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  • 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.

  • PSOE gains from useful vote against the reactionary right

    PSOE gains from useful vote against the reactionary right

    With a turnout of more than 75%, the PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español – Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) was the main winner (28.70% of votes, with 123 seats, as against 2016 when it obtained 85) against the PP (Partido Popular – Popular Party), which has entered an irreversible crisis (it has gone from 137 seats to 66, with 16.70%, while it did not obtain representation for the first time in the Basque Country and only has one seat in Catalonia), Ciudadanos (which rose from 32 to 57 seats with 15.86%, but did not overtake the PP and fell back in its original fiefdom, Catalonia) and Vox (which enters parliament with 24 seats and 10.26%, but below the expectations it had generated with its discourse of the Reconquista).

    Pedro Sánchez managed to channel the cry of “No pasarán”” to the detriment of UP (Unidos Podemos), which went from 21.15% in 2016 to 14.31% and also, unlike Ciudadanos, has been especially affected by the electoral system’s procedure of seat distribution, going from 71 seats to 42. In addition Sanchez won an absolute majority in the Senate (going from 43 to 121 seats) against a right (falling from 130 to 56 seats) that has traditionally dominated this institution, whose role had been revalued with the application of article 155 against Catalan autonomy after the days of September and October 2017.

    The second conclusion to be highlighted from these results is undoubtedly the rise of ERC (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya – Republican Left of Catalonia) which has gone from 9 to 15 seats, with 3.89% of votes, this being the first time that a pro-independence political force has become the biggest force in Catalonia in a general election. This is compounded by the rise of its Basque ally in the upcoming European elections, EH Bildu (which has gone from 2 to 4 seats, with 0.99% of votes), confirming the greater weight of sovereignist and republican leftist forces in the next parliament, although they are not going to be decisive to guaranteeing the investiture of Sánchez as president of the government.

    The PSOE’s triumph is completed with its achievement in the elections that were also held on Sunday in the País Valencià: it rises from 23 to 27 seats and, with the support of Compromís (17) and Podemos (8), has a majority to form a government over the three right wing parties (47 seats).

    This new scenario is a very serious defeat of the PP and, above all, its leader Pablo Casado, whose radicalization of discourse to compete with Vox has not yielded the desired results and, instead, now opens an internal crisis of incalculable consequences a little less than a month from the municipal, autonomous and European elections of May 26, 2019. Resignations and defections to Ciudadanos are not ruled out in the next few days, following in the footsteps of Ángel Garrido, former president of the Community of Madrid, a region where Ciudadanos beat the PP.

    The new correlation of forces in parliament allows Sánchez to obtain investiture by adding his votes to those of UP, the Basque nationalist PNV (Partido Nacionalista Vasco, which has risen from 5 to 6), Compromis (1) and the Cantabrian regionalist PRC (1), if not in a first in a second round of parliamentary voting, without having to agree with the Catalan independence movement (which includes Junts per Catalunya, which will have 7 seats) or with Ciudadanos.

    This last formation will enter a new stage in which its leader, Albert Rivera, has already expressed his aspiration to become head of the opposition to the Sanchez government, all the more so in view of the coming electoral battles and the new setback that awaits the PP in them. It does not seem foreseeable, therefore, that in the short term there will be a turn towards a negotiation on their part with the PSOE but, on the contrary, a greater effort to wrest votes from the PP and Vox and to strengthen its support so as to enter government in large cities like Madrid and some Autonomous Communities.

    Against this background we are seeing how Pablo Iglesias, despite the setback suffered, has offered to be part of a coalition government with the PSOE. An option that does not seem to be taken into account by Sanchez but which, if realized, would mean, given such an unequal correlation of forces between the two formations, moving towards strategic subordination to a party whose programmatic axis around the main cleavages – social, the national-territorial and political-institutional- that run through society continues to be that of a fundamental pillar of this regime – against which Podemos was born – and a faithful servant of the dictates of the Ibex 35 and the neoliberal troika.

    Such an orientation, in the midst of the new electoral campaign that is soon to begin, would not serve at all to recover that part of the electorate that opted this Sunday for the vote for the PSOE or other formations on its left, but quite the opposite. A coherent position should be limited to supporting the investiture of Sanchez in parliament and reaffirming the strategic autonomy of a project openly prepared to confront the right wing parties and, above all, the threat of the penetration of Vox among certain popular sectors with an alternative program that from the first day is able to seek a confluence with the social mobilizations and popular empowerment around urgent demands whether they are social, feminist, ecologist, anti-racist, the defence of liberties or national-territorial. The latter, essential in the face of a plurinational reality that has become manifest again and again and before which the PSOE of Sánchez continues to yield to the pressures of the right and of its own baronies, even avoiding its already moderate federalist proposals in its electoral program and turning a deaf ear to the majority clamour in Catalonia against the farcical trial taking place in the Supreme Court (let’s not forget that four elected representatives of ERC and Junts per Catalunya are in jail) and in favour of a dialogue-based way out that goes through a referendum on their future.

    The presence of a diversity of candidacies of popular unity in cities, towns and Autonomous Communities before the elections on May 26 should be an opportunity to seek greater social roots in neighbourhoods and workplaces that helps to move towards a process of recomposition of a left that, coinciding with the eighth anniversary of 15M, once again renews the spirit of indignation that saw it born while maintaining a clear horizon of rupture.

    Originally posted at International Viewpoint. 

  • Gertrude Ezorsky, 1926-2019

    Gertrude Ezorsky, 1926-2019

    Former New Politics board member Gertrude Ezorsky died on April 19, 2019, at the age of 92. The New Politics board mourns her passing and offers some links to help us remember her.

    Andrew Wengrad and Nanette Funk, “Gertrude Ezorsky,” New Politics online, April 23, 2019.

    Stephen R. Shalom, “Gertrude Ezorsky: From Left Democratic Socialist to Left Democratic Socialist,” New Politics online, Nov. 19, 2011.

    Nancy Holmstrom, “Do Workers Lose Their Rights?” Against the Current, 144, January-February 2010 (a review of Freedom in the Workplace? by Gertrude Ezorsky)

    Gertrude Ezorsky, “Hannah Arendt Against the Facts,” New Politics, vol. 2, no. 4 (1963) [re-posted July 29, 2011]

    For further writings by and about Gertrude Ezorsky, see here.

  • A State of Terror

    A State of Terror

    Sara Henríquez feels betrayed. As a student in the 1980s, she spent all her spare time working towards the Nicaraguan revolution, as a Sandinista youth and university leader, as part of the ‘literacy crusade’ and harvesting coffee and cotton.

    Henríquez and her comrades were successful in their struggle and the Somoza dictatorship was overthrown in 1979. The Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional – FSLN) governed the country until 1990, launching a massive social programme, including the Nicaraguan Literacy Campaign, massively reducing illiteracy rates. They also greatly improved the Nicaraguan health system, as well as carrying out land reform.

    But now, the FSLN that Henríquez worked so hard for is dominated by the family of President Daniel Ortega and his wife, the vice president Rosario Murillo. They are overseeing a violent political and humanitarian crisis that has been ravaging Nicaragua since April 2018. Peaceful protests against the government have been brutally repressed by the state and pro-government armed groups, resulting in the deaths of at least 320 people, over 3,000 wounded, more than 600 imprisoned and 60,000 in political exile. Many have been tortured or disappeared.

    Thousands of people took to the streets of Nicaraguan cities from 18 April 2018 to protest against social security reforms that would hit the poor and elderly hardest. The protesters faced violence from government supporters, causing thousands to demonstrate and show their indignation.

    The government has continued to use the police and paramilitary groups to violently quash the resistance, criminalising activists as ‘terrorists’ and making political protest illegal. A recent report by the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts has verified that the Ortega-Murillo government could be formally accused of crimes against humanity. Supreme court judge Rafael Solis – a self-described ‘ex-Sandinista militant’ – resigned saying that Ortega has transformed the country into ‘a state of terror’.

    The blue and white of the national flag have become symbols of the resistance movement. ‘But then people got arrested for releasing balloons onto the streets,’ says Henríquez.

    Tens of thousands of Nicaraguans have left the country, many to Costa Rica. In July 2018, UNHCR reported that every day an average of 200 asylum applications were being lodged there by Nicaraguans.

    There have been repeated reports of censorship, attacks and threats against the media and journalists. On 19 April 2018, several television channels were pulled off air and a radio station in León, Radio Darío, was set on fire the next day. A journalist from the Caribbean city of Bluefields was killed by the police, according to eye witnesses, and two young black men falsely accused of the crime. Since then, several NGOs and media organisations have been raided.

    Authoritarian machismo

    Henríquez, a feminist and LGBT rights activist and member of the Autonomous Women’s Movement, co-founded two feminist networks in Leon, where she lives. She says that feminists have seen the warning signs in Ortega’s politics and behaviour for many years.

    Between 1979-90 the ‘contra war’ raged in Nicaragua. Thousands of ‘contras’ (counter-revolutionaries) were backed by the US to try to overthrow the FSLN government and undermine its social programmes, leaving 30,000 people dead and 20,000 wounded.

    Ortega’s original presidency ended when he lost the election in 1990, and over the years he has become more authoritarian, neoliberal and focused on religion. By making a pact with the corrupt extreme right to avoid prosecution for sexual abuse, and then a deal with the churches to ban abortion in exchange for their support, he managed to return to formal power in 2006. Under current laws any form of abortion under any circumstance is punishable with several years in prison for women and medical personnel.

    Following his return to power, Ortega immediately began to attack feminists and independent civil society groups, and worked to concentrate state power in the hands of the FSLN under his leadership. The UN human rights office has highlighted ‘recurrent allegations of corruption and electoral fraud and media censorship, and high levels of impunity amongst other issues’.

    Ortega – who has now been president for three terms – pushed the national assembly to abolish presidential term limits in 2014. He also tampered with the constitution to allow his wife Rosario Murillo to become vice president in 2017.

    ‘What he’s actually done is make pacts with the extreme right and with big capital,’ says Henríquez. ‘He gutted the Sandinista party, banned abortion and erected a family dictatorship based on authoritarian machismo.’

    Henríquez says that women and feminist movements have played a key role in resistance against Ortega’s increasingly oppressive governments. In 1998, feminists supported Ortega’s adopted stepdaughter Zoilamérica Narváez after she published allegations that he sexually abused her for over a decade. However, Ortega had immunity from prosecution.

    ‘What’s allowed him to maintain himself in power has to do with this complicity between macho leaders and through this the processes of abuse, whether they be abuse of women, or abuse of the country. That’s become kind of naturalised. It’s basically political and economic corruption that’s allowed him to stay in power.’

    A peaceful insurrection

    Henríquez says that the Nicaraguan feminist movement has grown significantly over the past 15 years. It has joined forces with other movements, resulting in the broad resistance on the streets of Nicaragua today, including students and young people, environmentalists, peasant farmers and neighbourhood groups.

    ‘This is a popular movement that covers a huge part of the population… It’s a peaceful insurrectionary movement,’ she says.

    Women and LGBTQ political prisoners can face additional abuse in prison. ‘Not only are they being tortured but they also suffer from rape, often gang rape, and degrading displays of their bodies in front of other people – forced by guards,’ says Henríquez.

    ‘LGBT people are doubly vulnerable in this situation because it’s a very homophobic society, which has come out of the same machismo.’ She says that trans women are particularly vulnerable.

    Although some have condemned what is happening, Henríquez would like to see the international community, including politicians, speaking out more strongly against Ortega and his government.

    ‘What we have to recognise, and what everybody around the world has to recognise, is that Daniel Ortega is not representing the left at all – he’s a dictator. He’s a political opportunist,’ says Henríquez.

    ‘A lot of countries and a lot of people who represent “the left” are closing down, they’re not willing to listen to those of us who are coming from inside of the country. Whether it’s on the left, or on the right, we have to condemn this level of violation of human rights, otherwise we’re lost as humanity.

    ‘It’s difficult to overthrow a regime without using arms but we’re convinced there’s no way back. They’ve cornered themselves because of the repression and the violation of human rights and we’re sure that at some point – we don’t know when or under what circumstance, but at some point – they will be forced out of power.

    Originally posted at Red Pepper.

  • Are any of Rosa Luxemburg’s ideas relevant for us today?

    Are any of Rosa Luxemburg’s ideas relevant for us today?

    One hundred years after the murder of Polish-German revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg, are any of her ideas relevant for people today who want to transform society to achieve social and ecological justice? I believe the answer is yes. In spite of the many differences between our times and hers, some of Luxemburg’s most important ideas are still valuable political resources today.

    I contend that Luxemburg’s ideas are a more valuable starting point for today’s left than the ideas of any of the other major anti-capitalist thinkers of the twentieth century. Why? First, she was profoundly committed to human liberation, unlike much more influential figures like Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong who established a new form of class rule over workers and peasants. Her commitment to liberation was also more consistent than that of her famous contemporaries Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Second, the context that shaped her politics was less different from ours today than the Russian Empire that shaped Lenin and Trotsky’s politics or even Antonio Gramsci’s Italy.

    Still, it’s a mistake to try to simply apply Luxemburg’s politics today or look for answers to all of our questions in her writing. For one thing, capitalist society today is different from capitalism a century ago in ways that really matter – from social media to the end of direct European colonial rule and the classical workers’ movement. For another, Luxemburg wrote before some important questions of our time had even been posed – for example, how best to fight for drastic measures to reduce climate change? How to end the settler-colonial oppression of Indigenous people? Can workers change highly bureaucratic unions? It’s also true that she didn’t address some of the questions of her time in a fully adequate way, and some of her answers to those questions were wrong.

    That said, my aim here is to discuss some of what we do find in Luxemburg’s thought that is relevant and important today, not what we don’t find. Five ideas stand out as especially important.

    1. Capitalism inevitably causes terrible destruction and will eventually lead to total social breakdown (what Luxemburg called “barbarism”), with the loss of the best achievements that humanity has created under capitalism, unless people rise up and start a transition to a different society. Long before total social breakdown, capitalism throws up all sorts of regression and destruction.

    Luxemburg grasped that a system in which goods and services are produced for profit by competing firms, one in which the small number of countries where that system is most developed dominate the rest of the world – imperialism – is inherently destructive and leads to devastating wars.

