Misguided Award from an Anti-Nuclear Group

By: October 3, 2023
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The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation was formed in 1982 and says it is made up of 50,000 individuals and groups worldwide. It works to build a world “free of nuclear weapons.” This is indeed a worthy goal. So, it’s shocking that the foundation is giving a peace award in October to a man who has repeatedly appeared on the TV shows of a Russian known as Putin’s chief propagandist while Putin wages a murderous war of aggression against Ukraine, a propagandist who has called for Russia to drop nuclear bombs on Ukraine.

The man is economist Jeffrey Sachs and the propagandist is Russian TV talk show host Vladimir Solovyov. Last November (2022) after mentioning nuclear weapons, Solovyov said,

“If we have weapons that secure total victory it would be strange not to use them. Otherwise, why did we even make them? If we think that our lives have no value anyway and that nuclear weapons are not necessary because the wonderful Western world has to remain but Russia can be destroyed.”

On January 25 of this year a Russian Member of Parliament said on Solovyov’s show that using nuclear weapons would be a “dangerous trend.” Countering him “Solovyov replied that ‘not using nuclear weapons is a dangerous trend’ as he said that Russia should make the most of its ‘superiority in tactical nuclear weapons.'” On June 22, he said,

“They’re striking bridges on the border between Crimea and Kherson region. We no longer have any option. We must wipe them from the face of the earth… their decision-making centers. If our tactical nuclear weapons give us an advantage, maybe it’s time? Maybe we simply need to batter them.”

On August 22 he tore away any ambiguity: “Why are we still dancing around? I think we should strike. As soon as they officially deliver [F-16s], we conduct a strike with tactical nuclear weapons,” suggested Solovyov. “They’re convinced we won’t do it. This is why it should be done.” He said nuclear weapons would work “wonderfully in Ukraine.”

Solovyov was awarded the Order of Alexander Nevsky by the Kremlin in 2014 “for objectivity in covering events in Crimea.” He is a fierce supporter of Putin and of the Ukraine War. “He not only calls Ukrainians Nazis but insists they’re now working in league with LGBT activists to destroy Russia.” In March of 2022 he said: “And if you think we’re going to stop with Ukraine, think 300 times, I will remind you that Ukraine is merely an intermediate stage in the provision of the safety of the Russian Federation.” This is the fellow Sachs chats with.

To be clear Sachs was not on Solovyov’s program when the latter called for the nuclear strikes, but he could hardly not have known about Solovyov’s monstrous proposals. In late March of this year a statement by scores of economists via an open letter to him noted that “Vladimir Solovyov (apart from calling to wipe Ukrainian cities off the face of the earth, … called for nuclear strikes against NATO countries)”. Despite this open letter, Sachs appeared on Solovyov’s talk shows four more times. Needless to say, he didn’t do this to debate Solovyov or denounce his calls for genocide via nuclear weapons.

Sachs came to international prominence in the ‘90’s while as a Harvard professor when he advised a “shock therapy” regimen for a quick leap to free-market capitalism for Russia as it emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union. It didn’t work so well. One critic said, “Between 1991 and 1997, Russian GNP – i.e. the value of all goods and services that Russia produces – went down 83%. Agrarian production decreased 63%. Investment decreased 92%.” Russia started on a deep dive in population. Sachs defended himself by saying Russia didn’t adopt his playbook at all.

In the new century Sachs reinvented himself as a friend of the poor. In 2005 he wrote The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, how one could reform capitalism and eliminate extreme poverty by 2025 in a “Big Push.” The grand idea was to send poor countries lots of targeted development aid. He became advisor to a number of UN Secretaries General on poverty eradication. The U.A.E. gave him $3 million to study positivity and he issues a “World Happiness Report.”

Somewhere along the line Sachs decided he was an expert on diplomacy and geopolitics. The day before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, as tens of thousands of troops were on Ukraine’s border, Sachs, then a professor at Columbia, was on Bloomberg denouncing U.S. policy as provocative because it was supposedly expanding NATO.

By June 2022 he was blaming the Russian invasion completely on the United States. In an article on Tikkun he declared, the war was a“30-year project of the American neoconservative movement.” I did my best to tear his piece apart in this article. One does have to admit that Sachs became popular in the media. He appeared on CNN, Bloomberg, the Economist, the New Yorker, Fox Business, CNBC, Hungary Today, Democracy Now!, and more. One of his appearances on Democracy Now! garnered three million views on YouTube, which I suspect was a DN! record. Just a year after the invasion (on Feb. 27, 2023), Sachs was addressing the U.N. Security Council, sharing his supposed expertise to talk about the explosions at the Nordstream pipelines. It wasn’t as big a deal as it sounds, though. He was there as a guest of the Russian Federation.

The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (NAPF) started announcing its upcoming award to Sachs over email in mid-August 2023. It intends to honor him as a “Distinguished Peace Leader” on October 18 in Santa Barbara, California. In September, on behalf of the peace, anti-nuclear, and environmental group Promoting Enduring Peace (PEP), I wrote letters of protest to NAPF. There was no answer. So, some Ukraine solidarity activists started an open letter to the NAPF.

The signers of the letter are scientists, economists, professors, and writers who praise the anti-nuclear goals of the foundation, but fiercely criticize Sach’s view of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and his appearances on the programs of Russian TV presenter Vladimir Solovyov.

There were 175 initial signers including Anastassia Fedyk, UC Berkeley economist; noted Black feminist author Barbara Smith; Dr. Zaher Sahloul and Mayson Almisri, co-winners of the Gandhi Peace Award; Joseph Cirincione, national security analyst and author; Yuriy Gorodnichenko, professor of economics, UC Berkeley; writer Adam Hochschild; Denys Bondar, Associate Professor of Physics, Tulane University; and Bill Fletcher of the National Writers Union.

The letter notes Sachs’ endless claims about U.S. and NATO “provocations” and remarks that he ignores the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s own “Declaration of Concern” which says that the attack is “a violation of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994” (a document signed by representatives of Russia, the United States, and the U.K.). The letter asks how an organization dedicated to avoiding nuclear war could honor someone who has appeared on a program with a man who has repeatedly advocated for the immediate use of nuclear weapons. It calls on the foundation to withdraw the designation of Sachs as a “Distinguished Peace Leader” and to withdraw the invitation to Sachs to speak at their meeting.

The full letter with hyperlinks and current signers can be found at: https://bit.ly/44JSACHS. New signers are welcome. The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation email is info@napf.org. If you write to them and they respond, please let me know.

 

Ukraine: arms, alliances, and the logic of internationalism

Further reply to Gilbert Achcar
By: October 1, 2023
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This is a reply to Gilbert Achcar, following his initial article, my first reply, and his reply to that, concerning two topics: the supply of arms to Ukraine, and the politics of international military alliances in the context of Russia’s invasion.

Despite my criticisms here, Achcar’s position is a considerable improvement on that of much of the left: it represents a real attempt to develop a position that is rooted neither in kneejerk support for, or opposition to, the interests of this or that geopolitical bloc.

Yet his position is unsatisfactory because rather than committing to the policy necessary to realize his stated objectives in the context of a full account of Ukraine’s reality, Achcar instead tries to reconcile those goals with certain conventions derived from the broad-left and peace movement of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. That reconciliation, I believe, is a failure.

Arms

On arms, Achcar begins with the right idea: “The starting point is support for Ukraine’s right to get what it needs to defend itself and push Russian troops back from the territory they grabbed since last year’s invasion.” Unfortunately, he precedes to establish a series of principles that ensure that, if followed, that goal will not be met. The result is a well-meaning case study in the impossibility of useful comment on any war without understanding its material-technical realities.

This is evident in four areas.

First, the distinction between offensive and defensive weapons is not merely “not clear-cut”; it is close to non-existent. Achcar attempts to distinguish the former from the latter, in a theoretical innovation hidden to generations of military theorists, first by saying that any weapon with the prefix “anti” is defensive, and second by saying that “long-range missiles and planes” are offensive. Let’s consider the second of those conditions. How long-range does a weapon have to be before it counts as offensive? The range of standard GMLRS ammunition (90km)? ATACMS (up to 300km)? The Storm Shadow (up to 400km)? And why is that the important figure? Defensive strategies necessarily involve a) offensive tactics (rendering any such distinction irrelevant, even if it could be coherently described) and, b) in particular, long-range missiles, as the example of the GMLRS in stabilizing Ukraine’s lines last summer shows.

Second, limiting the range of munitions supplied by the West is not an optimum tool to manage escalatory risks supposed to be associated with strikes “deep into Russian territory.” There are four important considerations that disrupt the relationship between the range of the matériel the West supplies, and such strikes:

    1. Ukraine’s suppliers have insisted that technologies that they send, at least beyond the range of conventional tube artillery, not be used to target sites within pre-2014 Russian territory. This restriction has been observed. The reason it has been observed is that, as I mentioned in my previous piece, Ukraine’s supporters have the ability to close off, at any time, an ammunition and matériel pipeline that operates on a basis somewhere between just-in-time and definitely-too-late. This is also the reason that a Ukrainian attempt to take Crimea or the Donbas by force could be prevented by Ukraine’s external backers. There is an overriding incentive for Ukraine to abide by such restrictions.
    2. Several technologies have facilities that allow their target locations to be restricted, independent of their range. We know this includes the HIMARS (and therefore M270) launchers that fire both standard GMLRS and ATACMS munitions. It may cover the Storm Shadow or other air-launched munitions too: a similar modification was made to counter-battery radar given to Ukraine in 2015. In such cases, the same weapon, situated in Kharkiv can target sites in Crimea, hundreds of kilometres away, yet not target sites in Russia a few dozen kilometres away.
    3. Ukraine is not going to get air superiority, because it is not going to get F-35s. Russia’s air defense envelope extends even into Ukrainian territory. Even with longer range air-launched munitions such as the Storm Shadow, Ukraine’s aviation reach into Russian territory will always be fundamentally limited. The function of jets is to extend range through air-launched munitions fired from well within Ukrainian-held territory – as the Storm Shadow is already doing.
    4. Ukraine is manufacturing its own long-range strike drones, which have already conducted strikes up to 600km inside Russian territory – considerably further than even the Storm Shadow could penetrate.

In this context, preventing Ukraine from receiving ATACMS, jets, or more air-launched cruise missiles is neither necessary nor effective as a means to limit strikes deep inside Russia: its only function would be to make Achcar’s purported objectives harder to realize.

Third, it is part of Achcar’s declared purpose that Ukraine should retake land. Retaking land means offensives. Offensives require offensive capacities. As a matter of logic, a policy that deliberately restricts some category of weapons on the grounds that they have offensive potential cannot meet this declared aim. Thus, if there were a distinction between offensive and defensive weapons, it would be incoherent with his own stated objectives to enforce a policy built on that foundation. As a matter of observation, long-range strike capacities are vital for these offensives; as we saw in Kherson a year ago, and as is being demonstrated in Zaporizhia today. Neither defense nor offense can succeed without systematic measures to destroy and push back command and logistic nodes: that needs range.

Although cluster munitions are opposed by Achcar on different grounds, it is important to note that the current offensive would already have had to stop were it not for the US decision to provide these munitions, due to a shortage of conventional 155mm shells. Because these munitions are being fired into the middle of heavily mined areas, there are fewer humanitarian concerns than in other use cases: these areas will be inaccessible to civilians pending future one of history’s largest demining operations. The transfer of cluster munitions thus had more upsides and fewer downsides than were contemplated by those countries – not including Russia, the US, or Ukraine – which have agreed to proscribe them.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, Achcar shows no understanding of the dynamics of escalation as they have played out in the war. (I gave examples in my previous piece, which he did not address.) Both sides will make use of all escalatory mechanisms within their grasp, and will do so irrespective of whether their opponent adopts a given escalatory step themselves. The reason for this is simple: to do otherwise would amount to willingness to accept defeat unnecessarily. Both Ukraine and Russia are rapidly expanding their production of long-range suicide drones, with greater range than anything the US will provide to Ukraine. The idea that either would halt production if only their counterparts were unable to produce the equivalent munitions is baseless invention. The qualitative limit to this escalation is set by the two parties’ international partners: the use of chemical, nuclear, or biological weapons will not be permitted; and fortunately so.

Achcar expects the delivery of F-16s to be a “qualitative escalation of U.S. and NATO participation” that will lead Moscow to “do anything in its power to prevent their use (such as pounding Ukraine’s airports) and conduct further murderous onslaughts on the country’s civilian population in retribution.” If anything, it is more likely that Russian attempts to strike military runways (F-16s need very level tarmac) will redirect Moscow’s limited stock of ballistic strikes away from their usual, civilian targets. Even if a flurry of attacks on civilian targets greets the first use of an F-16, there is no reason to think that over time equivalent attacks would not have happened anyway: to believe otherwise is to be credulous about Moscow’s own restraint.

F-16s do not, in fact, represent a drastic qualitative escalation; particularly in the form of the Mid-Life Update model currently promised. As usual Achcar does not say what he thinks this qualitative edge is supposed to be. F-16s will allow Ukraine access to a number of slightly more sophisticated air-to-air missiles, and additional air-to-ground munitions similar to those it already has. They will allow it to maintain and perhaps marginally expand the size of its air force, which otherwise would inevitably become unviable due to wear and tear: there is only so long that whole new airframes can be cannibalized for spare parts.

Undoubtedly, F-16s represent less of a qualitative escalation than did the MiG-21s which the USSR supplied to North Vietnam. In that case, Achcar has already argued, the supply of such armaments (and even the occasional direct involvement of military advisors in fighting) did not amount to the participation of the USSR in the war for the purposes of his theoretical framework.

Achcar wants Ukraine to mount offensives against prepared positions without offensive weapons, and specifically without being able to fire over a certain (unstated) range. He wants it to do so with a quantitative disadvantage in matériel (a given), and, perhaps, no qualitative advantage in certain crucial types of matériel (as a matter of policy). He wants Ukraine’s partners to supply it, but not to increase net expenditure to do so (he never explains why this principle is so important, or how he is so sure it can be reconciled with his battlefield objectives), and also not to draw down existing stocks where these are problematic (as with cluster munitions). Something has to give. There is a need to bring objectives and means into alignment. On the basis of the means Achcar proposes, Ukraine could likely not even manage a sustainable defense, let alone the offensive action he seems to want.

Alliances

Achcar agrees with my characterization of the multiple causes of Russia’s invasion, and is nearly correct that I insist on a defensive alliance involving the United States as a necessary means to prevent it – I wrote that the other option was that European countries considerably expand their military-industrial base. Achcar has two arguments against my position.

The first is that I’m wrong to dismiss the OSCE and UN as guarantors of Ukraine’s security because, although they are presently unable to fulfil those roles, they could be “revamped and enhanced so as to be effective guarantors of world peace.” But absent some account of what these enhancements would look like, and how they could either neutralize the sources of Russia’s aggression or deter it through credible threats to deploy countervailing force, this merely moves the abstraction to another set of terms, in a manner reminiscent of the most utopian versions of liberal institutionalism.

Achcar’s second argument is that there was an alternative means available to prevent the sources of Russia’s external aggression reemerging after the 1990s. He writes that the neoliberal “shock therapy” of that decade initiated the hyper-nationalist, externally aggressive version of Russian politics that we see today, and implies that were it to have been avoided “collective security organizations” would be sufficient to deal with the reduced pitch of tensions. This argument has several difficulties.

The first problem is that although Russia’s path to its present condition ran through the economic catastrophe of the 1990s, history is replete with other paths to authoritarianism and imperial reassertion. There is a path leading not through recent national humiliation, but through wealth and power. That is the path that the US followed into the Iraq war, and that, perhaps, China is following now in respect of its intentions toward Taiwan. As a large hydrocarbon economy with a compact political elite steeped in an imperial ethos and weak civil society, the pressures in Russia toward authoritarianism and militarism were always going to be strong (compare Azerbaijan, the UAE, Saudi Arabia). Augurs of resurgent Russian revanchism were, contra Achcar, visible during the 1990s: in Transnistria, Chechnya, and Abkhazia, and in the Russian diplomats who told their Eastern European counterparts that Kyiv would soon be under Moscow’s control again. (See D’Anieri, Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War. 2nd Ed. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2023, pp. 54-56.) This is why Ukraine sought the Budapest Memorandum: as a hedge against an evident danger.

M.E. Sarotte, who is a skeptic of NATO enlargement, in her conclusion to Not One Inch, accepts that while it is “reasonable to speculate” that rising tensions between Russia and NATO may have been contained without the latter’s expansion, she admits that it is “impossible to know” whether Russia would not have chosen to engage in aggression anyway. We might also wonder whether the leaderships of NATO countries would really have moved, as Sarotte recommends, to admit frontline states to membership in the context of escalating Russian ambitions, should these have emerged anyway. It may have been that the late 1990s and early 2000 were a unique political window that made possible the expansion of NATO to the Baltics and Poland possible, and thus their ongoing security against Russian invasion.

Once this double uncertainty is admitted – that Russian aggression may have emerged whether the crisis of the 1990s was much softer or not, and whether NATO expanded or not – any worthwhile security policy, one with the interests of Eastern Europeans at its heart, must inevitably take place in that context. That implies deterrence, which for small states implies alliance politics.

The second problem is that, even if a different economic approach to Russia’s 1990s crisis would have made all the difference, that recognition is wholly useless a) once the opportunity to act differently had passed, and b) to any actors who did not have the capacity to deliver that different economic policy. It therefore implies nothing in policy terms a) since the mid-1990s, or b) to anyone save the most powerful actors within the US (and perhaps West European) political system that had the capacity to provide the necessary billions of dollars. What use is it to say to the Ukrainian majority who now favor NATO membership that the progressive alternative involves a time machine? What use is it to criticize the Polish and Czech leaders, who were so crucial in driving NATO expansion, on the grounds that there was an alternative route to their security that they had no capacity to enact? None at all.

Another world is possible. But it has to be dragged out of the sludge of the present through means available to specific actors at the moments in which policy is enacted, not established by pure critique of the aggregate consequences of historical development. Political actors, no matter how radical, propose their policies in a world in which the conditions of their action are defined by the mistakes, the practical limitations, and the deliberately vicious decisions of their predecessors. The subsequent policy debates are not primarily opportunities to rerun the debates of the past, with a view to proving one’s own political current to have previously been correct. Rather, they are primarily invitations to take responsibility for certain reasonably foreseeable consequences in the deplorable conditions of the present.

 

The Article on Ukraine that DSA Suppressed

Notes from Kyiv: Which side are we on?
By: September 29, 2023
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A few days ago, Democratic Socialists of America’s online publication ran my article about my recent visit to Ukraine. It was entitled “Notes from Kyiv: Which side are we on?”

DSA has now answered that question — by removing the article from its website.

This is the result of a decision taken yesterday by the organization’s National Political Committee.

Thanks to New Politics for publishing it here.

Please read it, share it, and spread the word.

We will not be silenced. – Eric Lee

Notes from Kyiv: Which side are we on?

Kyiv: A temporary memorial to those who have given their lives to defend Ukraine. Photo by Eric Lee

by Eric Lee

As I walked around Kyiv on a beautiful, sunny morning in early September, I noticed the scaffolding in the city’s squares.  Statues had been covered up to protect them from bomb damage. Later, I saw a statue with no protection around it– a graffiti-covered memorial to a Red Army general whose name nobody remembered. I was told that this statue had been covered by protective scaffolding before the war. The protection was removed when the war broke out. There was some hope that Russian bombs might solve the problem of what to do with this relic of Soviet rule.

You cannot understand the war in Ukraine without knowing its history. This was made very clear to me in a conversation I had with Olesia Briazgunova, who works for one of Ukraine’s two national trade union centers, the KVPU (Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine).  I suggested that I saw some similarities between the situation in Ukraine today and the Spanish Civil War.

Olesia stopped me right there and  asked if there had been genocide in Spain.  I said there hadn’t been. She said, “Well there’s genocide here — and the Russians have been trying to wipe out the Ukrainian nation for a very long time.”  I thought of Stalin’s terror-famine of the early 1930s, which Ukrainians call the Holodomor, and which they rightly consider an act of deliberate genocide.  She had a point.

Eric Lee (center) and the KVPU’s Mykhailo Volynets and Olesia Briazgunova look at film to be used to cover windows shattered by Russian artillery and bombs. The film is part of aid being collected for workers and their families. Photo by KVPU

History surrounds you in Kyiv.  You hear it in conversations, you see it in the street names, and you breathe it in the air.  The Solidarity Center, which is the AFL-CIO’s global workers’ rights project, is located on a street once named after Stalin’s Communist International.  The street was renamed in honor of Symon Petliura, a leader of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and a deeply controversial figure in the country’s history.

In addition to renaming streets with Soviet connections, the city seems to be removing much of its Russian history, too.  At one point I was directed by Google Maps to Pushkin street.  But Pushkin street no longer exists.

When I interviewed Georgiy Trukhanov, the leader of the 1.2 million member teachers union in Ukraine, about their relationship with the teachers union in Russia, he told me that those Russian teachers were partially guilty here. “Guilty of what?” I asked. All the Russian soldiers currently fighting in Ukraine, all of them, studied in Russian schools, he said. They were taught to be what they have become — killers and rapists.

The war has united Ukrainian society as never before. The unions are fully signed up. The FPU president, Grygorii Osovyi, told me that 20% of Ukrainian trade union members are now serving in the armed forces. Georgiy Trukhanov told me that teachers could not be drafted as they are considered essential workers — so thousands of them have volunteered.

I spoke with many union leaders about the situation in what Ukrainians call the “temporarily occupied territories.” Russian occupiers have essentially banned the Ukrainian language from classrooms. Many workers have fled those territories, and unions are doing an amazing job of helping them, collecting aid, providing accommodation, and much more. Union offices I visited were full of boxes of aid, including plastic sheeting to replace windows destroyed by Russian artillery. Mykhailo Volynets, a former miner and head of the KVPU, told me that there was an urgent need for bandages.

Amid the horrors of the war, there are occasional bits of very positive news.  An LGBTQI activist explained to me how Putin had weaponized homophobia in Russia, including spreading rumors that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and other leaders were gay. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, there has been a huge shift in public opinion regarding LGBTQI people, many of whom are serving at the front. This is a part of the world where homophobia has run rampant, and even turned violent, as we have seen in countries like Georgia. But in Ukraine, the war has helped change attitudes in a positive way.

I spoke with Ukrainian socialists, with young workers who organize couriers, with aviation workers and railway workers. I was interviewed by women members of the nuclear power workers union — who are staying at their posts at Europe’s largest nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhya, now under Russian occupation.

