. There are few rich people in prison and white-collar crime goes virtually unpunished.

    The most influential book in recent years is The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Published three years before the official beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement in response to the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2013, author and civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander lays down a fortuitous gauntlet in her claim that America’s criminal justice system is a form of racial apartheid comparable to the Jim Crow era born at the end of Reconstruction. Cornel West called it, “the secular bible for a new social movement in early twenty-first century America.” “Once you have read it,” he continues, “you have crossed the Rubicon and there is no sleep walking.”[10] Paul D’Amato, former editor of the International Socialist Review concurs: “The fight against racism…cannot be separated from the class struggle as a whole. Only by challenging oppression in all its forms can workers unite and become the threat to capitalism that they must become if we are to win a better world.”[11]

    Incarcerating the have-nots isn’t a new trend. The penitentiary was born not simply as a reform away from corporal punishment, but as a means for the ruling class to control the emerging impoverished working class that was growing up alongside the abundance of 19th-century capitalism–as well as the Black population freed after the end of slavery. “There is no very great danger of a rich man going to jail,” said the progressive lawyer Clarence Darrow to a group of Cook County Jail inmates in 1902: “First and last, people are sent to jail because they are poor.”[12]

    And although America has seen its first dip in incarceration rates in twenty years, at 2.2 million, it still holds the ignominious title of the World’s biggest jailer, incarcerating at a rate 7 percent higher and imprisoning more people than China and Russia. The United States holds more people in its prisons than were killed in the Vietnam War.[13] And the numbers hide the additional 5 million who are in the carceral state’s grip most of whom are on probation and parole and the gross imprisonment of migrants along U.S. Mexican border.[14]

    Youth incarceration and solitary confinement

    Much of the activist and media spotlight has been aimed at prisoners and in particular juveniles who face years in solitary confinement.

    The high-profile Kalief Browder story exposed the nightmare on primetime of what it’s like to be a teenager living alone 23 hours a day seven days a week in a 6-by-9 foot cell. In addition to being beaten by guards and other inmates, all captured on video surveillance tape, Kalief spent three years as a teenager at Rikers—two in solitary confinement—without ever standing trial. Thanks to activists who kept up protests and press conferences the case got national attention, which led to the plan to close Rikers under the supervision of Elizabeth Galazer, Director of New York City’s Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice.

    All of this was too little, too late for Kalief, who committed suicide after being released without charge at home using a hangman’s rope he had learned to tie at Rikers Island. As his mother, Venida Browder, recounted at a press conference with Speaker Melissa Mark-Verito in 2016:

    Physically, he was here, but mentally, he was still in Rikers. The solitary confinement really messed him up. It made him very paranoid. He was terrified of ever having to go back to Rikers. He felt that people were police plants, trying to get him. He even told me…“I don’t know if I can trust you.”[15]

    Kalief’s nightmare is just the tip of the iceberg. Over half of all juvenile suicides occur in solitary. Over 9,000 (1 in 5) juveniles haven’t been found guilty of any charge and are locked up awaiting trial. Nine-hundred are in long-term facilities, and only a third are charged with violent offenses. Juveniles are more likely to end up in solitary in adult facilities because by law they have to be separated from the adult population. The Juvenile Law Center reported that hundreds if not thousands of youth are kept in solitary and that juveniles in solitary are typically Black or Latino, often do not receive a disciplinary hearing before they are placed in isolation, and can be deprived of medical treatment, showers, eating utensils, reading and writing materials, mattresses, and sheets.

    High profile cases such as Browder’s have led some states to end the use of solitary for juveniles because it violates the Eighth Amendment on the prohibition of Cruel and Unusual Punishment. President Obama banned the use of solitary for juveniles in the Federal prisons, a largely symbolic move given that there were only 26 juveniles held in federal prisons at the time. In spite of the rush to reform and in light of Obama’s ban and op-ed piece stating that solitary for juveniles was “an affront to our common humanity,” there is still a long way to go, as columnist Eli Hager reminds us: that “for youth advocates, ending juvenile solitary will take more work. Twenty-three percent of juvenile facilities nationally use some form of isolation, according to a 2014 study by the U.S. Department of Justice.[16]

    The threat of solitary confinement, including temporary confinement in Administrative Segregation and security housing units, is one of the key punitive mechanisms used by prison officials to control individual prisoners and the prison population as a whole. In an article in The Atlantic, Natalie Chang says the “paths that lead to time in solitary confinement vary from institution to institution, but they are also the result of a criminal justice system that emphasizes control over rehabilitation.[17]

    The situation of juveniles in prison is particularly egregious. 53 thousand are held in facilities away from home, two thirds of which are in the most restrictive facilities. In a 2017 press release for the Prison Policy Initiative, Wendy Sawyer asks, how many of the 18,000 children and adolescents in juvenile detention centers should really be there? According to government guidance, “…the purpose of juvenile detention is to confine only those youths who are serious, violent, or chronic offenders.” Yet over 5,000 youths are held in detention centers for these same low-level offenses.”[18]

    The sheer numbers of all individuals in solitary confinement is staggering. According to the Bureau of Justice’s 2011–2012 study, nearly 20 percent of prison inmates and 18 percent of jail inmates (approximately 240,000) had spent time some time in restrictive housing, including disciplinary segregation, administrative segregation involving isolation and little out-of-cell time. The characteristics of those who are thrown into solitary confinement is even more disturbing. For example, younger inmates, inmates without a high school diploma, and lesbian, gay, and bisexual inmates were more likely to be in restrictive housing than older inmates, inmates with a high school diploma and heterosexual inmates.

    The use of solitary confinement became front page news in 2013, when the largest hunger strike in California’s history began in Pelican Bay’s notorious Security Housing Unit (SHU) and spread to prisons throughout California. Prisoners were protesting inhumane conditions and the lack of any step-down program that would allow prisoners to get out of solitary confinement. Thousands of SHU prisoners had spent years in solitary confinement some even decades. One strike leader and former prisoner, Joey Villareal, a leader of the Free Aztlan Movement, says “living there was hell. Nice and bright was one of the ways they tortured us. We never saw any color. Inside, egg shell white. Outside eggshell white, white boxers, tee shirts, jump suits, everything we see white and bright lights left on 24/7.”

    Thousands of SHU prisoners had spent years in solitary confinement—some even decades. Their struggle won the release of most of the prisoners and the dismantling of the SHU. Nevertheless, there remain security housing units throughout the state of California and nationwide where prisoners to this day are serving in isolation.

    The case of Sandra Bland received national attention after she committed suicide in solitary in the notorious Harris County Jail after being held for a routine traffic stop. Her arrest went viral and the officer was dismissed after everyone saw her horrifying arrest video. As the Nation reports, Sandra posted on her Facebook years before, “I’m here to change history.” Little could she have imagined that her death would spark national protests and documentaries as the world asked, “What happened to Sandra Bland?” by many who doubted she actually committed suicide.

    High profile cases such as Sandra Bland and Kalief Browder, coupled with large-scale protests against the use of solitary confinement have exposed the hypocrisy of a prison system that calls itself rehabilitative. They have led to a flurry of reforms around the use of solitary confinement but have not put an end to its widespread uses. Today, hundreds of thousands languish in solitary confinement on any given day with little hope of release some serving years in isolation. In spite of the preponderance of evidence that solitary confinement drives people insane and has the propensity to make prisoners more violent, solitary remains as the main mode of discipline within America’s prison system.

    The incarceration of the mentally ill has also garnered attention. It is estimated that one third of all prisoners are mentally ill and that America holds over two million mentally ill individuals in its prisons, now commonly referred to as the New Asylum. According to the National Alliance of Mental Illness, 83 percent of individuals receive little to no treatment in prison. Mentally ill individuals experience more brutalization and are thrown into solitary more often because of challenges in navigating each prison’s strict codes of conduct.

    From reform to abolition    

    It is within this atmosphere of greater awareness and a call for genuine reform that Angela Davis, American political icon, asks in an interview with Dylan Rodriguez, how do we stop taking the prisons for granted and see the urgency of building a prison abolition struggle within a reform movement. She explains that “it is when people struggle for reforms that such awareness can lead to the asking of fundamental questions about the necessity of such brutalities and the imagining of a better world without racism and incarceration.”[19]

    Davis highlights why fights to reform prisons shouldn’t be separated from the fight for prison abolition:

    “The most difficult question for advocates of prison abolition is how to establish a balance between reforms that are clearly necessary to safeguard the lives of prisoners and those strategies designed to promote the eventual abolition of prisons as the dominant mode of punishment….I do not think that there is a strict dividing line between reform and abolition. For example, it would be utterly absurd for a radical prison activist to refuse to support the demand for better health care inside Valley State, California’s largest women’s prison, under the pretext that such reforms would make the prison a more viable institution. Demands for improved health care, including protection from sexual abuse and challenges to the myriad ways in which prisons violate prisoners’ human rights, can be integrated into an abolitionist context that elaborates specific decarceration strategies and helps to develop a popular discourse on the need to shift resources from punishment to education, housing, health care, and other public resources and services.”[20]

    The history of prisoner reform movements adds credence to Davis’ claims, but there are others who would disagree with Davis’ conclusions. Roger Lancaster, a professor of Anthropology and Cultural Studies at George Mason University and author of Sex Panic and the Punitive State writes in “How to End Mass Incarceration,” published in Jacobin magazine, that prison reformers should reject Angela Davis Are Prisons Obsolete? Lancaster claims that, “abolitionism promises a heaven on-earth that will never come to pass.”[21] He counter poses prison reform to prison abolition, the latter which, he argues, is “unlikely to win broad public support.”

    Lancaster is wrong to accuse prison abolitionists of being “remarkably innocent of history,” or that their position is that we must “choose between abolition and reform, while discounting reform as a viable option.”

    One only has to look back to the largest prison rebellion in U.S. history in 1971 at the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York to see reforms won by those with revolutionary ideals. More recently, it was the 2016 prison abolition movement that generated the largest prisoner work stoppage in U.S. history. The 2013 Pelican Bay State Prison hunger strike, led in part by a sizable number of revolutionaries, resulted in a near-dismantling of its notorious Security Housing Unit (SHU), the passage of multiple new sentencing laws which have gained the release of thousands of prisoners, and an educational reform movement inside the prisons that is challenging the “lock them up throw away the key” model in California. As Joey Villareal states, “the Pelican Bay Hunger strike began as an isolated fight to end solitary confinement helped people become conscious about state repression and helped forge a new abolitionist movement.”

    Lancaster has his own utopian dreams. He recommends that the United States could adopt Finland’s rehabilitative system. To suggest that the U.S. would move to a model like Scandinavian prisons that “have no walls and allow prisoners to leave during the day for shopping” is ludicrous.

    Lancaster is not the only one calling for a kinder gentler prison system. Philanthropist, Frank Gehry, invited an audience of architects and students, corrections officials and campaigners for criminal justice reform to assemble at the Yale School of Architecture for the finale of Gehry’s semester-long “studio” on architecture and mass incarceration. A dozen students would present their projects—designs for a humane prison—to a jury consisting mostly of Friends of Frank and funded by George Soros. Christopher Stone, the outgoing president of Soros’s Open Society Foundation said, “We asked Frank, what would it mean to design a maximum-security prison if you treated the corrections officers and the prisoners as the clients instead of the state bureaucracy.” During the planning students went to Finland and Norway, but it proved too idealistic and impractical to most who wondered how a prison in the United States would work without walls and bars.

    Instead of imagining a kinder and gentler prison, Angela Davis suggests that no prisons would be better to reduce crime more than the current state of mass incarceration. As a second alternative she proposes, “building the kind of society that doesn’t need prisons.” She calls for a massive redistribution of “power and income” by taking resources away from the prisons and moving them into social service agencies:[22]

    She calls for the “demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance.”[23]

    Lancaster rejects this idea: “While the state-sanctioned brutality that now marks the American criminal justice system has motivated many activists to call for the complete abolition of prisons, we must begin with a clearer understanding of the complex institutional shifts that created and reproduce the phenomenon of mass incarceration.”

    Lancaster fails to see that the “punitive turn” that he argues took place in the early 1970s in the U.S. penal system was not just a “cultural shift,” but a refashioning of a racist tool that does not “exceed,” but is integral to the survival of the penal system. His blind spot is to see only institutional effects rather than the more dynamic changes that have occurred within America’s prison system. He states: “The American prison system is brutal and unjust. But the rhetoric of prison abolition won’t help us end its depravities.”

    In couching his understanding of a single “punitive turn,” he misses the reform waves that swept through American prisons in the early seventies. Two weeks after the murder by prison guards of Black Panther and revolutionary George Jackson at California’s San Quentin State Prison, one of the most significant prisoner rebellions erupted in a demand for better living conditions and political rights in upstate New York. Heather Ann Thompson recounts in Blood in the Water: A History of the Attica Prisoner Uprising what an era of educational reforms had on the Attica prisoners.[24] She explains how in the area of education “instructors were instrumental in inspiring Attica’s incarcerated to see the world both within and outside of Attica’s walls as inexorably linked.[25]

    This reform wave paralleled the Black Power movement that swept the country in the late sixties and early seventies. The Attica rebellion and prisoner reform movement were a reflection of the renewed radicalism outside the prisons. Their chant: “We are Men! We are not beasts and we do not intend to be beaten or driven as such” from the prison yard echoed the sentiments of the Black Power movement against police brutality and for better urban living conditions.

    The gains won through the early seventies prison reform wave lasted until 1992 when President Bill Clinton introduced his notorious Omnibus Crime Bill that brought in stricter sentencing, an increase in death punishable crimes, and an elimination of Pell Grants. This attack was part of a much broader attack on workers to destroy the social safety net by scapegoating African Americans to divert people’s attention away from the draconian cuts.

    Clinton’s policy of ending welfare as we knew it in exchange for workfare workers was an attack on all workers, especially unionized workers. In understanding the age of mass incarceration as a reflection of larger societal forces, there is hope that as societal forces such as the Black Lives Matter movement challenge systematic racism, the prisons themselves will again become hotbeds of radicalism that can unite with the resurgence of anti-racists struggles now gaining steam across America

    Race, Class and Prisons: It’s Personal

    I know the only humane and practical solution to America’s racist criminal justice system is abolition from my years of teaching in California prisons and from my decades-long fighting on the streets of New York City and Chicago, shoulder to shoulder with families and friends of those whose loved ones had been brutalized by the system.

    My first exposure to police brutality was with the case of Leonard Lawton, an unarmed fifteen-year old Black youth who was shot in the face from ten feet away while hanging out in his building at the Polo Grounds Housing Projects of New York City’s Harlem. I can still see the stunned Mrs. Lawton sitting quietly on the end of the sofa in her empty apartment with her hands in her lap as I began to interview her for a story for Socialist Worker the day after a cop killed her son. After the interview, I met Leonard’s father and brother, both of whom spoke on numerous panels and attended rallies organized by the International Socialist Organization.

    After covering stories equally horrific to Leonard Lawton, all inflicted on Black and Brown, none with indictments for perpetrators. I became increasingly aware of the systematic nature of police abuses. I also became inspired by families willing to take to the streets regardless of police reprisals.

    When I moved to Chicago in 1998, I shifted focus to a group of men railroaded on to death row on the basis of confessions extracted under torture by veteran detectives led by Police Commander Jon Burge. The tortures included electro-shock, suffocation and severe beatings along with the cover up by cops, supervisors, judges, states attorneys and mayors. Marlene Martin, Director of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, asked me to coordinate what came to be known as the Death Row Ten Campaign. Through the help of lawyers and the tireless marches, rallies, press conferences and forums with family members, we were able to fuel a growing wrongful conviction movement. It finally reached Governor George Ryan who pardoned four of the Death Row Ten and commuted all 176 death sentences to life without parole.[26]

    The sheer viciousness of the police torture scandal that led to hundreds being sent to prison on the basis of tortured confessions, and the depth of the conspiracy to cover it up, convinced me of the need for abolition. Our victory in Illinois also showed me how that ordinary people can prevail over the most repressive aspects of the system.

    Thus when I first stepped onto a California prison yard as an instructor in 2007, I was already committed to abolishing the prison system. I saw our reform work as but a stepping stone to help raise expectations among prisoners for a broader fight. As the Co-Founder and Director of Feather River College’s Incarcerated Student Program, I brought a handful of instructors behind the prison walls.

    The first time I taught a literature class to a student at High Desert State Prison, a level four maximum security prison, I was accompanied by one guard beside me and another perched behind. I peered through the dusty Plexiglas window of the steel door into the eyes of my student who was surrounded by darkness in his tiny cell with his cell mate on the bunk behind him. As he I responded to my question about extended metaphor in Macbeth, the space around us seemed to melt away. I was stunned by the capacity of the human mind to transcend even the most barbarous of circumstances. When I walked into my first classroom at Central California Women’s Facility, the world’s largest female prison, I saw a packed room of women sitting up straight each with a stack of books in their laps and a gleam in their eyes transformed from prisoners to students.

    My opportunity to bear witness to this capacity of human beings to strive for some immeasurable good in the face of the most repressive of circumstances changed my life. Through all I’ve beheld, including men and women living in over heated or freezing tiny cells and humans in upright cages, and all the stories I’ve heard about beatings and murder by guards and people wearing only boxer shorts in driving bitter rain forced to spend hours in cages, and the sheer callousness I’ve seen displayed by the custodial and service staff to the men and women forced to abide by their dehumanizing rules, I remain steadfast in my conviction that these men and women have an indomitable will and the ability to rise up against their oppressors.

    A recent interview with Nube Brown, a leading member of California Prison Focus and facilitator for Liberate the Caged Voices explains how working with prisoners inside the system should go beyond simple reforms [27]: “we have to do that work on the road to abolition. I don’t consider that reform. It’s what they are asking for on the inside. It’s not something that you do, it’s the place that you land. It’s not about reform but about building.”

    Prison abolitionists are right to draw such conclusions about the potential of real human beings’ ability to win through struggle rather than waiting for some “emergent institution.”[28] The only practical solution is to build an abolitionist movement within the struggles to win prison reforms. In doing so, activist will finally tear down America’ racist prison system brick by brick and free those who reside in its cages once and for all. The main task of socialists today should be to help link prison reform movements to a broader anti-racist movement that exposes the lie of the United States as the standard-bearer of democracy and fights to end the capitalist society that gave birth to such hypocrisy in the first place.

    Notes

    [1] Angela Yvonne Davis. Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003).

    [2] The First Step Act is a refinement rather than a reform of Federal prisons. It is divided into six Titles I. Recidivism Reduction; II. Bureau of Prisons Secure Firearms Storage; III. Restraints of Pregnant Prisoners Prohibited; IV. Sentencing Reform; V. Reauthorization of Second Chance Act of 2007; and VI. Miscellaneous Criminal Justice. That include, prohibition of anything but temporary juvenile solitary confinement; important data collection on solitary confinement, pregnant women, and medical care, treatment for opioid and heroin; notification to families and partners of the terminally ill and/or mental incapacity to apply for sentence reduction; compassionate release; home confinement for low risk prisoners; and transfers closer to families. The act does not offer sentencing reform but does reduce Life without Parole sentences to 25 to life.

    [3] A Bureau of Justice Statistics study from 2005 to 2010 about two-thirds (67.8 percent) of released prisoners were arrested for a new crime within 3 years, and three-quarters (76.6 percent) were arrested within 5 years, compared to BJS study from 2009 to 2014, when an estimated 68 percent of released prisoners were arrested within 3 years, 79 percent within 6 years, and 83 percent within 9 years. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2005, 2017, May 23, 2018.

    [4] The Three Strikes Law, first introduced in California in 1994, impose harsher sentences after someone has been convicted of certain felonies three times. In a notorious case in 1996, a California man with prior convictions for robbery and attempted robbery was given 25 years in prison for stealing a slice of pizza.

    [5] Manning Marable, “Racism, prisons, and the Future of Black America,” ZNet Daily Commentaries, August 31, 2000, at www.zmag.org.

    [vi] Phil Gasper, “Cruel and unusual punishment: Politics of crime in the U.S.,” International Socialist Review, Spring 1995, 65.

    [7] William J. Chambliss. “Misperceptions of Crime,” introduction, Power, Politics, and Crime (Colorado: Westview Press, 1999), 7.

    [8] See Marc Mauer (The Sentencing Project), Race to Incarcerate (New York: New Press, 1999).

    [9] Joseph T. Hallinan, Going up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation (New York: Random House, 2003), 40.

    [10] Michelle Alexander. The New Jim Crow, 186.

    [11] Paul D’Amato. “They Divide Both to Conquer Each,” International Socialist Review, March 22, 2002.

    [12] Clarence Darrow. Crime and Criminals: Address to the Prisoners in the Cook County Jail & Other Writings on Crime & Punishment (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, Clarence Darrow 2000), 15, 16.

    [13] Bureau of Justice Statistics.

    [14] Peter Wagner and Wendy Sawyer. “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie.” Prison Policy Initiative, March 14, 2018.

    [15] Alysia Santo, “What Kalief Browder’s Mother Thinks Should Happen to Rikers,” The Marshall Project, February 17, 2016, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/02/17/what-kalief-browder-s-mother-thinks-should-happen-to-rikers.

    [16] Eli Hager. “Ending Solitary for Juveniles: A Goal Grows Closer.” The Marshall Project, August 1, 2017.

    [17] Natalie Chang. “This Is Solitary.” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/spike/this-is-solitary/1245/.

    [18] Wendy Sawyer. “Youth Confinement: The Whole Pie.” Press Release, Prison Policy Initiative, February 27, 2018.

    [19] Angela Davis. “The Challenge of Prison Abolition: A Conversation,” https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/davisinterview.html.

    [20] Angela Y. Davis. “The Challenge of Prison Abolition: A Conversation.”

    [21] Roger Lancaster, “How to End Mass Incarceration,” Jacobin Magazine, August 2017, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/mass-incarceration-prison-abolition-policing.

    [22] Angela Y Davis. Are Prisons Obsolete?, 107.

    [23] Angela Y Davis. Are Prisons Obsolete?, Ibid.

    [24] Heather Ann Thompson. Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (New York: Vintage, 2016).

    [25] Ibid., 28.

    [26] Marvin Reeves, Mark Clements, Ronald Kitchen, in collaboration with Stanley Howard. Tortured by Blue: The Chicago Torture Conspiracy (Bloomington: Balboa Press, 2018).

    [27] Nube’s organization is one of many prisoner rights organizations that also fight for abolition and see it as a part of a more systemic problem. California Prison Focus, Critical Resistance, and Common Justice are just a handful of existing organizations.

    [28] Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. From #Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation (Haymarket Books, 2016).

    This article has been updated, 8/17/2020, to correct the spelling of Kalief Browder’s name.

  • Are we at a tipping point? Assessing the US political terrain

    Are we at a tipping point? Assessing the US political terrain

    “Liberal democracy is crumbling.” A Harvard Law Professor opened a recent talk with this matter-of-fact statement and the audience readily murmured its assent.