    As she wrote, “The triumph of imperialism leads to the destruction of culture, sporadically during a modern war, and forever, if the period of world wars that has just begun [she is referring to the First World War] is allowed to take its damnable course to the last ultimate consequence […] the destruction of all culture […] depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery.” This was an accurate prediction of the world wars and the Holocaust that happened between 1914 and 1945. Her view has also been confirmed by the wars in Vietnam from the early 1960s to 1975, in Afghanistan and Iraq from 1979 into the early 21st century, in Congo from 1998 to 2003, and others.

    There were weaknesses in Luxemburg’s theory of capitalism. But she was right to understand it as a chaotic system inherently driven by competition between firms and states into social crises, a system that will eventually inflict widespread extermination on humanity if it is not replaced.

    Today capitalism is tearing open rifts in the relationship between humanity and the rest of nature, threatening to disrupt the boundaries within which our species have existed for millennia (some scientists who see this boundary-crossing as defining a new era in Earth’s history have dubbed this period the Anthropocene). Climate change is extremely dangerous, but it’s only one aspect of what’s happening. There is also the extinction of species, the acidification of oceans, the depletion of fresh water, reduced genetic diversity of crops, and more. This ecological crisis is guaranteed to give us a future of worse suffering, strife, and social crises in a world in which many states have chemical and biological weapons, and some have nuclear weapons.

    Luxemburg’s understanding helps us to see why there can be no capitalist solutions to the ecological crisis, as so-called ecomodernists believe. It also guards against false hope that pressure from social movements and governments committed to action on climate change can deliver reforms that will make capitalism ecologically sustainable. It is possible – and urgent – to build mass movements to force states to implement measures to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, capitalism with major reforms to reduce emissions would still be an ecologically destructive system.

    2. An advanced society based on cooperative production to meet people’s needs – socialism – is possible, and socialism is inherently democratic.

    Capitalism is not simply incredibly harmful and destructive. It has also created unprecedented social cooperation and technology that represent the potential basis of a self-governing cooperative commonwealth, a society of shared plenty in which production is democratically planned to meet human needs, including a non-destructive relationship with the rest of nature. We need, in Luxemburg’s words, a “transition to a planful mode of production consciously organized by the entire working force of society – in order that all of society and human civilization might not perish.”

    Socialism would be a society in which “everybody works for everyone, for the public good and benefit,” with work itself “organized quite differently” from work under capitalism. It would mean the profound democratization of all aspects of society, with people having control from below over the decisions that affect their lives. “The great labouring mass ceases to be a dominated mass, but rather, makes the entire economic and political life its own and gives that life a conscious, free, and autonomous direction.”

    The only path a transition from capitalism towards socialism could take would be democratic: “by conquering political power, to create a socialist democracy to replace bourgeois democracy […] socialist democracy is not something which begins only in the promised land after the foundations of socialist economy are created; it does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators. Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and of the construction of socialism.” That’s why Luxemburg supported the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Bolsheviks who led it, but also recognized that the rapid decline of socialist democracy in a country descending into civil war and Bolshevik justifications for this decline were dangerous.

    I believe it was clear that the start of a transition to socialism was a real possibility in Luxemburg’s day. We can’t answer the question of whether it’s possible today by studying the past. However, I believe it is, as I argue in my book We Can Do Better: Ideas for Changing Society.

    3. The start of a transition to socialism requires social revolution. There is no road to socialism through piecemeal reforms, yet the struggle for reforms within capitalist society is very important.

    Luxemburg argued that “work for reforms” – think, for example, of a higher minimum wage or controls on greenhouse gas emissions – is not “a long-drawn out revolution.” Nor is revolution “a condensed series of reforms” – an important point to bear in mind today, when the word “revolution” is used so loosely. People who say their goal is socialism but believe it can be achieved without social revolution “do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society they take a stand for surface modifications of the old society.” In short, there is no road out of capitalism through reforms, as some radicals today who talk about “non-reformist reforms” believe. To begin a transition to socialism a revolutionary rupture is needed.

    Luxemburg doesn’t give us a strategy for social revolution in the twenty-first century. However, she was right about what will ultimately be needed. Crucially, she never made the mistake of thinking that people who yearn for social revolution should abstain from struggles for reforms: “the daily struggle for reforms” is a “means of engaging in the proletarian class war and working in the direction of the final goal […] The struggle for reforms is its means; the social revolution, its aim.”

    Luxemburg was a consistent opponent of reformism: politics whose horizon doesn’t extend beyond reforms within the existing social order. But her politics were not like those of would-be revolutionaries who think they should abstain from organizing for small reforms today because such work is not “radical.” In her politics we find an alternative to both of these dead-end approaches: to fight for reforms as people committed to the ultimate goal of social revolution, in ways that build the capacity to fight for more.

    4. The only way the struggle to replace capitalism will ever succeed is as a massive process of self-emancipation.

    Mass struggle is the key to mass radicalization, to many people coming to the conclusion that society needs to change from the roots. Luxemburg saw that for people to radicalize on a large scale takes learning not “by pamphlets and leaflets, but only in the living political school, by the fight and in the fight.” It’s the experience of collective struggle that’s crucial to changing people, forcing them to rethink their ideas so that they begin to realize that radical change is possible and necessary. Luxemburg was never against people reading – far from it. She took the need for education in socialist theory for granted. Yet she also grasped that experiences of mass struggle were the key to people changing on a large scale.

    “Every real great class struggle must rest upon the support and cooperation of the widest masses,” Luxemburg proclaimed. This stands as a rebuke to all anti-capitalists today who assume that what matters most is what the small minority of people who are self-conscious radicals do. Her point was not that political organizations of socialists aren’t needed; there is no support in her life or writings for the beliefs that mass movements are enough to make revolution or that revolutions can succeed without political organizations of revolutionaries. Instead, Luxemburg was emphasizing that mass movements are key and warning against substituting the actions of a minority of radicals for what only broad masses of people can do.

    She perceptively recognized that mass struggles tend to overflow their banks. There is no better illustration of this dynamic than the Yellow Vest movement in France that began in late 2018: starting as a protest against a tax on fuel, it soon became a broader uprising against unjust taxation, the rising cost of living, “the contempt of the powerful” and the discredited political system that delivers all this, as French socialists Christine Poupin and Patrick Le Moal contend.

    What’s needed is a social revolution unlike past revolutions in which “a small minority of the people led the revolutionary struggle, gave it aim and direction, and used the mass only as an instrument to carry its interests, the interests of the minority, through to victory.” Liberation can’t be handed down from above. Instead, we need a social revolution against capitalism made by “the great majority of the working people themselves.” This perspective was confirmed after Luxemburg’s death by the Stalinist counter-revolution in Russia and by subsequent revolutions in China, Cuba, and other countries in which small minorities “used the mass only as an instrument.” The cost in lives and the damage done to the cause of socialism by the bureaucratic dictatorships in these countries that were socialist in name only was extraordinary.

    5. We need internationalism, not nationalism.

    Luxemburg disdained loyalty to nation-states, writing of “the emptiness of nationalism as an instrument of capitalist domination.” She exposed the absurdity of claims about every member of a nation having common interests – for example, consider what the Thomson family (net worth $41 billion)and the rest of the capitalist class have in common with most of us in Canada. She rejected calls for citizens to unite behind governments that administer societies that are not really “ours” because they’re owned and controlled by a small ruling class.

    Instead of nationalism, Luxemburg called for solidarity across borders, naming “two rules of life […] “of world-historic importance” for the self-emancipation of the working class: class struggle against the ruling class in every country, and the “international solidarity of the workers of all countries.” This is a timely response to capitalist states that divide humanity with borders that are open to investment funds and rich people but closed to most people even in life-or-death circumstances; grant citizens rights but deny them to everyone else; declare some people “illegals” who can be detained or deported; and deploy police against Indigenous land defenders in order to build pipelines “in the national interest.” Her stance is also a fitting response to nationalist political movements that seek to rally people around the flag, proclaim “our nation is best” and denigrate people who, by accident of birth, happen to belong to other nations. (In my view, internationalism is important everywhere but the nationalisms of Indigenous peoples are different from Canadian nationalism, and so too are the nationalisms of countries oppressed by imperialism.)

    Rosa Luxemburg is not a saint. She was a brilliant revolutionary socialist of her time. The answers to all of our political questions today won’t be found in her writings (or those of any other past revolutionary). Yet there is much of value in her work for people who want to fight for immediate changes that will reduce the scale of the catastrophes we face and ultimately for a transition beyond capitalism. The best way to honour Luxemburg’s memory is to put the best of her ideas to work in building new political forces committed to liberation.

    This article is based on talks given in Winnipeg and Toronto to mark the centenary of Rosa Luxemburg’s death.

    For people who’d like to read Luxemburg, good texts to begin with are Reform or Revolution, The Mass Strike, and What Does the Spartacus League Want? All are available at marxists.org, along with many of her other writings. The best short overview of her ideas is still Tony Cliff’s 1959 booklet Rosa Luxemburg, also available at marxists.org.

    Originally posted at Briarpatch.

  • To give up on Arab-Jewish partnership is to give up hope

    To give up on Arab-Jewish partnership is to give up hope

    It’s so easy for those in positions of privilege to criticize any action taken by people doing work on the ground as “not radical enough” and to look at the world through a cynical and despondent lens. From that comfortable perch, it’s no wonder that in their recent article, “Let’s stop talking about a false ‘Jewish-Arab partnership,’” Rami Younis and Orly Noy chose not to see real opportunities — and to not believe in change.

    We, on the other hand, know that there is hope. We haven’t given up on this place and we haven’t despaired of the people living here. Optimism is a political position.

    There are two aspects of Younis and Noy’s article that should be praised. Firstly, even talking about Jewish-Arab partnership, one of the most important political matters to take into consideration these days, is praiseworthy. Secondly, by insisting on separating Arabs and Jews, they unwittingly demonstrate exactly how the right in Israel has maintained its power with its divide-and-conquer strategy and by driving a wedge between Arab and Jewish social struggles.

    Their point of departure sidesteps the question of how to achieve change in this land — and who has an interest in achieving it — and is what leads them to the mistaken conclusion that Jewish-Arab partnership is unnecessary.

    In the footer of the original Hebrew article, Rami Younis describes himself as a “not nice Arab who believes that Jews need to support Palestinian struggles” and Orly Noy describes herself as “a self-hating Jew who believes that Palestinians must lead their struggles themselves.” Beyond the attempt at humor, the crank bios reveal the pair’s underlying assumptions: the Arab-Palestinians living here have legitimate struggles but Jewish Israelis don’t (and if they do, they aren’t important enough or radical enough). But you can’t push aside the legitimate struggles of underserved neighborhoods and cities, of women, of Mizrahi Jews, of the disabled, public housing, the Ethiopian community, asylum seekers, and others. You can’t write off entire communities and simply declare that they are a part of a “destructive and violent majority.”

    What’s more, by erasing all of those communities’ struggles and lumping them in with a “destructive and violent majority,” Younis and Noy are suggesting that the majority of Jewish Israelis vote for the right simply because they are racists trying to protect their privilege. In short, Younis and Noy think that Jewish Israelis are shitty people. We at Standing Together believe that the current right-wing government and the people who live in this land have diametrically opposed interests, and that it is the left’s role to show just how harmful the government’s policies are — and to organize the struggles against those institutions and their policies.

    The right’s economic policies consistently harm workers and weaker population segments, proven at least in part by the series of social protests in Israel over the years. The right’s social policies disregard the views of the majority of the public; this past year alone, those policies led to mass protests over violence against women and LGBTQ rights. The right manages to stay in power not by improving the lives of its voters but by attacking the Arab-Palestinian national minority in Israel. Incitement to racism, among other things, is the right’s way of hiding the fact that it hasn’t improved the lives of those who vote for it.

    The way to fight Netanyahu is two-fold: show how his economic policies harm the broader public; and fight both his incitement to racism against Palestinians in Israel and Israel’s continued military control of the Palestinian territories. From Younis and Noy’s writing, it’s safe to assume they believe that the struggles for affordable housing, feminism, workers’ rights, and equality for Palestinians inside Israel are all secondary to the struggle to end the occupation. We think differently.

    The majority of the people in this land is harmed by the government’s policies. Jewish-Arab partnership is the way to fight those various forms of oppression, including ending the occupation. Since its founding, we at Standing Together have always believed it is both possible and necessary to work for Israeli-Palestinian peace alongside struggles for social justice and equal civil and national rights. On every front of that struggle we insist on working together on the basis of shared interests.

    We take that approach with a full appreciation for the fact that different groups in Israeli society suffer from exploitation, discrimination, and oppression in different ways. Arab-Palestinian citizens aren’t just harmed more severely by the right’s socioeconomic policies, they are also discriminated against on the basis of their national identity: racist legislation specifically targets the Arabic language and culture and the legitimacy of Arab political participation. That was articulated most poignantly by the Jewish Nation-State Law, which subverted the principle of equality and legislated Palestinian citizens of Israel into second-class status.

    There is no symmetry between the lived realities of Jews and Arabs in Israel. But the right in Israel survives precisely by turning that asymmetry into a barrier for anyone interested in effecting change. It becomes particularly effective when the right systematically stokes the fears of Jewish Israelis, suggesting that Palestinian national and cultural symbols embody a desire to “throw the Jews into the sea.” That is how the right manipulates national Palestinian symbols, particularly the Palestinian flag and Nakba Day.

    Notwithstanding the inherent complications and power relations of any Jewish-Arab partnership in a society as segregated and polarized as ours, we believe that such a partnership is the only way to advance an alternative and change our reality. Yes, it is a challenge. It is not easy to achieve equality within a joint political framework, as Noam Sheizaf wrote. But we in Standing Together choose to face those challenges every single day of the week. Sometimes we succeed; sometimes not so much. But we do not give up, we do not give in to despair, and we do not stop trying.

    Younis and Noy write in their article that the Arab members of Standing Together don’t really believe in Jewish-Arab partnership — that they only say they do to placate the privileged Jews in their midst. By writing that, they diminish the contributions of the Palestinian members of Standing Together — partners in the movement’s leadership who set its agenda, work to promote the interests of the Arab-Palestinian public in Israel, and who sometimes pay a personal price for their leadership. More tragically, by attacking Standing Together, Younis and Noy only strengthen the right’s argument, according to which those Palestinians who say they want to live peacefully alongside Jewish Israelis are actually lying.