The message I got from everyone could not have been clearer:  The Ukrainian labor movement and Left stand fully against the Russian invasion.  They want and expect solidarity from the labor movement and Left in other countries.  They enormously appreciate everything from solidarity gestures such as the visits of leading trade unionists, including the American Federation of Teachers’ president Randi Weingarten, and donations from unions ranging from generators to much-needed bandages.

Despite the differences, I still see this conflict as the Spanish Civil War of our time.  The many young men and women who have come to Ukraine to join the fight are inspiring in the way that the International Brigades were some 90 years ago.  The Spanish Republic was defeated in large part because many democracies failed to come to its aid, while the fascists were fully backed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.  Will the same thing happen in Ukraine?

Putin’s regime is a fascist one, and the war on Ukraine is an illegal, imperialist war. Ukraine is not a perfect society, and its government is not a perfect government. Nor was the Spanish Republic.  But in the fight against fascism, we need to ask ourselves, to paraphrase the old song, which side are we on?

Oppenheimer: Global Empire Trumps Good War

By: September 26, 2023
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Oppenheimer (directed by Christopher Nolan, based on the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, written by Kai Bird, of The Nation, and Martin J. Sherwin, a historian of foreign policy who died in 2021) is a morality play in which big personalities forcefully negotiate conflicting world views during and after the frantic drive to build the atomic bomb that would beat Hitler.

After the bait-and-switch bombing of Japan, the appalled leader of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer, embarks on a public crusade for a future free of nuclear holocaust, thinking that great minds will save the people. Truman dismisses the nerdy do-gooder as a useful policy advisor, and the cold-warriors proceed with planning their ascent into the new American Century. By the 1950s they’re thinking that having an articulate, technically astute, progressive critic inside the war machine was a bad idea and that potentially the guy was a damaging loose cannon in public discourse. Oppenheimer earlier had friends, including a girlfriend, in the Communist Party (CPUSA); he was a fellow-traveler on progressive issues. Did he share a Marxist perspective on social class or was he just a leftist dilletante? We don’t find out. The war planners could overlook this problem when they needed the bomb; now he had to be defrocked, eliminated. There were important issues and debates that accompanied these events and we need to understand the insights of leftists at that time, or the lack thereof. For that the film is not helpful. It’s worthwhile to think about what the film could have been with different objectives, and what Oppenheimer might have done differently at some points.

The technical challenge of the Manhattan Project was producing a special form of uranium – U-235 – which is a very minor component of refined uranium ore, and then designing a device that can suddenly smash U-235 material into a very compact sphere so fast that the resulting nuclear chain-reaction goes to completion and the murderous deed is done before it blows itself apart (which would interrupt the chain-reaction). At Los Alamos, they cheered when they got an 80% yield!! This all has to happen in hundredths of a second. The film doesn’t quite explain this task. To make this bomb required significant innovation in conventional explosives design and high-speed electrical circuitry (hence the drama of special-effects explosions in the film).

One can assume that Oppenheimer discussed with some friends his pending decision on whether to take the job of leading the bomb project. It would have been credible if his CP girlfriend had said in passing “you know, this whole war didn’t have to happen; it was predicted by high-level establishment strategists at the close of WW I because the terms of the settlement were so onerous, placing massive burdens on the German working class, while most of the ruling class got off almost scot-free.” A German Trump was predictable. Fascism happened for material historical reasons.

One wonders if the CPUSA position on defending the Soviet Union at all costs from Nazi defeat played a role here. The CP endorsed the “no-strike pledge” in the unions of the corporate war-profiteers, and shut down their comprehensive network fighting Jim-Crow racism in the South to smooth the war effort. The film provides few hints of debate on these underlying strategic choices. Although the bomb team comprised a broad spectrum from progressives like future Nobel Prize winner Isidor Isaac Rabi to right-wing anti-communists like Reagan’s future star-wars hero, Edward Teller, both of whom are in the film, it’s not clear whether Oppenheimer had comrades there who were conversant in the class struggle, or that he even wanted that conversation. The bomb team was more focused on the drama of our future with the bomb.

When the full significance of the bomb attacks on Japan sunk in for the bomb builders, Oppenheimer and some colleagues sought to use their public importance and authority to guide a public conversation on the future of nuclear energy and weapons policies. Their naivete was rewarded with dismissal and charges of betrayal. Was this approach of hoping to use positions of influence to change policy an instance of the “burrowing from within” strategy of the CP, thinking that if we just get the right people in positions of power, we can fix things? All social movements burrow from within; it’s called “politics.” Not too long ago having a Catholic President (John F. Kennedy) was considered risky, not to mention having socialists in office and administrative positions today. It seems like Oppenheimer and his leftist friends had put aside a social-class conflict perspective denying ruling class power in their appeal to public judgement on an existential issue. For dissenting participants within societal civic institutions, this can be a slippery slope with no hand-holds.

The 1954 hearings where the cold-warriors went after Oppenheimer were classic Joe McCarthy anti-communism, very convincingly portrayed in the film, so much so that one forgets that the agenda is a bigger one than merely the career moves of the director of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), Lewis Stauss. Were they afraid that he was a communist – corrupting their institutions – or that he wasn’t a communist – a credible, honest liberal promoting dangerous public dissent? From the film, we don’t know. Although Strauss was the bad guy, he actually opposed Truman’s bombing of Japanese cities in favor of demonstrating the bomb’s power by the annihilation of a large deserted island. The intent of the hearings was to deny Oppenheimer a security clearance, essential for any further work in weapons development and any related scientific research, and to eliminate his political persona. Dealing with star-chamber bullies was not generally well-strategized by the CP (with some notable exceptions where the victims turned the tables on the bullies and scored big in public; they usually pleaded the Fifth Amendment) and we don’t know from the film what if any CP input there was. Clearly better advice was needed.

The question is: Why did Oppenheimer still want a security clearance? It’s very unlikely he had wanted to help General Douglas MacArthur use the bomb on China in the Korean War, and he opposed development of the H-bomb. Why didn’t he denounce the new imperialism from post-war Greece and Korea to, in 1954, Iran, Guatemala, and Vietnam. In terms of terrible weapons, why didn’t he point to the war-crimes in the horrendous fire-bombing of cities in Japan or Dresden in Germany. Oppenheimer visits an important period in our history, provides many lessons and poses challenges for progressive thought and action and for highly placed progressive intellectuals regarding their political options.

We are anti-imperialists, not alter-imperialists.

The Left and Ukraine: Anti-Imperialism or Alter-Imperialism?

By: September 20, 2023
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Note: Recently, several sites have published translations (https://links.org.au/war-ukraine-four-reductions-we-must-avoid) of some of my articles (https://www.momentocritico.org/post/la-guerra-en-ucrania-cuatro-reducciones-que-debemos-evitar) on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I thank them for this. Yet, I feel it is important to update some of these interventions, some of which were written more than a year ago.

Seeking to navigate in an increasingly unstable and complex international situation, the left should keep three fundamental principles in mind:

  1. Consistent anti-imperialism
  2. Recognition of the right of peoples to self-determination
  3. Support of the struggles of the exploited and the oppressed in all states and nations

Surely, the first point includes the struggle against US and NATO imperialism. We reject the notion of NATO or its member states as a democratic force.  Some NATO members (Turkey) are far from being democratic governments, even by the least demanding criteria. Some NATO allies are downright undemocratic (Saudi Arabia). On more than one occasion NATO members have supported the overthrow of democratically elected governments and protected those who overthrew them. Simply put: NATO is an arm of Western imperialism and of US imperialism within the Western imperialist bloc (tensions exist and have existed within that bloc).

The idea that NATO would dissolve after the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact was based on the appreciation that its raison d’être was the Cold War against the Soviet Union and its allies. But that was part of its objective: the broader objective is the defense of Western imperialist (and capitalist) rule on a global level, against any threat. In recent decades this has included the imposition of the neoliberal order across the planet. This is why the demise of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, far from leading to the dissolution of NATO, was followed by its eastward expansion and its redefinition as a “security” pact, enabled to act beyond the borders of its members states. And the frictions caused by this expansion led to the aggravation of tensions which is undoubtedly one of the causes of the present conflict between NATO and the Russian Federation. Those who denounce the role of NATO expansion in the preparation of the conflict are right. That is undoubtedly an aspect of the war that we cannot lose sight of.

How should the left respond to NATO expansionism and Western imperialist policy? The general line of this response is well known. It includes building a defense of the living standards and immediate interests of the majority; linking that defense to an anti-military, anti-interventionist policy, while struggling to give that movement an increasingly clear anti-capitalist orientation.

Nevertheless, while we fight US and NATO imperialism, we must not reduce imperialism to its Western variant. The transformations in Russia and China during the last decades have created two great capitalist powers interested in consolidating their own zones of influence and political, economic, and military control and the projection of their interests beyond their borders. The fact that these imperialist projects are weaker than Western imperialism does not change their content or their nature. We are, as Lenin described in his classic study, faced with a world of growing inter-imperialist conflicts. NATO’s eastward expansion clashes with the Russian Federation’s attempt to create its own zone of influence in territories of the former Soviet Union. The preponderance of the United States and its allies in Asia and the Pacific clashes with China’s objective of carving out its sphere of influence in that vast region.

Those who argue that Putin or China are reacting to Western imperialism are right: Western imperialism is a dominant and aggressive force. But it must be underlined that the Russian and Chinese governments respond, not as anti-imperialist forces, but rather with their own plans for control and dominance. The invasion of Ukraine by the Russian federation is part of that imperialist policy and, as such, an evident violation of the right of nations to self-determination. Affirming that right, we must recognize Ukrainian resistance as a just war against imperialist aggression. We reject NATO expansionism, but rejection of NATO expansionism does not imply support for Russian expansionism, if we are to abide by the first two principles mentioned above. We support the movements in Russia that are campaigning against Putin’s war on Ukraine.

Some on the left insist that Putin’s arguments regarding NATO’s expansion and US imperialism are true. The West, Putin has argued, has no moral right to speak about democracy. Indeed, there are enough crimes of US and NATO imperialism around for anybody, including Putin, to point out and denounce. This is why we resolutely oppose Western imperialism. But Western imperialism’s crimes are no reason to support Russian imperialism. What moral standing does the Russian capitalist oligarchy have to speak about democracy? Neither Western imperialism nor Putin have any standing in this regard.

Working class and oppressed peoples must fight NATO expansionism through organization and mobilization against militarism and imperialism, linked to the fight against neoliberalism, austerity, and the many-sided employers’ offensive (against pensions, wages, labor rights, social provisions) and in defense of democratic rights (women’s, reproductive, LGBTQ). An anti-imperialist government in Russia (or elsewhere) would link-up with these movements. It would, along with them, denounce the massive waste of resources in military projects, while itself adopting and implementing a working-class and democratic agenda. But this is not Putin’s agenda or program. As the representative of a capitalist oligarchy this is not how he responds to NATO expansionism. Rather, he enacts his own imperialist agenda, a mirror image of his imperialist rivals. As anti-imperialists we reject both NATO imperialism and Putin’s imperialist reaction to it, as well as the anti-working class and anti-democratic policies that go with it.

It should be stressed that, since all imperialisms are aggressive and predatory, their mutual accusations are often true. During the First World War, German social patriots denounced the despotic character of Tsarism and French imperialism denounced German militarism. After the war, German imperialism denounced the abuses of the Versailles peace and Japanese imperialism denounced the excesses of Western imperialism in Asia. They were all true accusations. But none of them justified supporting German, Russian, or French imperialism during the war, or German rearmament after the war, or Japanese imperialism against Western imperialism, let alone supporting the Japanese invasion of Indochina, Indonesia, or the Philippines. Similarly, our rejection of NATO and Western imperialism cannot lead us to support (or tolerate or fail to denounce) the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation.

After the First World War, the imperialist victors imposed harsh and humiliating terms on a defeated Germany. As some already predicted at the time, this helped nurture the rise of a reloaded German nationalism and imperialism, seeking to break out of the limits imposed on it. The left could and did denounce many of the terms imposed at Versailles and the imperialist victor’s vindictive policies. But that did not turn the resurgent German nationalism and imperialism into a progressive or anti-imperialist force. The same applies to the catastrophic consequences of the capitalist shock therapy promoted in Russia by the United States and its allies in the 1990s. This surely was one factor that nurtured a nationalist reaction under Putin, seeking to repair some of the economic damage done under Yeltsin (and US advisors, such as Jeffrey Sachs). We can and should point out the West’s role and partial responsibility in all of this, but, as in the case of a resurgent German nationalism in the 1930s, this does not make Putin an anti-imperialist.

The left is now faced with a major danger. If, in a world of intensified inter-imperialist conflict it clings to the notion of the US and its allies as the sole imperialism, it runs the risk of sliding from anti-imperialism to alter-imperialism: not opposing all imperialist powers and projects but rather opposing one or some, while explicitly or tacitly supporting another.

In short, we reject NATO imperialism, but not to support the expansionism of the Russian Federation headed by Putin. We do not reject one imperialism to support another. We are anti-imperialists, not alter-imperialists. Therefore, while denouncing Western imperialism, we unequivocally reject the invasion and occupation of areas of Ukraine by the Russian Federation.

The same is true on the other side of the current inter-imperialist conflict. Our opposition to Russian expansionism cannot lead to any sympathies or illusions regarding NATO imperialism. That too would be a slide from anti to alter-imperialism.

Support for Ukrainian resistance does not imply or require an endorsement of Zelensky’s government. This corresponds to the third principle presented above. It is true that Zelensky’s government has perpetuated or initiated frankly anti-democratic, repressive, anti-worker and neoliberal measures. These policies must be denounced. Those resisting them must be supported. 

But it is one thing to oppose Zelensky or Zelensky’s policies, quite another to support Putin’s intervention or Russian occupation. Zelensky’s reactionary politics are a reason to oppose him or his government, not to support Putin’s invasion. The left cannot embrace Putin as the agent of its democratic agenda. If Zelensky needs to be removed, this is a task for the Ukrainian people, not Putin. 

Different voices have denounced the presence of far-right forces in Ukraine. Their weight is a matter of dispute. Yet, the same point applies: their presence must be opposed and denounced, but their presence does not justify the invasion led by Putin or support for that invasion. 

Let us recall the precedent of China and Japanese imperialism. During the 1930s, the international left supported China in the face of Japanese aggression. The left sided with China even though its government was controlled by the repressive and corrupt Guomindang apparatus, headed by Chiang Kai-Shek (fiercely anti-communist and perpetrator of the 1927 massacre), a government supported by western imperialism. Chinese resistance was a just fight against Japanese imperialism, despite the nature of its government and of the support it received from rival imperialisms. Similarly, Ukrainian resistance is a just fight against Russian aggression, despite the nature of its government and of the support it received from rival imperialisms.

The position outlined here closely follows Lenin’s views on this question. Lenin underlined the need to fight all forms of national oppression, which in turn required the recognition of the right of nations to self-determination. Tsarism had nurtured hatred against Russia among many in the oppressed nations of the empire, including Ukraine. The end of that oppression and the hope of reconciliation between the peoples estranged by Tsarism demanded the recognition of the right to self-determination, among other measures. In his own way, Putin understands this quite well: he openly blames Lenin for Ukraine’s independence, which he considers a crime against Russia that his invasion seeks to rectify. Logically, he also repudiates Lenin’s doctrine of the right of nations to self-determination, which he considers absurd and untenable. Consciously or not, those in Russia (or elsewhere) struggling against Putin’s war and defending Ukraine’s right to self-determination are recuperating Lenin’s orientation.

But Lenin also argues that all national cultures and all nationalisms, including the nationalism of the oppressed, contain aspects that are undemocratic, oppressive, discriminatory, and chauvinistic. The same democratic impulse that inspires the fight against national oppression commands us to struggle against these oppressive aspects present in all national cultures and characteristic of all nationalisms. In the struggle against US colonialism in Puerto Rico (to speak of the struggle in which I have been involved since the 1970s) we must also fight against the conservative, sexist, racist aspects of Puerto Rican culture, for example. This applies to Ukraine and all nations under imperialist aggression. While struggling against Russian imperialism, a fight must also be conducted against the reactionary dimensions of Ukrainian nationalism. Fighting Russian aggression but ignoring this would be inconsistent from a democratic and liberating perspective. Nor is it permissible to deploy the reactionary aspects of Ukrainian nationalism to support Russian aggression: this would be equally inconsistent from a democratic and anti-imperialist perspective.

To resist, Ukraine must obtain weapons wherever it can. Without recognizing this right, the denunciation of Putin’s invasion becomes an empty gesture. In the present context, Ukraine may only obtain these weapons in the NATO imperialist camp. There is no contradiction between denouncing NATO imperialism and supporting Ukraine’s use of its military supplies to resist Russian aggression. Unlike many in Ukraine, we foster no illusions regarding NATO, nor will we call for an end to the flow of military material required for an effective resistance. The same applies elsewhere. Faced with US aggression, we recognize the right of Cuba, or Venezuela, for example to seek material and military support wherever they can obtain it, including a rival imperialism, such as Russia. We would foster no illusions regarding Putin, nor would we call for an end to the flow of military supplies required for an effective resistance to US aggression. Again: this is the only way of remaining consistent anti-imperialists instead of embracing some version of alter-imperialism.

Alter-imperialism would have us choose between imperialisms. For some, any opposition to NATO implies support for Putin. To oppose Russian imperialism, they would have us side with NATO imperialism. For others, opposition to Putin is an indication of pro-NATO sympathies. To fight NATO imperialism, they would have us embrace Russian imperialism. We reject both formulas, based on the same alter-imperialist logic. We can and should stand against both NATO and Russian imperialism, and with the victims of their aggression, be they Cuba or Venezuela, or Ukraine.

Similarly, to call for an end of military aid to stop the war, despite the humane intentions of many, in practice disarms Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression. It plays into Putin’s hands. It means peace at the cost of Ukrainian capitulation. If the US were to invade Cuba or Venezuela, would we seek to disarm them to bring about an end to the war? Surely, we would campaign for an end to US aggression, while hoping that Cuba or Venezuela arm themselves to resist as best they can, using whatever sources they have at their disposal no matter how unsavory. The same position must be adopted regarding Ukraine and Russian aggression. 

Sometimes, the rise of China and Russia as rivals of US imperialism is presented as the emergence of a multipolar world, no longer under the thumb of the latter. But the contrast of unipolar and multipolar is too abstract. We must ask: what kind of “multipolarity” is crystallizing in today’s world? We should remember that the world order that produced the first and second world wars was a multipolar world. In other words, a world of inter-imperialist conflicts is a multipolar world. In such a world the role of the left is not to cheer or celebrate the rise of multipolarity given the consolidation of new competing imperialist projects but rather to clearly position itself against all such projects.

We recently encountered the argument that “Whatever you think about Ukraine, in Africa, Russia is fighting imperialism.” The premise here is that anybody clashing or in tension with Western imperialism is anti-imperialist. Again, the example of Japanese imperialism is illustrative. During the 1930s did it clash and fight Western imperialism in Indochina, Indonesia, the Philippines, etc.? Yes. Was it fighting imperialism? No: it was advancing its own imperialist project. In other words, rival imperialisms conflict with each and the fact that Russia clashes with Western imperialism does not make it any less imperialist.

Imperialist powers normally embellish their plans with reference to admirable ideals. US and NATO imperialism act in the name of freedom and democracy and, more recently, of anti-terrorism and even women’s rights. The left rightly dismisses these proclamations as the deceptions that they are. It seeks to demonstrate the stark realities that they hide. But this is and will be equally true of new imperialist projects. They will speak in terms of multi-polarity, cooperation, anti-hegemonism, etc. (Japanese imperialism once presented its Pacific empire as a “co-prosperity sphere.”) They will justify their denial of democratic rights as a sovereign act or as an alternative to degenerate or decadent Western culture and denounce any criticism as a foreign intervention or as eurocentrism. The left must also see through this rhetoric and teach others to see through it. Otherwise, it will be lured from anti to alter-imperialism while embracing the ideological justifications of one imperialist camp or another.

We similarly must reject such notions as the “Asian” sources of Russian imperialism, counterposed to “European” democratic values (there are many variations of this). If anything, little is more typical of Europe than imperialism, which has been part of European development since the rise of capitalism. Contemporary Russian imperialism is no less capitalist than its tsarist predecessor (both with diverse non-capitalist admixtures) and its present rivals: its roots are capitalist, not “Asian.”

It is a fact that inter-imperialist conflict creates some space for maneuver for non-imperialist countries in the Global South seeking concessions from the major powers. It is legitimate to play one power against another, to seek more aid, better trade arrangements, debt forgiveness, etc. But often governments may go beyond this to assume the perspective, orientation, or politics of their closest imperialist ally, be it US imperialism or Russian imperialism. Anti-imperialists must not follow them down that path if they wish to avoid the drift toward alter-imperialism.

In the present context it is easy to fall into a one-sided perspective. Faced with US and NATO aggression, military buildup, and propaganda (in Latin America, for example), it’s easy to lose sight of the need to confront Russian and Chinese imperialism or the need to support Ukrainian resistance. Faced with Russian aggression, it’s easy to lose sight of the need to oppose NATO imperialism. An internationalist left must offer a perspective which integrates the struggle against all imperialist camps, while defending the right of peoples to self-determination and the struggles of the exploited and oppressed in all states and nations, including those under imperialist attack. This is the perspective we have tried to present in this text, a perspective that can bring together progressives fighting in different fronts: those conducting working class struggles in Western Europe, those directly confronting US and NATO imperialism in the Global South, those struggling against Putin’s capitalist authoritarianism in Russia, and thus resisting Russian aggression in the Ukraine, while struggling for a democratic transformation of their own country (against the reactionary forces within it). This is not a program, but only a general framework. It must be developed by the participants in all those struggles. But it can be a shared starting point.

Zionist Volksgemeinschaft

On the völkisch nature of Zionism and its relation to imperialism
By: September 17, 2023
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Hawara checkpoint in the occupied West Bank (Photo by Magne Hagesæter)

Despite brilliant work on the question of Palestine from Marxists, often Arab or anti-Zionist Jewish, many on the left continue to have an inadequate understanding of Zionism. In this essay, I attempt to offer a Marxist examination of Zionism and some of its essential features: its völkisch character, its settler colonial character, and its relation to imperialism.