    The daily headlines certainly seem to confirm this assessment—that we are a nation in crisis. Yet, the nature of the crisis remains murky. While it is clear that in 2016 we witnessed an unprecedented display of shifting political sentiments, it is far less clear what the implications of this shift are.

    There are numerous interpretations floating around. Some argue that the U.S. government has taken an authoritarian turn and that President Trump, through doltishness, design, or both, is sabotaging the functionality of the state, rendering it incapable of carrying out the basic duties of democratic governance. Others focus on the growing sense that ordinary people have lost faith in the government—both in its ability to act in their interests and in the belief that they have a meaningful voice or a place in the demos.

    Has America reached a tipping point in which the contradictions built up over the past three decades have become an insurmountable barrier to the continuation of the post-Cold War neoliberal consensus?

    As a point of comparison consider the triple crisis (economic, social, political) of the 1970s which marked the beginning of a new era for capitalism. Expenditure overruns and stalled productivity combined with skyrocketing inflation and erratic financial flows to generate a situation of severe economic turmoil. The effects of this turmoil on working people, amidst a broader dissatisfaction with the status quo, led to mass strikes and social movement organizing around issues of racism, sexism, colonialism, and consumer rights fomenting a widespread and disruptive social crisis. By the end of the 1970s, the economic and social crises coalesced into a severe political crisis in the United States, encapsulated in Carter’s 1979 ‘crisis of confidence’ speech and an emergent bi-partisan elite consensus to abandon Keynesianism.

    Are we seeing a similar dynamic today? A deep, intersecting crisis generating a chaotic environment that demands resolution from above?

    The situation looks different depending upon where one stands. From the perspective of regular folks struggling against precarity, debt, oppression, and violence a feeling of deep crisis is pervasive. An upsurge of demonstrations around racist police violence, entrenched sexism, gun control, immigrant rights, and a living wage illustrate a growing collective anger over these issues.

    From the perspective of skilled, upwardly mobile workers, elites, and corporations however the situation remains relatively rosy. Nascent social movements and consciousness raising haven’t touched the privileged status of these strata (albeit with a few notable exceptions). Unlike the seventies, when elites were forced to the table and the survival of capitalism seemed in doubt, today’s crisis feels more confined.

    Yet, despite a considerably different landscape of crisis compared to the seventies observers across the spectrum are convinced, as Nancy Fraser argues in an article for American Affairs, that we are in the midst of a “[broad], multifaceted crisis.”

    What are the implications of this widely expressed sentiment? Revisiting our earlier question, have we reached a tipping point similar to the 1970s, despite the absence (for the moment) of an economic crisis or an upsurge of mass social movement organizing demanding resolution from above?

    It depends. If reaching a tipping point means a loss of legitimacy for the status quo and a loss of faith in the reigning elite consensus—neoliberalism—then we have certainly reached it. But if the tipping point means the emergence of a powerful force that compels a response from elites in the form of a new legitimating framework, or a new way of organizing capitalism, then we haven’t yet reached a tipping point.

    Put differently, for the first time in decades a genuine political opening has emerged, but the potential for a progressive movement to generate a new consensus that replaces the reigning elite status quo is deeply uncertain. Shifting sentiments have not yet translated into gains on a broad scale. Moreover, as the recent midterm elections demonstrated, the country is increasingly polarized as the center collapses.

    That said, the passionate mobilizations we’ve witnessed over the past few years—both in organized labor and in broader civil society—are promising and hold the potential to both reform atrophied organizations and to develop powerful new ones. As radical scholars working today argue, there’s no reason the left can’t build strong social movements.

    The challenge in this political moment is, in many respects, the same as it has always been: to translate political discontent into a constellation of radical, democratic, anti-capitalist social movements that represent working people and have the capacity to challenge capital and win. But this challenge is also more urgent than it has ever been.

    This article is adapted from Nicole Aschoff, “America’s Tipping Point? Between Trumpism and a New Left,” Socialist Register 2019: A World Turned Upside Down, edited by Leo Panitch and Greg Albo.

    Originally posted at the Marxist Sociology Blog.

  • Climate, communism and the Age of Affluence?

    Climate, communism and the Age of Affluence?

    Aaron Bastani
    Fully Automated Luxury Communism
    Verso Books, 2019.

    Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC) was a slogan in search of a movement, and now it has its manifesto. The aim: to accelerate capitalism’s positives (technological progress), curb its negatives (neoliberal globalisation), and to re-invent communism for the coming Age of Affluence.

    Aaron Bastani’s overriding concern is climate breakdown. Anything over a 2°C rise “could be cataclysmic, creating a cascade of feedbacks” that would accelerate global heating and the sixth mass extinction. The glaciers that provide drinking water for billions are evaporating, nine-tenths of the largest fish in the oceans have disappeared, and soils are suffering from industrial farming and salination.

    Although “humanity’s rise” was built on agriculture and on our “unique ability to reprogram the gifts of nature,” the planet’s natural limits are now being trampled with such violence that the prospect of human extinction begins to appear plausible. Our present course is worse than inaction. It is “rushing full speed to oblivion”. We have a window of ten or twenty years.

    How does Bastani propose we use that window? For starters, we need to recognise that it’s “the meat and dairy consumption typical to diets of the Global North which have us living beyond our ecological means”. Animal products are a “highly inefficient way of using finite resources to produce food”. Ideally, we should completely eliminate them from our diets.

    But even as this recognition dawns, the solution is arriving, in the shape of lab-grown meat, eggs and dairy products. This is the next glittering chapter of the Green Revolution, that “most important achievement of the last sixty years”, and one that enabled us to see that “our mastery of nature could confer almost limitless abundance”.

    The Green Revolutionaries understood “that food is ultimately information” and that “information wants to be free”— ergo, food wants to be free. Their successors are making the revolution permanent. Thanks to such salivatingly named companies as Finless Foods, Memphis Meats and Impossible Foods we can look forward to “using a 3D printer to ‘print’ steaks, bacon rashers or even a leg of lamb”.

    ‘Like a music video’

    In bypassing the animal’s whole-body processes, the shift to synthetic animal products will, notwithstanding the soy inputs required, enable savings in land use and labour. Yet, the overall energy inputs could be higher than in today’s industrial agriculture, warns Bastani. He may be right. Methane emissions would fall but CO2 emissions could even rise.

    But even as the vats fill with tissue-engineered proteins, the solution has arrived, in the form of ever cheaper and exponentially more abundant renewable energy.

    Driven by a “tendency to extreme supply”, Bastani foresees “the end of energy scarcity altogether”. Thanks to the internet of things, “in just a few years saving energy—in your home, car and workplace—will be entirely automated”. The fulcrum of the renewables revolution will be our four-wheeled friends. “Cars won’t just be data processors on wheels, they’ll be giant portable batteries.”

    With the exponential ramping up of wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles and batteries, Bastani recognises that the supply of such minerals as nickel, zinc, copper, lithium, platinum and rare earth metals —will ”quickly become strained”.

    But even as the minerals-guzzling drive to a low-carbon economy revs up, the solution is arriving, in the shape of Elon Musk’s SpaceX setting sail for the asteroids. Of those big ball bearings in the heavens, Bastani’s telescope settles on one that gleams especially bright: 16 Psyche.

    Suspended midway between Mars and Jupiter, 16 Psyche consists of iron, nickel and copper, with gold and platinum too. Its iron alone could be worth $10 quintillion, and if you scoop up a bunch of other asteroids their combined mineral wealth, “if equally divided among every person on Earth, would add up to more than $100 billion each.”

    From this he concludes that “under FALC, we will see more of the world than ever before … and lead lives equivalent, if we wish, to those of today’s billionaires”. Luxury communism indeed, and awash with glamour. “Yes, when you’re relaxing,” FALC “will look like a music video”.

    Now, how can we get our pickaxes into Psyche? A NASA mission may be launched in 2022 and, courtesy of a Mars gravity assist, might reach it by 2026. At some point after that, our guide assures us, Psyche can be harpooned and towed from its current location “into near Earth orbit” where—as soon as a bunch of technological obstacles are overcome—off-world mining can begin in earnest.

    Asteroid mining is the prerequisite for FALC, because without it “the limits of the earth would confine post-capitalism to conditions of abiding scarcity [and] the realm of freedom would remain out of reach.”

    Seizing Psyche will mean “the limits of the earth won’t matter anymore—we’ll mine the sky instead”. Mineral scarcity will cease to thwart our ambitions, and raw materials will become available in “extreme supply”. This is the final link in a chain that will permit humanity “to entirely exceed our present limits”.

    Bastani’s Law

    There is metaphysics in the madness. It’s there in the claim that “information, resources, energy, health, labour and food want to be free”. This axiom is the cornerstone of the manifesto. Let’s call it Bastani’s Law. As he puts it, the “tendency to extreme supply” ensures that “everything will become permanently cheaper.”

    Bastani’s Law permits us to seek techno-fixes to climate collapse — and indeed most other social problems — with a blasé shrug at issues of resource constraint and scalability. What will all the robots be made of? Megatonnes of stardust. What of energy-saving innovations such as the Passivhaus—how much concrete will be poured if the world’s buildings are to be razed and replaced? Psyche will provide.

    If we are to gamble the planet’s future on Bastani’s 10-Year Plan its calculations need to be as hermetic as a cosmonaut’s suit. But they are nothing of the sort. The grasp of climate science—including current CO2 levels, and estimates of future heating—is wobbly, as is the claim that energy consumption is in secular decline in the world’s richest countries.

    When highlighting a recent fall in Britain’s energy use it forgets that this is in large measure an accounting trick, given the massive and rising CO2 imports from China and elsewhere. It proposes, without warrant, that fossil fuel prices will remain high even if demand falls due to renewable alternatives.

    Bastani can declare solar energy to be “Limitless, Clean, Free” only by pretending that no real doubts or debate exist over its EROI, by assuming that it displaces fossil energy rather than adding to it, and neglecting to mention either that there is a real prospect of its price ceasing to fall or that its sharpest cost plunge occurred when manufacturing was shifted to low-wage China — where, given coal-sourced power, the manufacture of photovoltaic panels is carbon-intensive as well as highly polluting.

    Saudi sunlight

    As the title suggests, this is a breathless manifesto. Its descriptions of technologies are gushing. Innovations are “dizzying”, progress is “exponential”. Plaudits are showered on any firm or state that has invested in solar photovoltaics, lab-grown meat, or asteroid mining.

    Without hesitation or irony, Saudi Arabia is extolled for its solar-energy plans. They demonstrate “precisely the scale and ambition that is needed to move the world beyond fossil fuels by 2040″.

    With a steady patter of quotes from CEOs, the tone is often less manifesto than marketing brochure for SpaceX and other “disruptive” corporations. We are whisked from one marvellous fact or promise to the next. New medical technologies could “spell the end of age-related and inherited illness altogether”, rockets can be 3D-printed using “lasers that melt a steady stream of aluminium wire into liquid metal”, and so on.

    Such gadgets may be cutting-edge but the tune is old. We hear the same notes as in Erasmus Darwin in the eighteenth century, Charles Babbage and John Ramsay McCulloch in the nineteenth, and we might almost hear Lenin’s adage—Communism is “Soviet power plus electrification”— except that in this manifesto the pylons are towering, the rest is secondary.

    Back to the Future Shock

    New tech isn’t just a source of awed admiration for Bastani, but the heartbeat of history, the wellspring of the great “disruptions” that drive progress. He identifies critical moments of disruption in which changing technology sparked social transformation.

    Thanks to settled agriculture, humans accumulated surplus, began to cooperate in complex ways, asserted mastery over all other creatures, and began, “for the first time in their existence, to think about the future and make plans”.

    Thanks to the printing press, Martin Luther and the Reformation triumphed. Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, the power of fossil fuels was unleashed, catapulting humanity to our present state of potential abundance. And now, with IT, we see exponentially accelerating progress in the “cost of collecting, processing, storing and distributing digital information”, leading to extreme supply and “making possible the Third Disruption”.

    It’s a remarkably Whiggish account. It overlooks the dark side of the Neolithic revolution. It notes only in passing that transformed social relations preceded the Industrial Revolution. The leaps in productivity and cheapening costs over which Bastani effuses were enabled as much by imperialist land grabs and by altered organisations of production, often with the aim of disciplining and controlling workers, as by new technologies per se.

    Bastani’s analysis of the three disruptions and the role of IT rehashes mid-twentieth century prophesies of the post-industrial order. It bears clear resemblances to Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s Future Shock, but Bastani draws especially on another prophet from the same era, the business guru Peter Drucker.

    Drucker, having come to see that information “had become the primary factor of production” and was supplanting the traditional factors (labour, land and capital), then, in the 1990s, noticed that the economy had entered not merely a post-industrial but a “post-capitalist” phase.

    Yet neither Drucker nor earlier prophets of post-capitalism (Bastani mentions Marx and Keynes) could foresee how the new information-based “mode of production would stitch itself into the fabric of the present.”

    The genius who grasped that needlework was the neoliberal economist Paul Romer. His insight was that technological change is in essence immaterial: it amounts to “nothing more than an upgraded re-arrangement of previous information.” It follows that the most valuable input into commodities today, information, is “capable of infinite replication at near zero cost”.

    From this Romerian yarn, Bastani spins his central thesis: the supply of resources under capitalism tends to infinity. But, he adds, in a departure from Romer, the gains won’t translate into fully democratic luxury under capitalist conditions. If there is one single shortcoming in capitalism it is “its inability to accept natural abundance” and to allow prices to fall as far as they should. Unlocking that cornucopia requires an automated communist cosmos.

    Hand-mill, steam-mill, asteroid mines

    If the FALC manifesto is idiosyncratic, it is because it splices the ideas of Romer and Drucker—and Keynes—together with those of Marx and Engels. Drucker and Keynes, it asserts, shared Marx’s prognosis of “how capitalism might lead to a system beyond it”. It’s a conclusion that Bastani can reach by reducing Marx’s work to a few crude motifs, almost all taken from his early work or from a brief fragment of the Grundrisse.

    Through Bastani’s ventriloquism, Marx is a technological determinist. Tools and inventions are the active agent in history, ushering humanity from one “paradigm” to the next. Each “economic foundation” gives rise to its own “superstructure”: the hand-mill gives you feudalism, the steam-mill gives you capitalism, asteroid mining gives you FALC.

    Technological change in capitalism is especially progressive, for in the continual substitution of machines for labour (both “animal and human”), capital “undermines labour as the central factor of production” until we reach the present day when capital, embodied in AI, itself “becomes labour”.

    The economic consequences are, first, “that the role of humans as the most important factor of production,” and the creator of value, “is bound to diminish”, and, second, a tendency to “ever cheaper and more efficient ways of producing commodities” and ceaseless improvements in the “goods and services available to consumers”.

    With this, Bastani arrives at capitalism’s fundamental contradiction: competition drives down the price of the key factor of production, information, but in so doing it cuts off the fuel supply—profits—to the capitalist engine.

    Capitalism is “a force of potential liberation”. Its record was “impressive” right up until the early 1980s, but then, with the advent of the neoliberal era (and the birth of the prophet of FALC), it all turned south. Today, capitalism is disintegrating, for it is incompatible with the digital revolution it has unleashed. (Those familiar with Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism or Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ Inventing the Future will hear the echoes.)

    Critique of political economy

    All this makes a caricature of Marx. In the FALC manifesto, there is little need for a critical analysis of capitalist social relations—Marx’s project—because communism will arrive automatically, through the acceleration of the logic of capitalist production, backed by state power.

    Bastani’s framing of capitalism as a delivery machine of ever-cheaper goods is rooted in the conceptual paradigms of bourgeois political economy, of which much of Marx’s life’s work was a critique. Marx slammed the ‘factors of production’ approach to economics to which Bastani subscribes, and whereas Bastani hails capitalism as profoundly progressive, Marx was ambivalent.

    Marx didn’t share Bastani’s belief that businesses are systematically driven to improve goods and services, and while, yes, there is in capitalism a systematic drive to reduce production costs, it relentlessly displaces other costs (‘externalities’) onto people and nature.

    Nor did he conflate technology with the “economic foundation,” extracting it from the complexity of social life and attributing to it unlimited powers, as does Bastani. Capital, for Marx, is a social relation. It does not “become” labour; and knowledge and information are not separated out as a value-yielding “factor of production” that supplants labour.

    Labour itself is not simply a factor of production, but the connecting tissue of social life: the agent of humanity’s metabolic interaction with nature, and of our collective life-making, but at the same time a commodified force that is exploited and put to work by capital.

    From the ensuing contradictions (exchange value versus use value) flow Marx’s analysis of class struggle and the labour movement, terms that are pivotal to the Communist Manifesto but are mentioned only in passing in the FALC Manifesto—and even then, with the stipulation that movements must not seek “to turn down the volume on modernity”.

    Whiggish urges

    In short: this is an entertaining but absurd book. It is quaint in its belief that its advocacy of a “disruptive green industrial policy” is in any meaningful sense radical—when this has already become the standard patter of international governmental organisations such as UNEP.

    Its alloying of a Whiggish ideology of technological progress with a recognition of impending ecological disaster, and of an excoriation of neoliberalism with tech boosterism, give it a distinctive flavour. It will be seen as a cousin to other tomes of technophilic socialism, such as Inventing the Future.

    Indeed the alikeness of Bastani’s central slogans—Full Automation and Universal Basic Services (UBS)—and Williams and Srnicek’s Full Automation and Universal Basic Income is hard to miss. But Bastani’s book differs in taking environmental crisis seriously, and in disavowing the dogmatic antipathy to “localism” that defines the Williams-Srnicek mission. His arguments for economic “re-localisation”, at least of finance and of workplace ownership, and for UBS, are well made.

    In closing, we may ask why this matters. First, Bastani’s book represents a new iteration of the view, propounded in different ways by theorists from Kautsky to Negri and Mason, that irresistible technological/economic forces lead inevitably to the dissolution of the capitalist system, and moreover that it is, behind everyone’s back, already ending. It’s a sanguine, ‘ever-upwards’ cast of determinist thought that, with its optimism of the intellect and pessimism of the will, can justify strategic inaction.

    Secondly, Britain’s Labour Party is calling for a Green Industrial Revolution but what sort of revolution will it be? Should it be from below, “built from the ground up,” as some Labour members have argued? Or will it continue the project of the Industrial Revolution and the Green Revolution, potentially a bonanza for capital but at an exorbitant ecological and social cost?

    Thirdly, in championing automation as the decisive and dynamic ingredient of social progress, Bastani is reproducing what Alf Hornborg identifies as the “central fetish of industrial capitalism”. For capital, technology is the only solution — and it is one that promises profits. The FALC manifesto peddles the nostrum that technology will save the planet — arguably the greatest delusion of our times. The effect of technophilic fantasies is to spread complacency.

    We saw it with BECCS at Paris. Just those three short years ago, BECCS was the wonder tech. The Paris Agreement was built on it. But it was quicksand. Today, it is increasingly apparent that BECCS is unviable at scale. The Paris Agreement is in tatters. Its magic bullet was a promissory note — that salvation lies through burning wood and burying the carbon — but the note was ink on paper, and it is now aflame.

    FALC has been aptly described as “soft science fiction,” an imaginary of magical sustainability that, in its techno-fetishism, bears the stamp of “the same fossil-fuel dependent system that it seeks to criticize”. Bastani may wish to reach to the heavens, to grapple with that scintillating Psyche, but we’d be better off looking for solutions below.

    Originally posted at The Ecologist.

  • Picturing the Revolutionary Mexican Working Class

    Picturing the Revolutionary Mexican Working Class

    Picturing the Proletariat: Artists and Labor in Revolutionary Mexico, 1908-1940.
    John Lear
    Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017, vii + 366 pp
    $29.95 paperback

    Any mention of Mexican art immediately brings to mind the high cultural achievements of two civilizations separated by long centuries. There are the artifacts and constructions of the indigenous peoples, the art of the Aztecs and Mayas that predate the Spanish Conquest. And in our own time, the spectacular murals that are the icons of contemporary  Mexico – particularly the celebrated works of the so-called los tres grandes, Diego Rivera, Jose’ Orozco and David Siqueiros. But if it is the muralists who captured and continue to claim attention and admiration worldwide, there were other types of artistic expression in twentieth century Mexico, less celebrated if no less vital and essential to the advancement  of a radical social movement.

    By the turn of the twentieth century, economic development under the dictatorship of Porforio Diaz had bred an industrial proletariat, an aggrieved peasantry, and an expanded middle class all grown increasingly restless and disaffected under the extended years of his rule. The revolt of 1910 against his regime launched a decades-long social and political revolution that inspired a generation of Mexican artists and illustrators and finally saw the emergence of a national culture of Mexicanidad – a blend of radical ideology and a new-found nationalism. John Lear presents the graphic results of the commingling of art and revolution, the works of artists that displayed, expressed, and encouraged  the radical and revolutionary impulses of the Mexican working class and campesinos at the same time that the artists themselves, largely of middleclass origins, formed themselves into collectives and became increasingly drawn into the front ranks of the popular movement for social change. Lehr notes the contributions of  artists like Luis Arenal, Pablo O’Higgins, Leopoldo Mendez, and a score of others relatively unknown in North America.

    The Mexican Revolution gathered momentum in the same years that war and revolt convulsed Europe, disturbing traditional sensibilities and provoking new and unique styles in the graphic arts – dadaism, expressionism, surrealism…all of these left their imprint  on  the work of Mexico’s’ artistic community in the early twentieth century, even as they illustrated social injustice and celebrated the power of collective action. But unlike developments in the totalitarian states – the reactionary “socialist realism” enforced by Stalin in the Soviet Union, with its twin counterpart in Nazi iconography – the blend of art and politics in Mexico never conformed to any “official” regulation, despite governmental subsidy of so many artistic projects and the artists who produced them. In their work on public displays and in the journals and posters of the Mexican labor movement, Mexican artists and illustrators maintained a general independence of style and expression, ranging from cartoon-like graphics to photo-montage to surreal depictions of social conflict and class solidarity.

    The ascension of Lazaro Cardenas to the presidency in the mid-1930s proved to be the high tide of Mexico’s social revolution. Cardenas took the side of the popular movements and his administration began a program of land reform, extension of labor rights ,the encouragement of cooperatives and finally the expropriation of the foreign owners of Mexico’s oil industry. At the same time the Mexican Communist Party, following directives from Moscow, initiated a Popular Front policy of cooperation with liberal and progressive elements in anti-fascist alliance. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War further raised the political temperature. A reaction typical of Mexican leftists was Arenal’s drawing for the cover of the union periodical Futuro featuring an armed worker-soldier with the caption Mexico no sera’ Espana! (Mexico will not be Spain!) – a warning to right-wing elements.

    At the same time that he carried through policies of social reform, President Cardenas also reorganized and strengthened Mexico’s ruling political party, containing labor and peasant organizations within a corporatist system that would endure under his more conservative successors until the end of the century. Lehr takes note, but does not dwell on the various rivalries and quarrels both within and among Mexico’s labor unions and political organizations, Communist, radical and moderate. The dissident leftist Diego Rivera was expelled from the Mexican Communist Party and became an intimate associate of Leon Trotsky after the Bolshevik leader went into Mexican exile. Trotsky was later assassinated in Mexico City by an agent of Stalin’s secret police. Both Luis Arenal and David Siquerios had personally participated in previous failed attempts on Trotsky’s life.