    These are our beliefs and we really believe in them. We believe that the right’s policies harm Arab families more than Jewish families and that that harm has historical roots. We also know that Jewish-Arab partnership is the way to fight for the rights of all of those families, Jewish and Arab alike, and to ensure that they all can live together in this land. Those are our values. That is our theory of change. That is the source of our hope. We believe in the path we have chosen and we are building a broad movement — Jewish, Arab, and socialist — to bring about fundamental change in the society, economy, and politics of Israel.

    A version of this article first appeared in Hebrew on Local Call. You can read it here. First posted in English at +972.

  • New York City nurses threatened to strike against the Hospital Alliance—and won

    New York City nurses threatened to strike against the Hospital Alliance—and won

    In late fall of 2018, nurses from five private New York City hospitals in three competing hospital systems delivered their contract proposals to management. Born from a protracted gestation of surveying democratic priorities and tracking experiences with the previous contract, a triumphant mood presided at the presentation of the proposals. But no one expected an easy process from these hospitals, notorious for their union busting and connections to dark money.

    The New York State Nurses’ Association (NYSNA), the independent union belonging to these nurses, represents  almost 43,000 nurses statewide and enthusiastically encourages member activity. At the annual statewide convention in December, for the first time, delegates elected by their peers voted on the union’s strategic goals and direction, including to advocate for the repeal of the no-strike clause of the Taylor Law, which has stunted the public sector in New York State. (The NYC Health and Hospital system, where NYSNA nurses work, is the largest public health system in the US.)

    The roughly 13,000 of NYSNA’s 43,000 nurses represented in these NYC private-sector negotiations are still only a fraction of NYC’s private healthcare sector. Labor-side negotiating veteran Jerry Brown joined forces with the union to face off against rich anti-labor legal experts with plush Manhattan offices. The employers at the table who hired them—Montefiore, Mount Sinai, and New York-Presbyterian (jointly named “The Hospital Alliance”)—represent three out of four of the largest corporate healthcare entities in the New York City region. Despite retaining non-profit status, they together reported over $11 billion in annual revenue in 2016, with over $600 million in net income.

    “Management will not agree to ratios under any circumstance, at any time,” the Alliance’s lead counsel said on January 3rd, following months of heart-rending, firsthand accounts of the extreme dangers to both patients and caregivers posed by short staffing. For their part, the hospitals refused to admit that short staffing, a chronic condition, existed at all, clinging instead to their “flexible staffing plans.” One Chief Nursing Officer claimed that nothing was really wrong with staffing as it was being allocated by Alliance hospitals; instead, the problem was that “the nurses call out sick too often.”

    In February, after twenty-two negotiating session won nothing more than insults, NYSNA nurses coordinated informational pickets at thirteen sites across the city and rapidly proceeded to a strike authorization vote. With historic levels of turnout, the outcome should have grabbed the Alliance’s attention: 97% authorization to strike across all five hospitals.

    Instead, the bosses pulled a new trick from their bag: pleading indigence, they claimed that reimbursement rates from low-income patients were at severe risk of imminent state budget cuts. They offered negotiations contingent on the elimination of these cuts, but NYSNA teams wisely refused such terms. No one was fooled, although NYSNA continued to advocate against the cuts on the same grounds that one of the Alliance CEOs himself had earlier stated on record: it was not private hospitals put at risk by these cuts, but rather the public health safety net system which would—and could not afford to—suffer.

    In a stroke of magnificent strategy, on March 18th, NYSNA negotiating teams responded by issuing a 14-day strike notice, four days longer than the legal minimum of ten for healthcare strikes. This simultaneously maximized the remaining scheduled bargaining sessions under the threat of an impending strike while counting down the clock to the expected delivery of the New York State budget. Had the teams chosen to rush into a strike before the budget could be finalized, the Alliance could have co-opted the nurses’ strike threat as a mere pawn in their budgetary crisis. Worse yet, the nurses’ crystal clear “safe staffing or strike” could have been mistaken as a thinly veiled tantrum to fundraise for their own contract.

    The fourteen-day notice strategy became crucial again at ten days out, the day on which a legally minimum notice would otherwise have been served. Travel nursing agencies, which source scab nurses, typically demand a hefty down payment at the ten-day mark. Despite the presence of two federal mediators since early January, the ideological gulf between the parties remained as broad as it had ever been. With a new mediator on the scene, the nurses received an offer they had hardly hoped to expect: in exchange for lifting the strike notice, the ungodly sum of money destined for scab nursing contracts would be put toward externally enforceable staffing through ratios and grids, in addition to the Alliance meeting several other key nurse demands; moreover, the nurses would retain their right to strike. Nothing had been sacrificed. The ideological barrier was broken: nurses would have a say in their staffing at last.

    While many nurses back on the floors were skeptical that this breakthrough had truly been achieved—a few even seemed disappointed not to take part in the rising trend of work stoppages—the truth was that  the threat of over ten thousand nurses going on strike at once had caused a seismic shift in worker power in these facilities. New York-Presbyterian even agreed to cancel an expensive upcoming PR war against safe staffing similar to the one waged by Massachusetts hospitals leading up to the ballot measure in 2018. Just over two weeks after the strike was called off, all four negotiating teams endorsed a stunning and historic tentative agreement.

    What the Alliance had once sternly denied the nurses had been won. Transparency was established regarding current vacancies, which would have to be filled following ratification. A staffing allocation team would be created immediately, giving nurses a voice in safe staffing levels for each unit. These levels would then become an enforceable part of the contract, eliminating the unilateral management right to a staffing shell game through attrition or even sick call outs or leaves of absence. Furthermore, these newly enforceable grids and ratios would be subject to several levels of enforcement, including expedited arbitration terms above and beyond those of the rest of the contract. Under no circumstance would any violation of staffing be protracted in its enforcement.

    While these historic landmark wins and the immense sums of money allotted to the hiring of new staff in these facilities earned this tentative agreement an article in the New York Times, they were not the only gains made. Other wins include fully retroactive wage increases throughout the four-year contract, pension and healthcare contributions continuing untouched, retirement health benefit improvements both before and after 65, improvements in language for addressing safe patient handling and workplace violence (an enormous, daily risk for healthcare workers), ability to donate sick time to coworkers in need, contractual recognition for those choosing to take leave to participate in disaster relief missions, and management agreement not to retaliate against nurses when filing for pay for their missed breaks or meals, along with a technological tool to be developed to help track such occurrences. Still more wins were made which were specific to each hospital, as each facility continues with a distinct contract. Ratification is currently underway, and when ratified, this agreement stands to set a liberating precedent for nurses across the country (outside of California, where safe staffing limits are law) who are eager for safer working conditions for themselves and for their patients.

    Several other New York City private hospitals in Brooklyn where nurses are represented by NYSNA remain at the bargaining table now. The public NYC Health and Hospital system nurses (whose negotiating catchphrase is aptly “healthcare justice for the other New York”) are also in bargaining, and may experience distinct challenges in their contract campaign. All of these facilities continue to appreciate support; the Facebook page “We Stand with NYC Nurses & Patients” is one way to share messages of solidarity. Thank you in advance!

    Originally posted at The Strikewave.

  • Trump’s Controversial Decision on Iran’s Revolutionary Guards

    Trump’s Controversial Decision on Iran’s Revolutionary Guards

    There is little question that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is bad news. Some of its units have engaged in severe repression of nonviolent dissidents, supported Assad’s brutal counter-insurgency operations in Syria, backed hardline Islamist militia in several foreign countries, and more.

    But the Trump Administration’s unprecedented decision to label the IRGC as a terrorist organization—the first time the United States has given such a designation to any entity of an internationally recognized government—is dangerous and irresponsible.

    Trump justifies the terrorist label on the grounds that the Revolutionary Guards have provided direct support for repressive regimes and backed armed extremist groups. Of course, the same could be said regarding some U.S. government entities. Indeed, in a retaliatory move, the Iranian government has now labeled the U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations throughout the Middle East, as a terrorist organization as well.

    U.S. forces under the Central Command and Revolutionary Guard units have been operating within miles of each other in both Syria and Iraq, often working jointly in the fight against ISIS. Indeed, IRGC-led Iraqi Shia militia have been recognized as more effective than the U.S.-backed Iraqi Army in defeating these Salafist extremists, though both have also engaged in war crimes.

    With the IRGC and their allies now in the same category as ISIS and Al-Qaeda, the risk of an armed confrontation in these unstable war zones increases, and thereby the threat of a war between the United States and Iran.

    This may have been the goal of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton, who apparently convinced Trump to take the controversial decision and have long pushed for a military confrontation with Iran.

    IRGC-backed militias in Lebanon and Iraq serve as the armed wing of political parties which have leading roles in their country’s respective coalition governments. Since these parties are now formally considered to be “affiliated with terrorists,” this could hamstring U.S. diplomatic efforts in those countries. Trump appears to want to force the State Department to adopt a simplistic “you are either for us or against us” policy to the very complex and sensitive political constellations in the Middle East.

    With more than 125,000 members, the IRGC is one of the largest units of the Iranian armed forces. Iran has near-universal male conscription, in which the IRGC often gets priority over the other branches of the armed services for the best recruits. But now all of these young men, some of whom have no desire to even be in the armed forces, will now be labeled as “terrorists.”

    Like the militaries of Egypt and a number of other autocratic countries, the IRGC controls large segments of the Iranian government, the business sector, and social system unrelated to any military or security functions. These institutions employ an estimated 11 million Iranians, meaning they, too, could be designated as members of a terrorist organization.

    In an asylum case I was involved with a few years ago involving an Iranian dissident, the ICE lawyer noted that he had attended a technical college that was affiliated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The judge recognized that the school was one of many institutions the IRGC controlled and that his training was void of political content or military applications and thereby granted him asylum.

    With the IRGC now formally designated as a terrorist organization, the freedom of countless other asylum-seekers with similar affiliations are now in jeopardy.

    A related problem is that any business from Europe, the Middle East, or anywhere else that sells a printer, books, a stapler, or anything else to any of the thousands of entities controlled by the IRGC, could now be targeted by the U.S. government for providing material support for a terrorist entity.

    Ironically, just a few years ago, the Trump organization invested millions of dollars into a failed attempt to build a Trump Tower in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku that, according to an investigation by The New Yorker, appeared “to be a corrupt operation engineered by oligarchs tied to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.”

    Interestingly, the effort to label the IRGC as a terrorist organization was initially pressed by a bipartisan group in Congress more than a decade ago, including such prominent Democrats as Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, Patty Murray, and Dick Durbin. But the Bush Administration recognized its dangers and blocked its adoption, as did the Obama Administration several years later in response to a subsequent effort.

    Most Iranians see the Revolutionary Guard as repressive and corrupt, yet also as defenders of the nation, heroes of the Iran-Iraq war, and protectors of national sovereignty. As a result, Trump’s move will likely strengthen their influence, rather than weaken it.

    Individuals and units within the IRGC responsible for war crimes and severe human rights abuses, illegal financial activities, and similar activity should certainly be subjected to sanctions. However, this overreaching designation of the entire Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization is misleading, illogical, and dangerous.

    Originally posted at The Progressive. 

  • Gertrude Ezorsky

    Gertrude Ezorsky

    [This piece is jointly written but the first-person recollections refer to Nanette Funk, Gertrude’s colleague of many years.]

    Gertrude Ezorsky, professor emerita, in the philosophy departments of Brooklyn College, and the CUNY Graduate Center, died at home peacefully on April 19 age 92. She combined excellence in analytic philosophy with a courageous commitment to political and social change in a career of rigorously argued, scrupulously researched work, always lucidly presented in her terse, plain style. Drawn to lively and controversial issues with live applications. Gertrude took clear stands, some notably controversial, and she refused to bury her opinions in disclaimers. She secured this reputation with steady early work of the highest quality. Her earliest papers appeared in the elite journals, and her talent gained her the respect of men of top rank in the profession, including Hare, Hampshire, Isaiah Berlin, William Frankena, Chisholm, Maclntyre, and Morgenbesser, as well as her former professor Sidney Hook — this at a time when all but very few women were hardly acknowledged in philosophy.

    Gertrude attended Brooklyn College, returning to teach there fresh out of graduate school. Before going into philosophy Gertrude had done factory and office work and taught elementary school. She started her philosophical career working on traditional issues in epistemology and the nature of truth. She then published in ethics and metaethics, especially on utilitarianism, and she argued for an augmented consequentialism. Her lengthy assessment of Marcus Singer on generalization in ethics and her discussions of the work of Lyons and Rawls on the relation of act and rule utilitarianism earned her much attention. She then moved on to issues of justice and applied ethics. Gertrude challenged many all too easy empirical claims of equal opportunity and freedom, taking stands on discrimination against women, on justice in punishment, on discrimination in hiring of blacks and justice and on freedom for workers, freedom in the workplace being the subject of her last book. Looking back, the hallmark of her argumentation is to put social truths in context, showing the empirical premises and contextual nature of the assumptions of theorists who lift their social principles away from both particular and generalized contexts. Gertrude thus exposed certain stereotypes and errors of reference in theories infatuated by negative liberty. Her concise criticism of Judith Thomson on the rights of employers in Philosophy & Public Affairs is a good case in point. Her lead article “Fight over University Women” in the New York Review of Books in 1974 was a path-breaking knockdown attack on discrimination against women in the university that indicted the academic establishments at Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley, and Chicago and her own employers at City University of New York. Her article “Hiring Women Faculty” in Philosophy and Public Affairs continued that analytical argument. Her case was reprinted in the Congressional Record and in the Hearings of the House of Representative Subcommittee on Education and Labor. This research is a crucial document of that time, a scathing documentation of discriminatory attitudes and practices toward women in the university, and a fine piece of applied ethics. Gertrude single-handedly organized a full-page petition in the Times with 3000 signatures on behalf of affirmative action in hiring university women. This influenced then-President Ford to permit some affirmative action in hiring women in the university. Gertrude was also an active consultant in an important class action suit that established gender discrimination in CUNY. Many women in academia, however eminent or entitled to their current status, would not have work beyond the former level largely reserved for tokens of particular ability or niche recognition without the efforts in which Gertrude was a bona fide leader.