Origins of Zionism

Zionism arose out of Europe’s antisemitism, 19th century nationalism, race pseudo-science, and colonialism. It is the distinct origins of the movement with which we must start our examination.

In Europe, modern antisemitism was a tool of “landowners and capitalists [trying] to divert the hatred of the workers and peasants who were tortured by want against the Jews.” Russian Jews lived under brutal oppression at the hands of wretched Tsarism, confined to ghettos and subject to the Cossack’s sword. While the Jews of Western Europe saw assimilation and integration following the French Revolution, a reactionary turn occurred during the era of the Dreyfus Affair in the 1890s, which “had its social origin in the hatred of the aristocracy for the Jewish bankers who had bought up their castles, and of the sons of aristocrats who saw the careers that formerly had been ‘reserved’ exclusively for them now occupied by these dangerous competitors.” There were a range of responses to antisemitism. One with the least support among Europe’s Jews was Zionism.

Zionism from its genesis was a reactionary bourgeois nationalist movement, entirely völkisch and influenced by other bourgeois ethnonationalist, i.e., national exclusivist, tendencies. Zionism based itself upon the reactionary notion of a Jewish nation. While the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe arguably comprised of their own nation, the Jews of Western Europe were assimilated, linguistically diverse, and took the nationality of the state in which they lived; as the French socialist Alfred Naquet proclaimed: “although I was born a Jew… I do not recognise Jewish nationality…. I belong to no other nation but the French.”i The reactionary Jews who called themselves Zionists rejected the progressive process of assimilation, calling it impossible.

Zionism fully endorsed European racial pseudo-science both in seeing the Arab natives of Palestine as inferior and in adopting the position of antisemites that Jews were a race. This most notably reached its climax with the Zionist Federation of Germany agreeing with the Hitlerian distinction of “Ayrans” and “Jews” as separate races. The father of political Zionism Theodor Herzl embraced the forces of antisemitism as the movement’s greatest allies: “the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semetic countries our allies.” In Der Judenstaat, he stated: “The Governments of all countries scourged by Anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want.” Unlike the Zionist propagandists of today, who slander all anti-Zionists as antisemites, Herzl came to far different conclusions:

“In Paris, then, I gained a freer attitude toward anti-Semitism which I now began to understand historically and make allowances for…I recognized the emptiness and futility of efforts to ‘combat anti-Semitism.’”

The Board of Deputies of British Jews, of the Anglo-Jewish Association, protesting Zionism in a 1917 letter, well understood the absurd notion of “a secular Jewish nationality, recruited on some loose and obscure principle of race and ethnographic peculiarity.” They remarked that the “establishment of a Jewish nationality in Palestine, founded on the theory of Jewish homelessness, must have the effect throughout the world of stamping Jews as strangers in their own native lands and of undermining their hard-won positions as citizens and nationals of those lands.” As the late Noel Ignatiev put it:

“The claim that the Jews have a special right to Palestine has no more validity than would an Irish claim of a divine right to establish a Celtic state all across Germany, France, and Spain on the basis that Celtic tribes once lived there. Nevertheless, on the basis of ascribed descent, the Zionist officials assign those they have selected a privileged place within the state. If that is not racism, then the term has no meaning.”

Just as reactionaries in Germany viewed Lebensraum, i.e., the colonization of Eastern Europe and removal of its native populations, as the mystical destiny of the German nation, some reactionary European Jews viewed the colonization of Palestine as their destiny. Zionists aimed for the creation of a state in Palestine for the Jewish Volk through means of colonization.

Lenin wrote in Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism:

“We [saw] that the development of pre-monopoly capitalism, of capitalism in which free competition was predominant, reached its limit in the 1860s and 1870s. We now see that it is precisely after that period that the tremendous “boom” in colonial conquests begins, and that the struggle for the territorial division of the world becomes extraordinarily sharp. It is beyond doubt, therefore, that capitalism’s transition to the stage of monopoly capitalism, to finance capital, is connected with the intensification of the struggle for the partitioning of the world… The more capitalism is developed, the more strongly the shortage of raw materials is felt, the more intense the competition and the hunt for sources of raw materials throughout the whole world, the more desperate the struggle for the acquisition of colonies.”

As Lenin so correctly observed, the development of capitalism towards its highest stage, i.e., imperialism, and its eventual realization in the 1890s, was entirely responsible for the explosion of colonization around the world by the “great” powers of the time. It was precisely in this period to which political Zionism came into being and sought its own colonial conquest.

Palestinian historian Fayez Sayegh noted:

“The frenzied ‘Scramble for Africa’ of the 1880s stimulated the beginnings of Zionist colonisation in Palestine. As European fortune-hunters, prospective settlers, and empire builders raced for Africa, Zionist settlers and would-be state-builders rushed for Palestine…. Under the influence of the credo of Nationalism then sweeping across Europe, some Jews had come to believe that the religious and alleged racial bonds among Jews constituted a Jewish ‘nationality’ and endowed the so-called ‘Jewish nation’ with normal national rights…. If other European nations had successfully extended themselves into Asia and Africa…the ‘Jewish nation’ – it was argued – was entitled and able to do the same thing for itself…. For, Zionism, then, colonisation would be the instrument of nation-building, not the product of an already-fulfilled nationalism.”

Edward Said, too, observed:

“For although it coincided with an era of the most virulent Western anti-Semitism, Zionism also coincided with the period of unparalleled European territorial acquisition in Africa and Asia, and it was part of this general movement of acquisition and occupation that Zionism was launched initially by Theodor Herzl.”ii

Transition into the imperialist stage drove the colonization of the entire planet by the “great” powers, and it was the resultant colonial conquests that inspired Zionism’s aims. While recognizing the other unique social origins of Zionism, we can deduce that transformation into the monopoly stage of capitalism, i.e., imperialism, was responsible for the colonial ambitions and character of the Zionist movement (as it was for other völkisch movements). It is only through a scientific understanding of imperialism that we can trace the creation and development of the Zionist movement.

As we shall continue to see, Zionism is inseparably connected with imperialism.

Settler Colonialism and Al-Nakba

Much ignorance concerning Zionism stems from a poor grasp of settler colonialism. Settler-colonialism is the process in which a foreign body of settlers forcibly remove and replace an indigenous population to establish themselves as the majority on expropriated land. As Patrick Wolfe elaborated, settler colonialism “strives for the dissolution of native societies…. it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base…. settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.” Mark Muhannad Ayyash adds:

“To be sure, all modern nation-states have annexed land in certain respects, but the settler-colonial state’s distinguishing feature is that it does not come into being and cannot continue to exist without claiming sovereignty over land that is forcefully taken from its native inhabitants. In short, the settler colony can only claim its sovereignty through the eradication and erasure of native sovereignty…. their underlying logic: the expulsion of native people from their lands.”

The distinct difference between settler-colonialism and colonialism is demonstrated in the case of Zionism, as Fayez Sayegh observed:

“Zionist colonisation could not possibly assume the physical proportions envisaged by Zionism while the Arab people of Palestine continued to inhabit its homeland; nor could the Zionist political aspirations of racial self-segregation and statehood be accomplished while the nationally-conscious Arab people of Palestine continued to exist in that country. Unlike European colonisation [in 19th and 20th century Africa and Asia]…the Zionist colonisation of Palestine was essentially incompatible with the continued existence of the ‘native population’ in the coveted country.”

Edward Said put it this way:

“Zionism (like the view of America as an empty land held by Puritans) was a colonial vision unlike that of most other nineteenth-century European powers, for whom the natives of the outlying territories were included in the redemptive mission civilliance.”iii

This is the principal feature of the Zionist project. The movement’s ideological and political leaders emphasized: to achieve Jewish Lebensraum in Palestine, the natives must be dealt with. Herzl wrote of an “involuntary expropriation” of Palestinians being a requirement for the establishment of a Jewish settler state.iv He was chillingly correct. In 1917, when the Balfour Declaration was made, Jews comprised 6% of the population in Palestine and owned about 2.5% of the land. Despite an influx of 376,415 settlers from Europe between 1920-1946, Jews only owned about 6% of the land in historic Palestine, the rest inhabited by the indigenous Arabs who made up 67% of the total population. Despite this, the absurd UN partition plan of 1947 gifted to the Zionists 55% of historic Palestine, the rest left for Palestinians and Jerusalem to be internationally governed. To the Zionists, however, this was not enough, partition was always viewed as a temporary demand in the process of colonizing the totality of Palestine, if not further. The time for the longstanding Zionist goal of ethnically cleansing Palestinians to fulfill their Lebensraum had arrived.

In 1947-48 the Zionists launched their campaign of expulsion and expropriation. Massacres, terror, rape, theft, and vandalism were the means by which Israel was forged. Zionist militias and, after May 1948, the Israeli military operated (and still does) on a doctrine of expulsion: “destruction of villages as much as possible.” The Zionist usurpers ethnically cleansed 750,000 Palestinians from their homelands and destroyed over 530 villages; in doing so the settlers now controlled 78% of historic Palestine. During the 1950s, tens of thousands of the minority of Palestinians who remained within the new Israeli state were subsequently expelled. Later during the Naksa, Israel’s predatory 1967 war against the Arab states, 430,000 more Palestinians were ethnically cleansed as the Zionists captured the Syrian Golan Heights and the rest of historic Palestine, i.e., East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank. Today through continued settlement, massacres, blockade, systematic economic deprivation, arbitrary arrests, apartheid, and restrictions on every aspect of life, Zionism aims to be rid of Palestinians or to “finish the job” as current Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich put it. These are all not merely isolated events; the Nakba is an ongoing process of extirpation necessary for the existence, survival, and expansion of the Zionist state.

Zionism and Imperialism

“If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison for the land, or find some rich man or benefactor who willprovide a garrison on your behalf. … Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force.”

— Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of the Irgun terrorist organization.

Throughout its entire existence, Zionism has served and depended on imperialism. From their movement’s inception, Zionists always maintained the necessity of having a patron “great” power to enable the colonization of Palestine. Herzl vied for the German Kaiser’s support. Moses Hess, the German idealist who Marx and Engels famously ridiculed in the Manifesto, attached his ambitions to France, “the savior.”v Jabotinsky infamously proclaimed that “Zionist colonisation…can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population-behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach,” and he was entirely correct.vi

Ultimately it would be the British who became the Zionists’ vital imperialist sponsor. London strategically wished to establish a faithful European outpost in Palestine to manage any sort of Arab rebellion in the region, along with securing their control of the Suez Canal. As the first military governor of Jerusalem Ronald Storrs stated, Zionism “[formed] for England ‘a little loyal Jewish Ulster’ in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism.”

British imperialism enabled the colonization of Palestine, British imperialism enabled the Nakba, British imperialism made Herzl’s dream of creating “a rampart of Europe against Asia” a reality. It was British imperialism that had condemned the Palestinian people to their tragic fate when Balfour made his infamous declaration in 1917. Zionism had become official policy of the world’s most powerful empire. Rashid Khalidi, analyzing the favors done by the British for their Zionist colonial protégés, observed in his book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine:

“Of all the services Britain provided to the Zionist movement before 1939, perhaps the most valuable was the armed suppression of Palestinian resistance in the form of revolt…The savage British repression, the death and exile of so many leaders, and the conflict within their ranks left the Palestinians divided, without direction, and their economy debilitated by the time the [1936-1939] revolt was crushed…. This put Palestinians in a very weak position to confront the now invigorated Zionist movement, which had gone from strength to strength during the revolt, obtaining lavish amounts of arms and extensive training from the British to help them suppress the uprising.”vii

The martyred democratic revolutionary and theorist Ghassan Kanafani described how:

“The foundations of the Zionist military apparatus were laid under British supervision. The Zionist force which had been entrusted with the defence of the Haifa-Lydda railway was later given the defence of the oil pipeline in the Bashan plain. This pipeline, which had been recently constructed (1934) to bring oil from Kirkuk to Haifa, had several times been blown up by the Palestinian rebels….The British in an early stage were able to see the strategy called by the Americans 30 years later ‘Vietnamization’. This was extremely important, because it was this incident that strengthened Britain’s conviction that the formation of a Zionist striking force would solve many problems connected with the defence of Imperialist interests accompanied by efforts to form a Zionist armed force to protect these interests.”

Zionists commonly claim their violent confrontations with the British following the 1939 White Paper (which restricted Jewish settlement of Palestine) were an anti-imperialist or national liberation struggle.viii This is as ridiculous as claiming the same for the Anglo-Boer Wars or Rhodesia’s declaration of independence from Britain! The truth of the matter is evidenced by a 1937 statement before the Royal Commission on Palestine:

“Zionism in Palestine could not exist for a single day without the assistance of British ‘imperialism’. While Zionism therefore opposes ‘imperialism’ in all other countries, it is its ally in Palestine.”

Shortly after their supposed struggle for liberation, the Zionists were more than happy to employ themselves and their predatory ambitions for their former so-called “occupier” Britain, most notably against Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt in 1956.

By 1967 John Bull was replaced by Uncle Sam. Israel became the privileged and reliant servant of American imperialism. For most of its existence, the Zionist state has been nothing less than a US semi-colonial protectorate. Israel ultimately fulfills the same role for the Americans that it did for the British, and its importance to US imperialism has never been lost on Washington. The Americans have aided the settler state with over $50 billion since 1949, with defense aid to the tune of $3.8 billion per year having become the present status quo. The US House passed a resolution by a vote of 412-9, in July of this year, affirming that “the United States will always be a staunch partner and supporter of Israel.” (emphasis added) As President Joe Biden said as recently as July 18: “If there wasn’t an Israel, we’d have to invent one.”

Israel through its very existence not only serves imperialism but is dependent on it. The Palestinian struggle against Zionism is a struggle against imperialism.

The Zionists’ Political Economy

The German word Volksgemeinschaft translates roughly to English as “national [or] peoples’ racial community”. It is commonly associated with the Hitlerian vision for the so-called Aryan race (though it had its origins in earlier German völkisch movements). Zionism is a racist blut und boden (blood and soil) ideology and Israel, the settler colony established and maintained through the ethnic cleansing and expropriation of Palestinians, is a racial state. It maintains itself through apartheid, systematically discriminating against all Palestinians, who are seen as undesirables. Rights in Israel are determined based on one’s ethnicity (“nationality” as it is called and designated by the state). Today Palestinians living within the territories seized and annexed by the Zionists in 1947-1948 are subject to systematic racial discrimination; there is an entire database of such racist laws. Palestinians and Syrians living in the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights, places where Zionist settler-colonialist ambitions have ultimately failed thus far, are forced to endure deplorable standards of living, economic strangulation, further settler invasions and violence, and savage, racist colonial-military rule; all the consequences of a völkisch state and ideology. This is well summarized by Noel Ignatiev:

“Israel is a racial state, where rights are assigned on the basis of ascribed descent or the approval of the superior race. In this respect it resembles the American South prior to the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, Ireland under the Protestant Ascendancy, and, yes, Hitlerite Germany.”

Zionism has managed to embody and re-employ the oppression Jews faced in Europe onto Palestinians, this time through the means of their own völkisch movement.

Thus, Israel certainly fits the bill for an existing Jewish Volksgemeinschaft, and this is once again evident when observing the settler state’s economy.

Zionist leaders recognized that to establish a Jewish supremacist state, only Jewish labor would be tolerated in a “closed”, segregated economy; the “conquest of labor” in all sectors was the means to achieve this. Ghassan Kanafani explained how “the slogan of ‘Jewish labor only’ was to have grave consequences, as it led to the rapid emergence of fascist patterns in the society of Jewish settlers.” Palestinian trade unionist George Mansour detailed how:

“The attitude of the Mapai [Zionist Labor party of David Ben-Gurion] now towards Arab labour, then, is that of any other colonising immigrants towards the native inhabitants, very much intensified by the fact that Zionists regard the indigenous inhabitants as inconvenient interlopers in a land that ought to be entirely Jewish.”

Kanafani described how consistently “Zionism, in collaboration with the mandatory power, successfully undermined the development of a progressive Jewish labor movement and of Jewish-Arab Proletarian brotherhood.”

The general völkisch character of Israel’s economy is well summarized by Sumya Awad and Daphna Thier:

“Israeli workers continue to be committed to apartheid and the racist ideology enabling it…. This is the nature of labor in an apartheid economy. Almost complete separation means that, by design, Jews and Palestinians rarely work alongside one another as coworkers. Instead, they are segregated in ways that entrench racism and ensure that national loyalty trumps class consciousness…. Palestinians occupy the lowest rungs of the economy, making less than minimum wage with no benefits or pensions. Attempts by Palestinian workers to organize for better conditions are met with the threat of permit revocation. Undocumented workers are in even more precarious situations…. Desegregation of the Israeli labor market would mean competition for jobs, the return of stolen wealth, and potentially economic free fall for many Jewish Israeli workers. The end of occupation threatens these workers’ material standing. This is why the majority of Israeli workers oppose democratic rights for all: Zionism prevents working-class solidarity.”

The Present

Recently, bitter internal rifts have exposed Israel’s cracks. Civil conflict amongst the settlers, largely between the fascist and liberal camps, threatens to steer the Zionist state into “an abyss”, in the words of Arnon Bar-David, the head of the Histadrut, the Israeli trade union federation. Sacked Defence Minister Yoav Gallant proclaimed “The deepening split is seeping into the military and defence institutions…. [it’s] a clear, immediate and real danger to Israel’s security.” It is not uncommon to hear talk of civil war thrown around in discussions of these fractures in Israel’s settler society.

Israelis have also, for the last two decades, lost their demographic majority in historic Palestine which, in itself, was established through ethnic cleansing. This is no insignificant fact. Professor Joseph Massad notes:

“One of the key factors in the survival and irreversibility of white European settler-colonies around the world has been demography. If white colonists are unable to eliminate the majority of the native population, their fate, no matter how long their rule lasts, is ultimately sealed…. That Jewish colonists have again become a minority in historic Palestine is what precipitates the reasonable expectation that Jewish settler-colonialism has become reversible.”

This fact is essential to understanding the intensification of Israeli killings of Palestinians, which already this year have surpassed 2022 as being the deadliest on record in the West Bank since such figures started being recorded in 2005. The massacres, colonial punitive raids (particularly in Jenin), airstrikes in both Gaza and the West Bank, settler pogroms, and calls from Zionists for a “final war” against Palestinians to “subdue them once and for all”, as an Israeli MP recently put it, “are desperate measures of a settler-colony that knows its fate is now sealed, even if it will take a number of years before the final collapse.”

Simultaneously, we are nearing (or at the start of) an inevitable third Intifada as “many young Palestinians are increasingly getting frustrated, and becoming more determined to strike back.” The Palestinian anti-colonial resistance is taking a new form. Palestinian youths, in new community-based armed resistance groups such as Lions’ Den and the Jenin Brigade, have brought the fight to the Israeli occupiers with “independent resistance, free of the shackles of the old political factions.” An anonymous young Palestinian man of the Lions’ Den stated these new resistance groups “brought people together, to create one united resistance, without political factions…. Entire nations have tried to do this and failed.” This has caused serious trouble for the Israeli occupiers who, militarily, have been strategically defeated and tactically outsmarted by the new Palestinian resistance groups.

We are now at a pivotal moment for the Palestinian struggle as a revolutionary situation is simmering into fruition. There must be no illusions or ignorance about Zionism or what it is amongst revolutionary Marxists. If we are to see Zionism to its end, to cast it into the dustbin of history where it belongs, we must understand it. In contemporary discussions of Israel, the term apartheid is commonly used to describe Israel, but this is not the most fitting descriptor; not because apartheid does not presently exist in the Zionist state (it most certainly does as detailed), but because apartheid arose naturally from Israel’s blut und boden ideology. We first and foremost must emphasize the völkisch, settler colonial, and pro-imperialist nature of Zionism in our agitation against and analysis of this ideology/Israel. We too must stress that Zionism fundamentally violates Palestinian self-determination, an essential democratic demand of all serious internationalists. Our staunch campaign against Zionism must be matched with ardent support for the Palestinian national-revolutionary struggle.

 

i The Yiddish-speaking Jews of Eastern Europe, with their distinctive language, culture, geographical location, etc. comprised a nation. It is a reactionary notion, however, to consider this Yiddish-speaking nation one with the Jews of Western Europe who were assimilated into the nation-states of their residence (France, Britain, the Low Countries, Austria, etc.) or to the Jews of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Caucasus who were rightly viewed as Arabs, Persians, Georgians, etc. who practiced Judaism.

ii Edward Said, The Question of Palestine, New York, Vintage Books, 1979, p. 69.

iii Ibid., p. 68.

iv Ibid., p. 71.

v Ibid., p. 67.

vi Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017, New York, Metropolitan Books, 2020, p. 13.

vii Ibid., pp. 44-47.

viii While the White Paper marked a change in British policy, London “never seriously intended for one moment to be faithful to its promise,” said Husayn al-Khalidi, who foresaw that it was a means “to please the Arabs so they would stop their revolution,” and to allow the British imperialists “time to catch their breath as war clouds gathered.” This aside, “Britain had already more than done its duty to its Zionist protégé.” From: Khalidi, p. 49.

Black Candidates for President

Clifton DeBerry for President – 1964.

Black Presidential Candidates
By: September 14, 2023
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This is the second of a series of article about Black political candidates for the two highest offices of president and vice-president of the United States. The idea of writing this series originally begun when Cornel West announced his candidacy, the story of Black political candidates for the highest offices take on a new significance in light of Kamala Harris’ current campaign. This is the list of candidates that we discuss in this series, though the four candiates of 1968 are discussed in one article.

  • George Edwin Tayler, candidate of the National Negro Liberty Party, sometimes known as the National Liberty Party in 1904;
  • Clifton Berry, of the Socialist Workers Party in 1964;
  • Charlene Mitchell of the Communist Party in 1968;
  • Eldridge Cleaver with the Peace & Freedom Party in 1968;
  • Dick Gregory as a write-in candidate in 1968;
  • Channing Emery Phillips as a Democrat, all in 1968.
  • Shirley Chisholm, Democrat, in 1972;
  • Angela Daniels,  Communist Party for vice-president in 1984 and 1988;
  • Jesse Jackson, Democrat, for president in 1984 and 1988;
  • Ron Daniles, People’s Party candidate in 1992;
  • Cynthia McKinney, Green Party candidate 2008;
  • Cornel West, independent, in 2024;
  • Barack Obama, Democratic candidate in 2008 and 2012;
  • and finally Kamala Harris for vice president in 2020 for president in 2024.

We are currently (first week of August) editing these pieces. The essay on George Edwin Taylor has yet to be posted.