    Lear’s presents this work along with a plethora of  reproductions, plates and photographs of the art rendered in labor publications, union journals  and public walls, illustrations that carry his narrative as well as the written text. His is a unique study of popular culture in a  society undergoing radical renovation.    

  • To the Arab Readers of “Marx at the Margins”

    To the Arab Readers of “Marx at the Margins”

    I greet with great pleasure the Arabic translation of Marx at the Margins.  As readers will see, the book takes up three intertwined issues within Marx’s thought, all them in relation to capital and the struggle for its transcendence: (1) race, ethnicity and class within a particular nation; (2) nationalism and national emancipation; (3) colonialism and the resistance to it.

    Obviously, I am not the first author to address these issues within Marx’s oeuvre, but I hope to have brought them together in a manner relevant to the second decade of the twenty-first century.  I also hope that my use of little known works and in some cases unpublished notebooks by Marx can shed some new light on old debates.

    Marx is of course a controversial author, but the intensity of those controversies show that he remains a living author, one whose shadow haunts even those of his opponents who claim that his ideas were discredited long ago.

    The most common charge against Marx in scholarly circles remains the notion that he misunderstood the creative power of capitalism, of its “free” market, and that therefore history has passed him by.  This cliché has become increasingly worn since the Great Recession of 2008 discredited neoliberal orthodoxy.

    However, a second charge against Marx in scholarly circles in recent decades has revolved around his supposed neglect of issues like ethnicity, race, nationalism, and even colonialism. One can find this charge in authors whose overall perspective is quite different from one another, for example, the sociologist Anthony Giddens (in his 1987 book The Nation-State and Violence) or the Palestinian-American literary theorist Edward Said (in his 1978 book Orientalism). Given the rising importance of these social issues, such charges against Marx could be devastating, were they correct.

    Marx at the Margins began as a response to those kinds of charges, influenced strongly by the last book of my mentor, Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution (1982). In that book, Dunayevskaya intertwined non-class forms of oppression — around gender, race, ethnicity, and colonialism — with those around capital and class, and did so through a novel and original reading of Marx’s work, especially his late Ethnological Notebooks of 1880-82.  In her reading of Marx, the dialectic was not a closed, monist system, but a living thread that embraced universal human emancipation at the same time that it made room for particularity and difference.

    At no time was this more the case than in Marx’s last years, when he re-thought many of his earlier concepts concerning social development, placing societies outside Western Europe at the center of his concerns, and suggesting that these societies might take the lead in terms of bringing about revolutionary change.  Most notably, he wrote in the 1882 preface to the Communist Manifesto that in agrarian Russia, where capitalist social relations had only begun to appear, the resistance of communally organized villages to this encroachment could, if it linked up to the Western labor movement, become the starting point for a revolutionary transformation on a global level.

    Of course, in his earlier writings of the 1840s and early 1850s, Marx sometimes disparaged Russia, India, China, and other societies outside Western Europe as hopelessly backward and reactionary. But by 1856-57, he and Engels came out strongly in favor of the anti-colonial Sepoy Uprising in India, of Chinese resistance to the British in the Second Opium War, and also noted the growing agrarian unrest in Russia as a harbinger of radical social changes that were sure to come.  From about 1868 onwards, Marx came out against colonialism even more strongly, especially British colonialism in Ireland, at the same time embracing the Irish nationalist cause as never before.  On Ireland, as is discussed in chapter four, he acknowledged explicitly that he had changed his position, that he now saw Irish national emancipation not as something that would be achieved as a byproduct of the ascendancy of British socialist workers, but as the precondition of such an ascendancy.  His very last writings and notebooks suggest that he saw resistance to colonialism and to capitalist encroachment as a very significant factor in global politics and economics, not only in Ireland, but also in Russia, India, Indonesia, and North Africa.

    It is important to note that these themes – and these changes — can be found not only in Marx’s journalism, letters, and notebooks, but also in his core economic writings, from the 1857-58 Grundrisse to the various editions of Capital I that he personally prepared for the printer, the German editions of 1867 and 1873, and the French edition of 1872-75.  Moreover, as I argue in chapter five, some of this dialectic was lost in the way that Engels prepared what he considered to be the definitive German edition of Capital I of 1890.

    I have mentioned above Marx’s late notebooks and writings on Russia, India, Indonesia, and North Africa.  His notes on Algeria and North Africa, which cover both Ottoman and French rule, have been discussed before by several authors.  As I note in chapter six, the source for Marx’s notes is anthropologist Maxim Kovalevsky’s book on Communal Property, which covers India, Latin America, and Algeria. Concerning Algeria, Marx’s notes emphasize the extremely violent imposition of French colonialism and the fierce resistance of the Arab and Berber people to this imposition. He also emphasizes the particularly capitalist aspect of that colonialism, which, unlike the Ottoman version, uprooted the old communal agrarian relations in the village.  Here and there, he also shows that French imposition of more hierarchical and fixed property relations diminished women’s power in the villages.  Finally, he notes that the French colonialists were attempting to wipe out Algerian communal property at the same time that, back in France, the bourgeoisie was gripped with fear of another form of communal social relations that had emerged on the basis of the modern labor movement, the Paris Commune of 1871. In this sense, the struggles of French workers and Algerian peasants had a common basis, not as some kind of idealistic abstraction, but as a concrete example of the potential unity of working people across the world against capital.

    What I have tried to do in this book is to bring such notions to the fore, to help us to see a pathway forward in a time of crisis and struggle the world over.  At the level of pure theory, however, I have tried to link together a number of Marx’s writings on ethnicity, race, nationalism, and colonialism.  In bringing these issues together in a single volume, I hope that I have shown Marx as a creative thinker for the twenty-first century.  As we near the celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of his birth, 1818-2018, I hope readers will consider seriously my conclusion that Marx’s thought bears not only on capital and class, but also on a number of issues related to colonialism, ethnicity, race, and nationalism. And while I do not discuss it very much in Marx at the Margins, Marx was also concerned with gender and human emancipation throughout his life, but especially in his late Ethnological Notebooks, as discussed extensively in Heather Brown’s Marx on Gender and the Family (2012). In all these senses, Marx is not a thinker stuck in the nineteenth century, but one very much of and in our time.

    — Los Angeles, July 26, 2017

  • Discrediting Charges of Authoritarianism and Violence-Worship in Marx’s Worldview

    Discrediting Charges of Authoritarianism and Violence-Worship in Marx’s Worldview

    This blog post is based on a presentation on chapters 2 and 8 of Terry Eagleton’s Why Marx Was Right to the Lower Manhattan DSA Branch Political Education meeting, May 14, 2019.

    Milton Berle, the 1950s television comic superstar, had a saying: “If it’s not on the page, it’s not on the stage.” There was a time when I could give stem-winding speeches sans script: those times are gone, so I’ll do this Uncle Miltie’s way.

    Terry Eagleton crushes ten common arguments against Marx and Marxism; we’ll look at just two of them tonight. These are, first, that Marxism fails in practice because every regime claiming a Marxist pedigree has been both authoritarian and an economic disaster. Second, the mantra that the left’s quest for an egalitarian, classless society by nature requires a violent uprising against what is still widely assumed to be a “free world” and where armed struggle at the service of a partisan class interest is the socialists’ main and horrific remedy for ending the glories of “free enterprise” and individual economic mobility.

    Over the next several weeks we’ll highlight and take down other bourgeois criticisms of Marx’s radical critique of “capitalism,” a term that was only coined around the time of the 1848 revolutions, themselves political upheavals that collapsed in a host of European countries. Called “the turning point that failed to turn,” the defeats coincided with an industrial revolution advancing and a bourgeoisie lording over its laboring masses.

    With Eagleton, we aim to show up the arguments of Marx’s critics as puerile, themselves ideological justifications for existing power relations and a serious misreading of its own bourgeois revolutionary history. But I’d urge you to read the whole book, which is a wonder in its capacity to debunk anti-socialist caricatures not only sharply and exhaustively but with grace and humor, too. As one reviewer put it following its publication in 2011, “This book provides a formidable compendium that will be a useful reference for any socialist…At [its heart] is a simple but urgent truth: we need Marx more than ever before.”

    For Eagleton, “Marxism is a critique of capitalism—the most searching, rigorous, comprehensive critique of its kind ever to be launched.” Marx’s critics, Eagleton says “accuse him of being outdated, even as they “champion a capitalism rapidly reverting to Victorian levels of inequality.” What Marx focused on is not so much what a post-capitalist, post-scarcity society would look like—such is impossible to sketch in detail—except to say it will look nothing like a proto-slave-state of the Stalin era USSR. His focus was on what capitalism “bloody in fang and claw” allows, what it disallows and what its own corrosive internal logic leads to. Marx’s proper subject was how the conflict or contradiction between the growing socialization of the mode of production—now a world-straddling system—and its resulting alienation and exploitation of labor harms growing numbers of working-class people, potentially creating not just passive victims but a political response from its own active gravediggers.

    Modern capitalism’s high priests in the media and education extol “free enterprise” and individual economic mobility. They do so regardless of boom and bust in the economy even as disparities between rich and poor grow exponentially on a national and world scale. Marx, on the contrary, stressed the reality of class interests and class struggle as signposts of the system. Capitalism was his subject, socialism the popular resolution of the conflict inherent in capitalism. Rosa Luxemburg added a caveat: the future was a choice of either socialism or barbarism. Since World War II, with the advent of nuclear weapons and the real possibility of an environmental collapse leading to a sixth extinction, we 21st century humans have a good idea of what barbarism (or worse) may look like.

    A branch comrade wrote me that he couldn’t attend today’s session but wanted to share with me his thoughts on tonight’s reading. He wrote in part:

    “Instead of being overly defensive of the past (but also not disavowing it altogether), we should first offer a materialist explanation of why things happened the way they happened; and second, offer a path to socialism in the 21st century that’s more thoughtful and articulate than the Leninist impulse to say “we just need to overthrow this whole thing” as that’s not conducive to organizing. Whether or not there will be a rupture, we should be clear that we want to make structural changes to our economic system in the here and now and that doesn’t necessitate violence.

    There has never been a revolutionary rupture in a bourgeois democracy, and it’s unlikely that we’ll see one soon. But we also need the Berniecrats to pick up a methodology to get a longer view of social liberation (one might call this Marxism).”

    The comrade’s mandate could cover a life’s work, not just one session on two chapters of a solitary book. Let me deal with a bit of his.

    To be fair, Leninists don’t say “we just need to overthrow this whole thing” any more than do reformists say “all that is possible is gradual improvement over the slow course of centuries.” Both statements are more akin to bumper stickers, though that is often how arguments run over beers. What is at stake is differing views on the nature of the state and the role of a radical political party. That is something Eagleton touches on in conceding that Leninism and the “vanguard party” fit the needs of a movement in a backward, authoritarian country but not easily applicable to a western capitalist state with a sizably enfranchised working class, relatively high levels of consumption and a common if repressive bourgeois culture. I’d argue that the vanguard party concept is more flexible than either most Leninists or their critics would have it, and also that in its early instances in the Soviet Union and elsewhere before the Stalinization of the international Communist movement was not only innovative but democratic. But that’s another discussion for another time. Just know that a healthy party requires a healthy movement (one that at least knows the difference between the fight for reforms and “reformism”), a movement that operates not only electorally but substantively as an extraparliamentary force as well. Absent either a party or a real movement of the class, the other dies on the vine.

    Socialists certainly since Marx’s time never assumed they would be building a classless society in an industrially backward country, where as much as 90 percent of the populations were rural peasants or various degrees of landowners.

    If building socialism in largely agricultural Russia was at first a long shot, it was made nearly impossible by the ravages of World War I, the civil war that followed the world war, and the invasion by foreign armies—included those from Britain and the U.S.—to overthrow the new government. Add to that the failure of revolutions in the West to come to the aid of Russia—particularly in Germany, where the left was a growing force and numerous cities weathered general strikes, only to be undone by the right-wing socialist government and its ex-military allies. The result for Russia was as Eagleton says:

    “Building up an economy from very low levels is a backbreaking task. It is unlikely that men and women will freely submit to the hardships it involves. So unless this project is executed gradually, under democratic control and in accordance with socialist values, an authoritarian state may step in and force its citizens to do what they are reluctant to undertake voluntarily. The militarization of labor in Bolshevik Russia is a case in point. The result, in a grisly irony, will be to undermine the political superstructure of socialism (popular democracy, general self-government) in the very attempt to build up its economic base. It would be like being invited to a party only to discover that you had not only to bake the cakes and brew the beer but to dig the foundations and lay the floorboards. There wouldn’t be much time to enjoy yourself…It is not that the building of socialism cannot be begun in deprived conditions. It is that without material resources it would tend to twist into the monstrous caricature of socialism known as Stalinism.”

    Now—what about the issue of violence?

    As Eagleton makes clear, battling for structural changes in the here and now does not of necessity entail violence, but the push-back against those changes by the ruling class and its permanent government elite is itself often homicidal, based less on real threats than on perceived ones.

    For example, the nonviolent strike of the American Railway Union in 1894, led by Eugene Debs, was violently crushed by the U.S. Army under orders from Democratic Party President Grover Cleveland. The use of federal troops as strike breakers was made under the false claim that it was protecting the distribution of the U.S. mail, when in fact mail delivery was not being restricted, only passenger service. The attacks anticipated what an insurgent underclass might do, rather than what it was prepared to do, or did.

    At other times armed deputies murdered copper miners and their families at a peaceful encampment in Colorado in 1914. American Legion thugs under the watchful eyes of local police raided Socialist Party meetings after the armistice of 1919. The response of Southern racists to the nonviolent integration sit-ins of the 1960s was murderous, often done by police.

    Who can forget the Nixon administration and Henry Kissinger’s complicity in the murder of Chile’s Salvador Allende and the crushing of his moderate social democratic government? Let’s not turn a blind eye to the slaughter in 1871 of the Paris communards by the forces of order either.

    Add the efforts of the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro following the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, orchestrated by the Kennedy Brothers (as we now know thanks to research by reporter Seymour Hersh), along with the CIA’s success in murdering both Vietnam’s failing U.S. stooge Diem and the Congo’s anti-imperialist Lumumba, and it should be clear that violence is the option the ruling class takes when needs must. Often, it’s not even the last option, just the most convenient. They do it because they can.

    By comparison, left violence is scanty, reserved for the occasional anarchist incident, defended as “the propaganda of the deed” and exemplified in the classic line of a French anarchist justifying why he bombed a crèche serving upper class children. He said because “the bourgeoisie are never innocent.” Then there were the brief adventurist infatuations of the Weathermen in the U.S. or the Baider-Meinhoff Gang in Germany some 50 years ago. Hardly a tradition, let alone something we Marxists need to take responsibility for.

    And where the left has used force, its reasons are justifiable and need no excuses. In Britain, the battle of Cable Street in 1936 in East London was a clash between a broad section of the left, including Jewish workers, against a provocative march by the British Union of Fascists into the Jewish area. The fascists, soon routed, were at first protected by the police, and hundreds of counter demonstrators were brutalized by baton-wielding, horse-riding peelers. It is one of a number of international examples of working-class physical resistance to fascism, though rare in terms of left practice and nothing to apologize for. Eagleton doesn’t mention it. I think he should, and proudly.

    But what he does mention is worth knowing. He uses history to make the point that revolution and the resort to insurrection is hardly a tenet of the left alone. Eagleton notes how the British to this day don’t regret the violence of their own 17th century uprising. They barely acknowledge it as anything but heroic. As he writes:

    “Successful revolutions are those which end up erasing all traces of themselves. In doing so, they make the situation they struggle to bring about entirely natural. In this they are a bit like childbirth. To operate as normal human beings, we have to forget the endless anguish and terror of our birth. Origins are usually traumatic whether as individuals or political states. Marx reminds us in Capital that the modern British state built on the intensive exploitation of peasants-turned-proletarians came into existence dripping blood and dirt from every pour. This is one reason why he would have been horrified to observe Stalin’s forced urbanization of the Russian peasantry. Most political states came about through revolution, invasion, occupation, usurpation or in the case of societies like the United States, extermination. Successful states are those that have managed to wipe this bloody history from the minds of their citizens. States whose unjust origins are too recent for this to be possible—Israel and Ireland for example—are likely to be plagued with political conflict…So would it not be more honest to come clean and confess that it is socialist revolution one objects to, not revolution itself?”

    There is one point I wish Eagleton were sharper on, perhaps because it so bedevils strategic thinking in the United States. It deals with what constitutes class unity, expressed well in Kim Moody’s essay The Rank and File Strategy, which has become a key text for the DSA Labor Branch, DSA’s Labor Commission and for those of us who see union organizing and workplace agitation by socialists as key to our work. Moody writes:

    We want to make it clear that we do not proceed from some faceless, raceless, neutered idea of the working class. We endorse the thoughts of the Caribbean revolutionary Aimé Césaire who rejected the crude Stalinist version of class “universality” held by the French Communist Party when he resigned in 1955. In his resignation letter he wrote, “I have a different idea of a universal. It is a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particularities there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.” Nowhere does diversity shape the particularities of the working class more than in the U.S. Nowhere is this diversity more central to the divisions, diversions, and strengths experienced by working-class people in different ways. Nowhere do working-class people see themselves and one another in such different, usually distorted, ways.

    Picking up from this, a recent essay by a Suffolk County DSA activist, writing under the aegis of Build, one more of the numerous up-sprung DSA caucuses I honestly know little about, nevertheless argued something interesting in this light.

    The author called for what he termed “unity in diversity,” or “unifying the working class through particulars.” He writes

    “This unity in diversity cannot be accomplished through the universalism of class-only demands, but only through the true universalism of full-class demands. Whereas class-only demands seek flat solutions to the problems of working-class life, full-class demands understand that to fully express the needs of the total working class, particular needs must be addressed. Organizing at the intersection of multiple burdens within the working class is of supreme importance for a full-class politics.

    …The more effective at unifying the working class across and through particulars, the more likely that socialists can actually produce a universal working class capable of defeating capitalism. There cannot be a world of “proletarians and capitalists” if the proletarians are divided by social domination and bigotry. There can be no papering over of these divisions either. They are not merely ideas in our minds, but matters of material.”

    I don’t cite this as evidence that we ought to sign up for this new caucus willy-nilly or accept any variant of identity politics without reservation. Taking this argument at face value also doesn’t allow a free ride for masking or encouraging careerist opportunism, as for instance the wannabe Democratic Party leader in my neighborhood who smoked like a furnace all her life while loudly proclaiming smokers’ rights. The moment she was diagnosed with emphysema she demanded slating on her party’s delegate list as a differentially abled person.

    Putting such personally enriching ploys aside, the notion of an expanded vision of organizing all parts of the working class on their particulars is a telling point, worth exploring at length and something missing even in discussions of intersectionality, which are often framed in non-class terms.

    Remember, too, that we face an uncertain and highly problematic future. What Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci wrote so presciently from his prison cell some 90 years ago is still true and haunting, that “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

    Morbid times or not, it’s good to have a mentor such as Eagleton among us. Those of you who did the reading know how good is his work on Marx. And if you haven’t read it yet, you are in for a treat.

  • The State of the Sudanese & Algerian Uprisings: Livestream Event, June 1

    The State of the Sudanese & Algerian Uprisings: Livestream Event, June 1

    Saturday, June 1, 2019
    TIMES for Livestreamed Panel:

    12 PM United States Eastern Time (NYC)
    5 PM London Time
    6 PM Geneva / Khartoum

    Today in Sudan and Algeria, people’s uprisings that broke out this past winter have won momentous victories for the first time since the start of the 2011 Revolutions, overthrowing the heads of the regimes in both countries. But the people have vowed to go beyond the overthrow of their dictators, to take down the entire structure of the old regimes and replace them with governments that represent the people. They have also been working diligently to avoid the same mistakes as in Egypt and Syria, where the counterrevolution came to dominate by 2013 through the fracturing of peaceful protest and the large-scale acceptance of a military coup in Egypt.

    What sparked these latest uprisings, and what has made them so successful thus far? What are the balance of forces today in Algeria and Sudan? And what has changed since 2011 that may allow for a different outcome than the bleak reality we have seen across the Middle East for the past six years? What has been the role of women fighting patriarchy? What is the anti-racist dimension of these struggles, especially concerning solidarity with the victims of genocide in Darfur? How are labor unions involved? What role does the opposition to capitalism play in these uprisings? What kind of international solidarity is needed?

    SPEAKERS:

    Dr. Hamza Hamouchene is a London-based Algerian scholar-activist, commentator, researcher, and a founding member of Algeria Solidarity Campaign (ASC), and Environmental Justice North Africa (EJNA). He previously worked for War on Want, Global Justice Now and Platform London on issues of extractivism, resources, land and food sovereignty as well as climate, environmental, and trade justice. He is the author/editor of two books: The Struggle for Energy Democracy in the Maghreb (2017) and The Coming Revolution to North Africa: The Struggle for Climate Justice (2015). He also contributed book chapters to Voices of Liberation: Frantz Fanon (2014) and The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism (2016). His other writings have appeared in the Guardian, Middle East Eye, Counterpunch, New Internationalist, Jadaliyya, OpenDemocracy, Pambazuka, Nawaat, El Watan and the Huffington Post.

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

    Adam Baher is a Sudanese human rights activist based in Berlin, Germany. He is a member of Justice Equality Movement Sudan (JEM).

    Selma Oumari is a member of the New Anticapitalist Party in France, involved in anti-racist struggles as well as international solidarity.

    Link will be posted as soon as it is available.

    https://www.facebook.com/events/480716339335584/

    TIMES for Livestreamed Panel:
    12 PM United States Eastern Time (NYC)
    5 PM London Time
    6 PM Geneva / Khartoum

    Co-sponsored by:
    al-Manshour
    Alliance of Middle Eastern Socialists
    Socialism Conference

    ندوة: بث حي: ١٢ ظهرًا بتوقيت نيويورك // ٥ مساءً بتوقيت لندن // ٦ مساءً بتوقيت الخرطوم

    لأول مرة منذ بدايات ثورات ٢٠١١، سجّلت الانتفاضات الشعبية التي اندلعت في الشتاء الماضي في السودان والخرطوم انتصارات مهمّة أطاحت برأسي النظام في البلدين. لكن الناس قرروا المضي أبعد من مجرّد إسقاط الدكتاتور، مطالبين بتفكيك كامل هيكل النظام القديم واستبداله بحكم يمثّل الشعب، ومصرّين على تجنّب أخطاء مصر وسوريا، حيث سيطرت الثورة المضادة بحلول ٢٠١٣ من خلال كسر الاحتجاجات السلمية والوصول إلى قبول واسع باالانقلاب العسكري في مصر.