    Racism and Justice, her defense of affirmative justice, written at the height of criticism of affirmative-action policies, sold over 14000 copies. One can attribute this to its strong pedagogical value, because even when students were inclined to disagree with it, they were denied the false stereotypes of an already just and meritocratic social or legal context from which opposition to such policies often started. She offered clear and cogent arguments, not strawman versions, on behalf of affirmative justice, thus sharpening the issues. Gertrude was quick to see that her proposals did not become uniform policy. Her arguments were blunted and deflected by determined opposition, her proposed numerical criteria were turned into a terminally vague appeal for diversity, and her demand for compensation for any truly displaced white males was rejected by the white male power structure itself, which refused to pay the cost of compensation.

    Right or wrong, Gertrude was a model of intellectual integrity, a fearless woman loyal to those wrongly treated, willing to challenge those in high places. The writers she challenged were not personal rivals, except insofar as they were intellectually dishonest; the real competition for Gertrude was between ideas. Gertrude would raise fundamental criticisms with vivid real-life examples, not to score points, but because her significant philosophical abilities are always informed by compassion, moral sensitivity and a pragmatic sense. Her opponents included Hook, Rawls, Lyons, and Thompson aforementioned, Levin, Nozick, and Alvin Goldman. In her early criticism of Hannah Arendt’s use of Eichmann as a paradigm of the banality of evil, Gertrude argued that Arendt disregarded context, miscast the murderous Eichmann, and adopted half-truths as empirical premises. The charge was essentially about empirical assumptions, and remains controversial almost sixty years later.

    A cradle egalitarian and activist who did not bemoan injustice, elitism, academic dishonesty, evident unfairness, or brute exercise of power, but stood up up against them. She spent much of her energy fighting for those much more vulnerable than herself with action guided by the same acute, precise analysis she brought to her publications. She saved the jobs of several men and women who were victims of wrongful treatment, to which I can personally attest.

    I knew Gertrude since we became colleagues at Brooklyn College. A year out of graduate school at Cornell, I returned to the city, having quit my first teaching position. Someone suggested I call Gertrude, who helped find people jobs. Not only did she find me an opportunity at Brooklyn College, but she also took me seriously as a professional, inviting me to meetings of analytic philosophers and other New York intellectuals. The impact on me was tremendous. I sat in the subway on the way to a meeting, with a new sense of myself, thinking I must be a real intellectual if Gertrude invited me to such meetings. When I was threatened with firing early in my career, Gertrude did labor- intensive investigations of probably over 100 hours into the entire history of the Brooklyn College Philosophy Department and its present practices, showing that she was the only woman to have ever gotten tenure or become associate professor. She constructed the winning legal argument presented by our union’s grievance counselor in my case. It was one of the first decisions at the college based on evidence of gender discrimination. What was happening to me recalled to Gertrude her own very recent rebuffs in the department, by some of the same people and same prejudices pervasive throughout higher education, as Gertrude knew only too well. I was stunned to discover that in spite of all the recognition she had received, Gertrude encountered discriminatory treatment. Hired only as an instructor despite her PhD, she was later discouraged by her chair from applying for promotion to associate professor although she had by then published 14 articles in leading journals. She was passed over in favor of a man with two articles in philosophy, one a joint publication. She was also told that she would be supported for promotion only if she undertook secretarial duties, a confirmed affront which defies belief today. When Gertrude was rightly placed on the CUNY doctoral faculty at the Grad Center in the late 1960s, she was never told, nor given courses to teach, until the university was monitored for discrimination years later. Later in the 1980s at the Graduate Center she dealt with even more hostilities and injustices, in part because of her position on affirmative action.

    Gertrude’s efforts on my behalf were dramatic efforts in my professional life, but also significant reflections of her principled concern for respect for women in philosophy. Only recently others have told me how influential Gertrude was in helping them establish their career. Without her strong efforts, several other women in the department would not have gotten tenure. Few women in the profession of her generation were so outstanding professionally and yet gave so much of their time and effort to help others while also providing such notable service to the profession in general, publishing successfully all the while. These efforts were certain to garner Gertrude enemies, and they did. For anyone in academia to dare to act in such a way is remarkable – for a woman of that day it was singular. No matter how many enemies Gertrude made in these struggles, if there was to be a struggle, Gertrude came to fight. Her fights were principled appeals to justice against an essentially male establishment, but her principles were always stated with such clarity that they won the support of fair-minded men. Whenever one hears Gertrude described as a troublemaker, and who has not, one should think of the troubles she made on behalf of the entire profession and the cause of justice, and of what this troublemaking helped us to gain. To call her a troublemaker is to tacitly bestow on her a particular honor. We can leave it at that.

    Gertrude is survived by her husband of many years, Eli Cohen.

  • Puerto Rico: A U.S. Colony in the Caribbean

    Puerto Rico: A U.S. Colony in the Caribbean

    In 1898 the U.S. military invaded and seized Puerto Rico and Cuba during the Spanish-American War. Unlike Cuba, Puerto Rico has not yet achieved independence and the United States continues to exert political, economic, judicial, and military control over the Island.

    Two early twentieth-century decisions defined U.S. policies toward Puerto Rico.

    1. First, in 1901 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “Porto Rico is a territory appurtenant and belonging to the United States, but not a part of the United States.” More than one hundred years since that ruling, the fundamental legal relationship remains the same: Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory and lacks sovereignty.
    2. Second, in 1917 the U.S. Congress unilaterally decreed that Puerto Ricans were U.S. citizens – well, sort of. Unlike other U.S. citizens, Puerto Ricans who live in Puerto Rico cannot vote in any federal election, but can if they reside in the United States. Although they have a Residential Commissioner in the U.S. Congress, s/he has no voting power. And Puerto Ricans were drafted to serve in the U.S. military wherever they lived!

    In 1952 Puerto Ricans voted to become a U.S. Commonwealth or Free Associated State. Puerto Rico obtained a minimal increase in local governance, including an elected governor, but ultimate power remained in Washington.

    The 1952 change gave the United States cover to dismiss accusations it was a colonial power at the time it was proclaiming itself leader of the Free World, and waging a Cold War with the Soviet Union for the hearts and minds of non-aligned, developing nations.

    Puerto Rico sits astride the Mona Strait, one of the key maritime entry and exit points in the Caribbean. Military control of Puerto Rico has offered the United States access to trade and commerce throughout the Carib- bean region and guarded shipping routes to and from the Panama Canal. During World War II the U.S. Navy built the massive Roosevelt Roads base, which until 2004 included the island of Vieques and housed the U.S. Naval Forces Southern Command.

    The U.S. Navy took over two-thirds of Vieques, squeezing the residents into the middle third. It used the island to train U.S. as well as NATO troops in tropical warfare and to launch attacks against Guatemala (1954), Cuba (the Bay of Pigs, 1961), the Dominican Republic (1965), and Grenada (1983).

    U.S. Economic and GeoPolitical Interests in Puerto Rico

    The Puerto Rican economy has generated enormous profits for U.S. investors, absentee landowners, and manufacturers. In the first half of the twentieth century, agricultural products, primarily sugar, dominated the economy. U.S. sugar companies monopolized the land, forcing small landowners and peasants to work on their estates or migrate to towns or the United States in search of work. By 1928, U.S. capital dominated the Puerto Rican economy and U.S. investors owned over a quarter of Puerto Rico’s wealth. By the early 1950s, manufacturing replaced agriculture as the primary source of profits for U.S. corporations.

    **

    In the 1960s, pro-independence forces reorganized. Energized by the Cuban Revolution, protests against the war in Vietnam, and other global anti-colonial struggles, the movement embraced Marxism and included Puerto Ricans on the Island and in the United States. During the 1960s and 1970s armed clandes- tine organizations in Puerto Rico and the United States carried out bombings demand- ing an end to U.S. colonialism, freedom for Puerto Rican political prisoners, and that the U.S. Navy leave Vieques.

    Like most movements of the 1960s and 70s, the independence movement waned. But working with a broad section of the Puerto Rican population, it did force the Navy to leave Vieques in 2004, and secured the release of all Puerto Rican political prisoners.

    Puerto Ricans resist U.S. colonialism on a daily basis. They continue to speak Spanish, see themselves as part of Latin America, practice their cultural traditions, such as el Día de los Reyes (Three Kings Day); and send their own team to the Olympics. Neither of the two largest parties supports independence. The Partido Nuevo Progresista (New Progressive Party) supports statehood, while the Partido Popular Democrático (Popular Democratic Party) supports the Free Associated State. Several factors tie Puerto Ricans to the United States.

    Currently 5 million Puerto Ricans live on the mainland, with only 3.6 million on the Island. Families benefit from the ability to travel back and forth. Many Puerto Ricans have served in the U.S. military or worked in some branch of the U.S. government and do not want to lose their pensions, which, they fear, could happen as a result of independence. Other Puerto Ricans rely on U.S. welfare.

    Puerto Rico Today

    In September 2017 Hurricanes Irma and María devastated Puerto Rico, causing an estimated $90 billion worth of damage. At least five thousand Puerto Ricans died in the storm or its aftermath. Social and medical services and the electrical system collapsed. Food and potable water were scarce to non- existent. The U.S. government was criminally indifferent to Puerto Ricans’ plight, as epitomized by President Trump tossing paper towels to a hungry and homeless population.

    U.S. policy toward the Island has also ravaged the economy. In 2016 the U.S. Congress passed the PROMESA law, which created a legal framework to deal with Puerto Rico’s massive debt of more than $70 billion. The oversight board consists of Wall Street fi- nanciers whose plan includes converting much of Puerto Rico’s beautiful coastline into tourist spots or homes for wealthy North Americans; closing schools to “save money,” despite the protests of teachers, students, and parents; and charging high interest rates, which means more capital flowing out of Puerto Rico to the United States. Not only money is leaving Puerto Rico – so are Puerto Ricans. Tens of thousands of skilled Puerto Rican workers have migrated to the United States, leaving be- hind an older, sicker, and poorer population.

    It is not clear what impact the current debt crisis, the hurricanes, and the Trump administration’s disdain will have on politics in Puerto Rico. In the face of tragedy, Puerto Ricans have exhibited tremendous resourcefulness and self-reliance. As Naomi Klein discusses in The Battle for Paradise, many are trying to build their lives, communities, and nation so that they are more sustainable, more resilient in the face of climate disaster, less dependent on imports, and more reliant on the resources, skills, and riches of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans.

     

    Suggested Reading:

    Naomi Klein, The Battle for Paradise (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018).

    César J. Ayala and Rafael Bernabe, Puerto Rico in the American Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

    “Puerto Rico: A US Colony in a Postcolonial World?,” Radical History Review Vol. 2017, Issue 128, May 2017.

     

    This article first appeared in DSA Weekly, April 4, 2019. The editors commented: When we first started talking to Historians for Peace and Justice about sharing their thoughts with DSA Weekly, we had little idea that this very week, the U.S. president would be trash-talking the entire island of Puerto Rico and catapulting it into front-page news. We were thus triply glad that this essay was on its way, to help us all act and think with understanding of the issues.  What’s below is slightly abridged; you can order it here, one of the group’s  Broadsides for the Trump Era, as a full, designed pamphlet to copy and distribute at will.  Let us know what you think!

  • Venezuela: MAREA SOCIALISTA begins a new phase

    Venezuela: MAREA SOCIALISTA begins a new phase

    Amid the deep crisis that Venezuela is going through, the national coordination of our organization, together with a representation of our international current, the Anticapitalist Network, has analyzed, evaluated, and reevaluated Venezuela’s political situation. We looked at what has been done up to now, and what should be the political and organizational course of action to take, all as part of the re-launching of our organization, with new tasks and political proposals.

    We share here our first conclusions for our militants in the different states to consider before we meet with them, over the coming weeks, to debate these issues in depth.

    We are also making this text public as a contribution from our organization to the working class, popular sectors, women and youth. We do this because we are convinced that socialist and anti-capitalist revolutionaries will continue to face great challenges. In Venezuela, we are determined to continue contributing our militant efforts against the imperialist, capitalist and bureaucratic social and political forces in all their forms.

    The situation lived daily by workers, people, and the youth is unbearable. We struggle everyday in conditions of absolute precariousness just to get water, electricity, food and other basic needs covered. We have reached the limit of human survival, with hospitals in dreadful conditions, with no supplies, and long and inhumane lines just to get some water.

    The unrest and daily response of each family are visible, starting with the courage shown by women, who do everything in their power to at least get some food and provide for their children. We cannot, nor want to -nor should have to- get used to these terrible conditions; we are fighting to get out of this agony so we can have the dignified life we deserve. With this goal in mind, we invite all working families, the autonomous popular movement, and those young people aspiring to have a future, to get organized and fight back, without accepting this decadent present.

    Undoubtedly, we will not get out of this social and economic decadence by falling in the hands of the United States, imperialist Trump, and his puppet Guaidó. They have taken advantage of the enormous social discontent caused by our disastrous government, and are trying to move forward, at all costs, with their interventionist plans at the service of the great imperialist and transnational capital. They want to enjoy the millionaire profit from our extraordinary energy resources by promoting economic and political actions against Venezuela that only make the lives of millions more miserable. Anything coming out of the mouths of Trump and Guaidó must be denounced, confronted and rejected. We oppose a possible coup and any kind of interventionism, whether political, military or social. The first task of every anti-capitalist, socialist and working-class militant is to reject US plans of war in Venezuela and the entire region. If any kind of military intervention or invasion ever did take place, we would be active militants against it, independent from the government, and proposing specific measures for a direct attack on their imperialist interests in our country.

    At the same time, opposing imperialist plans does not mean supporting Maduro’s regime. That is, a government that has destroyed the best social conquests of the Bolivarian process and has become an agent of transnational capital, in some cases of US capitals but in general of Chinese and Russian capitals. In the context of a geopolitical war, these last two powers also want to steal the natural and strategic resources of our country and the continent.

    Contrary to the lies spread by pro-government media and spokespersons, Maduro’s government is not socialist, leftist, or left nationalist. It gradually consolidated as a bourgeois regime with Bonapartist characteristics and strong repressive-authoritarian tendencies in its political model, and as a model of nationalist capitalism regarding its economy. The government is to blame for unleashing a brutal austerity plan on the people through miserable wages and constant inflation, attacking workers’ rights, and for causing the deterioration of health care, education and other social rights. Meanwhile, it pays a corrupt external debt to financial capitalism, and has carried out and allowed the brutal embezzlement of our nation, all amid the shameful enrichment of government officials, in alliance with and being part of a new parasitic, financial bourgeoisie, born under the wing of the oil business. This is why we represent a clear opposition to this government, from an independent and leftist position.