Clifton Berry for President – 1964

Clifton DeBerry, the nominee of the Socialist Workers Party in 1964, ran against right-wing Republican Barry Goldwater and liberal Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson. Harassed by the FBI, DeBerry would have a tough row to hoe.

DeBerry was born on September 18, 1923 in Holly Spring, Mississippi. His family was part of the Great Migration of African Americans to the North, traveling like many on the Illinois Central Railroad to Chicago, Illinois. He attended Wendell Phillips High School, named after the famous abolitionist, in Bronzeville, the first Black neighborhood in Chicago.

DeBerry became an organizer for the Communist-led Farm Equipment Workers Union, later affiliated with the United Auto Workers Union, working in the Midwest and the South. Later he became a house painter. He was a delegate to the Negro Labor Congress convention held in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1950 and then to the founding convention of the Negro American Labor Council in Detroit in 1960. When the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott began in 1955, DeBerry organized Station-Wagons-To-Montgomery to support the boycott[1].

DeBerry’s party, the Socialist Workers Party, had been formed by former-Communists who had been expelled from the CP because they supported the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and criticized Joseph Stalin’s leadership of the Soviet Union and the Communist International. After leaving the CP, the Trotskyists played a leading role in the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of the 1930s that transformed the Teamsters and turned it into a powerful industrial union. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, concerned about “fifth column” organizations that might undermine U.S. war production and empowered FBI head Herbert Hoover to carry out investigations.

In June 1941 the FBI arrested twenty-nine party members, fifteen of whom also belonged to Teamsters Local 544. They were tried under the Smith Act, that is, the Alien Registration Act of 1940, a peacetime sedition law that limited free speech such as the advocacy of revolution. Eighteen of the defendants were convicted under the Smith Act, and in December sentenced to prison terms ranging from twelve to sixteen months. The Communist Party foolishly cheered the convictions under the act which would later be used against it. The arrest of so many key leaders of the party’s most important labor work had a devastating impact from which the party never recovered.

The SWP was far smaller than the Communist Party, which at the end of World War II had about 100,000 members and one million in its periphery, and the SWP suffered splits that carried away many of its members. In the late 1940, Max Shachtman led about half the SWP’s members to leave that party and from the Workers Party, while in 1959, Sam Marcy led another large group out of the SWP and in a  Stalinist direction. Then in 1954 the SWP expelled the followers of Bert Cochran.  Still, greatly reduced in numbers,  the SWP continued to behave as if it were a mass party, putting forward its Teamster leader of the 1930s Farrell Dobbs for president in 1948, 1952, 1956 and then in 1960. In 1960 Farrell Dobbs, received 60,166 votes or 0.06% of the total votes cast.

In the early 1960s, the SWP began to revitalize by relating to the Black civil rights movement and supporting the Cuban Revolution of 1959 through the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Dobbs and other SWP leaders visited Cuba and DeBerry played a major role in the attempt to develop relations to the civil rights movement. In the early 1960s, DeBerry became the branch organizer of the Socialist Workers Party in New York City and later the New York State organizer. In 1963, he ran as the party’s candidate for the Brooklyn Councilman-at-Large and he also conducted a national speaking tour discussing the Black “Freedom Now Struggle” and supporting the Freedom Now Party that the SWP had created.

At the SWP’s Convention in January 1964, Farrell Dobbs nominated DeBerry to be the party’s presidential candidate. The vote for DeBerry was unanimous, the party’s newspaper, The Militant, reported. The Militant noted: “DeBerry is the first Negro in U.S. history to be chosen by a political party as its presidential candidate.”[2]

DeBerry spoke out strongly against bothDemocratic candidate Lyndon B.  Johnson and Republican nominee Barry  Goldwater. His campaign literature laid out his party’s program in brief, combining the demands of the Black movment, the labor movement, and the anti-imperialist left.

In 1963, when DeBerry appeared at a hall in Chicago to give a campaign speech, he was arrested by the Chicago Police at the request of the Cook County Department of Welfare for failure to make child support payments. He was taken to the police station, immediately released on bail, and returned to make his speech. The FBI had been behind the whole business, having investigated DeBerry and learned he wasn’t paying child support, the FBI contacted the Welfare Department and the Chicago Police. DeBerry was subsequently convicted and given a six-month jail sentence, but allowed to go free when he agreed to make the back child support payments. The FBI sent reports of DeBerry’s personal problems to newspapers editors and reporters. While the FBI was responsible for the harassment, DeBerry was responsible for failing to support the child he fathered.[3] Those events were an embarrassment to the campaign.

The FBI also sowed discord between DeBerry and others on the Black left. According to an SWP suit against the U.S. Attorney General,

In May 1964 the New York FBI office made an anonymous mailing to various persons, including Daniel Watts and Harold Cruse, editors of a publication called ‘Liberator.’ The anonymous mailing suggested that the SWP was trying to manipulate the civil rights movement for its own benefit. Cruse later wrote articles in “Liberator” attacking DeBerry and the SWP. An FBI memorandum indicated satisfaction with this, reasoning that these articles would hinder any SWP efforts to form an alliance with the “rising tide of Negro radicals.[4]

Still, despite the FBI’s dirty tricks, the campaign continued. On Saturday, October 31 at the Woodstock Hotel in New York City DeBerry spoke with three other Black men Slater King was the head of the SWP-led Freedom Now Party in Albany, Georgia and a Milton Henry a Freedom Now Party candidate for Congress, but more importantly James Shabazz, an aid to Malcolm X and representative of Muslim Mosque Incorporated. Other SWP members would establish a relationship with Malcolm X before his assassination in 1965. In the end, DeBerry got 32,327 or 0.5 percent of the votes cast, little more than half of Dobbs’ campaign four years earlier. The Freedom Now Party which  DeBerry had been active in building died the following year.

Whatever the problems and whatever the vote, DeBerry’s 1964 run for the presidency was historically significant. At the height of the civil rights movement, the SWP had the political savvy to put forward a Black man for president. Moreover, DeBerry’s biography was typical of millions of Black Americans as part of the Great Migration from the South who had become part of the working class in the North. As union organizer and party staffer, he represented the commitment to the working class and socialism that the party espoused. His campaign as the first Black man to run for president was pathbreaking, opening the way for Communist Charlene Mitchell to be the first Black woman candidate in 1968, and for the others: Eldridge Cleaver, Dick Gregory, Shirley Chisholm, Reverend Jesse Jackson, and Barack Obama.

Notes

[1] Biographical information from several sources including Fred Halstead, “Socialist Walkers Party Nominates DeBerry as Candidate for President,” The Militant, January 13, 1964.

[2] Fred Halstead, “Socialist Walkers Party Nominates DeBerry as Candidate for President,” The Militant, January 13, 1964.

[3] Socialist Workers Party v. Attorney General of US, 642 F. Supp. 1357 (S.D.N.Y. 1986)

US District Court for the Southern District of New York – 642 F. Supp. 1357 (S.D.N.Y. 1986)
August 25, 1986, at:

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/642/1357/2398821/

[4] Ibid.

 

 

In Niger, Neither Generals Nor ECOWAS

By: September 14, 2023
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While the coup plotters in no way represent an alternative for Niger, the economic sanctions and threats of military intervention by ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States), backed by Macron, are a real danger for the population.

General Abdourahamane Tiani, head of the presidential guard, is no exception to the rule, justifying his coup d’état in the name of safeguarding the homeland. The other senior officers of the various army corps followed suit to avoid a bloodbath, they said. As for the deposed president Mohamed Bazoum, he is still imprisoned in the basement of the palace.

Greed and Demagoguery 

However, most of the coup plotters contributed to the policies pursued for years by Bazoum, such as Salifou Modi, the former chief of staff who is now vice-president of the junta.

Beyond the grandiloquent declarations, the reasons for the coup are more prosaic. Bazoum’s desire to thoroughly reorganise the presidential guard risked costing Tiani a position he had held for more than a decade and which had made him considerably richer.

Unlike their peers in Mali and Burkina Faso, the putschists in Niger are part of the country’s ruling elite.

What’s more, in a few months’ time Niger is set to become a major oil exporter, a fact that is stirring up a great deal of envy in the various spheres of power.

General Tiani is skilfully exploiting the desire for change and the exasperation of the people of Niger in the face of a social and economic situation that continues to deteriorate. And ECOWAS is making his task much easier.

A Clique Called ECOWAS

ECOWAS has instituted a total economic blockade. The President of Nigeria, who also heads the regional organisation, immediately stopped supplying electricity to Niger. In this landlocked country, as always, the first to suffer from these sanctions are the people.

Humanitarian organisations such as the International Rescue Committee are calling for humanitarian corridors to be set up to deliver medicines and nutritional support, which are beginning to be in short supply.

ECOWAS, which is headed by heads of state, is largely exceeding its prerogatives. In fact, the Court of Justice of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) had already ruled that the sanctions against Mali were illegal.

Not content with setting up an economic blockade, ECOWAS is planning a military intervention in the name of democracy. It’s hard to take seriously leaders who keep themselves in power in their own countries by tampering with the constitution and manipulating elections.

Aggressive Policy

Many are worried about ECOWAS’s bellicose course. Civil society organisations, while not supporting the coup plotters, are opposed to armed intervention, which would solve nothing of substance. The African Union Peace and Security Council is also opposed. Algeria, aware of the risk of destabilising the region, is trying to promote a political transition. The USA is also reluctant to take armed action. Only one warmonger stands out: Emmanuel Macron. He claims to be the herald of democracy, even though he has endorsed all the electoral misdeeds of his friends, the African autocrats.

The latest revelations in Le Monde sweep aside the cliché that Françafrique is behind us. We learn that French troops stationed in Niger to fight the jihadists were ready to launch a coup de force to free Mohamed Bazoum. It was only Bazoum’s refusal to do so that stopped the intervention. Macron had already used French troops from Operation Barkhane in Chad to bomb columns of Chadian rebels who had nothing to do with the jihadists in order to save the dictator Déby.

Given the instability in several French-speaking African countries and Macron’s bellicose policy, the demand for French troops to leave Africa is one of the most pressing issues of the moment.

September 7, 2023

Translated by International Viewpoint from l’Anticapitaliste.

 

 

 

 

The Struggle to Stop Cop City—By Any Means Necessary

By: , September 13, 2023
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Reposted from The Forge: A history of Stop Cop City and the struggle to defend the Atlanta Forest. A must read for anyone interested in getting the whole story and understanding the strategic thinking informing some of the most important organizing in the country or understanding the stakes of the 61 indictments against protesters involved in the movement.

Cop cars on fire. Occupations of the Weelaunee Forest. Weeks of action. Volunteers with clipboards, collecting referendum petition signatures in the summer heat. Weekly canvassing. Town halls and open mic sessions. Direct action and civil disobedience. Record-breaking numbers of people showing up for public comment (on three separate occasions!). Regular food distributions and mutual aid. Surveillance cameras smashed. Music festivals in the forest. Comrade care clinics. Protests outside the homes of politicians and CEOs. Trivia night fundraisers at local restaurants. Shareholder divestment campaigns. Wheatpasting, movement art, and diss track competitions. Children marching in the streets. Political education and community journalism. Jail support crews sitting vigil for people whose freedom was purchased by bail fund organizers. Bank ATMs vandalized. Corporate pressure campaigns. Marches, demonstrations, and solidarity actions across the globe. Construction equipment burned.

These are all scenes—by no means the full story—from the movement to Stop Cop City: a decentralized, autonomous movement that has worked since the spring of 2021 to stop the destruction of the Weelaunee Forest and the creation of a more than $90 million urban warfare training center, backed by a coalition of public and private Atlanta elites, in a majority Black working class community.

They are also all activities that the state is aggressively seeking to criminalize, most recently with a sprawling indictment filed days ago that charged 61 people with domestic terrorism and RICO (“racketeer influenced and corrupt organization”). The indictment is a blatant attempt to intimidate local organizers and movements across the country who are challenging the violence of policing, and to influence public opinion against the popular community-based struggle to stop construction of the facility.

The Stop Cop City movement has made Atlanta an epicenter of abolitionist organizing, weaving together movements for racial, economic, and environmental justice. The movement has no single unifying political framework; it includes abolitionists, anarchists, communists, liberals, libertarians, environmentalists, voting and civil rights activists, Indigenous and anti-settler colonialism organizers, and many more who may not identify with a particular political philosophy but who all choose trees over cops, transparency over backroom deals, and community resources over a burgeoning police state.

The movement’s decentralization and diversity of tactics has been one of its greatest strengths, building an astonishing breadth and depth of local, national, and international support. While comprising many different streams of action and thought, each has fed into the movement’s broader strategy: call it starving the beast, a war of attrition, or even just throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, the ethos of the movement is that community members must engage on all fronts to make Cop City as untenable, toxic, and challenging as possible for those working to build it. That we must stop Cop City by any means necessary.

The movement’s focus extends far beyond Atlanta’s elected leadership, focusing also on the Atlanta Police Foundation and its private backers, project contractors, corporate media, Republican state leadership, and “public private partnerships” such as the Atlanta Committee for Progress that form the bedrock of the city’s broader ruling class structure. The struggle has clarified the fundamental nature of Atlanta politics, as the so-called liberal Black Democratic mayor of Atlanta, the conservative white supremacist Republican governor of Georgia, and the web of corporate interests behind them both have coalesced in their attempts to destroy the movement, reinforcing the reality that the two party system remains united on issues of cops and capitalism. But just as the ruling class has consolidated behind Cop City, the Atlanta left is forging its own solidarities and fighting across tendencies and frameworks for a new city altogether.

The Birth of a Movement

The plans for Cop City were first proposed by the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF) as early as 2017, but it was not until the 2020 uprisings calling for a total transformation of the status quo that the City dusted off those plans. As the protests raged in response to the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Atlanta’s Rayshard Brooks, the city’s ruling class actors quickly consolidated around Cop City as a multifaceted solution to the threats of uprisings, white elite fear, crime panic narratives, police protest, and the corporate desire for stability.

Shortly after the announcement of the plan in January 2021, organizers began canvassing their neighborhoods and building community opposition to the project. A coalition began to formalize in early summer 2021 as organizations like Defund APD, Refund Communities (DARC), Community Movement Builders, A World Without Police, the Atlanta Sunrise Movement, the South River Forest Coalition, and others came together to organize residents against the plan.

Much of the summer 2021 organizing involved engagement with City Hall over the proposed legislation to lease hundreds of acres of forest land to the Atlanta Police Foundation, rallying residents for public comment, protesting outside council members’ houses, researching the network of corporations behind the proposal, and building public pressure through political education, banner drops, petition circulation, demonstrations, and town halls.

Atlanta leadership had initially expected the plan to sail through with little resistance. APF is an exceptionally influential actor in Atlanta politics, and few politicians would dare—or even desire—to challenge them. But significant public pressure generated by the campaign successfully delayed the Cop City legislation at the Atlanta City Council’s August 2021 meeting in a narrow 8-7 vote. While many expected the legislation to be approved at the following meeting, the delay opened up space to continue organizing and to win minor concessions, while giving corporate donors pause and building the nascent movement’s power. In September 2021, residents called in virtually to offer over 17 hours of public comment, the vast majority of which opposed the facility, while activists protested outside the homes of council members (and were promptly arrested). Despite the pressure, the Council approved the legislation with only four dissenting votes.

For many campaigns, a major legislative setback is the time when things fall apart. And in some ways, they did: one organization involved in much of the early organizing, DARC, dissolved in response to attempted co-optation and anti-Blackness, and many organizers experienced the characteristic burnout following a major setback.

But instead of collapse, a new tactic was born and the movement was given new life.  Following the September 2021 vote, in the long tradition of land defense, forest defenders took to the Weelaunee Forest and began camping out, building tree huts, erecting campsites, and challenging initial deforestation efforts.  Forest defense created a rush of new energy in some of the darkest moments of the struggle to #StopCopCity with an uncompromising call to defend the forest by any means necessary—in the process, deepening analysis of and resistance around the connections between police militarization, climate disaster, environmental racism, Indigenous displacement, genocide, and more. By putting their bodies on the line, forest defenders clarified the stakes of the struggle and made clear that nothing about Cop City would end on the powerful’s terms. City Council could approve the project, APF could secure contractors, and the funds could be raised—but none of that means Cop City will be built.

The forest defenders’ direct action garnered national and international attention and, alongside other organizing, successfully delayed the issuance of the permits needed to begin construction. Its success was also the reason that city and state leadership eventually resolved to crush it.

While police had terrorized protesters since the beginning of the movement, the end of 2022 marked a new phase of escalation in police violence and repression. In mid-December 2022, police began to intensify raids on the forest encampments, charging six forest defenders that month with domestic terrorism as part of a plan orchestrated by a newly developed task force including APF, the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, DeKalb and Atlanta police, the Federal Bureau of Investigations, the Department of Homeland Security, and others. Just days later, developer Ryan Millsap—who illegally claims to own the county-owned public land adjacent to the city-owned Cop City site—sent a team to demolish the entrance to the park, where much of the organizing and public events had taken place, in a clear act of retaliation against the movement.

The following month, a joint task force marched into the forest on what would become a deadly day. In addition to arresting seven more forest defenders on domestic terrorism charges, police opened fire on Manuel Paez Esteban Terán, known as Tortuguita, ending their life in an act of cold-blooded murder while Tortuguita sat with their hands raised and legs crossed on the ground. More domestic terrorism arrests followed at a protest held just days after Tortuguita’s murder, in which a cop car was burned and windows of APF donors were smashed in acts of righteous rage against the system that murdered their comrade.

Having taken control of the forest and cordoned it off to begin clearcutting, the state may have once again expected the movement to end. Instead, it only grew as national and international attention on Atlanta intensified and new people joined the fight. A March 2023 Week of Action was declared as local organizers invited people from across the country to join the fight for the forest. Once again, the state responded with escalated force, descending on a music festival held in the forest and charging 23 people with domestic terrorism in response to incidents nearly a mile away from the concert. Repression would continue in following months with more arrests, intimidation of activists, and the political arrests of bail fund organizers with the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. Most recently, the state announced a RICO indictment of 61 people allegedly involved in Stop Cop City efforts, representing yet another escalation in the state’s attempts to criminalize and cage the movement out of existence.

Organizing on All Fronts

Despite the repression, and in some cases because of the repression, the movement continued to grow and work on many fronts against Cop City. Activists continued to pressure contractors, while others worked through courts and the county commission to challenge the project’s construction permits. Canvassing around the forest continued, as organizers hosted town halls and block parties for residents surrounding the forest to get more deeply involved. Movement journalists and researchers with the Atlanta Community Press Collective continued to file open records requests and shed light on the backroom dealings of APF and the city, while attorneys and jail support organizers built out infrastructure to support criminalized protesters. Student organizers became activated and held demonstrations on and off campus, while an infusion of energy and resources from nonprofits who had previously stayed on the sidelines brought more attention and support to organizers on the ground. Others focused on media narratives, working to shape public understanding and combat the city’s attempted misinformation, gaining a decisive upper hand in the narrative war online and in national media—even as most local media continues to be a megaphone for powerful Atlanta interests.

While City Hall was a central site of struggle in the early phase of the movement, it was not until  the spring of 2023—after years of canvassing, movement building, and consciousness raising—that many in the movement once again engaged heavily with the Atlanta City Council. Through information obtained by movement journalists, organizers learned that legislation would be introduced on May 15th to authorize $67 million in public funding for Cop City—over double of what was originally promised by the City. Organizers rallied residents to City Hall for public comment, resulting in a record-breaking 7 hours of public comment that unanimously opposed the facility. Three weeks later, on June 5th, Atlanta and DeKalb County residents shattered the record they had just set, speaking for over 14 hours against the proposed funding.

Though the City Council voted to approve the funding, as many expected, these days of public comment were revealing about the state of the movement and the extent to which abolitionist frameworks have taken root in Atlanta. Hundreds who spoke articulated not just what they do not want—Cop City and the destruction of the forest—but also what they do want to see in their communities. Listen to the public comment from June 2023, and you will hear many who may not identify as abolitionists, but for whom an abolitionist ethos has clearly sunk in as they speak to a vision of safety that include well-funded schools, mental and physical healthcare, affordable housing, street lights and paved streets, bike lanes, parks and greenspace, public transportation, arts and culture, child care, and an array of other public services—not more police.

Following the Council’s approval of the funding for Cop City in spite of broad opposition, the movement has continued to organize on many fronts. Many have pressed further into the strategy of pressuring contractors and corporations away from the project. Organizers called the movement’s sixth Week of Action for the last week of June, during which time activists continued to protest key corporate Cop City backers and deepen base building efforts.

Meanwhile, activists in Atlanta and across the country have continued to engage in direct action against funders and contractors working to build Cop City. In the last month alone, ATMs were glued shut and windows were spray painted with #StopCopCity messaging at a Chase Bank in Michigan; bricks have been thrown through the windows of UPS stores in Oakland and Bank of America ATMs were destroyed in the Bay Area. In Atlanta,  two machines owned by contractor Brent Scarborough were burned, and the home of an executive for general contractor Brasfield & Gorie was tagged, protests were held outside the house of an Atlas Consulting project manager’s house (during which time they learned that Atlas pulled out of the Cop City project because, as he put it, “you guys are fucking nightmares and you broke all of our fucking windows”).

At the same time, a newly formed coalition announced a referendum effort to put Cop City on the ballot just days after the funding was approved (though the plan itself had been in development for some months). To put the issue on the ballot, the coalition must gather close to 70,000 signatures, which would trigger an election for Atlanta residents to vote on whether the project moves forward (an effort that is being challenged in court by the City, which has also announced its use of known voter suppression tactics such as signature matching to disqualify signatures).

Solidarity and Care 

While opinions vary on the political utility of the referendum strategy—in part over well-founded concerns that an infusion of larger nonprofit resources can co-opt radical energy and threaten to deradicalize movements in pursuit of vague notions of respectability and palatability—the Cop City referendum has been vocal about its support for a diversity of tactics. In June 2023, the coalition released a statement declaring full throated solidarity with the Stop Cop City Week of Action and abolitionist organizing in Atlanta, and rejecting the framing of nonviolent vs. violent resistance “at its very core.” When a coalition spokesperson was asked for comment about a small fleet of APD motorcycles that was burned —perhaps an attempt to pit the above-ground effort against the underground one—he responded: “Compared to arresting 76-year-old women and shooting activists who had their hands up? No, we’re not worried about the motorcycles.”