    فما هي الشرارة التي أطلقت الانتفاضات الأخيرة؟ وما سرّ نجاحها حتى الآن؟ ما هي موازن القوى اليوم في الجزائر والسودان؟ وما الذي تغيّر منذ ٢٠١١ والذي قد يؤدّي إلى نتيجة مختلفة عن الواقع القاتم الذي تشهده منطقة الشرق الأوسط في السنوات الـ٦ الأخيرة؟

    يستضيف البث الحي ٤ متحدثين/ات (٢ من الجزائر و٢ من السودان) في ١ حزيران/يونيو للإجابة عن هذه الأسئلة وغيرها.

    حمزة حموشين، كاتب وباحث وعضو مؤسس في “حملة التضامن مع الجزائر في لندن” وفي منظمة “العدالة البيئية في شمال أفريقيا”.

    سارة عبّاس، طالبة دكتوراه في العلوم السياسية في كلية الدراسات العليا للثقافات والمجتمعات الإسلامية في برلين.

    من تنظيم:

    المنشور
    تحالف الاشتراكيين في الشرق الأوسط

    Originally posted at the Alliance of Middle Eastern Socialists website.

  • The Green New Deal: Realistic Proposal or Fantasy?

    The Green New Deal: Realistic Proposal or Fantasy?

    The Green New Deal (GND), drawn up by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey, is the most ambitious and comprehensive program to deal with climate change ever made by political representatives to Congress and the U.S. public. It calls for making dramatic changes within the next ten years to end our reliance on fossil fuels that are warming the planet at an alarming rate. But it is not only about curbing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions: it is most of all a proposal to set us on a path of creating an ecologically sustainable society.

    The GND lays out seven major proposals for ending U.S. society’s addiction to fossil fuels—the most destructive form of addiction known on this planet:

    • Dramatically expand existing renewable power sources and deploy new production capacity with the goal of meeting 100% of national power demand through renewable sources.
    • Building a national, energy-efficient, “smart” grid.
    • Upgrading every residential and industrial building for state-of-the-art energy efficiency, comfort and safety.
    • Eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing, agricultural and other industries.
    • Eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from transportation and other infrastructure, and upgrading water infrastructure to ensure universal access to clean water.
    • Funding massive investment in the draw-down of greenhouse gases.
    • Making “green” technology, industry, expertise, products and services a major export of the United States, with the aim of becoming the undisputed international leader in helping other countries bringing about a global Green New Deal.[1]

    These seven policy prescriptions are ambitious enough. Yet the GND goes further, by stipulating it “Shall recognize that a national, industrial, economic mobilization of this scope and scale is a historic opportunity to virtually eliminate poverty in the United States and to make prosperity, wealth and economic security available to everyone participating in the transformation.” It spells this out with eight specific proposals:

    • Provide all members of society the opportunity, training and education to be a full and equal participant in the transition, including through a job guarantee program to assure a living wage job to every person who wants one.
    • Diversify local and regional economies to ensure workers have the necessary tools, opportunities, and economic assistance to succeed during the energy transition.
    • Require strong enforcement of labor, workplace safety, and wage standards that recognize the rights of workers to organize and unionize free of coercion, intimidation, and harassment, and creation of meaningful, quality, career employment.
    • Ensure a “just transition” for all workers, low-income communities, communities of color, indigenous communities, rural and urban communities and the front-line communities most affected by climate change, pollution and other environmental harm including by ensuring that local implementation of the transition is led from the community level.
    • Protect and enforce sovereign rights and land rights of tribal nations.
    • Mitigate deeply entrenched racial, regional and gender-based inequalities in income and wealth (including, without limitation, ensuring that federal and other investment will be equitably distributed to historically impoverished, low income, de-industrialized or other marginalized communities).
    • Include measures such as basic income programs, universal health care programs and any others as the select committee may deem appropriate to promote economic security, labor market flexibility and entrepreneurship.
    • Deeply involve national and local labor unions to take a leadership role in the process of job training and worker deployment.

    These eight proposals regarding full employment, universal health care, support for unions and marginalized communities, opposition to racial and gender-based discrimination, etc. may seem, on the surface, to have little to do with the GND’s central aim of radically reducing greenhouse has emissions within the next ten years. But in fact these eight proposals have a great deal to do with the seven that address ending reliance on fossil fuels. They are not some throw away meant to sneak a radical political agenda into an otherwise technical discussion of how to lower CO2 emissions. They are needed to wean U.S. society away from its addiction on fossil fuels.

    Here is why: Climate justice can’t be achieved without changing the structures of U.S. society that make it hard to break from our reliance on fossil fuel. Over 1.4 million Americans directly work for the fossil fuel industry. It makes no sense to propose scaling back and eventually eliminating this industry unless those displaced from it are assured of jobs that pay decent wages and benefits. As Jedediah Britton-Purdy recently put it, “In the twenty-first century, environmental policy is economic policy. Keeping the two separate…is an anachronism.”[2] Moreover, innumerable parts of our society depend on fossil fuel in addition to the gas we put in our cars. This includes building construction, packaging, and agriculture (most pesticides and fertilizers are made from fossil fuels)—even shampoo (yes, almost all of them are oil-based). Just look around you: almost everything, from the plastic tables and chairs to the Formica panels and light fixtures, are by-products of petroleum. These and many more products and the industries that make them will have to be reconfigured to drastically reduce CO2 emissions. Clearly, this cannot be done unless there is buy-in from the mass of the U.S. public—which needs affordable housing, health care, free education, and the elimination of racial and gender-based policies that maintain the status quo instead of fostering the common good. In sum, global warming is a social justice issue. If we don’t address the social injustice that is the main condition for the possibility and even the necessity of the addiction to fossil fuels, we are left without an approach to making even a dent in the problem.

    This is already obvious from some recent events. In France, Macron’s government imposed a carbon-tax on gasoline as part of its effort to meet the international accords reached several years ago to lower greenhouse gas emissions. But it did so at the same time as reducing tax rates for the rich and cutting social programs. As a result, the Yellow Vest movement arose, initially united around a demand that the gasoline tax be revoked (their demands have have since exceeded that). It isn’t that they don’t care about global warming—many participating in the protests are farmers who see evidence of it every day. But they don’t want those already subjected to austerity measures and social marginalization to be the only ones to pay the cost of redressing climate change.

    It is one of the virtues of the GND that it doesn’t include a carbon tax in its lists of proposals. The aim should not be imposing regressive taxes on the consumption of fossil fuels but rather restricting their production through a comprehensive program that can transition U.S. society from its currently ecologically unsustainable energy policies.

    Although the GND does not mention how much it will cost to achieve this transition, it will clearly cost trillions of dollars. Is spending that much realistic or an utter fantasy? It is surely necessary, given that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently reported that we have 12 years to transform the global economy away from fossil fuels it we expect a livable climate for human beings. Twelve years! The clock is ticking and we cannot wait until the effects of global warming become so dire as to be irreversible. Moreover, the trillions that it will cost to transition from carbon-based to sustainable energy systems pales in comparison with the many trillions more that will have to be spent dealing with mass migrations, loss of habitats and farmland, and the need to rebuild entire cities and even countries as sea levels inundate coastal areas. It is worth keeping in mind that the global energy infrastructure is today worth $30 to $40 trillion and turns over every three or four decades. That’s a huge sum of money needed just to reproduce the carbon-based energy infrastructure we already have. Why not spend a commensurate or even greater amount to eliminate it altogether with a new system of producing energy, given that the continued use of the one we have now may spell the end of civilization as we have known it?

    For these reasons, the GND is an important starting point for conceiving how to take effective action now to halt and reverse the impact of climate change. But it is only a starting point, since it has its limitations. The problems begin with its name. The Green New Deal obviously harkens back to the New Deal of the 1930s and 1940s, the comprehension program born in response to the Great Depression that produced the modern welfare state. While many praise its beneficial social impact, the New Deal actually did not lift the U.S. out of the Depression. World War II did. By 1944, 70 cents of every dollar spent in the U.S. went to the military. The size and role of the state expanded enormously, enabling the U.S. to marshal the power and resources needed to defeat Nazi Germany and fascist Japan. In doing so, the New Deal introduced important legislation that improved the lives of much of the populace, especially workers, and including African Americans (which is one reason Blacks switched their long-held allegiance to the Republican Party to the Democrats during the New Deal).

    However, the aim of the New Deal was to save capitalism from collapse—not to transition to a new social order. Here is where the comparison with our situation today ends, since we cannot effectively deal with climate change without transitioning to a new social order. This is because capitalism has been hooked on fossil fuel for over two centuries. It is endemic to the very structure of the capitalist economy. Capitalism is a system defined by the drive to increase monetary wealth, especially in the form of profit, as an end in itself. Every business exists to make a profit; if profit rates for a particular enterprise decline relative to others, it is only a matter of time before it will be driven out of business. Fossil fuels are highly conducive for economies driven by the profit-motive since it packs an enormous amount of energy into a relatively small volume that is easily transportable from one location to another. Capital’s abstractive logic of domination, which seeks to liberate social life from natural spatial determinations for the sake of augmenting value as an end in itself, is almost inexorably drawn to fossil fuels that can be transported anywhere. It is therefore extremely unlikely that it will be possible to wean capitalism off of its addition to fossil fuel without undermining the economic principles that govern it. The GND implicitly points in this direction this, by calling for a series of changes that get in the way of the business-model pursuit of profit (such as its insistence on full employment, paying workers a living wage, providing free health care and education to all citizens, etc.). But this fits uneasily with the model of the New Deal of the 1930s and 1940s, which was trying to save capitalism.

    When the GND was being drafted, Alexandia Ocasio-Cortez initially didn’t want to call it “the Green New Deal,” perhaps for some of these reasons. But others thought it has a catchy ring that would connect with the public. But as a result, most critics as well as supporters of the GND take the phrase literally, by thinking the same principles and policies that drove Roosevelt’s New Deal can save us from the grave threat of climate change today. But there are at least three major problems with this viewpoint.

    The first problem is that is narrows the horizon of the debate over global warming to private interests versus government intervention, or corporations versus the state. Private industries and enterprises operate according to the profit motive. For this reason, it is argued, they lack an incentive to produce goods and servies in an ecologically healthy way. If profit rates can be maintained or increased by using carbon-based fuels, they will use them—unless prevented to do so by some outside force. That outside force is the government or state. Since government is based in the collection and distribution of revenue, it is not driven, many argue, by the profit motive. It has no inherent incentive to produce goods and services in a manner damaging to the environment—at least when it is subject to the needs of the citizenry instead of corporate interests that manipulate it to serve its ends. Since the entire economic model is based on carbon-based emissions, it will take an outside force like the state to compel businesses to act otherwise. And they need to be compelled to act very soon: otherwise, we will reach the tipping point beyond which dealing with global climate change will be outside of our reach.

    Furthermore, the amount of economic resources and political power that even the largest corporate entity can muster, let alone private individuals, is minuscule compared to that of the government. The world’s largest multinational corporation, Apple, has a valuation of $800 billion—far smaller than this year’s Federal Budget of $4.5 trillion (state and local government budgets account for $3.1 trillion more). No private or business interest can match this level of resources. There would never have been a U.S. highway system without government spending (little of it came from private sources); and there would never have been the Internet, personal computers, or smart phones without government spending (the microprocessor was a product of hundreds of billions of dollars devoted to research and development by the Defense Department and NASA). And so it is when it comes to climate change: when it comes to such a huge and complex issue as moving our society away from its addiction to fossil fuels, a massive degree of government intervention in at least some form will be needed.

    There is much to be said for this argument. If we face a 12-year deadline to seriously reduce carbon emissions, it isn’t going to happen by relying on the market or private individuals. Yes, we can take individual steps to reduce our consumption of meat (79% of the land devoted to agriculture in the U.S. is devoted to animal feed, which produces a huge percentage of global greenhouse gas emissions), we can use less plastic when we shop, and we can try to recycle more. But such actions, welcome as they are, cannot stop the impending catastrophe on their own. They are drops in the bucket. As Benjamin Selwyn argues, “What we need, to avert climate catastrophe is a systemic approach to comprehending and transforming the current global economy.”[3]

    However, it is a major mistake to frame such a transformation in terms of uncritically embracing the power of the state. First, governments are readily prone to being used by corporate and oligarchic interests for their own ends. They are not neutral formations devoid of class interests. That has always been the case, but it has never been truer than today. To give but one of many recent examples, the Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizens United has allowed a flood of corporate money—including much from the fossil fuel industry—to shape government policy. Therefore, relying on the state to curb carbon emissions won’t work with the kind of political system we have today; it will instead require a radical transformation of the entire structure of American governance. It will require nothing less than a political revolution in which the U.S. and other countries become genuine social democracies (in the original sense of that term) that serve the needs of its citizens instead of the corporate elites that preside over them. In a word, the goals of the GND require transitioning from the partial and flawed democracy we have today to a genuine or true democracy.

    This is where the comparison of the Green New Deal to the New Deal of the 1930s and 1940s is quite misleading. The New Deal did not transform the structure of American politics; in some respects it further entrenched it. One reflection of this is the way in which Congress passed the New Deal with the support of Southern white segregationists who used it to solidify their power at the expense of African Americans.  Roosevelt’s housing policy, which was a central component of the New Deal, gave federal support to racially segregated housing, which prevented blacks from buying or renting property in many parts of the country. The authors of the GND are aware of this, which is why one of its points calls for “a ‘just transition’ for all workers, low-income communities, communities of color, [and] indigenous communities…” However, far too many supporters of the GND seem to naively presume that such goals can be accomplished with the framework of existing power structures. They assume that the state is more powerful than civil society can ever be. There is no doubt that the state appears to be powerful—even infinitely powerful. However, it is not as powerful as it appears, since it is ultimately dependent on the structures of civil society. Where the latter remain unchanged, the limits of policy changes at the level of the state become evident.

    Second, governments are notoriously bureaucratic institutions that tend to defer, delay, or indefinitely postpone implementing even the most well thought out and valuable plans and initiatives. Whereas private businesses pursue money as an end-in-itself, the state and governments promote bureaucracy as an end-in-itself (obviously this also applies to non-state entities as well, as in academia). One enthusiastic supporter of the GND, the acclaimed labor historian Jeremy Brecher, has become so enthralled of its presumed connection to Roosevelt’s New Deal that he recently proclaimed, “Government initiative is necessary to cut through inertia, bottlenecks, and bureaucratic red tape.”[4] I confess to finding it very strange to call upon government bureaucrats to cut through bureaucratic red tape; it’s sort of like asking the foxes to guard the hen house.

    For these and related reasons, although the Green New Deal quite understandably originated as a legislative initiative, it cannot be allowed to remain one. If it stays as a purely legislative initiative it will die a quick death, since there is very little chance that Congress will approve it anytime in the near future—and none at all so long as Trump is in power, since he cares not a whit for the future of the planet; his only concern is the future of his and his friend’s financial investments. Climate change deniers are so much in love with their pocketbooks that they seem not even to care about the future of their own children; the live by the motto, “after me, the deluge.” However, the barrier to the GND being taken seriously in Congress isn’t limited to Trump or the Republicans, since many congressional Democrats are likewise beholden to big business; a case in point is Nancy Pelosi, who has dismissed the GND as a “green dream.” She is wrong about this; the GND is not a mere fantasy. It sets forth a valuable series of goals that should be actively promoted with as much enthusiasm and force as we can muster. But doing so will require that we take the GND beyond the confines of its legislative origin by advancing aspects of it in our communities, social organizations, and other institutions of civil society. It must become taken up, revised, developed, and radicalized, as part of a mass social movement that is not simply an arm of one or another government agency.

    Third, and most important, confining the response to global warming within the parameters of the dichotomy of private versus government, or market versus state, misses a fundamental determinant: the growth imperative that is endemic to capitalist societies. Since capitalism is based on a drive to increase monetary wealth as an end in itself, capitalist enterprises face a constant urge to grow and expand—regardless of human or natural limits. This is why efforts to control capital (either through legislative initiatives or changing administrative policies or personnel) always prove quixotic: they all rest on the assumption that capital’s growth imperative is generated by the personifications of capital instead of by capital itself. It is not the system’s representatives that drives the growth imperative, but the growth imperative that drives the representatives. The New Deal was a clear expression of this: it aimed to redistribute greater amounts of wealth to workers and the poor as a way to pump up consumer demand as a way to achieve greater economic growth. In other words, government was used as a catalyst to spur greater capital accumulation—and it worked, at least by the time World War II came around. Not surprisingly, however, the New Deal was not aimed at protecting the environment (except when it came to fostering policies of soil conservation, but even there it was with the aim of increasing the productivity of agricultural labor). The GND is a form of ecological Keynesianism, in that it uses the power of the state to redistribute resources from the fossil fuel industry to renewable-energy industries. But it does not address how to slow down, defer, or eliminate capitalism’s growth imperative. On the contrary, it seeks to harness that imperative by using state power to encourage investments in ecological sustainable industries as against ones dominated by fossil fuels.

    That may all seem well and good, but let us not forget that retrofitting every building in the U.S. to become energy efficient—as called for in the GND’s stated goals—will require an awful lot of steel, cement, and yes, petrochemical-based products. It is not so clear that this would not add to the global carbon imprint even as carbon emissions come down in other areas. Moreover, if companies can grow their businesses by earning higher profit rates with materials and technologies that are less environmentally beneficial than others, they are likely to do so. But it is not so obvious that we can blithely assume that the government can be used to block such tendencies, since the state is bound up with the logic of capital in a myriad of ways. An economic as well as political revolution will clearly be needed to wean society away from its capitalistic growth imperative. As Ashley Dawson has recently argued, the goals of the GND often seem at odds with the means that are singled out to achieve them: “Proposals for genuine ecological and social reconstruction, therefore, cannot simply substitute renewable energy for fossil fuels while leaving the current global system of spiraling production and consumption untouched. Instead, the growth based presuppositions of the New Deal and environmental Keynesianism must be challenged. What we really need, in other words, is a crash program to shrink those sectors of the economy that are environmentally destructive, while in tandem sectors that do no environmental damage are expanded.”[5] She adds, “At the end of the day, environmental Keynesianism is predicated on economic expansion; since new growth means that fresh resources need to be exploited, any environmental benefits of more efficient technology and a transition to renewable energy will ultimately be undermined, and the biocrisis will intensify.”

    I should also add that market-based economies based on private ownership of goods and services are not the only ones with a built-in growth imperative. The same was true for statist “communist” regimes, such as the USSR and China, which placed the entire society under the control of the state—while engaging in some of the most egregious ecological destruction of any system in world history. Neither private capitalism nor state-capitalism (both of which are mainly focused on quantitative output, since both adhered to the law of value and surplus value) has succeeded in curbing capitalism’s inherent growth imperative. The world surely needs economic growth and development, but one of a radically different type than has defined modern industrial societies up to this point in time. Leaving this unaddressed poses some major problems when it comes to dealing with global warming. What is making it harder to address this issue at the present moment is the new found love affair many on the Left are currently experiencing with state-directed capital investment.

    As the Indigenous Environmental Network recently stated in emphasizing “the fundamental need to challenge and transform the current dominant political and economic systems that are driving forest destruction, social injustice, and the climate crisis,” “The AOC-Markey platform risks being an exercise in futility and could actually allow for increased emissions and global warming. We demand that fossil fuels be kept underground and that the subsidies and tax breaks that keep the fossil fuel industry viable be shifted towards a clear, grassroots-based Just Transition.”[6]

    So what would such a Just Transition look like? Time is short, and we need effective policies now—we can’t simply wait for capitalism to be overcome to begin promoting them. So what can be done in the short term to meet the goals of the GND and beyond? I would like to conclude here with a modest proposal along these lines.

    As noted, the GND lays out the goal to reduce and ultimately eliminate net carbon emissions within 10 years, and that is all well and good. Building upon but taking the GND further, let’s envision this: Every company and business is required to reduce carbon-based products or CO2 emissions within a specified amount of time. If they fail to do so, say after one year, they face a hefty government penalty. If they fail to meet their targets again, the ownership right of the business is denied to the employers and the government hands over control of it to the employees. Please note that this is not nationalization: the government itself does not take them over, as has occurred in many countries over the last 100 years. The employees take them over and democratically run the company as a cooperative enterprise. Of course, these worker-owned enterprises would also face mandatory restrictions on CO2 emissions and use of carbon-based products. If they fail to meet them, the enterprise is hit with a hefty tax penalty. Since the employees now own the company and there is no separate management or ownership structure—which also means no shareholders of stocks that don’t actually work in the enterprise—the penalty can be paid only through a reduction in the workers’ paychecks. The employees now have a built-in incentive to meet the quotas, since otherwise they will earn less wages and benefits. And since every enterprise in the country is subject to the same stipulations, there is no way to evade the limits on the use of fossil fuel.

    Moreover, since these are worker-owned enterprises, in which the proceeds circulate back to the employees, fetters are placed upon capital’s growth imperative. Workers might use a share of the proceeds to expand the enterprise, but it is just as likely that they will use it to shorten the workweek, provide services to workers, or simply give themselves a raise. Worker-controlled enterprises tend to dampen, at least initially, the profit-driven imperative of capitalist enterprises since they are based on a different imperative—meeting the human needs of its members. However, this becomes hard to sustain if such changes are restricted to a single country, since goods traded on the world market at a lower cost of production will tend to drive worker-owned enterprises out of business. For this reason Karl Marx never believed that socialism could exist in one country. Neither can a viable transition to a carbon-free economy. Since it is a global problem it ultimately needs a global solution. Worker-owned cooperatives and enterprises are great ways to begin to get there, but they are not ends-in-themselves. The ultimate end—assuming we can mitigate climate change to the point of living long enough to get there—is the abolition of value production on a global level.

    Nevertheless, on the national level, an effective transition from a carbon-based productive system could be achieved without relying exclusively on either privately owned or governmental agencies. The government provides the legal mechanism for transferring ownership of the enterprise from the capitalists to the workers, who have the motivation and incentive to care for the environment that the capitalists tend to lack. But the government is not in the driver’s seat when it comes to controlling the overall process. The people themselves do so, through forms of association and organization they forge as members of civil society. A GND of this sort would transition from a carbon-reliant model of energy production and consumption to a sustainable one based on renewal energy by taking what drives the destruction of nature and natural resources—the growth imperative of the logic of capital. Kali Akuno of the Climate Justice Alliance and director of Cooperation Jackson, a Mississippi group that grow out of the Civil Rights Movement, has referred to this as “a solidarity economy anchored by a network of cooperatives and worker-owned, democratically self-managed enterprises.”[7]

    My argument boils down to this: In order to save and preserve what we have in common, the earth, we must transition to a form of society that respects the commons. It is not about passively waiting for such a society to miraculously arise: the commons is already here, although hidden from view by the ideologies and structures of existing society. By fighting to reclaim the commons—which includes not only the land but also the social powers at our disposal to collectively organize our lives without recourse to hierarchical forms of domination—we can transition to a new society, at the same as saving the earth itself. It seems to me that working for this would be worth the effort.