    On the base of these definitions, Marea Socialista wants to promote the emergence of a new left alternative, completely independent of US imperialism and its puppet Guaidó, from the Maduro regime and every variant that wants to maintain this unfair and unequal system through a third space or “transition government” of class conciliation. The millions of workers and the youth that suffer this social crisis on a daily basis deserve a new political tool that denounces and confronts all those accountable for the social crisis we are in.

    To respond to the current crisis, we must also promote a process of autonomous mobilization in defense of our social rights. Our right to water, to electricity, to health and education, to a job, a wage and a house. We will not defend them if we do not mobilize with all our strength and independently from the reactionary actions of Guaidó and his national and international political allies.

    Therefore, we call on honest workers, students, farmers, women, critical intellectuals, social activists and classist left organizations to come together in the coordination and promotion of a common struggle for the fair demands of the people. United with some of these classist organizations, we denounced those who support Guaidó and try to divert the struggles in his favor in the Workers Intersectorial of Venezuela. The following task for those of us who put up that fight, is to advance toward promoting a new coordination of the peoples´ and workers’ struggle.

    At the same time, we must coordinate struggles and political actions everywhere. In that sense, in Marea Socialista, we have always had a unitary attitude towards different sectors that emerged from the Bolivarian process, today far from the government, beyond the differences and agreements we might have. In the previous months, we have promoted and been part of different platforms with different leaders, some of which at the time helped denounce the embezzlement of the nation, the theft of the external debt and the handing over of the Mining Arc of Orinoco.

    However in recent times, faced with the possibility of a greater crisis and confrontation, a space called ARC (Alliance for the Consulting Referendum) emerged that, in fact, became a political entity that promotes the intervention and tutorship of the United Nations and other international bourgeois sectors as a solution; a policy that we reject, because we oppose every kind of interference by these imperialist organisms, responsible for great plights when they intervene in different countries. We also consider that it is incorrect to create false expectations in a solution to the crisis coming from simply holding elections. Intentions aside, the demand for elections is the same that Guaidó and the imperialist countries with bourgeois governments that support him have on their agenda, which they hope to win, opening up the country to the complete control of US imperialism. The proposal of a referendum and elections in the context prior to the interventionist plan of Guaidó and the United States might have been useful. But not now, and less so, when it is posed at the service of an incorrect objective under the oversight of the United Nations, the Vatican and other reactionary international institutions.

    When the ARC first emerged, some members of Marea Socialista participated in it to pose our opinions and evaluate the possibility of it taking a correct path.

    Yet today we believe that an incorrect policy has consolidated within it, due to the predominance of sectors that come from right-wing political forces, with the mistaken support of comrades who come from Chavism. We believe that this path will not solve the crisis, and it also feeds a political solution under a democratic bourgeois program of class conciliation that we do not agree with. Therefore, we have decided in Marea Socialista to not participate in the ARC. Though with some of its participants, we will surely meet in specific struggles and other spaces of debate.

    Our political proposals

    There are no shortcuts out of the deep crisis our country is going through, within the framework of the capitalist system. Though it is a longer and harder path, in our current situation, we still believe that a positive change for the working class can only come from a real leap in its massive and genuine mobilization. This is the only thing that can shift the path of the current situation in favor of workers and the people. This is the path we promote, and for this reason we propose building unities of the left based on this objective in the political terrain, while strengthening the national construction of our organization.

    Marea Socialista calls on the social and political organizations of the left, committed activists, social and intellectual figures that are independent of Guaidó, Maduro and every capitalist formation, to meet and discuss the conformation of a unified political front of the left, behind an anti-capitalist, working-class and truly socialist program. And for this unity to also materialize in the joint promotion of the struggle of the working class, the people and the youth.

    Our commitment to the anti-imperialist struggle against the plans of Guaidó and the United States is complete, we want the United States out of Venezuela and Latin America. Our opposition to the political and economic plans of the government is also consistent: we want to expel those responsible for the crisis through independent and autonomous mobilization. With Guaidó´s “Plan País” we will lose all sovereignty, they will turn the country over to the empire and we will not have a better quality of life. With Maduro´s “Plan de la Patria” farce, the current disaster will continue, as will the miserable and unstable life of millions. This is why we advocate an autonomous and independent working-class and popular solution.

    We advocate developing an autonomous mobilization against any imperialist attack and foreign interference they may attempt in the following days and weeks, and promoting clear measures against the interests of the United States, which the Maduro government does not do. We are in favor of the unity of the people of Latin America against US imperialism, its associates Duque, Bolsonaro, Macri, and other governments complicit with US plans in the region.

    We advocate an emergency plan that begins with the re-planning of the electrical system, in which its workers, technicians and professionals evaluate the situation and propose, in conjunction with the affected communities, a new plan under public state ownership, controlled and run by its workers, with social control of the people, not the ruling bureaucracy.

    We advocate total workers’ control of the national oil system, with no intervention or participation of foreign corporations and no bureaucratic or military orders. We advocate banning mega-mining, expelling the mining corporations and opening a democratic debate with the communities and the workers about the possible forms of mining without contamination nor environmental destruction.

    We advocate an emergency wage increase according to the basic basket. In this sense, we will maintain our demand to the TSJ for Article 91 of the Constitution to be applied, though we do not place expectations on that tribunal, but on the mobilization of the working class. It is false that there is no money; there are millions from oil profits, in the nefarious payment of the external debt and the millions hidden in international banks as part of the embezzlement of the nation. With those resources we could improve the lives of millions.

    We are in favor of the recovery and repatriation of embezzled and stolen capital, so they can be destined to meet the urgent importation of food and medicine for meeting the needs of the people.

    We advocate recovering the assets of PDVSA (like Citgo) and the funds confiscated by the United States and other imperialist countries, and taking every possible measure to gain reparations a country against that act of rapine.

    We reject lay-offs in the public and private sectors, and advocate the hiring of the people who have been laid off. We advocate implementing workers’ control of production in any factory that lays off or threatens to close. This way we will maximize the capacity of the state industries in the food and basic products areas, abandoned by the government.

    We advocate the right to free mobilization and social protest. We oppose any kind of state or paramilitary repression against fair demands of working people affected by the crisis. We demand the liberation of workers imprisoned for fighting and the annulment of charges against workers and rural people for protesting.

    We advocate free union organization and the legalization of new unions, without the interference of the state, the government or the bosses.

    We advocate the free circulation and dissemination of ideas and information, the end of state blockade, the censorship and attacks against the alternative media outlet Aporrea, a democratic space with many years of activism in favor of the rights of the working class.

    Against the false democracy offered by Guaidó and the government´s fake Constituent Assembly, we advocate imposing a real sovereign and free constituent assembly through popular mobilization, in which the people debate and decide everything, with real representation of every party and political tendency. The sovereign people have the right to decide what to do with the great national issues in this crisis, and not to be forced to choose between Maduro and Guaidó, while those two decide the destiny of the country far from the working people.

    In a real constituent process, Marea Socialista would propose an anti-capitalist and truly socialist integral emergency plan, that would do away with all interference and privilege of international corporations, end with the political privilege of the dominant castes and the judicial and electoral powers governed by the political power; we advocate the direct election of the judicial and electoral powers of the CNE.

    We have these and more proposals in that sense, because we advocate a government of the working people, we want to end with the capitalist regime in all its variants and with the undemocratic institutions that, in one way or another, are sinking our country.

    It is clear that we are in a new situation, with new political tasks, and we are now entering a new and different phase in our construction as an anti-capitalist, working-class, socialist and revolutionary organization.

    In this political re-launching of Marea Socialista, we invite everyone who shares these ideals to join us. The workers that have been part of the Bolivarian process and experience the current disaster with disappointment. The youth that was born into political life in this crisis and sees the future with uncertainty. The women who fight for their rights everywhere, for equality in their workplaces and against every kind of misogynist violence.

    We invite all of you to organize with Marea Socialista, to build a revolutionary party of the working class, the youth, the anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal feminism. A militant, revolutionary and internationalist organization tied to our comrades in the Anticapitalist Network and the new international organization we are in the process of founding, because international construction is a key part of our struggle against imperialist capitalism in Venezuela and the entire world.

    For all these reasons, we invite you to make Marea Socialista a bigger and stronger militant, working-class and truly socialist organization. We will advance in these objectives in a national plenary of the organization next month, in which we will collectively debate how to strengthen this path.

    National Coordination of Marea Socialista, April 5, 2019

    Originally posted at Anticapitalist Network.

  • For Nicaraguans April Never Ended

    For Nicaraguans April Never Ended

    This awakening was not about ideologies, but for the country and against a common adversary: the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship. Nobody prepared us or financed us.

    By Lesther Aleman*  (Confidencial)

    HAVANA TIMES – We all asked for changes, but never thought of demanding, living and writing them. April is a month that brings with it a lot of dry heat and the winds of revolution. Many were those who criticized my generation for permanently being on devices, cellphones or social networks, but almost nobody predicted that we were silently accumulating all the social discontent of eleven years of Daniel Ortega’s authoritarianism, plus the fatigues of the eighties and nineties.

    We started the tenth of April 10 shouting an alert regarding the fire that was destroying “Reserva Biologica Indio Maiz” (Biological Reserve). For the most part, we were strangers who for the first time were participating in sit-ins and chanting slogans. Without realizing it, we were marking the beginning of the end, by demanding the Ortega Government to act. The protest reached another level on April 18, when the demand was to repeal the newly imposed Social Security reforms. Already on April 19, the national cry was the same as today: They must leave!

    Before April we had, on the one hand, a Nicaragua submerged in apathy, kidnapped by appearances and with a conformism that allow others to accumulate power and to nest a nepotistic and criminal dictatorship: the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship. On the other hand, we had another Nicaragua represented by peasants, feminists, LGBTIQ groups, political activists, among others, who struggled from their spaces against this dictatorship. They must be recognized for having prepared the way for us to arrive in April.

    Some of us young people lived a social discontent, everything seemed to be more of the same and we lacked role models. Nobody thought for us, because no one represented the feelings of youth. It even seemed that we did not believe in ourselves. There were few oases, like the classrooms at the Central American University, were we could vent our idealism and desire to remake our country, even if only on the blackboard. All this changed and for every evil there wa s a solution: the uprising, not to allow the abuse of power.

    During the dawn of April, we saw the best of Nicaraguans: the determination for social change once and for all, overflow of solidarity, the historical courage of a struggling people and the effectiveness of working together, although we were “disperse vitalities.” We also saw the worst: the repressive and murderous arm of the dictatorship and its operators, the blindness of fanaticism and the hypocrisy.

    On a daily basis, in each community or village, we amended the ways to resolve the conflict, through civic and peaceful resistance, because we considered that the success of the nonviolent struggle is to group more people under the same interest. We did not believe in violence, therefore, even if it was more complex, we did not want to repeat past mistakes. The youth are the first to want peace!

    Ambience in the mobilization of thousands of citizens concentrated in Managua for the Blue and White March, on May 2018. Confidencial / Carlos Herrera

    Nicaragua marches

    While we were involved in the different forms of protests, carrying the blue and white flag, we realized the power we had to corral a regime that was staggering, after a month and a half of daily mobilizations. We started having role models in an unfortunate way.

    First were our heroes, those killed by the dictatorship. Today their names are treasured in our memories or on the walls of Masaya, Jinotepe, Leon, Esteli and the Caribbean Coast. Others are alive, but without freedom, imprisoned without being able to feel the sun. Nothing is hotter than the “Infiernillo” (little hell) or colder than the cement of “La Esperanza.” Others wear a soutane and they are called Baez, Alvarez or Mata. Some give away water and they are street vendors, or were in the barricades and roadblocks, carrying only their desire to return and something to eat.

    In these twelve months of struggle, we have realized that changing reality will be costlier. Also that we have done a good exercise as a society, monitoring and being part of the processes to build an incipient democracy, ensure our human rights and demand justice. We have won some victories and advances, which are not the result of chance or handouts, but the sum of efforts of the youth, men and women who took the streets, losing the fear to demand a path to change, that also became the slogan that we all have plotted.

    Massacre

    We have the challenge and the opportunity to make a real change. For that, we need to travel a difficult path, which goes through the struggle that will unleash the transition from a dictatorship to democracy, the democratic transition itself and the long-awaited consolidation of democracy that we all want.

    We are in the process of getting out of the crisis of the Ortega-Murillo regime, as well as getting out of the dictatorial scheme that will allow us to rebuild the state. Before all this, a common agenda that draws red lines such as: not to allow Daniel Ortega to govern from below, that politics is not privatized by the elites and that, even in the midst of differences, unity persists. All this to establish in Nicaragua a political, social and economic model that represents, listens and operates heterogeneously, given that April made possible a spring of political actors and, social spaces that should be reflected.

    The Ortega massacre after the April protests left at least 325 dead and more than 700 political prisoners. Photo: Wilfredo Miranda / Confidencial

    The dream is to rescue the social gains for a more inclusive and prosperous country, that there are institutions and equal opportunities. That the young people who gave everything, despite having nothing, are rewarded. First of all, is to make sure that we close the cycle, and that this will never be repeated. We believe that truth, justice, reparation, and guarantees of non-repetition will enable us to honor the legacy to this eternal April in 40 years.

    Needless to say, because of his stubbornness and cruelty, Ortega managed to get Nicaragua to unite against him. This time, his “divide and conquer” did not work. This fight is not about who did more or less, since we have all contributed regardless of age, social position, education or origin. It is exciting to see that [religious] believers marched with non-believers, others who participated in the [1979] revolution along with those who were in the counterrevolution [Contras-1980s].

    This awakening was not about ideologies, but for the country and against a common adversary: the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship. Nobody prepared or finance us. We only decided to change the present and future of our beloved Nicaragua, attached to the blue and white flag that represents us with the banner of freedom, justice and democracy.

    The future belongs to all. We want a Nicaragua where we will not be killed for thinking differently. That is why it is time for decent Sandinistas to abandon ship. They should not continue supporting crimes against humanity. Those who are not stained with blood, it is time to react inside their structure. It is not necessary to approach “El Carmen” [the presidential bunker/residence/headquarters] to see the weakness of the regime. It holds up only with arms, and the fear of those who wear the uniform is palpable. We all know that it is a corpse and that soon we are going to his burial.