Mutual aid has been a foundational framework throughout the course of the Stop Cop City movement, with regular food distributions, lending closets, care clinics, and more across Atlanta and in the forest. An ethos of care pervades much of the movement, through both direct support for community members and the creation of infrastructure to defend those targeted for their involvement with the movement. The Atlanta Solidarity Fund (ASF) and legal nonprofits have built out protester support infrastructure to bail out criminalized protesters and match them with attorneys—even as ASF organizers have become targets of political prosecutions themselves.

The movement’s decentralization has made it slippery, posing a challenge for carceral forces trying to pin it down or determine a structure. Police warrants—and most recently, a bogus RICO indictment against 61 defendants— regularly refer to the “Defend the Forest” group, though no such group exists. There are Defend the Forest social media accounts that share information about the movement, but more broadly, Defend the Forest is simply a rallying cry for many working to prevent the destruction of one of the four lungs of Atlanta.

On the flip side, the decentralization sometimes makes it challenging for national organizations to know how to plug in. Many nonprofits learned the importance of “following the lead of organizers on the ground” in past years (while some simply learned the importance of saying they’re following the lead of local organizers), but what does that mean when there’s no clear leadership structure or organizing committee? These are challenges, but by no means insurmountable as national organizations have connected with organizers and local formations to lend support.

Many different tendencies and political frameworks also raise the potential for internal conflict. But in general, to the movement’s credit, organizers and supporters have kept tensions mostly offline, recognizing a common enemy and resolving to work through differences where the state is not watching. This isn’t to say there are no tensions, disagreements, or shortcomings of the movement, but rather that working through them in relationships and community has been critical. The movement has largely rejected attempts by corporate media outlets to pit “good” activists against “bad” ones, or feed the narrative that radicals or “violent” protesters are jeopardizing “peaceful” protesters. Despite differences and disagreements, this is a movement defined by solidarity and collectivity – in spite of the RICO indictment’s blatant effort to criminalize these very concepts.

Movement Wins

Through a diversity of tactics, the Stop Cop City movement has scored an array of wins on the way to its goal of not just stopping Cop City and defending the Weelaunee Forest, but of creating a new Atlanta altogether.

The first summer of the movement resulted in the delay of the legislation (a move that gave financial backers of the project pause) and ultimately a reduction in the authorized acreage for the facility—minor wins that nonetheless exposed early cracks in the project. The organizing also led to the creation of a community advisory board—which, as predicted by organizers, was a complete sham meant to provide cover for APF. Nevertheless, the board’s  continual blunders and scandals have further politicized residents and embarrassed the City. In the election following the Cop City vote, both the lead sponsor and a vocal proponent of the plan lost their City Council seats. Perhaps most importantly, the first summer of the movement laid the foundation through canvassing and base building for what would grow into a mass movement in the coming years.

In April 2022, construction company Reeves Young became the first contractor to bow out of the project following consistent pressure and direct action. Reeves Young would later be followed by Quality Glass Company and Atlas Technical Consultants, while the City of Atlanta and APF spends millions in attempts (thus far, futile) to secure the construction site.

The movement has continued to draw metaphorical blood, working toward death by a thousand cuts for Cop City and the ruling class structure behind it. The cost of the project has continued to climb. APF has struggled to secure the private funding it needs. The repression has been repeatedly denounced by free speech experts. The Democratic National Convention that Mayor Dickens worked desperately to attract to Atlanta chose Chicago instead. The city has faced a barrage of lawsuits and an avalanche of negative media coverage. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s function as a megaphone for corporations has been exposed. Lawmakers have been forced to make statements questioning political arrests and calling for an independent investigation into the murder of Tortuguita. The web of corporations behind so much of Atlanta’s inequality has been brought to the fore and the previously secret influence of APF over city affairs has been put on display again and again. The fight to Stop Cop City has become an international cause, and even mainstream commentators are predicting the staying power of the movement in future elections. The Atlanta ruling regime is crumbling as residents are being radicalized against the status quo.

In short, despite setbacks and extreme state violence, the movement has accomplished massive victories. Perhaps most plainly, APF declared in April 2021 that Cop City would open in under two years. Today, two years since the passage of the initial legislation, the project is nowhere close to completion.

One thing has been made clear: Stop Cop City activists are dedicated to stopping the project by any means necessary, whether it’s through a referendum, an inability to find contractors willing to continue work on the project, the loss of corporate funding, the Mayor and City Council canceling the lease, or by other means.

In any case, the movement to Stop Cop City by any means necessary is here to stay.

Struggle for Memory Continues 50 Years After Chile Coup

By: September 11, 2023
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Political prisoners in Chile’s national stadium after the coup

Today marks 50 years since the civil-military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Fifty years since the bombing of the seat of government at “La Moneda,” fifty years since air force planes strafed the skies, fifty years since rows of military tanks filled the streets of Santiago, fifty years since uniformed soldiers and police were deployed to torture, shoot and disappear anyone committed to change in Chile.

To this day, images of these events continue to reverberate and paralyze us with the horrors and crimes of the State terrorism imposed by the dictatorship, which lasted until 1990, and radically transformed Chilean society.

According to official numbers from Chile’s Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, during 17 years of dictatorship, 40,175 people were persecuted, tortured, executed and disappeared. Of these, it is believed at least 3,200 were executed and disappeared. To date, only 307 have been found and identified.

Where are our dead? This basic question remains unanswered. There is no justice, only impunity. Our wounds are still open.

The silencing of memory

I was born in 1987, three years before the dictatorship ended and the “democratic transition” began. On March 11, 1990, Pinochet handed the presidential banner over to Patricio Aylwin, who was elected President of Chile. Pinochet stepped down as president, becoming the Commander in Chief of the Army, thus assuming a role as “protector” of the Institutional Bases of the State through his leadership of the armed forces, as enshrined in the 1980 Constitution.

During the first decade after the dictatorship, virtually no one I interacted with spoke about what had taken place in the years previous. Not in my home, nor in the homes of relatives or friends. This history was not taught in schools: after 1979 history as taught in schools ended abruptly in 1970. There was no need to tell an official history, or to recover the narratives of those close to us who had lived through it. The past was silenced in hopes it would be forgotten.

The first two transitional governments followed the logic of silencing memory that was implemented during the dictatorship, and not just in education. From the outset, these governments were criticized for promoting reconciliation and national unity policies in a context in which criminals of the dictatorship went unpunished and enjoyed benefits and prestige in the armed forces and the police. So it was that the so-called unity and reconciliation contributed more to the maintenance of impunity and the silencing of memory than to truth and justice.

Denialism, relativism and justification

It wasn’t until I was a 15-year-old high school student in Santiago that I learned what happened during the dictatorship in Chile. I remember a persistent effort on the part of our teachers to stick to an interpretation that tended to neutralize history and justify the coup. According to this telling, Salvador Allende was an idealist responsible for a terrible economic and social crisis. We were taught that though Pinochet’s “military regime” committed crimes and disappeared people, it also imposed a new economic model that saved the country from crisis.

Twenty years later, that crude narrative continues to resonate. It is one of several provocative discourses the right wing is once again emphasizing in public debate, charging the atmosphere as Chileans prepare to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the coup d’état. The right wing, represented by the Renovación Nacional, Unión Demócrata Independiente, Evópoli and Republican parties, has introduced denialist and relativist discourses and even justified the coup in an attempt to minimize the dictatorship and promote a liberal and hyper-capitalist state. Together, these parties enjoy a representative majority in both the Senate and the Constitutional Convention.

On August 23, after 19 years of legal proceedings, Chile’s Supreme Court convicted former agents of Pinochet’s secret police for crimes of torture and sexual violence in the clandestine prison and torture center known as the “Venda Sexy” (now the Iran Memory Site 3037). That same day, in a clear example of denialism, Congresswoman Gloria Naveillán, a former Republican Party activist, suggested political sexual violence during the dictatorship “is part of urban legend.”

Then there are revisionists such as constitutional assembly member Luis Silva. “One should not simplify or reduce, in all seriousness, those 17 years to human rights violations, I think in doing so, we deprive ourselves as Chileans of a balanced understanding of our history,” Silva said on May 31. In his version of history, the dictatorship was required in order to restructure the state and restore economic stability.

There are yet are other supporters of the dictatorship who justify the coup. A motion presented August 22 by right-wing parties involved the endorsement and reading of the August 22, 1973 resolution declaring Allende’s government unconstitutional. Last month’s motion was adopted by the House of Representatives.

For their part, the government and the ruling parties have refuted and denied the actions and speeches of the right wing, in a context in which they have framed the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the coup and the beginning of the dictatorship without euphemisms. But in its attempt to set out a progressive reading of Chile’s history, Gabriel Boric’s government has appeared weak in the face of the country’s powerful right.

The fight for memory

The discourses surrounding the 50th anniversary of the coup d’état in Chile remind us that that the struggle for memory is a permanent exercise. It is not just a matter of reacting to the barbarities expressed by the powerful that rule the tribunes, or trying to refute each of their points. In fact, to do so is a trap that forces us into the logic of their terms.

Instead, fighting for memory implies a process of recovery and the reconstruction of stories of struggles and resistances that do not appear in official history, that have not yet been told from the perspective of the defeated, and that can play a role in building the emancipatory possibilities in the present.

Memory is alive. Our memories are embodied and help inform our praxis and forms of active resistance. Living memory contrasts with the kind of memory that fits neatly into dominant and hegemonic discourses, or that is crystallized in specific locations, which can then become spaces of institutionalization and whitewashing, as has taken place with some memorial sites.

This is what the Collective of Women Survivors in Permanent Resistance called out in a statement it published at the beginning of September: it matters what is remembered. There is no room for neutral memory, for memory that sanitizes torture centers, for patriarchal memory that invisibilizes disappeared women detainees and survivors, for memory that expropriates struggle, or that puts itself at the service of the accumulation of capital. Quite the contrary.

This is why the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the coup in Chile is itself a site of struggle. This fight survives as life is breathed into the memory of struggle and organization through vigils for our dead and those who fought against the dictatorship, and into actions and protest against impunity and state crimes.

We must continue to remember so that no one is forgotten, so that no face is forgotten, and so that our experience is not forgotten.

First published by Ojalá.

How GM Destroyed Poletown

By: September 10, 2023
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A block of Poletown.

The deadline for the current United Auto Workers (UAW) contract covering the Big Three automakers is fast approaching. While it is unknown which company will be the target to be struck, or if all three automakers will be struck at the same time, one of the plants that may be picketed is GM’s Detroit/Hamtramck Assembly, the Poletown Plant. The story of the construction of the Poletown plant is illustrative of many tendencies in American political and economic history, such as the collaboration between big business and government, the failures of business unionism, and the shortcomings of liberals and the Communist Party. Given this, it’s worth knowing this history for all those involved in the labor and socialist struggles, whether Detroiters or not.

Detroit in the 1980s was the site of a bonanza of large-scale developments pushed by Democratic Party Mayor Coleman Young in order to revive the cities’ flagging economy. Young had made a name for himself as a radical, and according to conservative historians he was a member of the Communist Party. If he was not a member, he certainly was a fellow traveler given his membership in the National Negro Labor Council and Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party. Young ran for mayor in 1973 as an aggressive proponent of affirmative action in city hiring and as a fierce opponent of the police department’s STRESS (Stop The Robberies Enjoy Safe Streets) program. Under STRESS, there were four hundred warrantless police raids and twenty-two police killings of Black civilians, giving Detroit’s police the highest number of civilian killings per capita in the country (Rich, 208). STRESS officers even raided a card game attended by Wayne County deputy sheriffs when they mistook the deputies for criminals. The resulting shootout led to the death of one deputy, Henry Henderson (Boyd, 227).

However, during his mayoral campaign and after, Young began tacking towards the center. His campaign literature promised to “lead a business resurgence that will produce jobs by the thousands, revitalize our downtown, and our entire city.” While some viewed the coalition that elected Young as a repeat of the one that elected Marxist Justin C. Ravitz to a judgeship, the difference was that “the radicals set the ground rules in the Ravitz effort with the liberals playing a supporting role, while with Young’s campaign the opposite would be true.”(Georgakas & Surkin, 222-224)Young’s lengthy term in office showed even more clearly who was calling the shots.

Shortly after Young was sworn in he reneged on a promise to support the United Farm Workers grape and lettuce boycott. By the late 70s-early 80s his administration was actively steering federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) community development money to rich businessmen like Al Taubman and Max Fisher. The city promoted luxury apartment complexes downtown that most city residents could never afford. One of these, the Millender Center, cost $71 million with only one-tenth of that being paid for by developers. The public footed the rest of the bill. Young’s economic prescription was Motor City Reaganism, make the rich richer and the benefits would trickle down.  What became the Poletown Plant fitted into this theory of growth.

Poletown was a neighborhood bordering Hamtramck, originally settled by Polish immigrants in the late 19th century. Unfortunately for the working-class people living there, many of them senior citizens, GM wanted the site for a new factory. The area GM selected was 465.5 acres in size, and contained 1,176 buildings, 16 churches, 2 schools, and a hospital. The area was also home to over three thousand people. GM promoted the factory as a way to create jobs, even though they were also shutting down two factories in Detroit, leading to a net loss of auto manufacturing jobs. Mayor Young and the City Council were all in favor and would pay $200 million to clear the site and give the company a 12-year tax abatement. They also made use of a new “quick take” law that made it easier to use eminent domain to seize private property for “public purposes”. It was only the tenacity of Poletown residents and the Poletown Neighborhood Council (PNC) who stood in their way. 

Given that the struggle to save Poletown pitted working-class residents against the government and a powerful corporation, one would think that the organized Left would be strongly supportive. This was far from universally true, though. Due to its deep respect for Mayor Young’s radical past, the Communist Party put out a statement absolving the Mayor of his complicity in the destruction of Poletown (Wylie, 102). The Party later panned the documentary film made about the struggle, Poletown Lives!. Nominally, they did so because of the references to the Solidarity movement in Poland, but it is also possible that their feelings were colored by their closeness to Mayor Young. Also on the Stalinist left, the Communist Workers Party made mention of the destruction of the neighborhood in Workers Viewpoint, contrasting the expense involved with Young’s claims that Detroit was broke and needed concessions from the unions and a tax increase. 

On the Trotskyist Left, things were a little better. Jeannine Wyle, author of Poletown: Community Betrayed said that the Bulletin, put out by the Workers League, was a favorite among locals. It gave them a forum for their unedited opinions, especially given how universally pro-GM the mainstream media was (Ibid. 99). But, when Ralph Nader got involved in the campaign, the Workers League backed out and warned residents against trusting the legal process”(“Beware Nader’s Raiders”). The Socialist Workers Party invited Thomas Olechowski of the PNC to address its Detroit Militant Labor Forum, where he called GM’s plan “an economic abomination”, and the Party’s mayoral candidate cited the fight as an example of Mayor Young’s pro-big business policies. But, the SWP did not take a leading role in fighting the displacement. Easily the socialist group most involved in the fight to save Poletown was the Revolutionary Socialist League, a spin-off of the International Socialists. The Revolutionary Socialist League covered Poletown extensively in their publication The Torch. The League also helped organize a protest march through the neighborhood that drew out 150 people on a bitterly cold December day.

The National Organization for an American Revolution, associated with Detroit’s Grace Lee Boggs, issued the leaflet “What’s Good for GM is Not Good for America” which pointed out that “GM comes like a knight in shining armor to revitalize our communities when, in fact, it is destroying the few communities that still remain.” But the organization did not play a role in organizing resistance to the city government and GM. Boggs reported that some members felt opposing Mayor Young was a betrayal of Black unity (Boggs, 179-180).

If the Left was divided, the United Auto Workers was actively hostile. UAW researcher Dan Luria bluntly said “I don’t believe in community” and that the Poletown struggle was “petit bourgeois” (Wylie, 102) The President of UAW Local 22 said, “I can’t in good conscience speak out against the plant when there are so many families around here out of work”(Brown). When Poletown resident Walter Duda, an early UAW organizer, went to the union’s headquarters in Detroit, he was told that the union couldn’t help him. While some auto workers centered around the rank-and-file newspaper Fighting Chance opposed the demolition of Poletown, they were not able to alter the course of the wider union.

On the city council, the only firm opponent of the Poletown land grab was Ken Cockerel, a Marxist veteran of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Cockerel opposed giving GM a tax abatement saying “I don’t see how we can justify giving a multibillion dollar corporation tax relief, when we are asking our citizens to dig down into their own pockets” (Jackson “Tax Break for GM Unsure, Council Says”). Young shot back that Cockerel was wrong on “the whole question of whether GM needs the money. They ain’t running no…welfare program” (McGraw, 8). Emmett Moten, advisor to the Mayor, and director of the Community and Economic Development Department had to admit that earlier promises of 6,150 jobs being provided by the project were “psychological grantsmanship” (Rich, 188), i.e. not true. In response Cockerel said “You talk about ‘new’ jobs, and keep pumping up the ‘big lie,’ while anyone questioning the administration’s credibility is considered stupid. It’s beginning to sound like a shell game” (“GM Plant Won’t Add to Job Rolls”).

Other politicians were almost uniformly in favor of the project, from Republican governor William Milliken to liberal Democratic Senators Don Reigle and Carl Levin. Riegle, who refused to meet with Poletown residents, stated that community resistance to the Poletown project “borders on the irresponsible.” Congressman John Conyers, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, was the only member Congress from Michigan to criticize the project and offered to hold congressional hearings on the matter. They were never held. The other DSA Congressman from Michigan, David Bonior, made no comment on the project.

The PNC tried a variety of approaches to stop the destruction of their neighborhood. At first, they asked GM to reconsider the footprint of the area requested. For example, the Immaculate Conception Church would be flattened for a parking lot rather than GM building a vertical parking structure. The company wasn’t interested. They petitioned public officials and the UAW to try to sway their opinion. As previously mentioned, those entities didn’t want to hear it. Some of their protests were quite creative. For example, they hired out a bulldozer and parked it in front of GM chairman Roger Smith’s house the day before Mother’s Day, 1981. Taped messages on the bulldozer read “GM, Don’t Bulldoze our Church” and “Happy Mother’s Day, Mrs. Smith, Talk to Roger.” All the while, the group continued with their lawsuits against the city questioning the legality of using eminent domain to take private property to give to a private corporation. The PNC were assisted in their work by the Poletown Support Team, a Ralph Nader affiliated group. When Mayor Young heard about Nader’s involvement, he went berserk saying “This man [Nader] has a phobia. Whenever you mention General Motors he foams at the mouth” (Doerr and Blankenship). His verbal attacks escalated, calling Nader a “carpetbagger” (Roach and Tucker) and a “publicity-grubbing prick.” (Binelli, 132) Young’s vitriol for Nader exceeded his volleys at Poletown, which he derided as “imaginary” and “so-called Poletown.”

While Poletown residents were fighting in the courts and in the streets, GM and their friends were pulling out all the stops to ensure the project moved forward. Not content with the fawning coverage in the media, they bussed in pro-plant demonstrators to make it seem like GM had more support than it did (Jackson “Buses Help Swell Ranks at GM Rally”). Signs contained slogans like “Import Jobs Deport Nader” and “Nader is a Lemon.” It wasn’t until a month after the rally that newspapers picked up the story that attendees were not Poletown residents. Much more sinisterly, Detroit Police arson investigator Robert McClary suggested that the city or GM could be behind the rash of fires in Poletown in an attempt to burn residents out. He told PNCl members “With enough money, you can do anything” (Wylie, 121).

The PNCl’s case against the legality of the use of eminent domain was appealed all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court. In a 5-2 ruling, the court found in favor of the city of Detroit in taking the property. Incredibly, despite the property being seized solely for the benefit of a multinational corporation, the majority opinion proclaimed “The benefit to a private interest is merely incidental” (Jackson “Court Paves Way for GM Project). After the Supreme Court decision, activists shifted their focus to saving the Immaculate Conception Church, which had housed PNC meetings. The church’s priest, Joe Karasiewicz, affectionately known as Father Joe, had supported the PNC’s efforts. Although Father Joe was supportive of saving the church, Cardinal John Dearden of the Detroit Archdiocese was not. Dearden, who Poletown residents derided for blessing a Gucci store in Sterling Heights after selling the neighborhood’s churches (Bullard), flat out refused, along with Coleman Young, an offer from GM to save the church. Given that GM promised to pay for all costs in moving and refurbishing the church two possibilities arise as to motive. Parishioner and PNC member Walter Jakubowski articulated one, that GM’s offer was a “charade, fabricated to counteract the bad publicity the automaker has been receiving over the Poletown issue” (Ewald). The other possibility is that Dearden and Young were so incensed by the opposition from the PNC that they decided to destroy their meeting place out of pure spite.

Undeterred, 12 people occupied the church from June 17 through July 14 in an attempt to prevent its demolition. The same police department that was apparently helpless to stop the epidemic of arson in Poletown mustered together a SWAT team to clear the church of demonstrators, several of whom were senior citizens. On that day, a group of protesters gathered outside GM headquarters downtown. There, they spray painted a car with slogans “Boycott GM” and “GM Destroys Churches” and began destroying it with crowbars and picks in act of revenge against the company that was destroying their church. This protest was a reversal of the protectionist events organized by the UAW where foreign cars and motorcycles were similarly destroyed.

In 1981, the same year Poletown was demolished and GM gifted over $250 million, Young began a campaign to raise city taxes and extract concessions from the city’s public sector unions. The Mayor claimed that the city was facing bankruptcy and a takeover by the state unless his plans were enacted. The ballot issue for the tax increase was bankrolled heavily by large corporations like Ford, GM, Chrysler, Michigan Bell, Detroit Edison, and the National Bank of Detroit (Fireman).  After the tax increase passed in a landslide, Young turned to wringing concessions out of the unions. While many AFSCME locals resisted, with the president of one local complaining “we already gave. We gave in 1974 and 1977 when we gave up the Cost of Living allowance…the city’s problems are not our fault” (Roach “Survival Plan Suffers Wages, Bond Setbacks”) the unions would eventually agree to the concessions.

The Poletown plant was delayed several times. In 1983, construction workers picketed the site over attempts to build the plant with non-union, out-of-state workers. Of the 6,000+ jobs promised by General Motors, only 3,700 ever materialized. Even if GM had employed 6,000 people, the city would have spent between $40,000 and $50,000 per job. Liberal city councilman Mel Ravitz admitted “the large corporations have directly benefited from these economic subsidies and political strokings and have eliminated over 50,000 jobs” (Ravitz, 19). To rub salt in the wound, Michigan Supreme Court overturned the Poletown decision in 2004, over two decades too late for Poletown residents.