    [1] See “Draft Text for Proposed Addendum to House Rules for the 116th Congress of the United States” [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jxUzp9SZ6-VB-4wSm8sselVMsqWZrSrYpYC9slHKLzo/edit#heading=h.z7x8pz4dydey]

    [2] “The Green New Deal’s Realism,” by Jedehiah Britton-Purdy, The New York Times, February 16, 2019, p. A21.

    [3] Benjamin Selwyn, “The Agro-Food Complex and Climate Change: Veganism or a Green New Deal?” The Bullet, April 5, 2019.

    [4] Jeremy Brecher, “The Green New Deal Can Work—Here’s How,” The Bullet, April 2, 2019.

    [5] Ashley Dawson, “A Greener New Deal?,” New Politics, Vol. 17, No. 2, Winter 2019.

    [6] Indigenous Environmental Network, “Talking Points on the AOC-Markey Green New Deal Resolution.”

    [7] See Kali Akuno, “We Have to Make Sure the ‘Green New Deal’ Doesn’t Become Green Capitalism,” Web Only, December 12, 2018.

  • Interview with Neil Davidson on Brexit: An Excerpt

    Interview with Neil Davidson on Brexit: An Excerpt

    With the recent announcement of Prime Minister Theresa May’s pending resignation, and the general chaos surrounding Brexit and British governance, New Politics has decided to offer a preview of a lengthier article which is to appear in the Summer 2019 print edition. Ashley Smith interviews Neil Davidson about the roots, politics, and trajectory of the battle over Brexit. Davidson is a member of Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st century (rs21) across the UK and RISE within Scotland, and the author of numerous books, including How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? and We Cannot Escape History: States and Revolutions.

    Ashley Smith: The EU just gave a long extension to Brexit negotiations until Halloween to give the British government time to come up with an agreement and pass it in Parliament. Why did this happen and what will be the impact of the long delay?

    Neil Davidson: The first reason for the delay is the failure of Theresa May and Parliament to vote in favor of any plan. The EU is itself divided between hards and softs. The six-month extension is a compromise between the two […] No one in the EU wants a hard Brexit or no-deal Brexit. At the same time Germany and France, who really run the EU, want to make sure that Britain does not set a precedent that leads other countries to leave. […]

    AS: A lot of people, even on the left, think the EU is a progressive formation. What was the EU set up to do, and what is its nature?

    ND: The EU developed over many decades since the end the World War II. (I’m just going to call it the EU regardless of earlier forms and names it took.) It was set up for four reasons. First, France wanted to avoid another war with Germany like the three they had fought over the previous seventy years. They wanted to establish rules that would separate economic competition from geopolitical and military competition. That’s the element of truth in the idea that the EU has kept peace since 1945.

    Second, the United States wanted the EU established as a political and economic complement to the NATO military alliance. […] It was part of Washington’s Cold War imperial project.

    Third, the EU was designed to avoid protectionism within Europe. The United States, Germany, and France thought such limitations on trade were one of the causes of the Great Depression. So, from the very beginning, free trade and globalization were immanent dynamics in the EU.

    Fourth, the EU took shape during the postwar boom—the greatest boom in capitalist history—when capital needed outlets for investment beyond the boundaries of individual states at a time when de-colonization meant that this was no longer possible across the Global South in the way it had been before 1945. The EU provided a mechanism for that to take place within Western Europe itself.

    Given the illusions many on the left have in the EU, it’s ironic that its structure corresponds quite closely to the model of “interstate federalism” devised by Frederick Von Hayek in 1939. Hayek, in many ways the intellectual forerunner of neoliberalism, proposed that economic activity in a federal Europe should be governed by a set of nonnegotiable rules presided over by a group of unelected bureaucrats, without any elected governments and irrational voters getting in the way.

    That’s how the EU is actually structured. The institutions that are least democratic— like the European Commission, the European Council, the Central Bank, and the Court of Justice—have the most power, while those that are at least nominally democratic—like the European Parliament—have the least.

    […] Its structures make it almost impossible for left-wing reformists like Jeremy Corbyn to implement his program in the EU. […]

    AS: What has been the majority viewpoint among the British capitalist class on membership in the EU?

    ND: British capitalists on the whole have always been in favor of the EU. They saw it as a replacement for their colonies, which they had used as key sites for investment. […] British capital remains in favor of remaining in the EU today.

    There are two exceptions to this rule at the opposite extremes of that capitalist class. First, many among the smaller capitalists, shading into the petty bourgeoisie proper, support Brexit. They do so because they are negatively impacted by the EU regulations on health and safety, maternity leave, and so on, which they can least afford. These form part of the base of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and the Tory Brexiteers.

    Second, some large financial capitalists also support Brexit. They tend not to be based in the City of London nor are they oriented toward investment in the EU. Instead they are oriented toward Asia, the United States, and the Middle East and don’t see the importance of the EU. But these two extremes are dissident wings of the capitalist class. Most of the core of British capital in finance, manufacturing, and service want to remain in the EU.

    AS: Why then did the Tory Party, the traditional party of capital in Britain, opt for Brexit? How have Labour and its party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, positioned themselves on the issue?

    ND: The Tory Party is not acting in the interests of British capital in pushing through Brexit. This dereliction of its duty is the result of how ruling-class parties have evolved in the neoliberal era. […]

    [S]ince Thatcher the Tory leadership has progressively degenerated in their capacity to think about developing a program to solve problems. They have been recycling the same ideas for four decades. On top of that, since the Poll Tax revolt of the late 1980s, they’ve not faced real opposition from organized labor, social movements, or even the Labour Party, which fully accepted and implemented neoliberalism until Corbyn took leadership.

    The Great Recession changed all of this. Neoliberalism has stopped delivering for a capitalist class that desperately needs solutions to restore growth and profits. But the Tories have not been able to come up with any. As a result, three things have happened.

    First, as I mentioned earlier, the capitalist class has splintered, with the petty bourgeois and a small section of finance capital deciding to call for leaving the EU, even though it’s not in the general interests of the class.

    Second, the leadership of the Tory Party started denouncing the EU to fend off a challenge from their right by the nationalist and bigoted UKIP. […]

    Third, a lot of Tory politicians are incompetent, ideologically driven, and incapable of thinking through the consequences of their rhetoric and policy proposals. This is a symptom of the decline of the quality of the ruling class—a global phenomenon, but one which for historical reasons is particularly acute in the UK. So, you have a perfect storm of divisions in the capitalist class over the EU, deep discontent in British society with neoliberal austerity, and ideological madness and political incompetence in the Tory Party. […]

    On the other side, the capitalist class on the whole backed Remain. Other sections of the professional middle class and well-paid workers in places like London, Edinburgh, and Manchester voted to remain for good anti- racist reasons. But they also fell for ideological fantasies that the EU is progressive, anti-racist, and pro- migrant.

    Corbyn and the Labour Party were caught in a contradiction. Corbyn stands in the tradition of Tony Benn and others, who long opposed the EU as a capitalist club. But he knows that the bulk of MPs supported Remain, and his base was divided between Leavers and Remainers. As a result, the party mildly supported Remain.

    AS: May’s failure to get a deal over Brexit and the long delay are likely to precipitate both a general election and a leadership fight in the Tory Party, right? What will happen to them in an election? What will happen in Labour, where Corbyn seems to be under massive pressure from Remainers and Leavers at the same time?

    ND: Most of the sane elements of the Tory Party did not want a delay for Brexit, because they were worried it would trigger a general election, in which they know they would suffer one of the biggest defeats in their history. There will be a fight over party leadership in the run up to the elections.

    A bunch of buffoons like Boris Johnson will stand for party leader. […] Many of those members are in the extreme wing of the Tory Party; most of them are over 60 and will probably vote for the most right-wing candidate possible. The more rational elements know that would be a disaster because they know that a right-wing leader would be totally unpopular in the general election. […]

    But the main electoral opposition to them, Labour, is also deeply divided. The Blairites, who are for remaining in the EU, have launched unrelenting attacks on Corbyn for months. They charged him with being an anti- Semite, and they have denounced him for his reluctance to aggressively campaign for Remain.

    Their attempt to portray Corbyn as antisemitic and their assertion that antisemitism is rampant in the Labour Party are of course absurd. They are intentionally confusing Corbyn’s support for Palestinian rights with antisemitism. In reality, he has a long record of combining opposition to antisemitism with support for Palestine. […]

    Nevertheless, the Blairites, who are the majority of the MPs, weakened Corbyn with these attacks. They will do anything to get rid of Corbyn. So, Labour is deeply divided and it will be very difficult for the party to come up with a manifesto for either the upcoming EU election or a general election.

    While the two main parties are deeply divided, other parties are in a better position politically. There are two anti-EU parties, UKIP and Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party, with clear platforms. On the other hand, there are a range of parties supporting Remain, including the Scottish National Party (SNP), the Greens, and the Liberal Democrats, and as a result they too stand to gain in any future general election.

    AS: What are the dynamics behind the push for a new vote on Brexit? What are the class and social forces behind it? Will it happen, and what would be the likely result of a new vote?

    ND: The main backers of Remain and a new vote on Brexit come from the big capitalists, the professional middle class, and sections of the well-paid working class. Each has different visions of the EU. The bourgeoisie wants to stay in the EU or secure a soft Brexit for their class interests and neoliberal project.

    They have drawn behind them sections of middle- and working-class people who have illusions in the EU as a progressive and anti-racist institution. […] In reaction to this push for a new vote to remain, Corbyn is trying to maintain a studied ambiguity about where exactly he stands. He supports the least bad Brexit possible, while all the time saying we need a general election, but has so far been silent on the question of a second referendum. […]

    AS: How will the fight over Brexit affect the EU?

    ND: As I said earlier, the EU is of two minds on Brexit. On the one hand, they want to punish the British suffi ciently scare anyone else away from doing an exit of their own. And they are succeeding in this; even right- wing governments and parties, who are mainly opposed to migrants, have dropped plans for leaving the EU because they do not want to suffer Britain’s fate.

    On the other hand, the EU doesn’t want to be so punitive as to force a hard no-deal Brexit that would affect their economies. […]

    Nevertheless, they don’t want to concede too much to Britain that would in any way compromise their neoliberal project. […]

    AS: What does this all mean for the neoliberal program of free trade globalization?

    ND: Brexit is a sign that neoliberalism is weakening as a regime of accumulation or possibly coming to an end, not just in Europe but around the world. Protectionism is beginning to revive. Some of this is just rhetorical, but the conflict between the United States and China is a harbinger of things to come. I think we are probably in a transition to a new phase of capitalism.

    This transition is going to last a long time. […]

    I’m not sure what that new regime of accumulation will be, nor am I clear what range of options capitalism has now. We won’t know the real form of its replacement for a decade or two. At the moment, you’re seeing the ruling classes reviving old strategies from the 1930s, like tariffs. […]

    AS: Finally, the radical left seems to have been divided, confused, and unable to impact the crisis over Brexit. Are there any signs of this changing? How should the revolutionary left position itself today?

    ND: British politics is highly contradictory right now. On the one hand, there is the unending crisis around Brexit, which frankly the radical left has yet to figure out how to intervene in with any degree of coherence and influence. On the other hand, there signs of hope, especially the Extinction Rebellion, which has essentially closed down the centers of London and Edinburgh for days, with hundreds of young people arrested.

    This action has come on the heels of the massive protests and school strikes against climate change. These have been some of the biggest actions since the anti-war protests in the 2000s. But they are different from those protests and earlier ones. Young people, largely from outside the traditional parties and organizations of the left, are initiating these demonstrations. […]

    We need intellectual clarity about what we’re doing, first and foremost. The approach of the British International Socialists back in the early 1960s is more like what we need to do today. It was about 500 people, it had real analysis of the dynamics of the system, and it was open and fl uid and really more “Luxemburgist” than Leninist. So, we need revolutionary organization of that sort.

    In the movements we need to gather together people who agree and want to collaborate, regardless of organizational affiliation, around shared viewpoints to push demands on a left government if it comes to power. This is classic united-front tactics […] [W]e have to work together on what we agree on, like anti- austerity, freedom of movement, more democracy, defense and expansion of the welfare state, and so on.

    We have come to the end of the process of party building that began in the 1960s. We are in a new phase and there are new movements. Of course, there are similarities with the past, and there will always be as long as capitalism exists; but the left should stop expecting tomorrow to be like yesterday and the day before that. […]

  • Microsoft’s Plan: AI Runs on Gas

    Microsoft’s Plan: AI Runs on Gas

    Microsoft has joined oil-imperialists James Baker and George Shultz’ Climate Leadership Council (CLC).  Their plan is to slap a $40 per ton tax on carbon emissions.  In trade, it blocks further regulation, including liability, and disempowers alternative energy research.

    The plan indemnifies the likes of Exxon, BP, Chevron, Shell, and others, sued by dozens of cities counties and states for burying proof and fabricating dis-proof of global warming.

    Microsoft boasts its own plan (AI for Earth) to wean us off CO2.  Yet Microsoft is the first tech company to join the CLC plan to keep us hooked.

    Why?  According to Microsoft’s CEO (Chief Environmental Officer), Lucas Joppa: “We support a carbon fee because we believe it’s a policy mechanism that works and accords with economic principles.”[1] Which principles?

    Carbon tax can be read in a lot of ways, a small hit to preclude a big one.  A plea bargain, so gas doesn’t go the way of cigarettes.  The slowest way to still nudge our economy toward clean energy.  A PR budget.  Or the going price for indemnity.

    All misread it.  A tax would neither cost them, nor open doors – even a crack – to alternatives.  So far as “economic principles” go, taxes don’t curb misbehavior, they move it to a lower-taxed country.  (Microsoft knows this.  Foreign subsidiaries license software to Microsoft USA, earning them royalties that are not taxed by the US at all, nor by anyone at more than 3%.  Microsoft does 85% of its work in the US yet avoids at least $2.5 billion in taxes.[2])

    Sometimes taxes are a boon, because they target the weakest sector – coal, in this case.  Then, instead of moving, companies just swap one racket for another.  Unlike coal, gas prices aren’t much tethered to gas use, since like rent, you pay it or go without.  Thus, a $40 per ton tax on emissions will likely increase gas use, since it will coax coal plants toward gas, but not gas to solar and wind, nor scrunch our cities to let us walk.

    Americans would get paid for wheezing, but not a cent would go toward repair.  The claimed rationale is that a rebate is the most-equitable option. Is cash really empowering?  Aren’t payouts notoriously regressive?

    I’m sure they recall the work of Page and Gilens:

    “Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”[3]

    We know already, the poorer you are the worse air you breathe.  So, using some of that revenue to replace fossil fuels, undoubtedly favors the poor more so than giving them a few dollars more to buy gas with.  Especially considering the poor tend to drive the most fuel-inefficient cars, commute the farthest to work, live closest to factories, and in the most congested areas.

    And of course, when companies recoup their costs at the pump, the poor pay more.

    Plus, payouts bankrupt the alternatives.  They scatter the money, so it’s not spent on research and development, education, infrastructure, public health, or remediation.  Besides, doing those things would reveal the plans bigger secret: its price.

    The social consequences, alone of current carbon emissions is around $220 per ton, according to research out of Stanford University.[4] That’s just the cost of enduring it, nothing of rehabilitating our habitat, preventing more abuse, weaning us off it.

    Ergo, given as rebate, further down our death spiral we can pretend it was squandered.  Whereas, if it was gathered it would be much harder to hide that the money was never there in the first place.

    But why does that interest Microsoft?

    Microsoft currently charges itself a token $15 per ton (and spends a ton advertising it).  Bill Gates told Thomas Pikety he didn’t want to pay more taxes on wealth or profits and wants to tax consumption instead.  Gates has invested considerably in “emissions capture,” but it’s not yet – and not proven – viable, and a gamble, since it doesn’t reduce use.  He’s also published a carbon-reduction manifesto, the overall thrust of which sees clean air as a technological challenge, rather than a behavioral one.

    In that vein, in 2017 Microsoft launched AI for Earth.  As per their website: “AI for Earth awards grants to projects that use artificial intelligence to address four critical areas that are vital for building a sustainable future.”

    But sustainability doesn’t inform Microsoft’s AI policy.  What does?  “Economic principles.”

    A recent Brookings Institute paper (not affiliated with the CLC), How artificial intelligence will affect the future of energy and climate, noted the technology boom was in fact boosting fossil fuel markets faster than it was replacing them.

    AI helps make markets more efficient and easier for analysts and market participants to understand highly complex phenomena from the behavior of electrical power grids to climate change. The author notes, for example, AI is particularly well-suited for mapping complex underground reservoirs and tailoring drilling methods required to mine oil and gas from shale.  “The question is whether there is a ‘bias’ in how AI-related technologies affect energy supply, such as whether they’re making traditional hydrocarbon suppliers more productive faster than they make zero-carbon renewables more productive.[5]

    For example: Microsoft is behind Shell’s much-promoted “machine learning push.” Microsoft also builds custom AI tools for BP.

    Microsoft has a 7-year, multibillion-dollar deal with Chevron to AI-enhance several of its operations, including ocean-floor well exploration and drilling.  Microsoft’s spokesperson explained: “The fact that it’s a multi-year partnership really emphasizes that Microsoft is committing to work with its most important customers for the long haul.”[6]

    Microsoft has been outfitting Exxon, too.  According to their press – release:  The application of Microsoft technologies by ExxonMobil’s XTO Energy subsidiary – including Dynamics 365, Microsoft Azure, Machine Learning and the Internet of Things – is anticipated to improve capital efficiency and support Permian (oilfield Basin in NM and TX) production growth by as much as 50,000 oil-equivalent barrels per day by 2025.  Permian cooperation will “…serve as a model for additional implementation across the U.S. and abroad.”[7]

    In Saudi Arabia.

    To backtrack a bit, James Baker III represents the Saudis through his law firm, Baker-Botts, with offices in D.C. and Riyadh.  Saudi-Aramco funds the James Baker, III Foundation for Energy-Policy Studies; the Texas think-tank behind the CLC plan.

    Saudi Aramco has pledged to increase its market share, and extend its dominance to other markets, as part of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 program.  Microsoft has signed on to both endeavors, in potentially its most lucrative AI deal so far.

    Microsoft pitched its products to other regional players at an oil and gas trade show (ADIPEC 2018) last fall in Abu Dhabi.  Per their press-release:

    ADIPEC has become a key event on the calendar of the global Oil and Gas industry, gathering stakeholders and specialists from multiple disciplines for the purposes of knowledge exchange and collaboration. Microsoft’s theme at this year’s event is “Empowering Oil & Gas with AI.” The company’s booth is dedicated to showcasing solutions around artificial intelligence and Internet of Things and highlight how they can enable digital transformation within the industry – the means to engage customers, empower employees, optimize operations and reinvent business processes and services.[8]

    Returning to “policy mechanisms that accord with economic principles,” the simple answer is, it’s much easier to broaden existing markets than it is to construct new ones.

    We needn’t look only to gas and AI for examples.  Microsoft President, Brad Smith just had the Pope’s ear about closing the global information gap.  Yet, Microsoft collaborates with China’s censors.  Microsoft has called for restrictions on face-recognition technology used by law enforcement (mostly Amazon’s).  Yet it continues fundamentally similar work for the Military. Regarding its Army contracts, including weapons-targeting software, Smith said: “it’s more productive to be engaged then disengaged in how AI is used.”

    Dwell here.  According to lure, the market is – at least conceptually – neutral, and – history aside – cares the same for oil wells and windmills.  Companies are all in myopic battle to poke their head above the crowd, and magically one crawling over the other constitutes a system.  Whereby the poison ones – usually after they poison us – fade, and better ones replace them.  But how, since we’ve already declared them solipsists, do they learn from each other’s mistakes, and not just repeat them?

    Comically, the vanguard in AI still smacks of the same, misreading (or misappropriation) of Darwin.  That nature struggles to better itself (hence, so do markets), instead of just struggle.  (This also, as far as I can tell, depicts our notion of “machine learning.”)  But it is a poor depiction, since, unlike the market or computer, nature has no specific obligations.

    That’s not hyperbole.  A recent NYU Research Center report (published by the AI Now Institute, as one of 150+ studies with like conclusions), found AI is inheriting our prejudices.  It concludes the industry’s overwhelmingly white-male workforce has gifted us systems that perpetuate historic notions of hierarchy and race and gender biases. [9]

    More likely, fossil fuels and capitalism have much deeper ties then we acknowledge (and so might AI).  Historically, the two recurse like chickens and eggs.  Mining and refining carbon fuels required enormous capital up front.  And it’s doubtful capitalists would have seen sufficient returns to expand their production, without the fuels themselves, to power more work.

    Such large enterprise would not have occurred without some “policy mechanism” to protect the capitalists.  Thus, they trained the still-emerging market to favor the fuel economy.

    We can look at capitalism’s (eventual) support for abolition, as example.  But we can’t believe the hype.  Fuel was averse to a free-market, since the confidence to spend such large sums required strong-state protections – from liability and labor, but also from other power resources (like slaves and wind).  Thus, think tank pitches that write the government out of the deal in no way signify deregulation.  Rather they seat policy mechanisms more squarely with the investors.

    And AI?  In February Trump signed an executive order for the U.S. to promote AI:

    “The United States must drive development of appropriate technical standards and reduce barriers to the safe testing and deployment of AI technologies in order to enable the creation of new AI-related industries and the adoption of AI by today’s industries. …The initiative directs agencies to make Federal data, models, and computing resources more available to America’s AI R&D experts, researchers, and industries.”[10]

    The Brookings report applauded Trump’s “market approach to regulation,” noting that “highly-adaptive technologies could help tamp down enthusiasm for regulation and make practical a greater reliance on market-based instruments such as carbon taxes.”

    Like Marx said, “machinery is the most powerful strikebreaker.”

    But there’s still the matter of indemnity.  Why, and why has Microsoft, so far, ducked the question?  The topic’s worth its own paper.  Let me just stew the pot.

    Last year a person was killed by a driverless car.  Remarkably, no suit yet.  But also, no rules pointing blame.  Still, AI can expect ample questions of liability in days to come.  There are already cases about AI’s racial and gender bias, both use and errors in sentencing,[11] profiling, trolling, mistaken-identity, data-collection, and disinformation.  There’s considerable debate on how it factors in medical malpractice liability.  No doubt, its role in climate-issues will appear on radar soon.

    While Google, Facebook, (Microsoft-owned) LinkedIn, and several others repeatedly get caught doing things they swore not to, instead of fumble like Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft has been vocal in its support for regulation.  Makes sense, Microsoft was in federal court once and was –almost – subject to regulation.[12]  So, it makes sense they’d want to be part of the discussion (better to be engaged).

    The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) begins to flesh out some rules for AI in Europe. Thus far, the U.S. has let the industry decide, here.  That’s not to say our government has remained neutral.  Rather, the government has willfully let the corporations call the shots, as per Trump’s AI executive order.

    But the wiser move for the industry, rather than enjoy free reign, is to pounce on opportunity; i.e., park their own minimal (or minimally effective) laws in spaces meaningful laws – laws that favor the public and environment – would fit, otherwise.