    I am inspired by the humility of Nicaraguans. For the memory of our heroes, the legacy of their families, the firmness and dignity of our politically kidnapped, the braveness of all those forced into exile, the resistance and insistence of the people in general and because it hurts all of us to breathe. We will never stop struggling.

    We will not get anywhere, if we do not go together. United we will triumph, and without unity there is no victory.

    *University student. Member of the Nicaraguan University Alliance (AUN), and the Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy.

    The photo at top: Susana Lopez demands justice for her son Gerald Vasquez murdered during the Ortega paramiliary forces attack on the UNAN Managua University and a neighboring church where the students took refuge in June 2018.  Photo: Carlos Herrera / Confidencial

    Originally published in Confidencial. This translation taken from Havana Times. 

  • California Teachers on the March: An Interview with Joel Jordan

    California Teachers on the March: An Interview with Joel Jordan

    Johanna Brenner (JB): On February 21, Oakland’s 3,000 teachers went out on strike after two years of failed negotiations with the Oakland Unified School District.  Clearly, the strike got the District’s attention and a deal was won after teachers held strong for seven days.  What did the teachers fight for and what did they win?

    Joel Jordan (JJ): Oakland teachers struck for three main demands.  The first was salaries: Oakland teachers are the lowest paid teachers in the county; they hadn’t had a raise in many years; they demanded 12% over 3 years and they won 11% over 4 years. The second demand not in order of importance was class size. The OEA, unlike other locals in California– or elsewhere– has a history of fighting for lower class size, although without any success since 1982. This time around, the union was able to win a reduction of 1 student per class/period next year in 45 schools with high needs students and a reduction of 1 student per class/period for all schools in 2021-22. Certainly a step in the right direction, though not very close to the union’s demand to reduce class size by 2 students for all schools and 4 students for high needs schools.

    The third demand was for increased students supports – counselors, nurses, resource specialists, psychologists, and speech therapists.  The union won reduction in caseloads for all these categories, the only exception being for nurses where the union negotiated a sizeable increase in nurses’ salaries to attract more nurses to the district without specifically addressing nurses’ caseloads. The union reasoned that since nurses are required to serve all students in need within the district, their caseloads could not be reduced without addressing the causes for the shortage of nurses in the district. The nurses themselves did not agree and were among the most vociferous opponents of the negotiated contract.

    Those three demands had been the union’s established negotiating position.  But a fourth demand emerged just as the union was about to go out on strike: a moratorium on the district’s plans to close 24 schools, mostly in low-income communities of color.  This plan was part of a long-term strategy on the part of the school board to expand charter schools in Oakland.  While Los Angeles has by far more charter schools than any other district in the country, Oakland has the highest percentage of charter schools in the state.  With almost 30% of the students in charter schools, Oakland is the poster child for charter school expansion.  A pro-charter school board runs the Oakland school district.  The Board would like to see Oakland become what has been called a portfolio district where students can choose between charter schools and public schools, which will in fact lead to an increase in the percentage of students going to charter schools in Oakland.

    If the district goes through with its plan to close 24 schools over the next few years, many of the students now in those schools will have no public school to go to that is close by them—they might have to go thirty, forty blocks to the public school so instead they will attend charter schools in their area.  As a result, the 30% charter school figure will rise to 40-50% as this process develops. And I understand from sources in administration that the announced closing of 24 schools is just the beginning and that they intend to close as many as forty schools out of the eighty-eight schools in the entire district.

    Supporters protest the closure of the Roots Elementary.  Photo: Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group

    The first school to be shut down was the Roots International Academy.  It’s in a low income, mostly African American community.  And the community rose up to protest the way that this was done and there was a lot of sympathy toward the school and other schools that were going to be closed, most if not all of which were in low-income communities of color.  So there was an anti-racist component in the union’s demand to call a moratorium on school closing until a more rational process could be put in place for how to deal with schools that are under-populated or performing poorly.

    I considered the demand for a moratorium to have been the key demand because it was directed at saving the district from piece-meal destruction. Not only would it hurt the workers, students and families from the schools being closed, but also the entire district, because the money that follows students into charter schools would be lost to the district and there would be a dwindling pie from which teachers would have to bargain salaries, benefits, working conditions, and learning conditions.

    The union, to its credit, took this on as a major issue in the strike, even though it came up at the last minute and even though many members protested about raising this demand saying that “we didn’t vote to strike over this.”  On the other hand, there were many members who wanted the union to make this a demand.

    Johanna: So are you saying that when the strike vote was taken, school closings were not part of the proposed negotiating demands, but the leadership added this demand later on during the strike?

    Joel: Yes, the strike authorization vote was taken in late January and the school closing demand was put to a vote, and passed unanimously, at the last Rep Council – the highest decision-making body of the OEA composed of site representatives, or shop stewards – that was held a few days before the strike began. So, although the Rep Council is a democratically elected representative body, the rank and file never had the opportunity to vote to agree with raising this as a strike demand.

    During the strike, the union almost got the district to agree to a one-year moratorium on school closings, but the Superintendent of Schools fiercely resisted this and in the end the union agreed to a five-month moratorium, which is essentially no moratorium at all.  Come August, 1919, the district can go ahead and close schools before the start of the next school year.  So, the union lost on this demand though it was always a long shot to oppose the district’s key strategic initiative.

    Still, over all, the strike made important gains, including additional support for schools with newcomers from other countries, substantially increased pay for substitutes, improved paid parental leave, and teacher training on restorative justice programs, and more. The strike also forced the Oakland school board to pass a resolution, similar to what was passed by the Los Angeles school board, calling on the state legislature to institute a moratorium on new charter schools. All this was especially impressive given the short time the union had to prepare the rank and file for the strike.

    Johanna: In the past, the Oakland Education Association has not been a fighting union.  What changed over the last few years that led the OEA to strike?  How was the strike organized internally among teachers?  How was community support mobilized?  What difference did that make in terms of the pressure the strike brought to bear on the school district leadership?

    Joel: The leadership of the OEA in the past has been militant in rhetoric but not in deed. For the past six years—before a new leadership came into office in July of 2018 – the OEA leadership simply negotiated for whatever contract they thought it could get without organizing the membership.  This time was no different.  They appointed a bargaining team that was set on making concessions so they could reach an agreement without a strike. This changed when the new leadership came to power.

    The new leadership was the product of an electoral alliance between Classroom Struggle – a progressive rank and file caucus coming out of the Occupy movement in 2012 – and a number of key black activists and officers in the local, including Keith Brown. The resulting Building Our Power slate, headed by Keith running for President and Ismael Armendariz (from Classroom Struggle) for Vice President, put forward a comprehensive social justice platform stressing the need for school site organization, deep relations with parents and community, and fighting for the schools Oakland students deserve. Building Our Power won the election overwhelmingly and immediately got to work, focusing first on school-site based organizing.  Two full time officers systematically went to schools that were not well organized.  They identified what they called organic leaders in each school who would be able to organize the rest of the faculty.  They did this very successfully, to the point where in January they were able to get a 95% yes vote for strike authorization with 84% of the membership voting.

    Pastor Anthony Jenkins, Sr. at Taylor Memorial United Methodist Church, serving as a “solidarity school” during the Oakland teacher strike. Photo: Cirrus Wood

    The new leadership also set up a committee for organizing in the community led by two co-chairs from Classroom Struggle. The committee contacted community organizations throughout Oakland who were very supportive and organized solidarity strike schools that parents volunteered to lead. Strike schools or solidarity schools have a history in Oakland.  In all previous strikes since the 80’s strike schools have always been set up; it’s a tradition.

    The most dramatic fact that emerged from this wide-spread parent support was that less than 5% of students actually attended school. Parents chose to keep their kids with them at home, in the solidarity schools or with them on the picket line rather than sending them to school.  This put the most pressure on school district because they were losing hundreds of thousands of dollars of state funding a day, because this funding is based on daily attendance.

    So how much did this teacher power and community support influence the results of the strike?  I would say it influenced it greatly.  The district had offered nothing to the OEA before the strike began so the power that was generated can only be attributed to the strike.

    Johanna: How does the OEA contract compare to what UTLA was able to win with their strike?

    Joel: UTLA overall made many more contract gains than did OEA.  One important difference between UTLA and OEA is that UTLA very judiciously brought in the Mayor of Los Angeles at a critical point when the strike had the most power. The Mayor appointed two of his staff members who were pro-labor to engage in the negotiations with the Los Angeles school district.  OEA also reached out for help to the newly elected (and supposedly pro-teacher) State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond who could have brought some pressure to bear on the district, but either did not have the necessary experience or the motivation to push the district toward meeting the union’s demands.

    Another difference is the matter of size. The UTLA strike shut down over 900 schools in the second largest city in the U.S. Oakland, while not a small town, is only one tenth the size of L.A. So, the very magnitude of the LA strike gave it more leverage than the Oakland strike was able to generate.

    Finally, UTLA’s leadership had over four years to meticulously prepare for their strike. The fact that the OEA leadership, after only being in office for a matter of months, was able to lead such a unified and militant strike was an amazing accomplishment. At the same time, the leadership’s inexperience showed up in some important ways we’ll discuss later.

    Johanna: Clearly, the OEA rank and file were fired up during the strike, but not everyone was happy with the contract that was negotiated –42% voted no.  Why were they disappointed in the contract?  Did the large no vote have a demoralizing effect on the members?

    Joel: There were several reasons for the “no” vote.    First the strike was so powerful and so solid that any agreement would be in some ways anti-climactic for many of the teachers who experienced the strike.  The strike raised expectations enormously; and most rank and file teachers did not have a clear idea of what could/could not be won by the strike.  The union had not produced an analysis of the District budget to show how realistic the teachers’ demands were and then to measure how much they had accomplished in light of budget realities.  Getting an accurate read on the budget is not easy because the District’s finances are so opaque.  So no one knew for sure how much money the district actually had in order to meet the union’s demands.  That lack of information led to widespread speculation all the way from “the district has no money and we have to go to the state,” to “the district has all kinds of money and we should have been able to win a lot more” and everywhere in between.  This lack of clarity contributed to the no vote.

    Second, the lack of progress on school closures especially was obvious to all and for many this was the key demand.

    Third, many were sympathetic to the nurses, who organized against the contract very publicly.

    A fourth reason for the no vote was that the leadership ended the strike in a very peculiar way.  When the tentative agreement was announced, the union was picketing a school board meeting in an attempt to shut it down, because the Board was meeting to consider cuts in student programs and classified staff in order to qualify for a 22 million dollar boost from the state.  So when the leadership asked members to withdraw the pickets from the school board meeting once the tentative agreement was signed, many rank and file members thought that the union was throwing the students and classified workers under the bus.  Even though the cuts that were being made had nothing to do with the union contract, the confusion surrounding pulling the pickets angered many of those who were picketing.

    Students rally with teachers during strike. Photo: Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group

    One other thing: many high school students were involved in supporting the strike and very much against the agreement though it is not clear why, since the union was not bargaining about student demands that had emerged from the students themselves.  In Los Angeles, students had demanded that the District end random searches for weapons in many district high schools and UTLA had included this in their contract bargaining.  There was nothing like this in the Oakland strike.  Of course, OEA’s demands around class size and student supports were directed at improving students’ learning conditions and the union had also put forward a demand, which it won, that the district support training teachers to implement restorative justice practices, something that high school students are very supportive of.

    Johanna: Was the controversy around the ratification of the contract demoralizing for the most activist teachers?

    Joel: It’s too soon to say for sure, but there are many indications that the dissatisfaction with the contract is not carrying over into dissatisfaction with the leadership or the union.  For example, during the contract ratification process, the Rep Council had split almost 50/50.  But the Council meeting immediately following the strike was very positive, with no recriminations and no hostility toward the leadership.  Another indication that people were not demoralized is that the organizing committee which had met during the strike held a post-strike meeting with more people attending than had attended during the strike.  Many teachers who had not been involved in the union now want to be involved.

    The union is also moving to repair relations with those who voted no.  The no vote was centered in the high schools, where the wildcat movement was strong before the strike began.  The leadership is organizing meetings at those schools, to debrief and discuss lessons learned– positive and negative– and how to take the next steps forward.  How that turns out, in my opinion, will be key to evaluating the long-term success of this strike.

    Johanna: Could you say more about these wildcats?

    Joel:  A few weeks before the strike began, as many as 12 schools, mostly high schools, wildcatted by holding two one-day sickouts, calling for better pay and conditions.  These actions were led mostly by younger teachers.  To some extent, at least at the beginning, the strikes occurred out of frustration with the slow pace of bargaining.  The union had been in bargaining with the district for almost two years with nothing to show for it.  The wildcatters were mostly unaware of the new leadership and its attempts to organize the rank and file since the summer of 2018.  Many of the wildcat leaders were dismissive of the union, believing that their own self-organization was sufficient.  But as the strike grew closer, many of these same leaders became active in the union, leading demonstrations and so forth.  Hopefully, even though many of these leaders voted against the contract, they will continue to be active in the union.

    Johanna:  What are the challenges facing the OEA in terms of expanding the depth and reach of teacher self-organization and developing rank and file leadership?

    Joel:  The leadership of this strike did an amazing job activating previously uninvolved members of OEA. They built structures, such as a sizable organizing team before the strike began, and held meetings of around 100-120 strike captains during the course of the strike. They also created a strategy team of around eight people who made the decisions on actions during the strike. This produced a problem as many of the strike captains disagreed with some of the strategy decisions and pushed back against them. But there was no institutional means by which the opinions of the strike captains had to be taken into consideration.  The opportunity to build a larger strike committee with better connections to the rank and file was therefore lost.

    Also, even though the rep council of OEA had directed the bargaining team to provide daily summaries of negotiations with the district during the strike, this didn’t happen.  In fact, the bargaining team, which was inherited from the old leadership of OEA and continued under the new leadership, invoked confidentiality in the contract negotiations—this even though the Rep Council had made clear its opposition to confidentiality which it considered a tactic for keeping the rank and file in the dark and disempowered.

    So what we had was a leadership that courageously fought and organized a social justice battle against the district, but did so too much from the top down.  Some of the reasons for this have to do with inexperience: the elected leaders had never negotiated a contract before, much less led a strike.  OEA had a tradition of compartmentalizing the work, so the right hand did not know what the left hand was doing.  Establishing a strategy team to centralize strike activities was a step in the right direction, but it was done at the cost of two-way communication with the rank and file and its most active leaders.