The human cost of the Poletown plant is more difficult to calculate in terms of dollars. Former residents dispersed across the Detroit metro area, to Sterling Heights, Warren, Eastpoint, Shelby Township, and more. Many of them complained that their new neighborhoods were disconnected and unfriendly. Poletown had been their home and now it was gone. Father Joe died December 14, 1981. Some said it was of a broken heart over his church. Pieces of that church were also scattered. The bells of the Immaculate Conception Church ended up at St. Margaret of Scotland in St. Clair Shores, while pieces of the altar and the statue of the Virgin Mary went to St. Hyacinth in Detroit. Poletown resident Jim Jackowski saved some pieces of the church to build a shrine in his Roseville backyard. 

Ken Kockrel, member of the Detroit Common Council.

The lessons of Poletown and the PNC campaign are fairly clear. One is the unreliability of liberals and the Communist left. The Democrats and Coleman Young were unwilling to listen to their constituents and identified more with the corporate titans than the citizenry. Compare this to Marxist Ken Cockrel’s firm opposition to the project. Another lesson is of the insufficiency of business unionism and the “team concept” in which unions do their best to help out the corporations. While it’s unknown whether UAW opposition would’ve stopped the destruction of Poletown, by going along with the project they helped ensure its annihilation. They sold their souls, but didn’t gain the world in doing so. 

Bibliography

“Beware Nader’s Raiders,” Bulletin February 20, 1981

Mark Binelli Detroit City is the Place to Be (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012)

Grace Lee Boggs Living for Change: An Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998) 

Herb Boyd Black Detroit: A People’s History of Self-Determination (New York: Harper Collins, 2017)

Warren Brown “Balancing the Pain” Minneapolis Star February 26, 1981

George Bullard “Blessed Are the Soles at Gucci’s” Detroit Free Press May 5, 1981

Barbara Doerr and Karl Blankenship “‘Mention GM, Nader Foams,’ Young Claims,” Detroit News March 12, 1981

Thomas Ewald “GM Offers Poletown a Reprieve” Michigan Catholic May 22, 1981

Ken Fireman “Tax Hike Supporters Spent $427,000” Detroit Free Press August 31, 1981

Dan Georgakas & Marvin Surkin Detroit, I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975)

“GM Plant Won’t Add to Job Rolls,” Detroit News October 22, 1980

Luther Jackson “Buses Help Swell Ranks at GM Rally” Detroit Free Press April 17, 1981

Luther Jackson “Court Paves Way for GM Project” Detroit Free Press March 14, 1981

Luther Jackson “Tax Break for GM Unsure, Council Says,” Detroit Free Press April 2, 1981

Bill McGraw the Quotations of Mayor Coleman A. Young (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005)

Mel Ravitz “Economic Development: Salvation or Suicide” Social Policy (Fall 1988)

Wilbur C. Rich Coleman Young and Detroit Politics: From Social Activist to Power Broker (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989) 

Robert Roach “Survival Plan Suffers Wages, Bond Setbacks” Detroit News July 7, 1981

Robert Roach and Michael Tucker “Young Assails Nader for Backing Poletown,” Detroit News February 1, 1981

Jeanie Wylie Poletown: Community Betrayed (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989)

Nicaragua – Statement on the Situation of the Universities and the Central American University

By: September 5, 2023
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Students protest the government takeover of the University of Central America by the Nicaraguan government.

August 21, 2023 -The cry of alarm of academics, teachers and university workers (including CETRI – Tricontinental Center*) in the face of the new escalation of the offensive of the Ortega-Murillo regime against Nicaraguan universities. First signatories below. 

As academics, teachers and university workers, we would like to make public our deep concern at the alarming news reaching us from Nicaragua that shows a new escalation of the offensive that the Ortega-Murillo regime has launched against Nicaraguan universities.

Since the end of 2020, taking advantage of reforms to the General Law on Education and the Law on the Autonomy of Higher Education Institutions, more than 26 universities have been closed and their property confiscated. Together with the assets of some of these universities, new public universities were created without following the procedures established for this purpose, which aggravated the situation of confusion and anxiety for students that already existed in the country’s higher education subsystem. This time, a new threshold has been crossed in the actions carried out for years to threaten, weaken, isolate and finally close one of the most important universities in the country, the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA).

As reported by the Central American Province of the Society of Jesus in a statement dated August 16, 2023, “the serious accusations brought against the UCA in the official notice issued by the Tenth Criminal Court of the District of Managua on August 15, 2023, in which it is described as a ‘center of terrorism’ and accused of having ‘betrayed the trust of the Nicaraguan people’ and of having ‘transgressed the constitutional order,  the legal order and the order governing the country’s institutions of higher education” are absurd and deceptive. We share this view all the more because no fair and independent judicial body has presented evidence to support these accusations.

On the basis of these accusations, the order was given to freeze bank accounts, expropriate property  and the de facto takeover by the  National Council of Universities (CNU), which has become the state organ of repression and submission of universities to absolute political control. Not content with disrespectfully and irresponsibly endorsing the extinction  of the UCA, the CNU rushed to appoint new authorities to run the university without the support or agreement of the UCA academic community.

In its 63 years of existence, UCA has become one of Nicaragua’s leading and even the leading university and is considered a model of the kind of university that should be established in poor countries with poor education systems, weak democracies and development models based on extractivism and the supply of cheap labour. UCA has demonstrated that it is possible to provide quality higher education to all sectors of the population and to contribute to the creation of a truly humane and sustainable development model.

Since its foundation in 1960, UCA has contributed to the development of science and research at national and international level, offering young people and professionals a comprehensive academic training with criteria of excellence and based on humanistic values. This vision led this institution to become a space for open debate and promotion of social and political rights during the years of the Somoza dictatorship.

During the 1980s, the UCA preserved its founding principles and maintained a relationship of respect with the new authorities, while some of the decisions taken by the higher education governing bodies of the time had undermined the structure and functioning of the UCA.
Since its inception, the UCA has been the headquarters and actively supported the work of the Nicaraguan Academy of Sciences, which never received state support and was eventually closed along with thousands of other civil non-profit organizations.

Through its research and social intervention centres and institutes, UCA has invested in areas such as education, sustainable development, regional history, science and has provided social services such as legal advice and psychological support, both to the educational community and to society at large.

It also played an important role in the processes of dialogue, promotion of peace and recognition of multiculturalism after the armed conflict of the 1980s. Its rector had been invited, with the agreement of Daniel Ortega’s government, to participate in the search for a peaceful solution to the serious socio-political crisis that erupted in April 2018.

In 2010, the World University Ranking, published annually by the Spanish National Research Council, ranked the Central American University of Nicaragua first among the 52 institutions and centers of higher education operating in Nicaragua. It is also among the top ten on the long list of universities in Central America.

In 2012, UCA achieved another important academic recognition when it was included by  the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) ranking in the list of 250 institutions considered the most prestigious centers of higher education in the Latin American region, where more than 7,000 higher education institutions operate, of which nearly 2,000 are universities. UCA is the only Nicaraguan university to be included in this list. Throughout its history, UCA has been an internationally recognized space for knowledge production, connected to different international networks that connect academic centers in Latin America, North America, Europe and Asia.

All of the above highlights the intentions of the Ortega-Murillo regime to close all spaces that encourage critical thinking, the free exchange of ideas and informed debate on issues of concern to the country. Ortega’s plan to establish a dynastic dictatorship in Nicaragua, equal to or worse than those that plunged Latin American countries into pain and doldrums for many decades, is no longer in doubt. Free and autonomous universities have no place in this project and that is why they want to destroy the UCA.

As academics, Nicaraguans or from other countries, we, who have had the privilege of knowing and working with colleagues of the UCA or who know its trajectory, because it has been an example for those who want to build free educational institutions committed to the future of our countries, we want to make our protest heard against what is currently happening in Nicaragua and we call on university organizations,  rectors’ conferences, professors and students from all over the world, men and women who love justice, peace and freedom, to condemn the Ortega-Murillo regime for its senseless attacks on Nicaraguan universities.

We support and take up the requests of the Central American Province of the Society of Jesus addressed to the Ortega-Murillo regime:

that the severe, abrupt and unjust measure adopted by “justice” be immediately annulled and corrected;2. an end to the growing government aggression against the University and its members;3. that a rational solution be sought in which truth, justice, dialogue and the defence of academic freedom prevail.

Given the arrogant and disrespectful manner in which the CNU-appointed authorities presented themselves on the UCA campus, we demand respect for the physical integrity and freedom of all UCA staff. We demand respect for the job stability of all academic and administrative staff and the prompt delivery of academic records to all students who request them.

We call on the international academic community to be attentive to the events in Nicaragua, to raise their voices in protest and to express their solidarity with the UCA through concrete actions.

Today, more than ever, the motto with which Dr. Mariano Fiallos Gil, “father of university autonomy” in Nicaragua, undertook the struggle for the autonomy of universities and for their transformation into institutions committed to the nation that welcomes and supports them must be heard:

“FOR THE FREEDOM OF THE UNIVERSITY”.

University centres, groups and collectives

Institute of Regional Studies of the University of Antioquia (Colombia)

Institute of Social and Human Sciences of the Rafael Landívar University (Guatemala)

Institute for Development Policy, University of Antwerp, Belgium

Institut de Hautes Études de l’Amérique latine (IHEAL), Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

Working Group of the Latin American Social Science Council (CLACSO) “Gender, (in)equality and rights in tension”

CLACSO Working Group “Borders, Regionalisation and Globalisation”

CLACSO Working Group “Political Ecology(s) from the South / Abya-Yala

University of the Land of Puebla (Mexico)

Utopía Collective, Puebla (Mexico)

Geobrujas – Community of Gerographers, Mexico City (Mexico)

Latin American Institute for the Study of Peace and Citizen Coexistence (ILEPAZ), Mexico City, Mexico

Initiatives of Bridges for Students of Nicaragua (IPEN), Costa Rica

Flora Tristan Centre for the Study and Promotion of Gender Equality, National University of Misiones (Argentina)

Alba Sud, Barcelona

Aula abierta, NGO for the defense of universities in Latin America

Association of World Citizens (AWC)

Tricontinental Centre – CETRI (Belgium)

Argentina

Horacio Tarcus, historian

Carmen Elena Villacorta, National University of Jujuy (UNJU), Central American Articulation O Istmo (Argentina)

Belgium

Bernard Duterme, director of CETRI (Centre tricontinental), UCL Louvain, sociologist and journalist. Former university cooperant at UCA

Geoffrey Pleyers, Professor at the Catholic University of Leuven

Éric Toussaint, PhD in political science from the universities of Paris 8 and Liège

Marleen Goethals, Master in Urban and Spatial Planning, Urban Development Research Group, ISTT Research Unit, University of Antwerp

Devanshi Saxena, PhD, Researcher, and Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Law, University of Antwerp

Brazil

Salvador Schavelzon, Professor at the Federal University of São Paulo

Ana Mercedes Sarria Icaza, Professor, Federal University of Río Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre

Vera Bornstein, Professor, Ecole Polytechnique (EPSJV), FIOCRUZ Foundation

Humberto Meza, PhD in Political Science. Researcher at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

Canada

Anne-Emanuelle Birn, MA, ScD, Professor, Global Development Studies and Global Health, University of Toronto

Ruth W. Millar, author, former journalist and bookseller

Chile

Pablo Abufom, researcher at the Institute of Anticapitalist Studies Alternativa, editor of the journal Posiciones

Juan Cornejo Espejo

Colombia

José Luis Socarrás Pimienta, Dean of the Faculty of Cultural Heritage Studies

Maria Lucia Rapacci Gomez, Professor, Pontificia Javeriana University, Bogota

María Margarita Echeverry B., Professor, Pontificia Javeriana University, Bogotá

Luis Ramírez Zuluaga, Professor, Institute of Regional Studies (INER), University of Antioquia

Sara Yaneth Fernández Moreno, Colombian teacher, feminist activist, in exile

Catalina Toro, Associate Professor in the Department, Environmental Policy and Law Group – A – Colciencias, Faculty of Law, Political and Social Science, National University of Colombia

Costa Rica

Dr. Mario Zúñiga Núñez, University of Costa Rica, CLACSO Working Group “Violence in Central America”

Dra. Denia Román Solano, professor and researcher at the University of Costa Rica, CLACSO working group “The Central American Isthmus: Peripheral Epistemological Perspectives” O Istmo – Articulación Centroamericanista

Dr. Onésimo Rodríguez Aguilar, Director of the Center for Anthropological Research (CIAN), Lecturer School of Anthropology of the University of Costa Rica

Abelardo Morales Gamboa, National University of Costa Rica

Carlos Sandoval García, National University of Costa Rica

M.Sc. Carolina Sánchez Hernández, School of Sociology, National University of Costa Rica

Celia Barrantes Jiménez, Acting Professor, School of Anthropology, University of Costa Rica

Dr. Jorge Rovira Mas, Professor Emeritus of the School of Anthropology of the University of Costa Rica

María Esther Montanaro Mena, Public Servant, University of Costa Rica

Óscar Montanaro Meza, retired professor, University of Costa Rica

Claudine van Gyseghem Szabo, Retired Professor of Anthropology, University of Costa Rica

Saray Córdoba González, retired professor, University of Costa Rica

Eugenia Solís Umaña, Retired Professor, University of Costa Rica

Dr. Alexis Segura Jiménez, Coordinator of the PhD in Social Sciences, National University of Costa Rica

Elthon Rivera Cruz, President IPEN

Denmark

Susanne Lysholm Jensen, Syddansk University, Roskilde University Center (RUC), , UPOLI, Nicaragua

Else Mikél Jensen, Spanish Master’s degree, University of Aarhus

Alejandro Parellada, IWGIA (International Organization for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples)

Gorm Rasmussen, writer and journalist, member of PEN

Gertrud Permin

Jan Franck, Financial Advisor

El Salvador

Dr. Carlos Gregorio López, Bachelor of History Teacher, University of El Salvador

Karina Esther Grégori Méndez, WG Feminisms, Resistances and Emancipation Processes-CLACSO, Central American Sociological Association-ACAS

Jorge Alberto Juárez Ávila, historian

Spain

Fernando Harto de Vera, former Vice-Rector of the Faculty of Political Science at the Complutense University, Madrid

Jaime Pastor, professor of political science and editor of the journal Viento Sur

Marcos Roitman Rosenmann, Professor, Complutense University, Madrid

Juan José Tamayo, Secretary General of the Spanish Association of Theologians of the Ignacio Ellacuría Chair of Theology and Religious Studies, Carlos III University, Madrid

Lola Cubells Aguilar, Professor of Constitutional Law, Jaume I University (Castellón de la Plana)

Teresa Virgili Bonet, Professor of Economic Policy, University of Barcelona, Doctor Honoris Causa of UNAN Managua

Benjamín Bastida Vilâ, Professor Emeritus of the University of Barcelona, Honoris causa of UNAN Managua

Dra. Aurelia Mañé-Estrada, University of Barcelona

Carmen de la Cámara, Retired Professor at the University of Barcelona

Rafael Grasa Hernández, Professor of International Relations at the Autonomous University of Barcelona

Francesc Carmona Pontaque, Professor, Department of Microbiology, Genetics and Statistics, Faculty of Biology, University of Barcelona

Xavier Martí González, Associate Professor of World Economics, University of Barcelona

Albert Puig, Professor, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

José Ignacio González Faus, Lluís Espinal Foundation, Catalonia

Sara Porras Sánchez, Professor of Sociology, Complutense University, Madrid

Omar de León Naveiro, S.D. Applied, Public and Political Economics, Complutense University, Madrid

Rafael Díaz-Salazar, Faculty of Political Science and Sociology, Department of Applied Sociology, Somasaguas Campus, Madrid

Rafael Ruiz Andrés, Professor of Sociology, Complutense University, Madrid

Ph.D. Juan Ignacio Alfaro Mardones, teacher and researcher, Asturias.

Amparo Madrigal, PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Valencia and former graduate in Psychology from the Central American University of Nicaragua (UCA).

United States

William I Robinson, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara

Samuel Farber, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Brooklyn College, New York University (CUNY)

Mary Ellsberg, Director of the Global Women’s Institute, Washington DC

Dr. Julia Ahmed, Independent Consultant (Sexual Reproductive Health & Rights; Mainstreaming Gender Equality & Health System Strengthening)

Dr. Samira Marty, Binghamton University

Jorge Mauricio Herrera Acuña, Mellon Faculty Fellow, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Dartmouth College (Hanover)

Ignacio Ochoa, Latin American Studies, San Diego State University

Dr. Tom Hare, University of Notre Dame

María Estela Rivero Fuentes, Doctor of Law, Central American Research Alliance (CARA) Co-Director, Pulte Institute for Global Development, University of Notre Dame

France

Michael Löwy, Emeritus Research Director, CNRS

Eleni Varikas, Professor Emeritus, Paris 8

Henri Saint-Jean, doctor in social psychology Clipsy laboratory of the University of Angers, former trainer at CEFORSE of Managua

Robi Morder, Associate Researcher at Laboratoire Printemps, Université Paris-Saclay

Jean Malifaud, retired professor of mathematics, Paris-Jussieu University

Hubert Krivine, physicist

Antoine Hollard, honorary professor in preparatory class for engineering schools

Pedro Vianna, university teacher, economist, poet, theatre man

Pierre Salama, Professor Emeritus, Sorbonne Paris-Nord University

Christian Tutin, Professor Emeritus of Economics, University Paris-Est Créteil

Roland Pfefferkorn, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of Strasbourg

Samy Johsua, Professor Emeritus, University of Aix-Marseille

Philippe Enclos, lecturer and researcher in law, retired, University of Lille

Jean-Paul Bruckert, historian, emeritus university professor, Besançon

Jacques Fontaine, geographer, professor emeritus, University of Besançon

Silvia Fabrizio-Costa, Professor Emeritus of Italian Language, Literature and Civilization, University of Caen

Djaouidah SEHILI, sociologist, professor, Institut national supérieur du professorat et de l’éducation (INSPE), head of the Department of Human and Social Sciences, Centre d’études et de recherches sur les emplois et les professionalisations (CEREP), Université Reims-Champagne-Ardenne

Laurence Proteau, sociologist, Associate Professor, University of Picardy/ EHESS/France

Frank La Brasca, retired professor, Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance de l’Université de Tours

Georges Ubbiali, sociologist, University of Burgundy

Serge Aberdam, researcher at INRA, retired

Hubert Cochet, professor, AgroParistech, UFR Comparative Agriculture and Agricultural Development

Dr Christian Castellanet, agronomist and ecologist, former scientific director of GRET, Nogent-sur-Marne

Isaline Réguer, agronomist

Michel Dulcire, retired agricultural development researcher

Florent Maraux, agronomist, former aid worker in Nicaragua

Laurent Levard, contract professor at the University of Paris-Saclay and the Sorbonne Institute of Development Studies, former professor and researcher at UCA

François Doligez, associate researcher at the University of Paris-Pathéon-Sorbonne, former cooperant in Nicaragua

Anaïs Trousselle, researcher in geography, former visiting PhD student at the Nitlapán Institute (UCA)

Odile Hoffmann, Research Director, Geographer at the Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD)

Eric Léonard, Research Director at the Institut de la recherche pour le développement (UMR SENS), Montpellier

Lucile Medina, Professor of Geography, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, Laboratoire de géographie et d’aménagement de Montpellier (LAGAM)

Jean-Marc Touzard, Research Director, INRAE, University of Montpellier

Catherine Samary, researcher in political economy, member of the French Association for Research on the Balkans

Jules Falquet, Professor of Philosophy, University of Paris 8 – Saint-Denis

Fabien Granjon, sociologist, University of Paris 8

David Dumoulin, sociologist, Institut des Hautes Etudes de l’Amérique latine (IHEAL) Université Sorbonne nouvelle

Sébastien VELUT, Professor of Geography, Institut des Hautes Etudes de l’Amérique latine, Sorbonne Nouvelle University

Juliette Dumont, Researcher, Institut des Hautes Etudes de l’Amérique latine, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

Mathilde Allain, Researcher, Institut des Hautes Etudes de l’Amérique latine, Sorbonne Nouvelle University

Capucine Boidin, Researcher, Institut des Hautes Etudes de l’Amérique latine, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

Carlos Quenan, Researcher Institut des Hautes Etudes de l’Amérique latine, Sorbonne Nouvelle University

Marie Laure Geoffray, Researcher, Institut des Hautes Etudes de l’Amérique latine, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

Laurent Faret, Professor, CESSMA, Université Paris-Cité

Delphine Lacombe, sociologist and political scientist, researcher at CNRS, CEMCA, USR 3337

Natacha Lillo, Professor of Contemporary History of Spain, Paris-Cité University

Carlos Agudelo, associate sociologist at the University of Paris

Michel Cahen, CNRS Emeritus Research Director, Sciences-Po Bordeaux

Pierre Blanc, lecturer and researcher in geopolitics, Sciences-Po Bordeaux, Bordeaux Sciences agro

Franck Gaudichaud, Professor of Latin American History, Jean-Jaurès Toulouse University

Olivier Neveux, Professor, ENS Lyon

Laurent Ripart, professor at Savoie Mont Blanc University (Chambéry)

Dr. Catherine Bourgeois, URMIS associate researcher, Paris-Nice

Daniela García, researcher in the energy industry

Christophe Aguiton, retired researcher in the telecommunications sector

Pablo Krasnopolsky, teacher

Robert March, Teacher, ENSAPVS

Patrick Silberstein, MD, editor of Syllepse

Dr Christine d’Yvoire-Doligez, pediatrician

Jean Puyade, retired language teacher

Patricia Pol for the International Knowledge for All Collective (IDST)

François Laroussinie, computer scientist, University of Paris-Cité, SNESUP-FSU

Jean Pierre Debourdeau, former member of the FSU departmental office (Côte-d’Or)

Maurice Brochot, Departmental Manager (Côte-d’Or) of the FSU

Josette Tract, academic, member of SNESup

Philippe Cyroulnik, Art Critic (AICA)

Finland

Dr. Florencia Quesada Avendaño, Associate Professor of Latin American Studies, University of Helsinki

Barry K. Gills, Professor of Global Development Studies, University of Helsinki

Guatemala

Ana Silvia Monzón, sociologist

Prof. Simona Violetta Yagenova, FLACSO Guatemala

Carmen Rosa de León-Escribano, sociologist

Honduras

Efraín Aníbal Díaz Arrivillaga, economist, consultant and university teacher, UNAH