    Dennis Garcia, Microsoft’s Assistant General Counsel said this:

    “Since AI is still very much in its early stages, there are no meaningful AI-related laws or standards that can be relied upon—although given AI’s dependence on data, applicable data privacy laws will be relevant. From a regulatory perspective, some may view AI as the Wild West. While this lack of an AI regulatory framework or standards can create some confusion and ambiguity, it does provide opportunities for lawyers to help build and develop this area from the ground up.”[13]

    In Brad Smith’s words: “Only by creating a future where AI law is as important a decade from now as, say, privacy law is today, will we ensure that we live in a world where people can have confidence that computers are making decisions in ethical ways.”[14]  (Note he used “important,” not “effective.”)

    Now consider, Trump’s memo called for a “Federal action plan to protect the advantage of the United States in AI.”  To that end, the Department of Commerce is hashing plans to list artificial intelligence a “controlled export,” it claims, due to national security concerns. [15]  But Microsoft wants a seamless globe for its deals with Saudi Arabia, China, UAE, its tax shelters in Ireland, etc., etc., etc.

    So, wouldn’t de-fanging AI be a wise move? Besides, breaking laws ghost-written by lobbyists, likely won’t incur fines big enough to discourage breaking them, anyway.

    Finally, a principle that applies.

     

    [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/01/microsoft-joins-group-seeking-to-avoid-climate-change-lawsuit

    [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-microsoft-avoids-taxes-loopholes-irs-2013-1

    [3] https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf

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

    [5] https://www.brookings.edu/research/how-artificial-intelligence-will-affect-the-future-of-energy-and-climate/

    [6] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2017/10/30/chevron-partners-with-microsoft-in-cloud/#40d1c468684d

    [7] https://news.microsoft.com/2019/02/22/exxonmobil-to-increase-permian-profitability-through-digital-partnership-with-microsoft/

    [8] https://news.microsoft.com/en-xm/2018/11/12/microsoft-demonstrates-the-power-of-ai-and-cloud-to-oil-and-gas-players-at-adipec-2018/

    [9] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/16/artificial-intelligence-lack-diversity-new-york-university-study

    [10] https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/accelerating-americas-leadership-in-artificial-intelligence/

    [11] https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-analyzed-the-compas-recidivism-algorithm

    [12] https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-fact

    [13] https://www.lexisnexis.com/lexis-practice-advisor/the-journal/b/lpa/posts/preparing-for-artificial-intelligence-in-the-legal-profession

    [14] https://news.microsoft.com/apac/features/technology-ethics-and-the-law-grappling-with-our-ai-powered-future/

    [15] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2018-11-19/pdf/2018-25221.pdf

  • Venezuela: A Country Held Hostage

    Venezuela: A Country Held Hostage

    Under the global spotlight for the past two months, Venezuela is perhaps the most debated and at the same time misunderstood country in recent times. The truth embraces demanding paradoxes: a country ruined but rich in resources, with a civilian-military dictatorship kneeling before transnational capital, but claiming to be “socialist” and “anti-imperialist,” where a “worker president” has imposed capitalist semi-slavery working conditions, and where the new Chavista bourgeoisie and the traditional bourgeoisie live in the most obscene privilege, while the majority of the population is subjected to misery. It is a country hostage to a civilian-military dictatorship, and at the same time under siege by the USA. For every fundamental fact in the nation´s daily reality there are two mutually exclusive versions, plagued with falsifications that are functions of the propaganda war key to the dispute for power.

    This is the dense fog that has to be penetrated in order to appreciate the reality in Venezuela. Between blackouts and precarious Internet access, and in the heat of the political vortex, we will try to appreciate the unstable and changing situation. While these lines were being written, a conference was held in Rome between representatives of the US and Russian governments to discuss the Venezuelan crisis, which as expected, ended without agreement. At the same time, on the table there is an unscheduled call by the bourgeois opposition to march towards the presidential palace of Miraflores, in Caracas.

    COUP AND ECONOMIC COUNTERREVOLUTION

    On January 23, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans took to the streets and an almost unknown member of the National Assembly proclaimed himself interim president, with the support of the U.S. and right-wing governments in the region. The main concern for large sections of the world left was that we were facing a pro-imperialist military coup, like the one in April 2002. This unilateral bias led them to take Maduro’s side. Contradictorily, what drove the vast majority of those hundreds of thousands to take to the streets was not support for a coup but, from their point of view, the recovery of the democratic rights reversed by Maduro’s government. On the other hand, more than two months later there has been neither a military coup nor a significant break in the repressive apparatus. We have arrived at a sort of equilibrium, which cannot last long, between the opponents.

    Let us review the origins of the current political crisis. After three years of the most brutal adjustment plan to be suffered by the Venezuelan people in their history, through which Maduro drastically cut wages and public spending to pay off foreign debt, in December 2015 an exhausted population used the ballot box to punish the government for its pseudo-socialist doublespeak and brutal repression, as seen in both the smashing of the 2014 protests and through the Operación Liberación del Pueblo (People’s Liberation Operation) in the poorest neighborhoods, which resulted in hundreds of extrajudicial detentions and executions. This is how the bourgeois opposition obtained two thirds of the National Assembly.

    In anticipation of and in the months following its electoral defeat, the government reacted by appointing several members of the Supreme Court to secure an unconditional majority, stopping a presidential referendum contemplated in the Constitution via swindling and maneuvers, nullifying the election of opposition representatives in the Amazon state to eliminate the two-thirds majority, and finally through a series of court decisions and presidential orders, eliminating all the parliament’s powers.

    In other words, Maduro didn’t recognize his resounding electoral defeat, eluding it through a coup. With the support of the army, he suspended constitutional guarantees indefinitely. The regime was transformed into an open civilian-military dictatorship, albeit with the weaknesses and contradictions resulting from its internal disputes. Important sectors of the Bolibourgeoisie were displaced from power. The gangster Rafael Ramírez was removed from the head of the oil ministry and the state oil company, Pdvsa; heads of repression and intelligence such as Miguel Rodriguez Torres and Hugo Carvajal were removed, former Vice President Elias Jaua would also be marginalized. General State Attorney Luisa Ortega, architect of the criminalization of protests, quit in the middle of the 2017 mobilizations. A dissident wing of Chavismo emerged, calling itself “critical” or “original”. Both changes in the regime and the reduction of state income in the context of falling international oil prices intensified the inter-bureaucratic and inter-bourgeois conflicts within Chavismo, strengthening the military wing.

    The bourgeois opposition grouped in the MUD, mostly coopted through corruption, capitulated to the government throughout 2016, succumbing to all its maneuvers. At the end of the year it even went so far as to sign a joint statement with the government, after long negotiations, in which it accepted all the official theses, even a commitment to collaborate in the area of economics.

    In March 2017, a judicial decision granting Maduro legislative powers and authorizing him to hand over oil and mining licenses to transnational companies without going through parliament forced the MUD coalition to call for mobilizations, control over which they quickly lost, as these exploded into massive riots and looting. Trying to hold back the popular rebellion, the MUD capitulated to the government again, agreeing to negotiations that Maduro took advantage of to gain time and divide the opposition. The government managed to bleed out the protests, killing more than 140 people, wounding and imprisoning thousands, using torture and military trials on a large scale. He sealed his victory by imposing a National Constituent Assembly with executive, parliamentary and judicial functions, with 100% pro-government members, ratcheting up a notch the dictatorial nature of the regime. However, it would be a pyrrhic victory due to the continuous worsening of the economic and social disaster.

    The self-proclaimed “anti-imperialist” international Left not only silently endorsed Maduro’s austerity plan to pay foreign debt on the basis of hunger, while Maduro was carrying out a reactionary coup d’état, they were railing against another coup… of which Maduro was supposedly a victim! The revolutionary socialist tendency of the International Unity of the Workers-Fourth International, whose organization in Venezuela is the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSL), was consistent in denouncing Maduro’s adjustment and coup, and supporting the popular rebellion of 2017, for which it endured not only the persecutions of the government but also the slanders of those renegades from socialism for whom fighting against Maduro was “playing the game of imperialism”.

    Maduro’s coup in the political arena had its economic parallel in an acceleration of the murderous adjustment process. Between 2013 and 2018, Maduro paid more than 80 billion dollars in foreign debt, reducing imports by more than 80%. Wages were reduced by more than 90%, to less than 10 dollars a month. To get an idea of the cut applied to education and health, by 2019 the annual budget to cover expenses at the University Hospital of the University of the Andes was less than fifteen dollars. Maduro’s extreme subservience to Wall Street’s financial vultures, in addition to belying his “anti-imperialist” claims, also ended up sinking the Venezuelan economy. The GDP was halved. The government’s decision to reduce the supply of goods, cutting imports and national production, as well as the attempt to cover the budget deficit through a vertiginous increase in the mass of money in circulation, fed an inflationary spiral that lead to hyperinflation, with a monthly rate of more than 50% in October of 2017. The social consequences of this economic policy were brutal. One tenth of the population, more than three million people, mostly from the poorest sectors, have left the country in the last five years, seeking to survive and be able to send remittances to their families. Infant and maternal mortality rates have risen to levels not seen in fifty years. Undernourishment rose dramatically, with the majority of the population experiencing large weight losses. To cover up this economic counterrevolution and the worst setbacks suffered by the working class currently anywhere in the world, Maduro’s government invented the false theory of an “economic war”, a supposed external and internal sabotage of the economy. The first U.S. financial sanctions were applied in the second half of 2017 and the first oil sanctions in January 2019. Although these were measures of interference that should be repudiated, the truth is that by then the economy was already in ruins. The causes of the disaster are in the Chavista model, which squandered the greatest oil boom in our history. Enormous revenues were not only lost to the transnationals operating in the Venezuelan oil industry, through the formula of the mixed enterprises, import subsidies added to the plunder, as these resulted in a capital flight of more than 350 billion dollars following the currency exchange controls applied in 2003. The looting was on such a scale that the crisis began to become manifest even before oil prices fell below 100 dollars per barrel. After that, Maduro’s adjustment did the rest.

    CAUGHT BETWEEN IMPERIALISM AND A DECOMPOSING BOURGEOIS REGIME

    In 2017, the National Assembly and the MUD took steps towards challenging the government’s legitimacy, such as the parliamentary declaration of an “abandonment of office” by Maduro, as well as the holding of a plebiscite to endorse the formation of a parallel government.  However, the U.S. government responded by clarifying that it would only recognize Maduro’s government, and since the MUD is completely subordinate to U.S. imperialism, it backed down.  The top US officer for Latin America, Thomas Shannon, visited Caracas on several occasions and gave his support to the dialogues between the government and the MUD. The collapse of the opposition bloc as a consequence of its capitulation in 2017 postponed a new political crisis until the beginning of 2019. The year 2018 was one of great workers’ struggles against poverty wages. In May 2018 a fraudulent presidential election was held, illegally called by the National Constituent Assembly, with the majority of the opposition leaders and parties outlawed and which was boycotted by the vast majority of voters. The decision of the bourgeoise opposition to not recognize Maduro’s new mandate in January 2019, and to declare the president of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, as interim president of the country, was handed down from the United States.

    Statements by opposition leaders such as Capriles, as well as reports by media free of any suspicion of Chavismo, such as the Wall Street Journal, show that the move was decided behind the backs of the majority of the bourgeois opposition, by a conclave of four opposition leaders in agreement with Trump’s government: Leopoldo López, María Corina Machado, Antonio Ledezma and Julio Borges. The move was so openly directed by the Yankees that the leadership was handed over to the Lima Group, which is composed of right and center-right governments in the region, who called upon Maduro to hand over power to parliament on the 4th of January.  Formally, the National Assembly claimed to be implementing the figure of the interim president, who according to the Constitution must hold an election within 30 days, which evidently did not happen. Thus, in the words of the web publication El Disidente we became, “the only country with two illegitimate presidents”.

    The Chavista government, beyond having acquired relative political independence from the US after the 2002 coup, never had anti-imperialist or socialist policies. On the contrary, it favored Chevron with the largest oil licenses and subsidized General Motors with more than 6 billion dollars for imports.  As we have already seen, it proved itself capable of imposing the worst privations on the people in order to pay the foreign debt.  When the possibility of oil sanctions was discussed in 2017, it was the U.S. oil companies’ own lobby that asked the Trump government not to apply such sanctions.

    Why then has Trump made an attempt on political power in Venezuela?  We could adapt a popular adage to say, “this is how imperialism pays those who serve it well.”  There are both domestic and foreign policy reasons for this orientation. The generalized collapse of the country has fed concerns about avoiding a disorderly collapse of the Chavista regime, under an onslaught of popular mobilization, which would generate very difficult conditions for rebuilding capitalist governability in a post-Chavista scenario. These are the same concerns that in 2017 prompted imperialism to prioritize a negotiated solution. They are reflected in Guaidó’s current orientation: to carry out limited mobilizations without directly confronting the headquarters of political and military power, to exert economic and diplomatic pressure, together with threats of military aggression, and to extend a promise of amnesty for the crimes of corruption and repression to those in the military in anticipation of a coup. All pointing to a way out from above that deprives the people of the possibility of leading a struggle based on their own interests.

    Already in 2018, the far-right tycoon had proposed to his advisors to invade Venezuela, although without obtaining their approval. A reconfiguration of Trump’s government team with the entry of figures more in tune with his perspective, such as John Bolton, opened up the possibility for adopting a more aggressive line. The Venezuelan debacle presents him with an opportunity to distract from the internal political and even legal problems that harass the deranged head of imperialism. Added to this are the potential electoral votes from the state of Florida, the traditional seat of a right-wing vote of Cuban origin, which factor in the pre-campaign for the presidency. From the strategic point of view, there is the opportunity to install a puppet government in a country of importance due to its location and great natural resources.  The presence of extreme right-wing allies in Colombia and Brazil and a docile Lima Group also favor the expanding intervention.

    While Venezuela never ceased to economically be a Yankee semi-colony, with the U.S. as its main trading partner and debt creditor, at least until the oil sanctions of January 2019, it is no less true that the economic destruction under the Maduro government has reached a point that it poses a problem for the imperialist companies, despite these having benefited for many years from Chavista policies. Oil production has fallen from three million barrels a day to just over one million. The electricity industry is greatly deteriorated, as demonstrated by the blackout in March. The possibility of benefiting from a recovery of oil production, from large privatizations of public companies, of expanding its participation in the oil industry through a partial privatization of PDVSA following the model of Petrobras, as has been suggested by the economic guru of the Venezuelan right, Ricardo Hausmann, all of this represents a very tempting economic opportunity for imperialism.

    Trump combines oil sanctions that will drastically aggravate misery with “humanitarian” demagogic propaganda to disguise the Yankee government as a benefactor of the Venezuelan people. Reports from The Economist and Anatoly Kurmanaev of The New York Times have revealed that there are actually no medicines and a minimum amount of food in the highly publicized warehouses in the Colombian city of Cúcuta. The provocation operation of February 23rd, which simulated an attempt to pass humanitarian aid to Venezuela and ended with the burning of two truckloads in confusing incidents at a border bridge, was another step in the escalating intervention. The government carried out repression, with its usual brutality, particularly against the indigenous Pemón community on the border with Brazil.

    THE ILLUSIONS IN GUAIDÓ AND THE NEGOTIATIONS

    The defeat of 2017 weighs on the collective conscience and contributes to political backwardness, with important sectors of the population having illusions in the interventionist and pro-coup policy of Guaidó. A situation diametrically opposed to the one portrayed by the U.S. Embassy in Venezuela in the cables released by Wikileaks a decade ago, when U.S. officials complained about the very strong popular rejection of U.S. interference in Venezuelan politics. The Venezuelan government is responsible for this tendency towards a stronger right-wing, after many years of applying an ultra-reactionary policy with “left-wing” makeup and crushing any possibility for popular and workers’ self-organization.

    In spite of this, there have also been demonstrations of popular resistance, which neither wait for direction from the right nor obey the pacifist recriminations of the bourgeois parties. This is demonstrated by the protests during the week of January 21st in the popular neighborhoods of Caracas, which were savagely repressed by the special groups of the FAES, resulting in more than 30 murders, and the mobilizations of the Pemón people in February, as well as the spontaneous protests against the great national blackout in March.

    On the one hand, there is the legitimate repudiation of Maduro’s government by between 85% and 90% of the population, including the enormous majority of the workers and popular sectors that were once the social base of Chavismo, and for whom the struggle against the hunger-imposing bourgeois government is a struggle for survival. At the same time, there is the dispute for power between the civilian-military regime and a political leadership led directly by the US, in which, very secondarily, there is also a conflict with China and Russia, allies of Chavismo. China is creditor of around a third of the Venezuelan foreign debt and has oil investments; Russia is a supplier of military equipment and also an oil partner. At the time of the January sanctions both were well behind the U.S. in terms of trade with Venezuela. Without any expectation of the civilian-military regime’s ability to recover, they have retreated from the Yankee oil sanctions, as shown by the business freeze announcements by the Russian company Lukoil, and China has not responded to funding requests to the extent hoped by Maduro.  They have not raised the stakes beyond jockeying in the diplomatic arena, of which the greatest example is the February 28 veto of a U.S. resolution at the UN. For Russia, facing Yankee sanctions for its annexation of the Crimea and its aggression against Ukraine, and involved in a genocidal invasion in Syria, Venezuela represents an important bargaining chip.

    The Venezuelan government has said it is willing to accept the proposal of the governments of Mexico and Uruguay, sponsored also by the European Union and the Vatican, to undertake negotiations with the National Assembly. According to the Communications Minister, Jorge Rodríguez, the government places some preconditions such as the lifting of the oil sanctions.  In February, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza admitted that there are secret negotiations between the Trump and Maduro governments. Although no agreement was reached, the Russian-Yankee summit in Rome was another example of negotiation. The successive declarations of the Lima Group at its Bogotá summit against an invasion, the special representative for Venezuela, Elliot Abrams, statement to CNN on March 1st that Trump’s government was not seeking the military route, but “financial, diplomatic and political” pressure, and even Guaidó’s comments, after his re-entry into the country on March 4th, are all indications of the search for a negotiated solution, which mark a contrast with the previous insistence on the existence of a military option.

    POPULAR REBELLION AND THE REVOLUTIONARY ALTERNATIVE

    We can broadly identify four positions on the Venezuelan crisis. On the one side there is the government position and on the other side the bourgeois opposition, with nuances within sub-sectors of both blocks. For example, in the bourgeois opposition there is an openly collaborationist sector headed by Henry Falcón, who participated in the fraudulent election of May 2018, as well as such hard-right wing sectors as led by María Corina Machado, furiously pro-invasion. But in general, they stand behind Guaidó and Trump. In the government, the crisis is deepening, as evidenced by the recent restructuring of Maduro’s cabinet, which involved the resignation of all its ministers. There are sectors in favor of negotiating an electoral solution with guarantees of impunity, while the hard line prefers to maintain or to delay as much as possible a negotiated solution; up to now they are all behind the duo of Maduro and Cabello.

    Then there are two minor sectors, the social democrats of dissident Chavismo, gathered around the defense of the Constitution of 1999, which has met publicly with Guaidó and whose policy is centered on the proposal for negotiations to agree on a consultative referendum in which it would be decided if general elections are to be held. This policy, sustained in pacifist arguments, does not contemplate any initiative to promote it from below, not even a collection of signatures. It is simply based on appealing to the good faith of Guaidó and Maduro, without analyzing the concrete bases of their respective policies, an exercise therefore utopian and demagogic.

    The fourth position is that of the left opposition, which aims to build an autonomous mobilization of both workers and the people in order to defeat the dictatorship while ensuring that the great majorities take their destiny into their own hands. As part of the workers’ movement, it recognizes the working class and popular communities’ genuine and massive rejection of Maduro’s government as a result of its policy of starvation and capitalist semi-slavery. This sector is represented by the Socialism and Freedom Party (Partido Socialismo y Libertad) as well as union activists from the left wing of the Venezuelan Inter-sector Federation of Workers (Intersectorial de los Trabajadores de Venezuela), the largest workers union in the country today. This sector has tried unsuccessfully to promote an independent policy in said labor federation, proposing organizing from below with an independent program for a general strike. Unfortunately, most union leaders have bowed to Guaidó’s policy. Although it is a marginalized position, it is the only one that consistently defends the right of the Venezuelan people to rebel against a corrupt and murderous dictatorship, as a true expression of popular self-determination. It also includes the repudiation of Trump and the Lima Group’s attempts to decide who rules the country and keep open the possibility for a military coup. Unlike the abstract calls for the restitution of the democratic process, it recognizes that in the current context democracy can only be won in the streets, where there is also a struggle for food, access to health care and education, and the right to organize politically and for independent unions. These are the aspirations of the great majorities that are not contemplated in the “Plan País”, Guaidó’s privatization and economic adjustment plan, nor obviously in the model of unlimited looting and semi-slavery currently in force. In response to the crisis, the PSL proposes as a program a workers’ and popular plan with measures such as the non-payment of the foreign debt, fraudulently contracted by the Bolibourgeoisie; the nationalization of the oil industry, without mixed companies; the confiscation of the properties and accounts of corrupt officials; the repatriation of capital; agrarian reform and the restitution of salaries and the labor rights liquidated by Chavismo, among other demands.

    The weakness of this alternative is explained by the long years of repression against the workers, peasants and indigenous movements, with major events such as the destruction of the National Workers Union (Unión Nacional de Trabajadores), the assassination of several of the main leaders of UNETE-Aragua, the only revolutionary workers federation that carried out regional general strikes against Chávez; the repression against the Yukpa communities in the northwest of the country, including the imprisonment and later assassination of cacique Sabino Romero; the repression against factory occupations such as Sanitarios Maracay, which resulted in a self-managed plant for several months in 2007, and against the occupation of a Mitsubishi assembly plant, in which the government shot two workers. The complicity of the government with the sicariato campaign by landowners [Translator’s note, the use of hired thugs], in which more than two hundred peasants were executed in land disputes with total impunity, was another example.

    In this context, the majority of the left kept a complicitous silence, when it did not actively join in supporting the repression and attacking the left opposition. This prevented the rise of a strong alternative, by the left, to Chavismo, feeding the right-wing opposition as the only politically and electorally based alternative, to the point of helping it to become a majority, albeit without merits, as it really only capitalizes on Chavismo’s failure. The current perspective is that of an agonizing aggravation of the situation being suffered by the Venezuelan people, if the dictatorship continues on its feet – while surrounded by Yankee sanctions and the threat of a coup.

    A coup or invasion would give continuity to the looting and would impose new and brutal sacrifices of all kinds on the population, as demonstrated by the entire history of Latin America and the Yankee military interventions in the world. The only way out that would allow not only the conquest of democratic freedoms and social rights currently denied, but also generate the processes of workers’ and people’s self-organization – crucial for the construction of a revolutionary alternative – is that of a popular rebellion. If that possibility is frustrated again by the imposition of an imperialist military aggression, the main task of the revolutionary left would be to defeat the invasion, without giving any support to the civilian-military dictatorship, in an analogous manner to the repudiation of other invasions perpetrated by the United States, such as that of Panama or Iraq. That is the true internationalist approach today. Only overcoming these enormous difficulties can the popular majorities cease to be hostages of a deaf dispute over state power between the Bolibourgeoisie and the US-backed opposition. No matter how small the possibility of advancing towards our own emancipation, we must fight for it.