    Another factor in this top down process has to do with what I think is an inevitable tendency of leadership, even the most militant, to trust its own knowledge rather than risking opening up decision-making to members who may or may not agree with the leadership’s point of view.  This is why having a check on the leadership from a well-organized rank and file is so important.

    For the OEA leadership to build confidence in the entire membership after this strike, it will need to reevaluate the manner in which it conducted the strike. It will need to open up not just avenues for activity but for real leadership. It will need to develop committees, led by rank-and-file members, that take up the important projects coming out of this strike– projects like fighting the upcoming school closures, fighting against cuts in restorative justice programs with students, and organizing statewide actions with other locals for increased funding and against charter school expansion. All committees would involve work with students and parents as well. The union should be encouraging school site organizing and making space for school sites to share organizing ideas across the district based on the sense of empowerment that students, teachers, and parents feel as a result of the strike.

    Johanna:  United Teachers of Los Angeles has followed a similar trajectory to OEA—a rank and file caucus comes into power, transforming the union and broadening its mission to striking for the schools our students deserve.  What challenges do these two unions share?

    One of the challenges facing the leadership of both unions is the challenge of capacity.  In both cities, a rank and file reform caucus successfully won either all or a part of the elected leadership. This inevitably means that those who were caucus leaders now have key roles to play in the union – as officers, Exec Board members, organizers, and so forth – leaving them less time to build the caucus. Unless the caucus has a secondary leadership that can pick up the ball and keep the caucus growing, it tends to stagnate. This is especially true as many members tend to question the need for the caucus once a progressive leadership is elected. This is what has happened in UTLA, though the Union Power caucus is making efforts to turn that around.

    Joel: The situation is a bit different in Oakland. While Classroom Struggle is allied with OEA President Keith Brown, the Building Our Power slate unfortunately never did evolve into a broader progressive caucus. At the same time, several of the Classroom Struggle activists played key roles in the union before and during the strike, and will continue to do so. How this will play out for Classroom Struggle following the strike is not clear. Given the unprecedented member activism and politicization that the strike unleashed, the caucus has many opportunities to grow. But the lack of a deep bench of activists within Classroom Struggle makes that a challenge.

    Another challenge facing the OEA leadership is how to repair historic racial divisions within the union.  One of the great achievements of the new leadership is that now a number of teachers of color, especially African American teachers, are playing primary leadership roles. The new President of OEA, Keith Brown, belongs to many African American organizations and has deep roots in Oakland’s black community.  Ismael Armendariz is the new First Vice President.

    It could not have happened at a better time in a city that is primarily Black and Latino to have the two top officers of the OEA be Black and Latinx. At the same time, there has been a history in OEA of racial antagonism between black and white teachers and this has led the current leadership to mistrust sharing power. This was one reason that the new leadership kept the strike strategy committee to a small and trusted group.  Building a multi-racial leadership with teachers of color in the lead is essential; overcoming the historic racial divides that inevitably arise in urban districts will be another important challenge for the OEA.

    OEA and UTLA face similar issues arising from their urban locations experiencing skyrocketing rents, displacement, homelessness, growing inequality, and so forth.  Both LA and Oakland school districts are targets for privatization. Both districts are already underfunded and becoming further underfunded by charter expansion.

    Teachers and community supporters protest charterization on day 2 of Oakland strike. Photo: Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group

    Another commonality is that as urban school districts, they are disproportionately impacted by the need for special education funding.  Poorer communities, low-income communities of color, have a higher percentage of special ed students and among those a higher percent of the most severely disabled and therefore more costly students.   The federal government mandates that schools serve these students, but refuses to pay for these mandates.

    What all this means is that no matter how powerful a strike that either local can muster, by themselves they are even less able to win substantial improvements in school conditions than other districts with relatively more resources.

    Johanna:  In many states teachers have engaged in political strikes aimed at state legislatures who control school funding.  Is this something that OEA is working on?  With UTLA? With other teacher locals?

    Joel: Actually, conventional wisdom would tell you that California should definitely be a prime candidate for militant statewide action. California is ranked 43rd in per pupil funding and has among highest class sizes of any state. Teacher salaries in absolute terms are higher than the national average but not when you factor in cost of living, especially housing costs. The state provides 90% of education funding. Yet, the RedForEd movement has yet to reach California except in support of the recent local strikes in L.A. and Oakland.

    Ironically, one reason that teachers have not organized statewide around funding and privatization issues is that California has local wall-to-wall collective bargaining.  That means that by law if teachers unionize, districts have to recognize the union and engage in collective bargaining. On the other hand, in the states where we’ve seen statewide teacher strikes, collective bargaining is either “permissive” (Oklahoma), meaning that districts can legally refuse to bargain with the union, or is outlawed altogether (West Virginia and Arizona). Just as important, the legislatures in these states play a much more direct role in determining teacher salaries and working conditions, unlike California, where salaries, etc., are set through local district/union negotiations. So, with weak unions and state determined salaries, the rank and file in the Red States were able to organize themselves, primarily through social media, and strike statewide. In California, however, because of the pervasive practice and culture of local collective bargaining, teachers have tended to see the districts as their primary target even though the state controls the purse strings that each district depends on.

    This local parochialism is encouraged by the California Teachers Association (CTA), which, with 320,000 members, is arguably the most potentially powerful public sector state affiliate in the National Education Association.  However, the CTA has failed to organize a fight back around funding, starting way back in 1978 with the passage of Proposition 13—the law which limited property tax increases on all property, both commercial buildings and private homes and has been a disaster in terms of the state budget—for all state services, not only public education. Nor has the CTA organized a fightback against the growing privatization of education in California whereby privately run charter schools now enroll over 10% of California students, mainly in low income urban areas. This is because CTA is a staff-dominated organization with a service union orientation that prioritizes cultivating cordial relationships with Democratic Party politicians and school board members rather than organizing its own members to take action—whether at their school sites, in their community, or at the state level.

    To overcome local parochialism and the CTA’s conservatism, about two years ago, UTLA, OEA, and the San Diego Education Association (SDEA) formed what later came to be called the California Alliance for Community Schools (CACS).

    Now a consortium of ten of the largest locals in California, CACS is committed to building toward coordinated statewide mass actions and working with community organizations to fight for increased school funding and against further charter school encroachment on the public school system. It has also played a key role in moving CTA to take action on a number of fronts.

    On the issue of funding, CACS has been working with community organizations to place an initiative on the 2020 California ballot that would reform Proposition 13 with a “split-roll” property tax whereby commercial property and homes would be taxed differently.  Prop 13 limits would stay in place for homeowners but lifted for commercial property, potentially raising over $11 billion a year for schools and other needed services. The top leadership of CTA resisted joining this effort. They wanted to protect their treasury rather than spend the millions it would take to counter the big money the real estate industry will pour into the No campaign.  The Democrats don’t want to take on the real estate industry either.  But recently, through the organizing within CTA by CACS locals, the CTA State Council voted overwhelmingly to support this effort. Also, as a result of the powerful UTLA strike, L.A. Mayor Garcetti publicly endorsed the initiative.

    While the Red State teacher strikes have been a source of inspiration throughout the country, CACS understands that it will take a combination of political education and action to overcome local union parochialism and CTA conservatism. One way CACS has promoted this is through linking local contract struggles with the need for state intervention. In both the Los Angeles and Oakland strikes, the union leaderships raised the need for expanded state funding and deepened the anti-charter narrative.  The strikes helped to turn around public attitudes about charter schools and about school funding. At the same time, in order to foster cross-local solidarity and coordinated action, CACS locals successfully urged CTA to call for simultaneous “walk-ins” and “RedForEd days” in support of those strikes throughout the state.

    Following the UTLA and OEA strikes, CACS is currently attempting to build momentum for a mass lobby and rally day in Sacramento on May 22 to support legislation for a moratorium on charter school expansion as well as for increased public education funding. Some CACS locals, especially in the Bay Area, may very well encourage member sickouts to ensure mass participation. Not surprisingly, CTA leadership is resisting building such an action, consistent with its “inside the beltway” strategy of not embarrassing Democrats. As of this writing, CACS is bringing a motion to the CTA State Council to get full CTA support.

    One encouraging development has been the recent emergence of California Educators Rising (CER), a statewide rank-and-file grouping centered on its facebook page with many of the same goals as CACS. During the UTLA and OEA strikes, California Educator Rising successfully developed an adopt a striking school program whereby schools throughout the state paired up with a striking school to offer whatever support was needed – financial assistance, moral support, etc. While CER has not come close to matching the size of the red state facebook audiences – not surprisingly given some of the challenges mentioned previously — it has definitely helped to spread the word and involve more people. CER is also pushing for a big turnout on May 22 in Sacramento.

    There is plenty of work to do, obviously, but grass-roots momentum is building among California teachers.

    Originally posted at Against the Current.

    Joel Jordan is a retired teacher activist who spent many years organizing with the Los Angeles teachers’ union (UTLA) before relocating to Oakland where he helps coordinate the California Alliance for Community Schools.

  • Yellow Vest Movement Struggles to Reinvent Democracy as Macron Cranks Up Propaganda and Repression

    Yellow Vest Movement Struggles to Reinvent Democracy as Macron Cranks Up Propaganda and Repression

    (Montpellier, April 10)  After five months of constant presence at traffic circles, toll-booths and hazardous Saturday marches,  the massive, self-organized social movement known as the Yellow Vests has just held its second nationwide “Assembly of Assemblies.” Hundreds of autonomous Yellow Vest activist groups from all over France each chose two delegates (one woman, one man) to gather in the port city of St. Nazaire for a weekend of deliberation (April 5-7).

    After weeks of skirmishing with the municipal authorities, the local Yellow Vests were able to host 700 delegates at the St. Nazaire “House of the People,” and the three-day series of general meetings and working groups went off without a hitch in an atmosphere of good-fellowship. A sign on the wall proclaimed: “No one has the solution, but everybody has a piece of it.”

    Their project: mobilize their “collective intelligence” to reorganize, strategize, and prolong their struggle. Their aim: achieve the immediate goals of livable wages and retirements, restoration of social benefits and public services like schools, transportation, post offices, hospitals, taxing the rich and ending fiscal fraud to pay for preserving the environment, and, most ambitious of all, reinventing democracy in the process. Their Declaration ends with the phrase “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” I often wonder if they know who coined it.

    Yellow and Green Unite and Fight

    Particular attention was paid to the issue of the environment, reaffirming the popular slogan: “End of the week. End of the world. Same logic, same struggle.” (It rhymes in French.) The Assembly went further and called on “All persons who wish to put an end to the expropriation of the living to take up a conflictual stance against the present system in order to create, together, a new ecological, popular social movement.”

    This shows growth from the original Yellow Vest uprising which began as a protest against a hike in taxes on Diesel fuel imposed in the name of the “saving environment.” (Less well known is that only 17% of that tax was actually earmarked for the environment. In any case, Macron rescinded it in an early attempt to pacify the movement.) Since then, the Yellow Vests have tentatively converged with the environmental groups, whom many poor and working-class Yellow Vests can’t help seeing as bourgeois on bicycles wanting to be nice but unwilling to struggle directly against the establishment.

    So their call for unity is also in part a challenge to the environmental movement: “join us in the struggle for social equality and be ready to fight the whole system.” Brilliant! Who said an unstructured autonomous movement of ordinary, not well-educated people, could not come up with strategies and tactics? Psychologists explain that this “wisdom of crowds” emerges whenever people are on an equal footing and free of constraint.[1] It grows through experience. And discussion. A dialectical process leading to its emergence. “No one has the solution, but everybody has a piece of it.” This was the basis of direct democracy in Athens, from which the Yellow Vests have also borrowed the idea of choosing representatives by lot.

    Autonomy

    The Assembly of Assemblies reaffirmed the Yellow Vest founding principle of keeping clear of political parties. Also of leaders. To my mind this is a genius stroke. Every popular mass movement I have participated in over the past 60 years has been co-opted by the establishment (or crushed). Leaders set up an office, they try to raise money and gain access to power, end up compromising; they treat the rank and file activists like a mailing list and the power and dynamic of the mass movement melts away – like the Nuclear Freeze which once mobilized millions. Eventually, the Democratic Party lures them. Here, the Socialist Party swallowed SOS Racism, the embryo of a much-needed Civil Rights movement here in France.

    Instinctively, from the beginning, the Yellow Vests seem to have assimilated and put into practice the profound criticism of representative democracy that goes back to the 18th century and was applied during the Paris Commune in 1871. There delegates were given limited mandates, subject to instant recall, regularly rotated, and paid at workmen’s wages. The Communards also called on other cities to rise and link up as a federation. This is precisely the Yellow Vests modus operandi.

    Europe

    This critique of representation explains the Assembly’s attitude toward the upcoming elections for the European Parliament, which will play out as a rehearsal for the next legislative elections when parties will be competing seriously for votes. The fear of being manipulated for political purposes as strong. Last month Yellow Vests at a Paris demonstration recognized a Yellow Vest who had just declared her candidacy to great media fanfare, apparently in the name of the Yellow Vests. They were furious and yelled at her until she withdrew, shaken. Ugly, but a necessary example to anyone else who would rather be a politician than a Yellow Vest (without resigning first).

    As far as Europe is concerned, the Assembly, far from calling for a “Frexit,” reached out to social movements in the other countries of the European Union in a call to come together and struggle against its neoliberal policies. The Assembly saw no point in voting in this sham election. As everyone knows, the European Parliament has no power or even visibility. It’s not even in Brussels, where the important decisions are made by representatives of the German banks and multinational corporations. Moreover, it limits the deficit spending of its member countries, thus making it illegal for France to finance the social services and environmental reconstruction the people are demanding.

    Restructuring and Reflection

    Last weekend’s Assembly of Assemblies coincided with Act 21 of the Yellow Vests’ long struggle to occupy public spaces and freely proclaim their hopes and angers, and it brought out only 23,400 people (government count) across France, the lowest number so far. Small wonder after five straight months of bloody repression. The police were as usual out in force, and they stopped and frisked 14,919 people according to the Paris Prefecture. After twenty-one weekly battles, many of us are too tired, too scared and/or too old to continue “running with the bulls” through the streets dodging gas canisters.