Miguel Alonzo Macías, Professor-Researcher, Department of Sociology, UNAH

Mexico

Dr. Gilberto López y Rivas, Professor-Researcher, National Institute of Anthropology and History, Morelos Regional Center

Aida Luz López, National Autonomous University of Mexico

Dr. Juan Manuel Sandoval Palacios, coordinator of the permanent seminar of Chicana and Border Studies, Directorate of Ethnology and Social Anthropology INAH

David Fernández Dávalos, Commissioner of the Historical Investigative Mechanism of the Truth Commission 1965-1990

Víctor Manuel González Romero, former Rector General of the University of Guadalajara, member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences

Verónica Rueda Estrada, Autonomous University of the State of Quintana Roo

Raúl Arístides Pérez Aguilar, Autonomous University of the State of Quintana Roo

Adela Vázquez Trejo, Autonomous University of the State of Quintana Roo

Enrique Joel Burton Mendoza, Teacher, Autonomous University of the State of Quintana Roo

Dr. Francisco Javier Güemez Ricalde, Professor-Researcher, Autonomous University of the State of Quintana Roo

Dra. Natalia Armijo Canto, Research Professor, Autonomous University of the State of Quintana Roo

Horacio Pablo Espinosa Coria, Autonomous University of the State of Quintana Roo

Emilia Velázquez Hernández, CIESAS Golfo

María Teresa Rodríguez, teacher-researcher, CIESAS-Golfo

Dolores Figueroa Romero, University Professor CONACYT-CIESAS, Mexico City

Regina Martínez Casas, teacher-researcher, CIESAS, Mexico City

Carolina Rivera Farfán, CIESAS

Xochitl Leyva Solano, CIESAS Sureste y GTCuter Clacso

Sabrina Melenotte, CIESAS/IRD

Delphine Prunier, Institute of Social Research, National Autonomous University of Mexico

Rosa Torras Conangla, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mérida, Yucatán

Dra. Eva Leticia Orduña Trujillo, Researcher, Center for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean, National Autonomous University of Mexico

Dra. Alicia Castellanos Guerrero, UAM

Jorge Alonso, National Researcher Emeritus

Dr. Mauricio Genet Guzmán Chávez, Full Research Professor B, Anthropological Studies Program

Dra. Alma Amalia González Cabañas, Researcher B, UNAM

Cristóbal Santos Cervantes, Agricultural Engineer specializing in Rural Sociology, Autonomous University of Chapingo

Elisa Cruz Rueda, lawyer and anthropologist, research professor at the School of Management and Indigenous Self-Development, Autonomous University of Chiapas

Gisela Zaremberg, FLACSO teacher-researcher

Dra. Mónica Toussaint, teacher-researcher, Mora Institute

Bruno Baronnet, sociologist, University of Veracruzana

Yerko Castro Neira, Research Professor, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Iberoamerican University

Carlos Mario Castro, Professor at the Iberoamerican University

Cecilia Zeledón, alumnus of the Ibero-American University of Puebla

Enrique Lavín, alumnus of the Iberoamerican University CDMX

Dr. Jorge Ceja Martínez, University of Guadalajara, former cooperant in Nicaragua (1984-1985)

Dr. Miriam Cárdenas Torres, University of Guadalajara, former aid worker in Nicaragua (1984-1985)

Salvador Lazcano Díaz del Castillo, civil engineer, consultant in the field of geotechnical engineering and holder of a master’s degree from ITESO and Pan American Universities of Guadalajara

Dr. Alberto Bayardo Pérez Arce, Professor, Department of Sociopolitical and Legal Studies, ITESO, Guadalajara

Luis Ignacio Román Morales, teacher, ITESO, Guadalajara

Efrén Carrillo L, Former student of the Society of Jesus

Ramón Martínez Coria, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Forum for Sustainable Development

Rafael Ibarra Garza, Coalition for Academic Freedom in the Americas

Luis de Tavira, playwright, theatre director, La Casa del Teatro. A.C., Mexico

Alfonso Castillo S. M., Director of the Union of Efforts for the A.C. Campaign

Gabriela Fenner, Institute of Geography for Peace

Juan Carlos Núñez Bustillos, journalist

Fernando Valadez Pérez, psychoanalyst

Salvador Alonso, Anaesthetist

José Luis Hernández Ayala, member of the Mexican Union of Electricians

Nicaragua

Cristian Ernesto Medina Sandino, former Rector of UNAN-León y UAM

MSc. Marco Aurelio Peña. Economist, lawyer and academic. Former professor at Paulo Freire University and Juan Pablo II Catholic University, associate researcher at the Center for Transdisciplinary Studies of Central America (CETCAM) and member of the Board of Directors of the Central American Philosophical Association (ACAFI).

Diego, former student at UCA

María Castillo, university professor in exile

Azahalia Solís Román, lawyer, feminist and human rights defender, in exile

Haydee Castillo, former president of the Leadership Institute Foundation of Las Segovias – ILLS, and member of the Women’s Initiative for the Defense of Human Rights in Nicaragua, in exile

Netherlands and Aruba

Margreet Zwarteveen, Professor of Water Governance, IHE Delft Institute for Water Education and University of Amsterdam

Dr. Julienne Weegels, researcher and professor at CEDLA, University of Amsterdam

Irene van Staveren, Professor of Pluralistic Development Economics, International Institute for Labour Studies, Erasmus University, Rotterdam

Dr. Max Spoor, Professor Emeritus, International Institute for Labour Studies, Erasmus University, Rotterdam

Nanneke Winters, Associate Professor of Migration and Development, International Institute for Labour Studies (ISS) – The Hague

Helena Pérez Niño, Associate Professor, International Institute for Labour Studies (ISS) – The Hague

Georgina M Gómez, Associate Professor of Local Development, Governance and Development Policy, President of the Research Association on Monetary Innovation and Complementary Currencies.

Luisa González, PhD student at the Centre for Research and Documentation on Latin America, University of Amsterdam

Marianne Eelens, Public Health Consultant, Aruba

Paraguay

Fernando Masi, Director of the Centre for Analysis and Dissemination of the Paraguayan Economy – CADEP

Lilian Soto, CLACSO Working Group “Gender, (in)equality and rights in tension”
United Kingdom

Lyla Mehta, Professor, Institute of Development Studies

Sweden

Eva Zetterberg, former Swedish Ambassador to Nicaragua (2003-2008), former Deputy Speaker of the Swedish Parliament 1998-2002

Switzerland

Stéfanie Prezioso, Professor of History, University of Lausanne

Sébastien Guex, Honorary Professor, University of Lausanne

Janick Schaufelbuehl, Associate Professor, University of Lausanne

Lene Swetzer, Anthropologist, Geneva Graduate Institute

Venezuela

Nelson Rivas, researcher at the Human Rights Observatory of the University of the Andes

Alexis Mercado, Professor, Central University of Venezuela

Alba Carosio, Full Professor, Central University of Venezuela

Hebe Vessuri, Central University of Venezuela

Angela Davis for Vice-President 1984 and 1988

Black Candidates for President
By: August 30, 2023
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This is the fifth of a series of article about Black political candidates for the two highest offices of president and vice-president of the United States. The idea of writing this series originally begun when Cornel West announced his candidacy, the story of Black political candidates for the highest offices take on a new significance in light of Kamala Harris’ current campaign. This is the list of candidates that we discuss in this series, though the four candiates of 1968 are discussed in one article.

  • George Edwin Tayler, candidate of the National Negro Liberty Party, sometimes known as the National Liberty Party in 1904;
  • Clifton Berry, of the Socialist Workers Party in 1964;
  • Charlene Mitchell of the Communist Party in 1968;
  • Eldridge Cleaver with the Peace & Freedom Party in 1968;
  • Dick Gregory as a write-in candidate in 1968;
  • Channing Emery Phillips as a Democrat, all in 1968.
  • Shirley Chisholm, Democrat, in 1972;
  • Angela Davis,  Communist Party for vice-president in 1984 and 1988;
  • Jesse Jackson, Democrat, for president in 1984 and 1988;
  • Ron Daniels, People’s Party candidate in 1992;
  • Cynthia McKinney, Green Party candidate 2008;
  • Cornel West, independent, in 2024;
  • Barack Obama, Democratic candidate in 2008 and 2012;
  • and finally Kamala Harris for vice president in 2020 for president in 2024.

We are currently (first week of August) editing these pieces. The essay on George Edwin Taylor has yet to be posted.

Angela Davis for Vice-President- 1984 and 1988

In the 1980s, voters had an opportunity to support Black candidates for the nation’s highest offices in two different parties. Angela Davis, for vice-president on the Communist Party ticket in 1980 and 1984, and Rev. Jesse Jackson for president in the Democratic primaries in 1984 and 1988. We look here at Davis’ campaigns.

Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1944 to a working-class family with connections to the Communist Party. Her paternal grandfather had been a member of the Communist Party. (Angela Davis, An Autobiography, New York: Bantam Books, 1974, p. 84.) Her father was a gas station owner and her mother was an elementary school teacher. Her parents were involved in civil rights organizations and also in the orbit of the Communist Party, as were family and friends. She grew up in this Black Communist milieu.

An outstanding student, virtually her entire education came through scholarships. As a teenager she moved to New York and lived with a white family of party fellow travelers while she attended Elisabeth Irwin High School, a private progressive high school some of whose teachers were Communists who had been blacklisted and couldn’t teach in the public schools. In her high school she became interested in the utopian socialists and their communities and read The Communist Manifesto, which, she wrote, “hit me like a bolt of lightning.” (Davis, Autobiography, p. 109). At about the same time, at around the age of sixteen, she was invited to join Advance, the Communist Party Youth Group filled with the children of national leaders of the Communist Party. Many of Advance’s meetings were held in the home of Communist historian of African American slave rebellions Herbert Aptheker whose daughter Bettina was a leader of Advance. (Davis, Autobiography, p. 111.) Through her mentor Herbert Aptheker she was inculcated in the most Stalinist version of Communist politics.

Thanks to  her Communist Party connections, she attended the Eighth World Festival for Youth and Students held in Helsinki, Finland in 1962. It had been organized by The World Federation of Youth and Students, a Soviet dominated organization. There she had an opportunity to meet Communist youth from other countries. Throughout her youth and young adulthood, the Communist Party guided and assisted Davis as she moved from country to country in Europe and from city to city in the United States. Though she did not join the CP until later. The party did not have to direct her, because she had grown up in it and shared its positions and outlook, though her involvement in the militant and armed Black movement represented her own decision.

She enrolled at Brandeis University in 1961 where she studied modern French literature and became interested in the existentialists like Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. While there she was impressed to hear a talk by Malcolm X, then still a leader of the Black Muslims. She took advantage of an undergraduate program to study in France spending time in classes in Biarritz and Paris. While there she learned of the racist bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham on September 15, 12 where four girls ages 11 to 14 had been killed, all from families that were friends of her family.

When she returned to Brandies, she began to attend the lectures of the German Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. He was not a Communist but rather a member of the Frankfurt School for Social Research. He began to meet regularly with him to discuss the history of philosophy. Those discussions led her to decide to pursue a career in philosophy, going off to Frankfurt to study with Theodor Adorno, also of the Frankfurt School.

In West Germany she participated in the radical social movement of the era led by SDS (Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund or German Socialist League of Students). She also visited East Berlin, part of Communist East Germany, a thorough-going police state, for which she expressed naive admiration. But she was feeling out of touch with the growing and ever more militant Black wanted to get back to the United States. She persuaded Herbert Marcuse to take over the supervision of her PhD at the University of California at San Diego from which she received her doctorate.

Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis at work on philosophy together.

Davis found the San Diego Black movement to be a backwater, so she began to become involved in the more sophisticated and militant Black milieu in Los Angeles. In 1968 she was invited to a meeting of the Che-Lumumba Club, the Black collective within the Communist Party and was impressed by a talk by Charlene Mitchell, the club’s leader. Still Davis declined to join the CP at that time. She did, however, join the Black Panther Party and soon became involved in its fights with a rival faction, buying and carrying a gun to defend herself. She also joined and became active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which was trying to expand its West Coast presence. Through her role in these groups and the campaigns to free jailed leaders Huey Newton of the Panthers and Rap Brown, head of SNCC, she met many national leaders of the black movement.

When the Los Angeles movement went into crisis and the local SNCC chapter collapsed, Davis decided to more seriously consider joining the CP. She began to meet and talk with veteran CP leader Dorothy Healey and she read Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? and W.E.B. DuBois’s essay on his decision to join the Communist Party. In July 1968 she joined the Che Lumumba Club and the Communist Party. (Davis, Autobiography, pp. 185-88.) When her CP membership became an issue within the Panthers, at about the same time as the murder of three L.A. Black Panthers, Davis returned to UCSD in La Jolla and began to work there with the Black Student Council. Their demand was that UCSD’s third college campus be called the Lumumba-Zapata Campus and the Council organized protests, won the support of Marcuse and some other professors, and organized a brief take-over of the registration building.[1]

That summer of 1969, Davis went to Mexico City and then to Havana, Cuba to work for a while in the cane fields as Fidel Castro pressed Cubans to harvest ten million tons of sugar. Davis, like many young people of the time, was swept up in the romance of the Cuban revolution and what she saw as a socialist society. As she wrote, “The Cuba trip had been a great climax in my life.” (Davis, Autobiography, p. 215.) While a sharp critic of the United States, Davis was blind to Cuba’s problems at the time—the persecution of LGBT people, the persistence of racism, the dismantling of Black cultural organizations, the state’s control of the labor unions, and the complete lack of political democracy. Just as when she visited the GDR, as a Communist she saw everything in Cuba through rose-colored glasses.

When she got back to Southern California, she found herself embroiled in another controversy. She had received a one-year appointment as an assistant professor to teach philosophy at the University of California in Los Angeles, but Governor Ronald Reagan had pressured the regents of the university and the chancellor to fire her because she was a Communist. Rightwing activists were also demanding she be fired. She received hate mail and death threats and at that time her brother-in-law Ben was shot by the police and he and his wife Fania charged with murder. Shortly afterwards some 100 police surrounded the L.A. Panther offices, an event protested by a movement of thousands. Still, she toured the state organizing meetings on college campuses to defend her job at UCLA.

At the same time, she became involved in the movement to defend the Soledad Brothers, three men—George Jackson, John Cluchette, and Fleeta Domingo—accused of murdering a guard in Soledad prison. She combined organizing to defend her right to her job with demands that they be freed from prison. The Minute Men and the Ku Klux Klan appeared at her rallies and the continued to receive death threats. In the midst of those events, the Regents met and announced that they were not renewing her contract. Because of a court ordered injunction, they could not fire her for being a Communist. So, they justified not renewing her contract because she had given speeches “unfitting a university professor.” But as Angela later wrote in her autobiography, the truth was, “I had just been fired from my teaching position at the University of California by Ronald Reagan and the Regents because I was a member of the Communist Party.” (Davis, Autobiography, p. 6.) Now without a job, Angela returned to work on her dissertation, wanting to complete it so that she could look for another academic job.

On August 7, 1970 at a court hearing at the Marin County Civic Center for Black Panther James McClain, who had been accused of stabbing a prison guard, Judge Haley, who was also the judge in the Soledad Brothers’ case, was presiding. George Jackson’s 17-year-old brother Jonathan Jackson, carrying three weapons, attempted to kidnap Judge Haley in order to force Jackson’s release from prison. Jackson tossed one weapon to McClain and then gave another to another prisoner, Black Panther William Arthur Christmas.  A witness in the McClain hearing, Ruchell Cinque Magee, went to free the other prisoners. Those four men then took five hostages, including the judge and the district attorney to a van waiting outside. As they drove from the courthouse, they were stopped at a roadblock a gunfight broke out and four people, including Jonathan Jackson and Judge Haley were killed, and three others wounded. Angela had not been present when these events took place.

FBI Wanted Poster for Angela Davis.

Shortly after those events, a warrant was issued for the arrest of Angela Davis who had own the guns used in the courtroom attac. She fled secretly to Chicago where she met up with David Poindexter Jr., an under-the-radar Communist, who took her to Florida. Davis changed her appearance, cutting her famous Afro, and used false identities and then went to New York City. The FBI found her there at a Howard Johnson motel on October 13. She was charged as an accomplice to conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder and extradited to California for trial.

The Communist Party provided her with one of its most experienced attorneys, John Abt. The state introduced evidence that the guns used in the attempted kidnapping had belonged to Davis and that she had been corresponding with the men involved. During the long, drawn out legal proceedings, Davis spent 16 months in jail during which time the Communist Party and many other organizations created Angela Davis Defense Committees around the country and some spang up in foreign countries as well. Thousands around the country participated, many from churches. The Soviet Union and East Germany organized campaigns for her release as well. In 1971, John Lennon and Yoko Ono even wrote the song “Angela” for the campaign. Remarkably Abt and her other lawyers convinced the jury that she had had no knowledge of the events and had not been involved in planning them or carrying them out. Incredibly, on June 4, 1972 the all-white jury in Santa Clara County found her not guilty.

Once free Davis spoke in several American cities at large rallies of thousands celebrating her victory. Davis also visited Cuba, East Germany, and the Soviet Union where she also received praise.

When in the 1980s the Communists were considering candidates for national office, it is not surprising that they would have chosen Davis. First, “Angela Davis” had become a household name, known to millions of Americans, perhaps more than any other Communist since Paul Robeson. All of the events described here had constituted the daily news for years. True, many white conservatives reviled her, but she was admired by millions of young Blacks, Latinos, and whites. Second, Davis was an absolutely loyal Communist who never criticized the CPUSA, the Soviet Union, or other “socialist” countries.

Raised in Communist milieu, as an adult Davis was a dedicated member of the Communist Party, even if her rhetoric was sometimes more revolutionary than her party’s. She supported the Party’s domestic strategy, including its alliance with the labor bureaucracy and its tacit support for liberal Democrats. When Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague spring reform movement, she supported the repression. And when in 1972, Jiří Pelikán, a leading Czech dissident wrote an open letter asking her to support Czechoslovak prisoners, she refused, arguing that the prisoners had been trying to overthrow Czech socialism. Nor would she support prisoners in the Soviet Union’s gulags. She taught in several California colleges in the 1970s and 80s, though found it difficult to advance her career. She similarly remained loyal to the Party and the Soviet Union even as Polish Marshal Jaruzelski, with Soviet approval, crushed the Solidarność labor union movement that was fighting for workers’ power and an end to the Communist state.

Davis’ loyalty to the  CP led her in 1980 and 1984 to accept the party’s assignment that she be the running mate of diehard Stalinist party leader Gus Hall. A former lumberjack and steelworkers, Hall, who traveled to Moscow every year to be reconfirmed and reanointed by the Soviet Communist leadershi, had first become party leader in 1959. He had run for president in 1972 and 1976 with another Black vice-presidential candidate, Jarvis Tyner. In those two years the votes for Hall were few, respectively 25,595 and 58,99, miniscule percentages of the national vote. Though it ran its own candidates, the Communist Party permitted and even often encouraged its members and followers to work and vote for Democrats.

Angela Davis, as a veteran of SNCC and the Panthers, and famous for her trial and victory in the courts, should have helped the party. Yet, despite Davis’ fame, the CP’s vote declined from 43,871 in 1980 and 36,386 in 1984. As the New York Times wrote of Hall’s campaigns, “Mr. Hall’s message won few converts, and his four presidential campaigns, from 1972 to 1984, met with yawning indifference.”  In all fairness, however, some Communists, many in the CP’s periphery, and many others who admired Davis, likely voted for Jimmy Carter in 1980 and for Walter Mondale in 1984 in order to stop Ronald Reagan’s Republican candidacies.

The Hall-Davis campaign, taking place as the social movements of the two previous decades had subsided and the country turned to the right, could not have advanced either the movements or the left. While they won more votes than Charlene Mitchell, the Hall-Davis campaign was a similar electoral fiasco. One has to wonder if the campaign might not have been more effective if Davis rather than the aging Stalinist bureaucrat Hall, had headed the ticket. Or if she had run as the candidate of the Black movement rather than the Communists

[1] I was at the time a graduate student in the Literature Department at UCSD and part of the local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. At an SDS rally on campus, Angela Davis showed up with a column of Black and Latino students and said they were taking over the registration building and said that if we supported their demand to create a Lumumba-Zapata Campus, we could join them. Angela and the Black Student Council had never come to SDS to discuss their plan to take over the registration building, they simply told us to follow., Irritated that we in SDS had not been consulted from the beginning, I and my friend Helene Frances, stood at the door for a while before we too decided despite our objections to join the occupation. Once inside, the doors were barricaded, some students rifled through the files, and my friend Ran Mitra, who was close to Angela, came up to me and told me that some of her Black Panther friends form L.A. had also occupied the building and were armed. I thought that was something we should have been told before joining the occupation. The occupation only lasted a day; there was no violence and the administration punished no one.

 

 

I’m Sick to Death of Florida’s Racism

By: August 14, 2023
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Before the Florida Department of Education issued its curriculum directive that slavery in the United States did, after all, produce “personal benefits” for the enslaved in the form of a well-stocked resumé of trades, useful after Emancipation in 1863, the board members might have consulted a seminal document in the literature of the oppressed—Angela Davis’s 1971 essay, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves.”

These days we’ve rightly exchanged the conditional designation, “slave,” for enslaved person. Fifty years ago, Davis prophesized this nominative shift; she cataloged the means by which Black women resisted the shackles. Among the first scholars to gather the evidence, Davis argued that a woman (daughter, mother, wife) was equal to a man in attacking bondage, surreptitiously and openly, at her peril. “If she was burned, hanged, broken on the wheel, her head paraded on poles before her brothers and sisters, she must have also felt the wedge of this counter-insurgence as a fact of her daily existence.”

Where did the woman’s skill in improvising defiance with her wiles and deceit come from? Obviously, such resistance wasn’t taught by any master or wife and was not covered in the McGuffey Reader in a chapter on treachery. Her refusal to kowtow lies in the organic ingenuity and duplicity oppressed people adopt. Any “personal benefit” was invented on the spot by and for the enslaved.

According to Davis, here’s some of the devious tactics women parlayed against the master and his mistress: poisoning food and medicine with subtle folk remedies; fawning praise and obsequity to earn and undermine trust; caretaking children with moral instruction and compassion; disrupting schedules and household tasks; pilfering, breaking tools, overcooking oatmeal, fouling crops, slowing work details, exercising indolence, and exacting all sorts of domestic sabotage.