  • Will German Social Democrats expel youth leader for socialist ideas?

    Will German Social Democrats expel youth leader for socialist ideas?

    Young Socialists in the SPD with Chairperson Kevin Kuehnert vote against the start of coalition talks during the SPD’s party congress in Bonn, Germany, January 21, 2018. REUTERS/Thilo Schmuelgen – RC19E9F900E0

    The SPD — the Social Democratic Party of Germany — is Germany’s oldest political party. Its history includes both revolutionary struggle against capitalism and the betrayal of revolution. Many still consider it a socialist party, and its youth organization identifies as Young Socialists.

    Now, in a May Day 2019 interview, the leader of the party’s youth organization, the “Jusos,” 29-year-old Kevin Kühnert, has shocked the German political establishment, including an SPD leadership committed to capitalism. Kühnert said that capitalism must be “overcome.” He said important social decisions should be made “collectively.”

    Kühnert added specifics that further concerned SPD leaders about their chances among middle-
    class voters in the current European Parliamentary elections. He said collecting rent from tenants is not a legitimate way to earn a living and housing should be owned only by whoever lives in it, not by landlords.

    As for the real owners of Germany, Kühnert suggested that companies such as BMW should be nationalized and run by their employees. He was supported by commentators from one of the SPD’s rivals, the Left Party (Die Linke), and denounced by all the other major parties.

    Meanwhile, German and US capitalist expropriations get a pass. Kühnert mocks horror at “collectivizing” BMW even as Germany “collectivizes” land for Autobahn construction. In Detroit, GM is closing its Poletown plant decades after Detroit repressed protesters and leveled a community to make way for GM. Socialists demand the plant now be expropriated for green production.

    The top SPD “parent party” leader, Andrea Nahles, wouldn’t comment on Kühnert’s statements. Some party leaders joked about positions they themselves held as youth. But former SPD chief Sigmar Gabriel accused Kühnert of using Donald Trump’s demagogic methods. An SPD council on the economy proposed Kühnert’s expulsion from the SPD.

    Jusos, led by Kühnert, is more independent than most political parties’ youth groups, but is the traditional incubator for party leaders who shed the sins of their youth.

    Some mainstream media took Kühnert seriously. They suggested SPD spark a national discussion of rising inequality to restore party’s profile among voters. Academics defended his criticisms of the housing market.

    The SPD is truly in crisis. Jusos opposed forming the party’s current national coalition with Merkel’s Christian Democrats and their Bavarian ally, the CSU. Since then this youth opposition has strengthened.

    SPD youth see that the Green Party, starting from conservative-humanistic values, has in some ways passed the SPD to the left as the latter moved rightward. Many progressives favor the Greens over the SPD on climate change and immigration, and as an alternative to the rising far-right party, the Alternative for Germany. Many voters value Greens’ record in governing at local and regional levels (while, unlike the SPD, so far avoiding national coalitions).

    Yet here were the Greens criticizing Kühnert as too left-wing. A leading Green said Germany needs ecological rather than socialist reform of the economy — the latter a subject “for seminars.”

    Die Linke, the Left Party, supported Kühnert on workers running BMW and added a more Marxist statement that those doing the work should own the production process and product.

    Die Linke has a small but significant and stable voting base as well as a wing promoting a mass progressive, cross-party movement. The SPD leaders lose youth to the left, but their response seems to be, “Shut the baby up so we can go back to sleep.”

    In the 1960s and 70s, Kühnert’s comments would have been unremarkable in a youth leader. In the neoliberal world, they draw a line between social-democratic electoralism and socialist solutions.

    Time will tell whether this controversy in the SPD is merely a tempest in a May Day teapot. However, SPD youth will continue to threaten a split over the coalition government with the conservatives of Angela Merkel’s CDU. These youth may increasingly look toward Die Linke. Even a slight socialist breeze from Jusos is a relief from international social democracy’s suffocating capitulation to neoliberalism.

    Originally posted at the Solidarity website.

  • Escalating Threat of Direct U.S. War Against Iran: Is There A Way Out?

    Escalating Threat of Direct U.S. War Against Iran: Is There A Way Out?

    The Trump administration is openly taking steps toward a military confrontation with Iran by sending  an aircraft carrier, B52 bombers and a Patriot Missile interceptor battery and more naval firepower to the gulf region. A meeting of President Trump’s top national security aides reportedly discussed a plan devised by National Security Advisor John Bolton, one of the masterminds of the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, which called for sending up to 120,000 troops to the Middle East to attack Iran.

    The U.S. claims that according to recent intelligence information, Iran is mobilizing proxy groups in Iraq and Syria to attack U.S. forces.  However, even some Republican supporters and senior British military officials say that they have not seen such a report. The Iranian government, on the other hand, has announced that given the U.S.’s unilateral withdrawal from the nuclear agreement it signed with Iran in 2015, Iran will no longer abide by all the terms of the agreement.

    Earlier in April, when the U.S. administration designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization, Iranian president Hassan Rouhani declared in a speech on Nuclear Technology Day that “If the aim of your sanctions was to reduce our military power, you should know that during the past year we have obtained missiles and weapons that you cannot even imagine. You cannot stop our military power.” The Iranian parliament then signed a bill that designates all U.S. security and intelligence forces in west Asia as terrorist. (“روحانی:  موشک هایی داریم که در مخیله تان نمی گنجد.زمانه،  20 فروردین 1398)

    At the same time, several oil tankers (including two owned by Saudi Arabia) off the coast of the United Arab Emirates were sabotaged on May 12. No entity or country has taken responsibility for these explosions. However, sources from the U.S. army say that Iran is being held responsible. Iran-backed Houthi rebels have also used drones to attack Saudi Arabian oil facilities.

    The possibility of any explosion or confrontation leading to U.S. air-strikes and a full-scale war is very likely. Saudi Arabia and Israel are  strongly behind such a war and have indeed promoted claims that Iran plans to attack U.S. forces in the region.

    Why Is The Trump Administration Pushing for War with Iran?

    Although the Trump administration does not seem to have a coherent policy with respect to the Middle East, its policy vis-à-vis Iran has been very much determined by its aim of strengthening its  most important regional allies, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammad Bin Salman, two powers which have joined in an effort to wage war on Iran, a regional rival.  It has also promoted the creation of an “Arab NATO” mainly consisting of the Gulf states and Jordan as a bulwark against Iran and its reliance on Russia and China. This administration also seeks to use a possible war on Iran as a convenient way to turn attention away from its own assaults on labor, civil rights and women’s rights in the United States and to promote its authoritarian policies domestically  in the name of national security.

    To the extent that this administration wants “regime change” in Iran, it does not even pretend to be in favor of democracy. Instead, as Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo stated very clearly in a speech to a group of Iranian supporters in Washington D.C., on April 24, that the goal of the United States is to promote “transfer of power” and “leadership by a group of non-revolutionaries.” ( پمپئو در جمع ایرانیان:  واشنگتن در به کار بردن لفظ رزیم چینج محتاط است.زمانه،  2 اردیبهشت 1398 ا ) John Bolton, National Security Advisor, has also been working closely with the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), an Iranian militarist cult which receives funding from the U.S., supports U.S. military intervention and was for years allied with the butcher regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq from which it received arms and support.

    Whither Iranian Progressive and  Revolutionary Opposition?

    In the words of an Iranian journalist, Rahman Bouzari: “Trapped between the Trump administration and the domestic oppressors are ordinary people. They are offered a choice between imperialism and authoritarianism. However miserable their situation might be, they continue to reject both.”

    The Iranian masses are currently being crushed under the heavy weight of U.S. sanctions, a militarized authoritarian state capitalist regime, and the effects of the recent massive floods which have led to the displacement of millions. While they are deeply afraid of a U.S. military assault, they continue to express their opposition to the regime in various ways:

    • Ongoing labor struggles and strikes have led to the arrests of almost all the leaders of the existing independent labor unions and the teachers’ union, including Esmail Bakhshi of the Haft Tapeh Sugar Cane Workers’ Union, Jafar Azimzaeh of the Free Union of Iranian Workers and Esmail Abdi of the Teachers’ Union, to name of a few.
    • Prominent women’s rights activists are currently in prison and have received long prison terms or await trial because of their activism and their writings. These include Nasrin Sotudeh, a human rights attorney who has defended the Girls of Revolution Avenue (women who took off their headscarves in public and were arrested and imprisoned as a result), Narges Mohammadi, a leader of a campaign against the death penalty, and Parvin Mohammadi, co-leader of the Free Union of Iranian Workers, to name a few.
    • Kurdish political prisoners are serving prison terms for opposing discrimination against Iran’s Kurdish national minority. Over one thousand Arab human rights activists  have been detained in the southern province of Khuzestan.  Bahai and Sufi activists are imprisoned for being religious minorities.
    • Imprisoned environmental activists face the possibility of execution for “endangering national security.”
    • Many student activists and dissident intellectuals are either detained or have been released on heavy bail which allows the regime to send them back to prison at any moment.

    These are the forces that could help lead a nationwide progressive and possibly revolutionary movement to overthrow the Islamic republic and to oppose war and imperialism in the region. However, given the crushing force of U.S. economic sanctions and the current threats of war from the U.S., the Iranian regime has been able to increase its repressive apparatus and crack down on any efforts to oppose the regime from a progressive standpoint.

    A Labor Day protest of feminist, student and labor activists in Tehran on May 1 was viciously assaulted by security forces who arrested many of the protesters.

    Another protest by hundred of student activists at Tehran University on May 13, 2019 opposed the compulsory veil and the “morality police.”  They forced members of the Basij (“volunteer” force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) off the stage before they were attacked by the Basij and the security police.

    Desperately needed is international solidarity from progressive and left forces throughout the world to support these ongoing struggles and to oppose a U.S. war on Iran.  Such an effort needs to oppose both U.S. imperialism and Iranian sub-imperialist interventions in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.

    What Kind of Solidarity Is Needed to Find A Way Out of War, Imperialism and Capitalist Authoritarianism?

    In December 2017-January 2018, popular protests throughout Iran openly called for the overthrow of the Islamic Republic and an end to its military interventions in the region. The wave of labor, feminist and student protests that have continued since then however, have often lacked an explicit opposition to Iran’s military interventions in the region.

    To the extent that the discourse against Iran’s military interventions and missile program and nuclear ambitions has been promoted, it has been led by monarchist nationalists who promise a well-managed capitalist and non-interventionist state and also support U.S. military intervention in Iran.

    The reformist and leftist intellectuals who oppose U.S. military intervention, and are also strongly nationalist, do not offer an anti-war discourse that goes beyond anti-U.S. imperialism.

    With a few exceptions, no systematic effort has been made from a progressive and socialist standpoint to expose and oppose Iran’s interventions in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen,  its ongoing missile program and its prior efforts  to develop nuclear weapons. Even a systematic discussion of the dangers of nuclear energy without nuclear weapons and the lessons of the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters has not been promoted. (For the few exceptions, see here, here and here.)

    Desperately needed inside Iran is an independent socialist vision that is opposed to Iran’s military interventions, all regional and global imperialist powers, patriarchy, racism, and also explains why capitalism in private or state form always breeds war.

    Within the U.S. and international left, most of those who actively oppose U.S. imperialist sanctions and war threats against Iran do so from a standpoint that is uncritical of the Iranian regime. Hence they are not able to appeal to the U.S. and international masses or call on them to relate to the struggles of workers, women and oppressed minorities inside Iran. They also seem to have no genuine interest in these struggles inside Iran. (See Code Pink and Open Letter to Code Pink.)

    A much smaller segment of the international left opposes both U.S. imperialism and other global and regional imperialist powers in the Middle East. It is trying to form active relations of solidarity between labor, feminist and oppressed minority struggles throughout the Middle East/North Africa region and globally. This effort has been energized by the Sudanese and Algerian popular uprisings which are both challenging militarized capitalist regimes and have strong labor, feminist and anti-racist dimension. (See the Alliance of Middle Eastern Socialists website.)

    Conclusion

    A direct war between the U.S. and Iran can lead to unimaginable destructive consequences and will only strengthen the Trump administration’s authoritarian agenda.  Even if the Iranian regime is overthrown, the Trump administration and its Israeli and Saudi allies will do everything in their power to not allow for any  progressive or revolutionary alternative to emerge from the ground. What happened in Iraq after the 2003 U.S. invasion is a possible scenario.

    Stopping the ominous drive toward a direct U.S. war against Iran demands opposition both to U.S. imperialism and to the repressive Iranian regime. It demands reaching out to labor, feminist, student and oppressed minority struggles in Iran and connecting them to labor, feminist and anti-racist struggles in the rest of the region and internationally. It demands explaining the necessary relationship between capitalism and war, and showing what can be a humanist alternative to capitalism.

    Originally posted at the Alliance of Middle Eastern Socialists website.

  • At the Trotsky Conference in Beleaguered Cuba

    At the Trotsky Conference in Beleaguered Cuba

    Trotsky Conference in Cuba Poster

    Last week I was in Cuba to attend an academic conference on Trotsky. The night before the conference began I had arrived very late at the government-regulated air B&B where I was staying. First there had been a thunderstorm in Miami and lightening strikes, hail, and gusts of wind had prevented my plane from leaving on time and eventually it left two hours late. After I had passed through migration in Cuba I came into a room were a short young man was holding a poster with a portrait of Leon Trotsky. I walked up to him and introduced myself and he told me his name was Junior, welcomed me, and said that he had been waiting for me for hours.

    He explained that a taxi would come soon to pick us up. The José Martí International Airport seemed to have few arriving flights and little automobile or pedestrian traffic at 11:00 at night. There were several taxis standing by, but Junior told me we were waiting for a specific taxi. He was a literature student and, though he did not know English, he was very interested in American poets and he asked me about Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and especially about Ezra Pound. As a young man I too had loved poetry above all else and I had memorized and surprisingly still remembered Pound’s poem “Virginal” and recited it to him and then translated it into Spanish. I was astonished that I could still remember it and he was impressed that old American who had come to a conference about Trotsky and could also talk about poetry.

    About a half-hour later the taxi arrived, one of those old cars from the 1940s and 1950s still used in Cuba, some of which have been beautifully maintained or restored, though this one was a jalopy. I got in and we started off, the car filling with exhaust fumes coming up through the floorboards. I was reminded of rolling wrecks that I had owned back in the 1960s and 70s when I was a college student in California. The Cuban car’s maximum velocity seemed to be about 35 miles an hour, a speed that could not be kept up because of the large potholes in the road. About an hour later, we arrived in Habana Vieja (Old Havana).

    My young guide and the driver got us to the neighborhood in the historic center but we couldn’t drive in to the area because it had been made into a pedestrian mall, the streets blocked with old cast iron canons that had no doubt been taken from one of the forts that for centuries guarded the Havana harbor from pirates and from the English. So we stopped near Plaza Vieja and with them leading the way I dragged my suitcase along over the cobblestones until we arrived at the air B&B’s address on Mercaderes Street where I said thanks and goodbye to my greeter and driver. Clearly this was an old street from the capitalist era, probably from the early colonial era, since Mercaderes means merchants. There are in Cuba today still some merchants on Meraderes, but commerce is not flourishing.

    Luckily at 1:30 in the morning a woman named Gracia was sitting by the gate to receive me—but also to inform me that my apartment, #13 was already occupied by two of my “compañeros,” presumably others attending the conference. Gracia told me she would call her husband who was better informed, but he had just gotten out of the shower, she said, which explains why it took him about 15 minutes to dress and come down. The four-story building had perhaps a dozen apartments, each of its apartments owned by a different person. “Well,” he said, “yes, that one is occupied. But the one next to it, #14 may be free, let me ask Patricia.” They called Patricia, who lived in another apartment in the building and eventually she got up, dressed and came down. “Yes,” she said, “I think it is free, but let me call Daniel who owns it.” She called Daniel who told her she could rent it to me and gave a price. So, finally, at 2:00 a.m., I was taken to a room, threw myself on the bed, and instantly fell asleep.

    The next morning I arose and went in search of coffee and breakfast in that same neighborhood. The entire area is given over to tourism with many bars and restaurants that serve the thousands of tourists who come on cruise ships and tramp through Old Havana in search of something not found in Canada or Germany, but at 7:30 or 8:00 in the morning nothing seemed to be open on the main street. I turned into a side street where I saw what appeared to be a restaurant. There was no sign, just an open door six feet wide and eight feet tall and inside a counter, a broken chair, and a couple of boxes on which people were sitting. While I speak Spanish, I am not familiar with Cuban food and there was no menu, so I watched to see what the others were eating. I saw a man consuming what looked like a whole-wheat hamburger bun from which an omelet seemed to be spilling out. I asked him what that was called and he said, “tortilla.” “Tortilla” in Mexico is a corn pancake, in Spain it is a potato pie, but in Cuba it is scrambled eggs on a bun, or at least that is what a tortilla was in that restaurant.

    I ordered a tortilla and given my hunger the whole-wheat bread and eggs tasted great. But, it turned out, there was no coffee. When I went to pay for the sandwich, all I had was a bill for 10 CUC, the currency principally used by tourists that is pegged to the dollar while the cost of my sandwich was just a few CUP, a few pennies, in the Cuban currency used by the local residents, The clerk said he had no CUC change and shrugged his shoulders. A woman in her sixties who sat on a chair half-in and half-outside the door, apparently the owner or manager, turned to me and said, “Don’t worry about it. You don’t have to pay.” Then she insisted that I also have a glass of mango juice. The breakfast was indicative of the generosity of the Cuban people, but also of the worthlessness of the currency.

    While I sat there drinking my juice, two men were talking loudly about the scarcity of things. No pigs, no chickens, no eggs. Later I heard similar stories in other places in Havana, so it came as no shock when I returned to learn that the Cuban government had expanded rationing on the day that I left. Chicken, eggs, rice, beans, cooking oil, soap and other hygiene products will all now be rationed.

    The next day I discovered that at the Hotel Ambos Mundos, the famous place where Earnest Hemingway had lived for ten years and written three novels, was just a block away. Thousands of tourists passed through it every month, led by guides with flags or signs, some of them going up to look at Hemingway’s typewriter, jacket, and shoes. At Ambos Mundos, I learned, one could get coffee and a very complete breakfast of eggs, little pancakes, cold cuts, and juice all for 10 CUC. Of course there they don’t let you leave without paying.

    The customers’ discussion in the poor little restaurant of the lack of food in Cuba was only one sign of the difficult economic and social situation. Since I was last in Cuba about 15 years ago, there were more beggars on the streets in the tourist zones, still many hustlers, and perhaps more petty criminals. I watched a couple of the latter for 15 or 20 minutes as one would go up to a tourist and start a conversation about helping his sister and then the other man would appear to help work the scam. They repeated the scene three or four times while I watched, looking for their mark. Prostitutes too work the streets, day and night, approaching the male tourists and drawing them into conversation.

    All of these are, of course, symptoms of the poverty, which is largely a result of U.S. policies such as the trade embargo and blockade as well as the Helms-Burton Act. Though, when I went to change some money in the bank, the teller volunteered that the economy was a disaster, “and it’s the government’s fault,” he offered. He didn’t go into it, but Cubans are well aware that Raúl Castro’s government has failed in its efforts to produce more food and consumer goods. And now Venezuela’s economic collapse means that Cuba can no longer get cheap petroleum and must buy it on the world market.

    The situation may not yet be desperate, but it is pretty depressing. Near my air B&B on Plaza Vieja there was an elementary school where I saw children just like my own four-year-old granddaughter going to their pre-K program. Now they will have to tighten their little belts because of the cruel U.S. policies. Walking out of the core tourist area, one is saddened to see the poverty, the run-down housing, the people wearing old clothes, the empty shelves in the stores. Where there is poverty, there is competition for jobs and for income and, as everywhere, immigrants are blamed. A taxi driver tells me that things in Havana have gone to hell because of the “invasion” of people from the East, meaning the eastern provinces of Cuba.

    I spent the next three days in the first-ever Cuban conference on Trotsky, an academic conference largely attended by Trotskyists who had come from all over the Americas and Europe to attend the event. The organizers and the attendees saw the conference as an historic occasion because since Fidel Castro had moved Cuba into the Soviet camp in the early 1960s, Trotskyists had been imprisoned and Trotsky’s ideas have been taboo. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Cuban Communist leadership began to view the Soviet Union as a failed experiment with a flawed system and, while recognizing the support that Cuba had received from the USSR, the Cuban government distanced itself from the Soviet experiment. With Cuba no longer part of the Communist camp and the Soviet Union now looked upon as a failure, Trotsky became less important. And perhaps that is why the Trotsky conference could take place in May of 2019.

    What did this event, where 40 professors and independent activist intellectuals presented papers on virtually every aspect of Trotsky’s thought mean for Cuba? Was it simply like most academic conferences, just an occasion for specialized discussion of an abstruse topic? Or was this event symptomatic of something taking place in Cuba? Some of us wondered if this event suggested that some space was opening for more critical Marxist theories? Might it somehow presage a more open Cuba with freedom to discuss a wide range of political theories? Was this conference the beginning of opening the window and letting in some fresh air? Would Cuba become more democratic, allowing its citizens to engage in freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to assemble?

    As it happens, at the same time the Trotsky conference was taking place there was a test of democratic rights in Cuba. The 12th annual “Conga against Homophobia and Transphobia,” Cuba’s gay pride parade sponsored by the government’s National Centre for Sex Education (Cenesex), was supposed to take place but was suddenly canceled. The Cuban government called off the Conga, arguing that it was not advisable at this time of “international and regional tensions,” a clear reference to severe U.S. measures taken recently against Venezuela and Cuba. The government appeared to fear that the parade would lead to protests by right-wing Evangelical Christians, a group that has become a conservative force in various Latin American countries and helped to bring authoritarian governments to power in places like Brazil. At the same time the government also made the argument that the parade could not be held at a time of economic crisis.

    The Conga organizers, however, decided to go ahead and hold the event anyway, without government sponsorship or approval. The LGBT activists stated that walking down the street holding hands and carrying rainbow flags would have no impact on the economy. And they were not prepared to back down because of the Evangelical Christians. But holding their own march crossed a well-known line: no independent social or political activity in permitted in Cuba. Still they went ahead. Some 300 LGBT activists marched down the Paseo Prado, but when they reached the Malecón, the five-mile long sea wall that stretches from the center of Havana to the Vedado and is one of the principal tourist areas, the police blocked the parade, leading to clashes and arrests. So, while a group can meet to discuss Trotsky and even his criticism of the Communist bureaucracy in Russia in the 1930s and the lack of democratic rights in the Soviet Union, one cannot in Communist Cuba walk down the street and continue down the Malecón holding hands and waving rainbow banners without Communist approval.