    “We thought we were off for a sprint. In fact we were involved in a marathon and we need to prepare ourselves,” admitted one speaker.”  We realize we need to vary our tactics, refine our goals, organize our democratic structures better for the movement to last, and last weekend’s Assembly attempted to face this challenge, starting with three weeks of discussion and a number new approaches.

    Among the new tactics was a call for a huge nationwide protest against the increasing repression being imposed by the Macron government, the liberation of all those in jail, whether Yellow Vests or in other “criminalized” struggles and refers directly to the oppressed North African and immigrant communities in France, whose 2005 youth rising was brutally put down. “[The violent repression] we are experiencing today now has been for decades the daily experience in the popular quarters [ghetto-like “suburbs” –Ed.]” and concludes: “Now authoritarianism is being generalized to the whole society.”

    Macron’s Response: Propaganda and Violent Repression

    In contrast to these deliberations, last weekend the Macron government delivered the results of its official “Great Debate,” a publicity stunt organized by his government at a cost of 12 million Euros to showcase the President articulately answering questions from selected audiences of mayors and local notables in towns and villages across the country. In all, Macron logged 92 hours of speaking.

    France’s elected monarch concocted this “Debate,” whose limits were set in advance (taxing the rich and the corporations was off the table), as his “answer” to the Yellow Vests’ demand for participatory democracy. The results were unsurprising: the French want “lower taxes, no cuts to services” (NYT April 9). Asked if the “Great Debate” was a “success for Macron and his government,” only 6% of those polled by BFM-TV answered “yes.” Another poll revealed that 35% of French people still approve the Yellow Vests (down from 70% last December) while only 29% approve of Macron.

    PR aside, the Macron government’s real answer to public opposition posed by the Yellow Vests has been brutally stark: slander, violent repression and strict new laws limiting the right to demonstrate – a right enshrined in the Declaration of Human Rights and the French Constitution. Macron and his ministers have publicly denounced the Yellow Vests as “anti-Semites,” “fascists,”  “a hateful mob,” and a violent conspiracy of “40-50,000” terrorists “of the extreme left and extreme right,” out to destroy French institutions.

    This vicious caricature, echoed endlessly by the media and reinforced by scary images of violence and vandalism against the symbols of wealth and power in Paris, is designed to dehumanize the protesters, otherwise easily recognizable as poor provincials who are tired of being ignored. Thus demonized, the Yellow Vests’ actual demands for dignity and justice can be ignored.  As a threat to France, they must be repressed by any means necessary.

    Since November 2018, when the Yellow Vest movement suddenly sprung up 300,000 strong, the government has unleashed unprecedented police brutality, using military grade weapons against unarmed demonstrators, provoking hundreds of serious injuries (including blindings, loss of limbs, and broken faces). Although invisible on French mainstream media (government subsidized and corporate owned), this French government violence has been repeatedly condemned by human rights panels in France and the European Union, as well as by Michelle Bachelet, former President of Chile and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

    Government Violence At Last Exposed

    On Saturday March 23, as President Macron was visiting the Riviera, 73 year-old Geniève Legay, local spokesperson ATTAC (the 20-year-old international NGO that proposes taxing financial transactions for social purposes) joined the Yellow Vest demonstration at Nice to speak out against this repression. Interviewed on local TV carrying a rainbow peace flag, she declared “We are here to say we have the right to demonstrate …We will leave this square when we choose. And if they use force… Then we’ll see. I’m not afraid. I’m 73 years old, what could happen to me? I’m fighting for my grandchildren. Against tax havens, and all the money the banks are laundering, against fossil energy.”

    Moments later, Police Commander Souchi ordered his heavily armed riot police to charge the peaceful group in which Geneviève Legay was standing, and she found herself on the ground, surrounded by riot cops, bleeding profusely, with a cracked skull and broken ribs. She is still in the hospital with serious injuries.

    On Monday, the Public Prosecutor and President Macron categorically denied that she had had any contact with the police, and the President, interviewed by the local paper, made a hypocritical apology, “wishing her a speedy recovery and hoping that she might learn some ‘sagesse” (literally “wisdom” but typically applied to children in the sense of learning to “behave”).

    According to the President of France, as a fragile elderly person Mme Legay should have known better than to go out to the square in the first place, and so had got herself trampled in the crowd. (The haughty Macron, like the arrogant Trump, seems to enjoy adding insult to injury.) But, as her TV interview makes clear, Geneviève Legay knew very well she was risking her life to defend the democratic freedom to demonstrate and foresaw such an attack moments before it was ordered by police Commander Souchi.

    Indeed, videos taken on the spot and the testimony of street-medics and other eyewitnesses (including policemen) told a different story. Apparently a policeman wielding a shield hit her in the head and knocked her down, whereupon he and other cops straddled her and dragged her away bleeding, refusing to allow street-medics to attend her. They may also have kicked her when she was down, which would explain her cracked ribs.

    Later, police entered her hospital room, where Mme Legay was alone (her daughters having been barred without explanation). They repeatedly tried to get Mme Legay to admit that a “cameraman” had pushed her down, but when she repeated that it was a policeman, they stopped taking notes.

    Meanwhile, videos of the attack were all over the Internet, and the independent, subscriber-supported news site Médiapart gathered eyewitness evidence and presented it to the Public Prosecutor, who on March 29 was obliged to reverse himself and affirm police involvement.

    Then, on April 8, Médiapart exposed the deliberate official cover-up of this attack. It turns out that the person placed in charge of the investigation, Hélène P, one of the policewomen who had pressured Mme Legay in her hospital room to declare that she had been pushed down by a “cameraman,” was none other than the common-law wife of Commander Souchi, who had shouted the order to “Charge! Charge!” at the peaceful group in which Mme Legay was standing.

    This scandal has finally broken official silence on French police brutality after five months of violent, indiscriminate attacks on Yellow Vests – visible on YouTube but not on TV. Even the death, during a housing demonstration in Marseille, of  Zaineb Redouane, an 80-year-old woman who was killed on Dec. 4 at her upstairs window when shot directly in the face with tear-gas grenade, went unacknowledged. (She was only an Algerian.)

    Macron’s Lies and Cover-ups

    Thus, the President of the Republic was caught outright lying to cover up police brutality. Not as strange as one might think, given the scandal that has clung to him like a tick since last summer, also uncovered by Médiapart, is the Benalla Affair – named for Macron’s Security Chief, who last year was captured on a video, wearing a borrowed riot police uniform, viciously clubbing a demonstrator lying on the ground – apparently for the fun of it. It then emerged that Macron’s protégé and left-hand man Benalla was also involved in a variety of international intrigues and scams, which continue tarnish Macron’s Mister Clean image in France as new evidence emerges.

    Nonetheless, Macron,  a former Socialist, is still seen internationally as a progressive, democratic leader, efficiently modernizing France’s archaic “exception” to neoliberal dogma, basically a friend to human rights. The extraordinary violence of his regime has remained hidden behind a smokescreen of demonization of the Yellow Vests and de facto censorship by the mainstream media. Even the liberal New York Review of Books, which in the 1960s printed a diagram of a Molotov cocktail on its front page, has clung to this line, placing the blame for “violence” on the protestors. So before leaving this subject, let’s look at some unpleasant statistics and then examine the role of the Black Block of so-called casseurs (“trashers”) in sustaining this image.

    Whose Violence?

    The official narrative is that the Yellow Vests have been attacking the forces of order, and indeed they are often seen on TV throwing teargas canisters back at the police. Interior Minister Castener has been categorical: “I know of no policeman who has attacked the Yellow Vests.” Here are the statistics.

    No policemen have been reported as seriously injured during the five months of weekly clashes with the Yellow Vests.

    On the other hand, the latest official Interior Ministry figures list 2,200 wounded demonstrators, 10 eyes permanently put out, 8,700 arrests, 1,796 convictions, 1,428 teargas canisters fired, 4,942 dispersion grenades fired, 13,460 Flashballs (LBDs) fired.

    Flashballs, manufactured in Switzerland, are listed as “sub-lethal military weapons” but when they cross the French border they magically become crowd-control devices. They are extremely powerful and accurate at 50 yards, and the number head-wounds indicate that they have been deliberately aimed at demonstrators’ heads, as have been tear-gas canisters and grenades.

    Médiapart’s list counts 606 demonstrators wounded including one death, 5 hands ripped off, 23 blinded in one eye, 236 head wounds (including jaws ripped off) and 103 attacks on journalists. Among the wounded 464 were demonstrators, 39 minors, 22 bystanders, 61 journalists and 20 medics.[2]

    What About the Violent Vandals?

    Concerning the Black Bloc and other casseurs (“trashers”) they are certainly guilty of property damage on a fairly significant scale, but have as far as I know not wounded, blinded or crippled any human beings. That, to me (but apparently not to the French media) is a significant difference. I have never eaten at Fouquet’s restaurant, and I’m sure they have insurance.

    My problem with the Black Bloc at Yellow Vest demonstrations is that they never get arrested or struck by flashballs. Go on YouTube and you can see dozens of videos of masked, black-clad guys with crowbars smashing banks and trashing stores in plain sight. No one ever stops them. Why?

    A certain number of casseurs have been spotted (and videoed) as police provocateurs, infiltrating the demonstrations, smashing stuff, and then being filtrated through police lines. This is an old French police tactic designed to spoil the image of a demonstration and justify violent repression, but the whole truth is that Europe is full of angry young men, self-styled anarchists, deeply invested in fighting the establishment by smashing its symbols. They come in from all over Europe.

    So the cops leave them alone and concentrate on their main mission: brutalizing the crowds of ordinary demonstrators to scare them off and stifle dissent. Moreover, the Black Bloc folks are more likely to kick the shit out of the cops who try to stop them than are high-school kids, parents with children, and old folks like me and Geneviève. I’d like the Black Bloc much more if they would fight the cops themselves, instead of using us as human shields while expressing their quite understandable rage while we get gassed and shot at.

    “Libertycidal” Legislation

    The new “anti-casseurs” laws that Macron is pushing through the legislature will legalize and set in stone for the future the repressive practices used against the Yellow Vests, making them permanently available to his successors (for example Marine Le Pen). They have nothing to do with actual casseurs (who are obviously breaking existing laws and need only to be apprehended under them) and everything to do with making it nearly impossible for ecologists, trade unionists or Yellow Vests to demonstrate.

    For example, if you are a small-town Yellow Vest and take the train to Paris on a Saturday, you are likely to be stopped several times between the station and the Champs Elysées. If you have in your backpack Vaseline, eye drops, ski goggles, a bicycle helmet, a face-scarf or God forbid a gas mask, you can be arrested, brought to summary trial, and convicted the very same day for being part of a “group organized for the purpose of destroying public order and obstructing the forces of order.”

    Of course if you insist on a real trial with lawyers and everything, they will gladly hold you over in jail, but if you’re not at work on Monday you’ll lose your job and meanwhile who is minding the kids? And if you eventually  do get to demonstrate and the demonstration leads to property damage, you may also be made legally and financially responsible. You may also be placed on a list of dangerous people and barred from demonstrating again at the whim of the local Prefect.

    The chilling prospect of turning these absurd police-state practices into law is what brought pacifists like Geneviève Legay out into the streets with the Yellow Vests. Interviewed in the hospital, where she is still in pain and recovering slowly from multiple injuries, she declared: “Today I am determined to carry on the fight. It is ever more necessary to do so when you see the anti-democratic drift of this government […] The Yellow Vests support me and I will continue supporting them. I am not going to stop fighting to defend our rights, as I have for 50 years, and to struggle against State repression whatever form it may take.”

    The Cat Is Out of the Bag

    She will not be alone. The League for the Rights of Man and more than 50 other civil liberties groups, religious associations, trade unions, civic associations and far-left parties have just called for a massive national demonstration for the right to demonstrate, along with the Yellow Vests this Saturday, April 13. I hope it will be massive.

    The choice of Saturday is significant as an act of solidarity with the Yellow Vests, who alone have been defending the public’s right to assemble in public places, and this at considerable personal risk. For 22 weeks, the Yellow Vests have been acting out this basic democratic right through their principled refusal to beg the police for special  permission for citizens to gather in a public square or parade through the streets. Imagine “Occupy Wall St.” happening all around the country, in cities and on traffic circles, on a weekly basis. All alone, the Yellow Vests have sustained thousands of injuries and thousands of arrests through this weekly act of civil disobedience, proclaiming the right to the city. Now, at last, they have recognition and allies.[3]

    This convergence of other groups, along with the new perspectives flowing from the Yellow Vests’ Assembly of Assemblies, may mark a new phase in their long and lonely struggle against Macron’s harsh, anti-democratic, neoliberal regime in its implacable drive to wipe out the relative advantages in living standards, social services and personal liberties won by previous generations of French people in 1936 (the general strike), 1945 (the Liberation) and 1968 (the general strike and student uprising). Indeed, since 1789 (the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which enshrines the people’s right to demonstrate grievances).

    P.S. Meanwhile, the Algerian people, having suffered a century of French colonial rule, a long and bloody war for independence, and more than 60 years of corrupt police-state rule, are carrying on a similar struggle for dignity and democracy, filling the streets once a week (but on Friday, not Saturday) in so-far peaceful massive demonstrations. (The Montpellier Yellow Vests immediately voted their support.) The irony is that the Algerian police have held back on violence, whereas here in France, the level of state repression against the Yellow Vests reminds me of the oppressive atmosphere of police repression I experienced as a student in Paris during the Algerian War.

    P.S. In my next report from Montpellier, I will try relate, as a participant-observer, what it’s like inside the Yellow Vests. Meanwhile, don’t hesitate to send me any questions you may have about this under-reported but much-maligned autonomous popular movement.

     [1] See James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations (Anchor, 2005).

    [2] https://www.mediapart.fr/studio/panoramique/allo-place-beauvau-cest-pour-un-bilan

    [3] Typical of Yellow Vests’ sense of autonomy, our Montpellier/Peyrou group, although happy to join the Oct. 13 demonstration (which has received an actual permit) reserves the right to break off from the official group, march around where they please, and return when they choose. You can only « have » a right if you use it. During Act 21, after chasing around town with the cops on their heels, they ended up on the main square and spontaneously formed a very long line and began dancing an improvised Medieval dance to the rhythm of drums, flutes and noise makers.