    Most of those attending the Trotsky conference were Trotskyists and most supporters of the Cuban Communist government, even if some are more critical supporters. Within the conference no Trotskyist dared to suggest that Trotsky’s analysis of Soviet Union as a “degenerated workers state” controlled by an oppressive and exploitive bureaucracy might be applied to Cuba. The argument is always made as it has been for more than sixty years that Cuba is under attack by U.S. imperialism, which it is, and that therefore one must not criticize the beleaguered revolution. Some of the Trotskyists theoretically believe that a genuinely democratic socialism might better defend the Cuban people than its current top-down leadership, but to raise that notion implies the building of an independent movement against the existing one-party Communist state as well as demands for democratic rights. It implies the right to organize independent labor unions and an opposition socialist party. The Trotskyists will generally not go there.

    Perhaps a small movement for democratic rights is developing in Cuba, but it was less likely to be found in the Trotskyist conference than in the courageous LGBT marcher who organized independently to walk down the Havana streets holding hands.

  • An open letter to Extinction Rebellion

    An open letter to Extinction Rebellion

    This letter was collaboratively written with dozens of aligned groups. As the weeks of action called by Extinction Rebellion were coming to an end, our groups came together to reflect on the narrative, strategies, tactics and demands of a reinvigorated climate movement in the UK. In this letter we articulate a foundational set of principles and demands that are rooted in justice and which we feel are crucial for the whole movement to consider as we continue constructing a response to the ‘climate emergency’.

    Dear Extinction Rebellion,

    The emergence of a mass movement like Extinction Rebellion (XR) is an encouraging sign that we have reached a moment of opportunity in which there is both a collective consciousness of the immense danger ahead of us and a collective will to fight it. A critical mass agrees with the open letter launching XR when it states “If we continue on our current path, the future for our species is bleak.”

    At the same time, in order to construct a different future, or even to imagine it, we have to understand what this “path” is, and how we arrived at the world as we know it now. “The Truth” of the ecological crisis is that we did not get here by a sequence of small missteps, but were thrust here by powerful forces that drove the distribution of resources of the entire planet and the structure of our societies. The economic structures that dominate us were brought about by colonial projects whose sole purpose is the pursuit of domination and profit. For centuries, racism, sexism and classism have been necessary for this system to be upheld, and have shaped the conditions we find ourselves in.

    Another truth is that for many, the bleakness is not something of “the future”. For those of us who are indigenous, working class, black, brown, queer, trans or disabled, the experience of structural violence became part of our birthright. Greta Thunberg calls world leaders to act by reminding them that “Our house is on fire”. For many of us, the house has been on fire for a long time: whenever the tide of ecological violence rises, our communities, especially in the Global South are always first hit. We are the first to face poor air quality, hunger, public health crises, drought, floods and displacement.

    XR says that “The science is clear: It is understood we are facing an unprecedented global emergency. We are in a life or death situation of our own making. We must act now.”  You may not realize that when you focus on the science you often look past the fire and us – you look past our histories of struggle, dignity, victory and resilience. And you look past the vast intergenerational knowledge of unity with nature that our peoples have. Indigenous communities remind us that we are not separate from nature, and that protecting the environment is also protecting ourselves. In order to survive, communities in the Global South continue to lead the visioning and building of new worlds free of the violence of capitalism. We must both centre those experiences and recognise those knowledges here.

    Our communities have been on fire for a long time and these flames are fanned by our exclusion and silencing. Without incorporating our experiences, any response to this disaster will fail to change the complex ways in which social, economic and political systems shape our lives – offering some an easy pass in life and making others pay the cost. In order to envision a future in which we will all be liberated from the root causes of the climate crisis – capitalism, extractivism, racism, sexism, classism, ableism and other systems of oppression –  the climate movement must reflect the complex realities of everyone’s lives in their narrative.

    And this complexity needs to be reflected in the strategies too. Many of us live with the risk of arrest and criminalization. We have to carefully weigh the costs that can be inflicted on us and our communities by a state that is driven to target those who are racialised ahead of those who are white. The strategy of XR, with the primary tactic of being arrested, is a valid one – but it needs to be underlined by an ongoing analysis of privilege as well as the reality of police and state violence. XR participants should be able to use their privilege to risk arrest, whilst at the same time highlighting the racialised nature of policing. Though some of this analysis has started to happen, until it becomes central to XR’s organising it is not sufficient. To address climate change and its roots in inequity and domination, a diversity and plurality of tactics and communities will be needed to co-create the transformative change necessary.

    We commend the energy and enthusiasm XR has brought to the environmental movement, and it brings us hope to see so many people willing to take action. But as we have outlined here, we feel there are key aspects of their approach that need to evolve. This letter calls on XR to do more in the spirit of their principles which say they “are working to build a movement that is participatory, decentralised, and inclusive”. We know that XR has already organised various listening exercises, and acknowledged some of the shortcomings in their approach, so we trust XR and its members will welcome our contribution.

    As XR draws this period of actions to a close, we hope our letter presents some useful reflections for what can come next. The list of demands that we present below are not meant to be exhaustive, but to offer a starting point that supports the conversations that are urgently needed.

    Wretched of the Earth, together with many other groups, hold the following demands as crucial for a climate justice rebellion:

    • Implement a transition, with justice at its core, to reduce UK carbon emissions to zero by 2030 as part of its fair share to keep warming below 1.5°C; this includes halting all fracking projects, free transport solutions and decent housing, regulating and democratising corporations, and restoring ecosystems.
    • Pass a Global Green New Deal to ensure finance and technology for the Global South through international cooperation. Climate justice must include reparations and redistribution; a greener economy in Britain will achieve very little if the government continues to hinder vulnerable countries from doing the same through crippling debt, unfair trade deals, and the export of its own deathly extractive industries. This Green New Deal would also include an end to the arms trade. Wars have been created to serve the interests of corporations – the largest arms deals have delivered oil; whilst the world’s largest militaries are the biggest users of petrol.
    • Hold transnational corporations accountable by creating a system that regulates them and stops them from practicing global destruction. This would include getting rid of many existing trade and investment agreements that enshrine the will of these transnational corporations.
    • Take the planet off the stock market by restructuring the financial sector to make it transparent, democratised, and sustainable while discentivising investment in extractive industries and subsidising renewable energy programmes, ecological justice and regeneration programmes.
    • End the hostile environment of walls and fences, detention centers and prisons that are used against racialised, migrant, and refugee communities. Instead, the UK should acknowledge it’s historic and current responsibilities for driving the displacement of peoples and communities and honour its obligation to them.
    • Guarantee flourishing communities both in the global north and the global south in which everyone has the right to free education, an adequate income whether in or out of work, universal healthcare including support for mental wellbeing, affordable transportation, affordable healthy food, dignified employment and housing, meaningful political participation, a transformative justice system, gender and sexuality freedoms, and, for disabled and older people, to live independently in the community.

    The fight for climate justice is the fight of our lives, and we need to do it right. We share this reflection from a place of love and solidarity, by groups and networks working with frontline communities, united in the spirit of building a climate justice movement that does not make the poorest in the rich countries pay the price for tackling the climate crisis, and refuses to sacrifice the people of the global South to protect the citizens of the global North. It is crucial that we remain accountable to our communities, and all those who don’t have access to the centres of power. Without this accountability, the call for climate justice is empty.

    The Wretched of the Earth

    Argentina Solidarity Campaign

    Black Lives Matter UK

    BP or not BP

    Bolivian Platform on Climate Change

    Bristol Rising Tide

    Campaign Against the Arms Trade CAAT

    Coal Action Network

    Concrete Action

    Decolonising Environmentalism

    Decolonising our minds

    Disabled People Against the Cuts

    Earth in Brackets

    Edge Fund

    End Deportations

    Ende Gelände

    GAIA – Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives

    Global Forest Coalition

    Green Anticapitalist Front

    Gentle Radical

    Grow Heathrow/transition Heathrow

    Hambach Forest occupation

    Healing Justice London

    Labour Against Racism and Fascism

    Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants

    London campaign against police and state violence

    London Feminist Antifa

    London Latinxs

    Marikana Solidarity Campaign

    Mental Health Resistance Network

    Migrants Connections festival

    Migrants Rights Network

    Movimiento Jaguar Despierto

    Ni Una Menos UK

    Ota Benga Alliance for Peace

    Our Future Now

    People’s Climate Network

    Peoples’ Advocacy Foundation for Justice

    Race on the Agenda (ROTA)

    Redress, South Africa

    Reclaim the Power

    Science for the People

    Platform

    The Democracy Centre

    The Leap

    Third World Network

    Tripod: Training for Creative Social Action

    War on Want

    Originally posted at Red Pepper.

  • Should the Green Party Stand Down in 2020?

    Should the Green Party Stand Down in 2020?

    We can expect much commentary on why the socialist left should unite behind the Democrats in 2020 to get rid of the dreaded Trump. The Green Party will be told to stand down in the 2020 presidential campaign.

    The quadrennial attacks on the Green Party will come from the usual whiny liberals like Eric Alterman, Jonathan Chait, Katha Pollitt, Michael Tomasky, and Joan Walsh in publications like The Nation, The New Republic, and The Daily Beast. They are already recycling their 2016 attacks on Bernie Sanders for being too left to beat Trump.

    There will also be arguments against an independent left approach to 2020 coming from self-identified socialists who support Bernie Sanders and—in the end—any damned Democrat who is nominated to run against Trump. An early submission to this genre is “A Left Strategy for the 2020 Elections and Beyond” by Carl Davidson and Bill Fletcher, Jr., which is now making its way around the left blogosphere.

    This article is not another cranky diatribe against the Green Party. It doesn’t even mention the Green Party, although some comments on it have attacked the Greens. The article is a rational argument for supporting Democrats to defeat Trump and the ultra-right Republicans. But rational doesn’t mean right if the premises are wrong.

    Their starting point is “The defeat of Donald Trump and the ejection of his right-wing and white supremacist populist bloc from the centers of political power is a tactical goal of some urgency not only for Democrats but also for leftists.” The independent left should have no argument with that goal.

    Their next premise is “Given how unlikely Trump’s resignation or impeachment is, the election of the candidate running on the Democratic Party line seems like the likeliest path toward his removal.” Here there is certainly room for argument.

    Why not demand Trump’s impeachment right now? The hesitation of the Democrats to impeach Trump is the first reason why the left should not count on the Democrats to defeat Trump and the ultra-right.

    The many grounds for impeaching Trump are plain to see for anyone who cares to look at the news: self-enriching emoluments and nepotism; abuse of power, obstruction of justice, and contempt of Congress; constant lying, racist tropes, and incitements to violence; demonizing the press; surveillance and harassment of journalists, immigration lawyers, black and Muslim groups, and anti-Trump protesters; felony campaign hush-money payments; and seeking and welcoming campaign support from Russians, Saudis, Emiratis, and Israelis. The circumstantial evidence is overwhelming for many Trump crimes committed before taking office, including sexual assault, racial discrimination, money laundering, bank fraud, insurance fraud, tax evasion, wage theft, and failing to pay contractors and creditors.

    Only a rich white man could expect to get away with this in America. The Republicans would have impeached Obama instantly for any one of these offenses. But the Democratic leadership seems cynically intent on leaving Trump in office as a villainous foil for fundraising.

    Speaker Pelosi has said impeachment would “divide the country.” But Trump’s whole political strategy is to divide the country racially in order to consolidate his “white supremacist populist” electoral base. That bloc of voters is a minority of the country that has only prevailed because Democrats like Pelosi cow before it. The left cannot depend on the Democrats to defeat the ultra-right. The surest and quickest way to beat Trump is to beat him up now and cripple him politically with impeachment proceedings.

    Fighting to impeach Trump should be part of the “war of position” that prepares the “war of movement” that Davidson and Fletcher invoke: “The election-of-the-day looks a lot like the Gramscian ‘war of movement,’ mobilizing forces quickly for the taking of a strong point of power. The other protracted base-building campaigns are more like the ‘war of position,’ gathering strength, taking or winning over stronghold by stronghold, concentrating our forces on the weak spot to make a breakthrough.”

    Gramsci posited the wars of position and movement as the way to build a socialist counterculture to the hegemony of capitalist ideology that convinces so many people to accept their exploitation and oppression without much force and violence. With respect to impeachment, the proceedings are the war of position, exposing Trump’s crimes for all to see and debilitating him politically, as well as the Republicans who defend him. The war of movement is taking Trump out by a Senate conviction or by crushing him in the 2020 election because he is irreparably damaged by the impeachment process.

    This useful wars of position and movement framework makes a better case for independent left politics. Positioning inside the capitalist Democratic Party obscures the socialist left’s distinct identity and muffles its radical message. Supporting the most progressive Democrats on the party’s left fringe only makes the Democratic Party look better to progressives than it really is. If the point of the war of position is to build mass organizations rooted in an oppositional socialist culture, supporting the candidates of the one of the two capitalist parties obviously undermines that objective.

    The war of movement for the Green Party is building up its power from below in elections by increasing its votes and its elected officials. The US Census of Governments reports over 87,000 local and state governments with more than 500,000 elected offices. The Green Party has over 100 elected officials, but that is just a drop in the bucket of what is possible and needed to challenge the two-capitalist-party system. Building a bench of elected municipal officials will create the foundation for electing Greens to state legislatures and Congress and becoming a socialist force in American government. The Greens can’t wait to do this until after 2020. Climate collapse won’t wait. Millions of working families who deal with crises every month paying for food, rent, utilities, medical bills, and/or tuition and student loans can’t wait either.

    In order to execute a strategy of building from below, the Green Party still needs to run statewide and presidential tickets in 2020 because in most states these elections are the only way the Green Party can secure ballot lines for use by its local candidates in the next election cycle. The war of position for Green statewide and presidential campaigns is to put solutions into the public debate that the major parties want to ignore. The war of movement in 2020 is to win state ballot lines.

    The classic socialist case for independent working-class politics was stated by Karl Marx in 1850:

     Even where there is no prospect of achieving their election, the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength, and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention. They must not be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the workers’ candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of reaction the chance of victory. All such talk means, in the final analysis, that the proletariat is to be swindled. The progress which the proletarian party will make by operating independently in this way is infinitely more important than the disadvantages resulting from the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body.

    Marx made this statement in the wake of the failed democratic revolutions of 1848 where the workers’ coalition partners, the liberal business owners and professionals—the “democratic party” in the quote above—sold out the workers when property owners, but not workers, were granted voting rights and economic reforms. Most of these liberal governments soon fell as the reactionary landed elites reasserted their exclusive rule through military dictatorships. The analogy today is the Democrats compromising with and thereby enabling the Republicans’ upward redistribution, institutional racism, court packing, executive authoritarianism, and militarism.

    Davidson and Fletcher nevertheless propose supporting Democrats, but through progressive organizations not formally embedded in the structures of the party or its candidates’ campaigns. “… the way we should participate in electoral politics is through our existing organizations rather than simply jumping into an official campaign…. Socialists shouldn’t work ‘within the Democratic party,’ but with one of its clusters, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, especially its DSA/WFP/PDA left wing and its mass allies.”

    Except for DSA, none of these organizations profess to be socialist. This war of position does not spread socialist ideas. It submerges the differences between socialists and liberals. Worse, the logic of working inside the Democratic Party in this way leads to supporting any damned Democrat, as Davidson and Fletcher acknowledge: “We should not abandon working within campaigns of non-left Democrats….The left forces under the Dem tent will be tempered by the need for wider left-center unity to defeat far-right measures and candidates, but we will wage our ‘war of position’ nonetheless.”

    The logic at work here is not only leftists being compelled to support centrist candidates in hopes of defeating far-right Republicans. Support for centrist candidates is required of leftists in order to simply be accepted into even the progressive organizations that support the Democratic Party.

    I agree with Davidson and Fletcher that “election campaigns are … at the center of our work. We use them to make our local base communities stronger, more connected and more aware. Through electoral campaigns, our mass outreach can be magnified tenfold or even more.” But I would argue this mass organizing is only effective in winning changes if the masses have an independent left political alternative. Without that, social movements are reduced to ineffectual lobbies on the Democrats, who take them for granted because they have nowhere else to take their votes. The independent alternative gives the movements leverage over Democrats who then have to meet demands or lose voters.

    In the end, Davidson and Fletcher are actually for a left party. “But the work begins under the Democratic tent as a largely inside job. Once you get over 100,000 or even 200,000 new DSA members from the organizing and base-building of backing Sanders on the Democratic line, you’ve created at least one key component of the large bloc needed for a new First Party.”

    The problem is you can’t get there from here. It has been tried many times before. The farmer-labor populist movement died after its People’s Party cross-endorsed Democrat William Jennings Bryan in 1896. The socialist left disappeared as a distinct and influential force in American politics after the Communists’ Popular Front policy led most of the left into the Democrat’s New Deal coalition in 1936. The New Left of the 1960s melted away as much of it went into the Democratic Party with the McGovern campaign of 1972 and most of what was left of it with the Jackson campaign in 1984.

    In the absence of a strong independent left since the 1930s and especially since the 1970s, the Democratic Party has moved steadily to the right on economics and foreign policy. Behind the two capitalists parties’ public bickering, a bipartisan consensus prevails in support of neoliberal capitalism and the endless wars of the US empire. The Democrats’ discourse is certainly more socially tolerant than the old Democrats when their southern Dixiecrats controlled congressional committees. But the symbolic tokenism of diverse representation at the top of the Democratic Party has not stemmed the rising tide of economic and racial inequality for the working-class majority.

    It is self-defeating for socialists to lose their distinct voice and message in electoral coalitions with the Democrats. The concrete practice of such coalition politics—whether the goal is to take over the Democratic Party or to split it—is to submerge the differences between liberals and radicals. In the heat of campaigns, the socialists must downplay their radical program in order to concentrate on electing liberal and centrist Democrats. Public expression of the socialist critique of capitalism is dropped in order to be accepted as coalition partners by the Democrats and their satellite organizations. Instead of heightening the contradictions between progressive and corporate Democrats, the left obscures them and disappears as a socialist alternative.

    The Greens won’t convince many progressive Democrats of the efficacy of independent left politics until there is a stronger Green Party. Actions are more persuasive than words. It is up to the Green Party to become a strong enough political force to be a viable home for progressives and socialists who tire of losing their demands inside the Democratic coalition, from the Green New Deal to Medicare for All. In the meantime, one can hope that progressive Democrats will focus their attacks on the Trump Republicans to their right instead of the Green Party to their left—and join the Greens in demanding that the Democrats impeach Trump now.

  • No U.S.-Guaido Coup – Let Venezuelans Decide!

    No U.S.-Guaido Coup – Let Venezuelans Decide!

    The U.S.-sponsored coup in Venezuela appears to have fizzled on the first day. But the country remains on a knife-edge. A failure of this coup would leave the Trump administration facing the prospect of its own “Bay of Pigs”-type debacle – when John F. Kennedy in 1961 authorized a CIA-organized invasion of Cuba, which was rapidly crushed, a generational humiliation for U.S. imperialism in Latin America.

    Venezuela in 2019 is far different from Cuba in 1961, and the world is a different place too. But the Trump gang’s proclamation of “all options on the table” clearly signals, if the regime-change coup sputters, to organize a civil war in Venezuela, a foreign mercenary invasion, a blockade or even direct U.S. military intervention.

    This is a return to the longstanding U.S. imperial doctrine that Latin America is “our back yard” to be dominated and exploited at will. In fact, Trump’s national security advisor John Bolton has openly stated that it doesn’t stop with Venezuela — Cuba and Nicaragua are also targets of the drive to enforce U.S. dictates in this hemisphere.  A movement is urgently needed opposing this vicious intervention and U.S. threats to destabilize and destroy governments that don’t obey Washington’s orders.

    At this exceptionally dangerous moment, the fact that there’s essentially no opposition from the Democratic Party leadership is both shameful, and utterly predictable. Have you seen any Democratic Congressional leader utter a word opposing Trump’s coup attempt in Venezuela? (A few Representatives including Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have spoken out against it, and on May 2 Bernie Sanders tweeted: “The Trump administration is threatening a disastrous military intervention in Venezuela. Under our Constitution, only Congress can authorize the use of force. We must make sure the United States does not get involved in yet another war and destabilize another region.”)

    Nor has there been Democratic opposition to Trump’s months of preparation for the coup, including turning over millions of dollars of Venezuelan oil revenues to “interim president” Juan Guaido,  sanctions to cut the country’s access to capital markets, and the blatant political manipulation of purported “humanitarian aid.”

    U.S. imperialism in Latin America demonstrates “bipartisanship” in practice. The Democratic administration of president Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton welcomed a coup in Honduras in 2009, which returned that Central American nation to the rule of multinational corporations, death squads and drug cartels. When the Honduran people voted that regime out of office in 2017, the election was blatantly stolen – with the approval of the Trump administration, of course. That’s the main reason why tens of thousands of Hondurans, including whole families, have fled seeking asylum and are being caged at the southern U.S. border.

    From the ostensible “opposition” press – CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times – consumed with the 24/7 spectacle of post-Mueller subpoenas, hearings and impeachment chatter – there’s a virtual consensus that “restoring democracy in Venezuela” means putting Guaido in the presidential palace. There’s no consideration of what engineering a rightwing restoration in Venezuela would actually mean for the future of democratic rights, indigenous peoples and working class movements in the region – or what an emboldened Trump gang might undertake next.

    The Coup and the Crisis

    Juan Guiado proclaimed himself “interim President of Venezuela” when Mike Pence signaled that it was time to do so. Undoubtedly, his April 30 proclamation of the “final push” to overthrow the Nicolas Maduro government was prompted by the U.S. government’s assessment that the time was ripe for the Venezuela military to crack. This may well have been an enormous imperial miscalculation, or as George W. Bush might have put it, “misunderestimation” of the relation of forces.

    For anyone with progressive or democratic values, it is essential that this coup fail, and fail decisively.

    This doesn’t mean blinding ourselves to the depth of the social, economic and political crisis in Venezuela today. In fact, neither side of this confrontation is politically strong. As some on the Venezuelan left have stated, “the people no longer want Maduro, and no one elected Guaido.”  Popular support for the existing government is thin, Guaido’s pretense of legitimacy is largely promoted by external governments, and in truth much of the Venezuelan population are exhausted and consumed with the daily struggle for survival. The likely prospect is a protracted, grinding struggle as the U.S. government seeks to prey on people’s suffering and desperation for any solution.

    Venezuela’s crisis is the product of multiple well-documented factors. These include the failure of the “Bolivarian revolution” to develop well-rooted institutions of grassroots popular power and workers’ control of production; the consequent growth of bureaucracy and corruption in the regime; the collapse of oil prices; and brutal U.S. sanctions that (as estimated by expert economist Jeffrey Sachs) have contributed to some 40,000 civilian deaths in Venezuela.

    As desperate as conditions have become for much of the Venezuelan population, a successful coup and U.S.-sponsored rightwing regime would make everything much worse – for Venezuela and for all of Latin America.  As the governments of Mexico and Uruguay have been seeking to bring about a peaceful political solution, the Trump-Pompeo-Bolton gang is determined to destroy anything other than a U.S.-imposed result to show who’s the boss of the Americas.

    Down with the U.S.-Guaido coup – only Venezuelans can determine their future!

    Originally posted at the Solidarity website.