Some women outright rebelled—and, if caught, paid the price. They started fires in homes and outbuildings as payback or as cover for revolts. They hid runaways and staffed escape routes. They helped children feign illnesses. And some even killed their babies rather than have them live a life of forced labor.

She would ferociously attack and brawl if the master tried to “take” her. Much written and oral testimony backs this up, the violence waged against sexual conquest, the mental strain Black mothers faced, trapped between raising children (mulatto, maroon) and seeking retribution with the “fathers.” This managing of her choiceless condition was often met by cruelty from a slaveholder’s wife who may have slaveholder’s wife herself been raped.

A few historians before Davis (Herbert Aptheker was one) wrote of the skills at insurgency developed by U.S. slaves. Today, we recognize how resistance was practiced by women, their opportunities perhaps more available than the men’s—in the field, in the house, on the underground railroad, and in the domestic survival of an enslaved family.

But these things are hardly what the Florida educators mean by “personal benefits.” No, this is authoritarian conservatism, the dictates of white nationalists, fashioning policy. They are speaking to parents of the state’s blank slates who believe “fairmindedness” is in order when teaching American slavery, that, after years of bad press, they need to rehabilitate the slavers and the cause of the South.

If you like, here’s another way: African adults were forced into bondage in the Atlantic trade only to have their offspring, mercilessly, born into it, separated from their parents, sold, and worked to death as a matter of course.

The implication of Florida’s directive is as clear as a desert sky. Some contemporary white apologists seek to redefine slavery as an “issue” of a well-meaning rabble of their forebears, who designed the practice so as not to be that bad or even all bad. Human slavers must have some back-pocket redemption built into their patronage. Surely, there were kind masters here and there, a doting mistress of home and hearth, either of whom taught an enslaved woman to read, to ride a horse, to decorate a supper table, to treasure keepsakes, to sew nightgowns, and to speak the King’s English. Surely.

Didn’t such benevolence accrue later goodness? Eventually, Africans took on the Christian faith and were saved. Freed Africans were given tenant farming as compensation. And, most astonishing, Africans gave birth to a world-renowned artistic child—blues, jazz, gospel, R&B, soul—which we now regard as the core of American music. Surely all these things are plusses.

Logic that enables and excuses suffering is fuzzy and full of holes.

I’m sure the pedophile priest was nice to his altar boy at first. I’m sure a kind hangman granted a last sumptuous meal to the leader of a slave rebellion. I know that Primo Levi’s captors in Auschwitz used him as a chemist in an on-site lab producing synthetic rubber but, alas, his fate was not extended to the 1.1 million who were murdered. I doubt poets and proletarians chained to walls in gulags during Stalin’s Great Terror from 1936 to 1937 said to themselves, “Now, Dmitri, what can you learn about your survival skills during this unfortunate detention?”

To end on a serious note: We can never say that slavery is essential to the idea of a redeemed, and redeemable, American identity. Some sins are unforgivable. The world that both compelled slavery into existence and the world that came out of the horrid institution is characterized succinctly by Toni Morrison: “The desire for freedom is preceded by oppression; a yearning for God’s law is born of the detestation of human license and corruption; the glamor of riches is in thrall to poverty, hunger, and debt.”

Which is to say it’s the psychological and physical damage endured by captured Africans, child laborers, the disabled, the uneducated, over generations, that engenders the by-any-means-necessary call to liberation. Slavery’s historic crime cannot be scrubbed or blunted by the canard that suffering produces a good work ethic, solid training from which future employers will profit.

The American value, “the desire for freedom,” was not abetted by the masters’ munificence, their sunup-to-sundown classes in ditch-digging and cotton-picking, but by the collective human resourcefulness of those who opposed, in all aspects of their daily lives, what Angela Davis defines as “male supremacist structures.” Look to “the perpetual assault on slavery” by Black women, she writes, to find the true story of how the personal begat the political.

Shirley Chisholm for President – 1972

Black Candidates for President
By: August 13, 2023
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This is the fourth of a series of article about Black political candidates for the two highest offices of president and vice-president of the United States. The idea of writing this series originally begun when Cornel West announced his candidacy, the story of Black political candidates for the highest offices take on a new significance in light of Kamala Harris’’ current campaign. This is the list of candidates that we discuss in this series, though the four candiates of 1968 are discussed in one article.

  • George Edwin Tayler, candidate of the National Negro Liberty Party, sometimes known as the National Liberty Party in 1904;
  • Clifton Berry, of the Socialist Workers Party in 1964;
  • Charlene Mitchell of the Communist Party in 1968;
  • Eldridge Cleaver with the Peace & Freedom Party in 1968;
  • Dick Gregory as a write-in candidate in 1968;
  • Channing Emery Phillips as a Democrat, all in 1968.
  • Shirley Chisholm, Democrat, in 1972;
  • Angela Davis,  Communist Party for vice-president in 1984 and 1988;
  • Jesse Jackson, Democrat, for president in 1984 and 1988;
  • Ron Daniels, People’s Party candidate in 1992;
  • Cynthia McKinney, Green Party candidate 2008;
  • Barack Obama, Democratic candidate in 2008 and 2012;
  • Cornel West, independent, in 2024;
  • and finally Kamala Harris for vice president in 2020 and 2024.

We are currently (first week of August) editing these pieces. The essay on George Edwin Taylor has yet to be posted.

Shirley Chisholm for President (1972)

The most important Black candidate of the radical 1960s and 70s, if we judge by votes and delegates, was Shirley Chisholm. A civil rights and feminist activist from the Afro-Caribbean community of New York City, Chisholm was the first was Black woman elected to Congress in 1968 and in 1972, and she sought the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination in order to fight for race and gender equality. She represented something new: a Black feminist politician.

Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm who was born in 1924, lived part of her childhood in Barbados, and later grew up in a Afro-Caribbean family in Brooklyn. Her father, Charles Christopher St. Hill, was a laborer from Guiana and her mother, Ruby Seale St. Hill, was a seamstress from Barbados.

In part, Chisholm’s left-of-center politics came from her family; her father was an ardent follower of Marcus Garvey, the Caribbean Black Nationalist and Pan-Africanist whose movement was large and influential in New York. Her father’s politics instilled Shirley with a strong sense of racial pride. a strong sense of racial pride. In addition, her father’s role as a union shop steward gave her an appreciation of the role of unions in improving workers’ lives.

But Chisholm’s politics were also a product of the time, the rise of the post-war African American civil rights movement. While a student at Brooklyn College just as World War II broke out, Chisholm had joined the Harriet Tubman Society, founded a club for Black students, and joined the Brooklyn NAACP and Urban League.

Ambitious, he decided to at Columbia University, and graduated in 1951 and graduated with master’s degree in early childhood education. After become a director of day care centers, she became active in League of Women Voters, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Urban League, and the Democratic Club in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. (Barbara Winslow, Shirley Chisholm: Catalyst for Change [Westview Press, 2014], pp. 12-26.) Chisholm launched her own political career in the early sixties and in1964 was the second African American elected to the New York State Legislature followed by her election to the US. Congress in 1968, the first black woman ever elected to that that body.

Her congressional career was remarkable. As her biographer, Barbara Winslow, writes:

Chisholm entered Congress with a clear social and political agenda that was far more ambitious than those of most of her liberal colleagues. She envisioned an expanded welfare state: programs for the poor, the unemployed, and underserved children; greater access to higher education and more federal support for public education and health care. (Winslow, Shirley Chisholm, p. 76.)

In her maiden congressional speech, speaking as a woman and a teacher, Chisholm explained why she would vote against every military funding bill.

As I take this stand today, I am joined by every mother, wife and widow in this land who ever asked herself why the generals play with billions while families crumble under the weight of hunger, sickness and unemployment. We must force this administration to rethink its distorted, unreal state of priorities.  (Winslow, Shirley Chisholm, p. 80.)

She also took a stand against the Internal Security Act’s preventative detention section that would allow the government to carry out the preventive detention of political dissidents. She pointed out that during the Second World War and unlike German citizens who had not been rounded up, Japanese Americans had been incarcerated “because of the color of their skin.” She expanded that:

Today it is not the Ku Klux Klan or the [crime] Syndicate whose doors are being kicked in, it is the Black Panthers. Skin, skin, skin color, gentlemen, that’s the criteria. It makes us special targets. (Winslow, Shirley Chisholm, p. 81).

During her Congressional service, Chisholm—a cofounder of the National Organization for Women in 1970—also became a strident voice of the feminist movement. It was she who in 1970 reintroduced in the House of Representatives the Equal Right Amendment (ERA). She called upon women to act:“ Women must do it themselves. They must become revolutionaries.” (Winslow, Shirley Chisholm, p. 83.)

She also courageously called for abortion rights, which were opposed not only by conservatives, but also by both the traditional leaders of the civil rights movement and the Black Nationalists. Sh explained just how important freedom of choice was for working class women, especially those who were Black and Latina. She became the honorary president of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL, Pro-Choice America). She proposed federal abortion rights legislation and supported repeal of New York’s restrictive abortion law. The Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, which legalized abortion at the federal level, was due to the strong pressure that Chisholm and many other feminists exerted. (Winslow, Shirley Chisholm, 86-88.)

On January 25, 1972, Chisholm announced her candidacy, not, she said, just as a Black or female candidate, but as the candidate of the American people formed decades of civil rights struggles that preceded her campaign and by the rising feminist movement. At this juncture, it is necessary to discuss the National Black Political Convention held in Gary, Indiana in March 1972.

Imamu Baraka, Mayor Richard Hatcher, and Jesse Jackson, National Black Political Convention, Gary, 1972

The National Black Political Convention

The NBPC was in many ways, the culmination of the civil rights movement that had begun in 1955 with the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and had culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which abolished the legal pillars of Jim Crow in the South. While racism and economic inequality had not been ended, this legislation had been an enormous step forward, and the Black freedom movement was proud of that accomplishment. Thousands of Black activists attended the convention, which was addressed by many movement leaders: Gary Mayor Richard Hatcher, Amiri Baraka, Coretta Scott King,, Betty Shabazz (widow of Malcolm X), Queen Mother Moore, Congressman Charles Diggs, Black Panther chair Bobby Seale, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

In his opening address, Hatcher suggested that the Democrats and Republicans were now getting their “last chance” to respond to the needs of the African American people, and if they didn’t, Blacks might organize an independent political party and take with them Puerto Ricans, Native Americans, white youth, impoverished whites, and some of the white working class. The crowd cheered loudly for all but the latter, in which they clearly had little faith.

Jackson led a call and response, asking, “What time is it?,” to which the crowd responded, “It’s nationtime?” The neologism “nationtime” suggested that black people had become a political power on the national stage, that they should assert their identity as a nation, and that perhaps their nation needed their own political party. Jesse Jackson’s statement, “I am a Black man and I want a Black party,” brought the hall to its feet. The political question—reform the Democratic Party or creation of a new Black party to lead all of the country’s oppressed—was left open.

Unfortunately, this climax of the Black freedom movement of the 1960s was also its funeral. Though Baraka had called for “unity without conformity,” the delegates could not overcome their differences over whether or not to create a black political party. The convention ended in political division, dispersed, and disappeared, never carrying out its promises

Richard Hatcher had declared in his opening speech that Angela Davis, then in prison, would be welcome at the NBPC, but he never mentioned Shirley Chisholm, who was by then a presidential candidate. Chisholm was not in  attendance , perhaps because she didn’t want to be seen as a “Black candidate,” perhaps because the NBPC was male-dominated and dismissive of feminism, and perhaps because its politics was more radical than hers, at last rhetorically. Though some of her fellow Black Political Caucus members had helped organize the event, the NBPC leadership did not back her and the gathering did not endorse her. “Black male politicians are no different from white male politicians,” Chisolm said at the time. “This ‘woman thing’ is so deep.”

The Chisholm Campaign

Chisholm had little money, no big-name backer, and had no actual organization except in a few states—though she did somehow find the means to campaign in California and Florida. The Democratic Party’s predominantly white liberal establishment leadership worked to stop her from having a major role at the convention and excluded her from the debates. Black establishment politicians and elected officials shunned her, and in North Carolina some went so far as to declare that “a vote for Shirley Chisholm is a vote for George Wallace,” the segregationist governor of Alabama.

Chisholm, however, won the support of feminists such as Gloria Steinem, who campaigned for her, wrote speeches for her, and was one of her pledge delegates to the Democratic Party National Convention. Betty Friedan, a founder and leader of the National Organization for Women (NOW), also ran to be a Chisholm delegate.

Despite these obstacles, Chisholm entered 12 Democratic Party state primaries and won a remarkable 152 Convention delegate votes or 10 percent of the total. When her bid had failed, she threw her support to George McGovern, the candidate of the liberal anti-war movement and campaigned with him in New York and Pennsylvania, in an attempt to find support among Black voters. Speaking at the The election was a landslide for Republican Richard Nixon, who carried every state but Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, winning 520 Electoral College votes to McGovern’s 17. The Democrats, the left, the progressive movements had been smashed.

However, Chisholm was notable as a social and political activist and political leader of both Black movement and the women’s liberation movement who had created an organization and a relatively broad base of support. On the other hand her allegiance of the Democratic Party, committed to maintaining the system and opposed to fundamental change, meant that her effort remained constrained with in its limits. Had she run as an independent candidate could she have done as well? Not likely. The Democrats would have been even more hostile and even the anti-war candidates would have eschewed her.

 

I’m a Ukrainian leftist. This is why I support Boris Kagarlitsky

The left-wing Russian theorist, who has gone from pro-war hawk to anti-war political prisoner, deserves solidarity
By: August 5, 2023
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Leading left-wing Russian thinker Boris Kagarlitsky is facing up to seven years in prison on charges of “justifying terrorism” even though it is clear to everyone – including supporters of Vladimir Putin and his aggression in Ukraine – that he was arrested for his anti-war views.

Kagarlitsky is perhaps the most prominent Marxist thinker in the post-Soviet space, known in academic and political circles inside Russia and beyond. He was arrested on 25 July after stating in a social media post that the attack on Russia’s Crimean Bridge in October 2022, believed to be the work of Ukraine, was understandable “from a military point of view”. His case is just one of hundreds of police investigations into anti-war Russians.

His arrest has provoked a heated debate about solidarity – and whether Kagarlitsky deserves it, given his previous statements.

Starting out in the late Soviet Union as a left-wing dissident and underground Marxist, Kagarlitsky, now 64, was perhaps the only person from this community to achieve widespread recognition in Russia and the wider region following the fall of the USSR while retaining his socialist convictions. Several generations grew up on Kagarlitsky’s books and lectures, and his assessments of political events in post-Soviet countries became a guide for observers in the West. He became a symbolic figure for the Russian left.

Kagarlitsky’s public rejection of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was therefore bound to irritate the Russian authorities. His arrest shows that even internationally famous public intellectuals, who have connections in high political circles, are no longer safe from repression.

Support for Russia’s annexation of Crimea

But Kagarlitsky’s views on the war in Ukraine have not always been the same. Following Ukraine’s Euromaidan revolution, he was an enthusiastic supporter of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the pro-Russian separatist movements in the Donbas, seeing some progressive ‘anti-imperialist’ features in those events.

As he put it in 2015: “Novorossiya [New Russia] is not a project, but a movement, a dream, a public goal.” The website he ran, Rabkor, followed suit, arguing that “the way to end the civil war in Ukraine lies through… [Kyiv’s recognition of] defeat in its war against the rebellious south-east”, meaning the so-called ‘people’s republics’ in the Donbas.

Many who grew up on his work found it difficult to read such articles – it felt as if the author had been replaced by someone completely different.

Kagarlitsky became a frequent guest on state television, commenting on Russia’s military operations in the Donbas. His new milieu came to be dominated by people associated with Russia’s so-called ‘patriotic left’, which often involved conservative and imperialist positions.

The conclusions that Kagarlitsky drew from world-systems theory (an analytical framework that emphasises long-term political and economic trends outside of nation states) matched the expansionist aims of the Russian state.

If you present world politics exclusively as a confrontation between the global periphery and the global centre, it isn’t difficult to imagine the 2014/15 war in the Donbas as one of the hotbeds of this confrontation. In this analysis, Russia became (even unwittingly) a kind of vanguard of anti-imperialist struggle, supposedly helping the Global South to free itself from the hegemony of the West.

Kagarlitsky also expressed hope that, under the burden of new historical challenges, the Russian regime would put an end to neoliberalism and transform into a more progressive system. But, as it became clear that this was unrealistic, and that such a position was merely a left-wing prop for the Putin regime and its imperial adventures, he began to revise his views.

Changing views

Kagarlitsky’s political assessments began to change in 2017, as Russian political life became ‘interesting’ again. He seems to have realised that he had got involved with a rather unpleasant crowd and it was time to move away – towards the Russian opposition, a much more natural place for him as a representative of the progressive Russian intelligentsia.

He clashed with political conservatives who applauded the Russian police’s vicious crackdown on youth protests. Unambiguous comments about the need to overthrow Russia’s top officials and the supreme ruler himself began to appear. Kagarlitsky also sought to expose Putin’s statements about Russia as a “besieged fortress” as ridiculous self-justifications of a corrupt regime.

In 2020, he supported the huge anti-Lukashenka protests in Belarus, calling on Russians to learn from their neighbours. In 2021, he supported protests defending opposition leader Alexey Navalny, who had been detained on his return from abroad, and called for his release.

Kagarlitsky’s dislike for the current system and Putin personally had grown so much by this point that he was ready to devote entire streams on his Rabkor YouTube channel to discussing rumours of the president’s poor health. He did not conceal his hope that the ‘wait’ would not be long.

On 24 February 2022, the Russian army began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Kagarlitsky immediately took a very specific position against Russian aggression, calling it a sinister adventure of the regime that was doomed to failure.

When asked about his changed attitude towards Ukraine, Kagarlitsky replied: “The victim may be a bad person, but they are still a victim. 1930s Poland was a very reactionary state, but when Germany attacked, it was a victim of aggression and it had every right to support and sympathy in repelling the attack.” He did not hesitate to compare Russia with the darkest aggressors of the past.

Since the invasion, Kagarlitsky’s Rabkor YouTube channel and website has published anti-war content from Marxist positions, aimed at the Russian left rather than the liberal audience that is traditional for the opposition media. Other anti-war leftists and even liberals began to appear on Kagarlitsky’s live streams – people who were on the opposite side of the argument from him eight years ago.

As another anti-war blogger Alexander Shtefanov noted, Kagarlitsky’s activities became dangerous for the Russian authorities because they created rallying points for a wide range of anti-war opposition – and specifically for those who remained in Russia.

In 2022, the authorities declared he was a ‘foreign agent’, hinting that it was time for him to get out of the country. He decided to stay – despite the real risk of going to prison, which has now happened. Undoubtedly, this was a very brave and honourable act.

Anti-war, anti-Putin

Has Kagarlitsky rejected his past positions? Probably not. He adheres to the theory of the ‘absolute event’, which is to say neither the failures nor the merits of the past matter when you’re facing a crisis such as Russia’s war against Ukraine. Instead, it’s your attitudes and actions that count.

Kagarlitsky’s approach is very practical. Instead of excluding potential allies, it assumes that the coalition against the ‘absolute event’ will be open and inclusive.

Kagarlitsky’s media activity since February 2022 has shaped the anti-war views of thousands of Russians. In fact, his stance in 2014 and 2015 may have helped, allowing him to reach those with moderate patriotic views, who would never have been won over by agitators with an ‘ideal’ past and a clear-cut position.

Kagarlitsky may have once supported sections of the Russian patriotic left who yearn for territorial expansion. But no other well-known leftist has done more to instil into thousands of Russians a simple thought: the Putin regime is criminal, the invasion of Ukraine is criminal, there is no justification for it, and it must be resisted.

Some still cannot forgive him for his past conduct, but now he has been detained for his sincere anti-war convictions, for his actions against the war. For this reason alone, he deserves international solidarity.

The campaign to free him is important for other reasons. Without an anti-war movement inside Russia itself, it will be very difficult, perhaps impossible, to end the war in Ukraine. Russian society is far from ideal, of course, but only from this imperfect society, with its imperfect people with their imperfect biographies, can an anti-war and anti-government movement emerge.

Anyone who delays this movement is doing harm. For the last 18 months, Kagarlitsky brought it closer.

 

This article originally appeared on OpenDemocracy on Aug. 1, 2023.

Image: Rabkor/You Tube

Why (and how) to campaign for the liberation of Boris Kagarlitsky

By: July 31, 2023
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Boris Kagarlitsky has been imprisoned for opposing Russia’s war on Ukraine.

On Wednesday 26 July, we heard that Boris Kagarlitsky had been arrested by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), who promptly transferred him from Moscow to Syktyvkar, in the far north, on charges of “apology for terrorism.” A trial is scheduled for September where he faces up to 7 years in prison.

The Russian regime, whether Putin’s loyalists or other networks, has no legitimacy and no historical right to try anyone – not even the criminal torturer Girkin. Boris Kagarlitsky has nothing to do with “terrorism” and is a celebrity on the international “radical left”, which makes his arrest internationally politically relevant. Aplutsoc therefore associates itself with the statement circulating in ENSU, irrespective of the issues addressed in the rest of this article:

On 25 July, Boris Kagarlitsky, a well-known intellectual and socialist activist, was arrested by the FSB on charges of “justification of terrorism”, and immediately transferred to Syktyvkar, 1300 km from Moscow. There, at a hearing held behind closed doors and without the presence of his lawyer, the court decided to keep him in detention until his trial, which is due to take place in September, at the end of which he could be sentenced to 7 years in prison.

Kagarlitsky’s prosecution and detention are part of a repressive campaign to silence all voices opposing both the invasion of Ukraine and the Russian government’s domestic policies. Over the last year, the Putin government has prosecuted, imprisoned or forced into exile a number of well-known political figures, intellectuals and activists who have spoken out publicly against the war as ordinary citizens via social networks. Kagarlitsky himself was classified as a “foreign agent” in May.

We express our solidarity with Boris Kagarlitsky and demand his immediate release, as well as that of all those detained on political grounds.

Having said this, a campaign for the release of Boris Kagarlitsky must, for us and, we believe, for European Network in Solidarity with Ukraine (ENSU/RESU) if it were to take position as such, be well understood politically if it is to be effective. This undoubtedly requires all activists to be fully informed. That is the purpose of this article.

To make it clear that we could face a problem, let’s mention two communiqués from Russia.

The first is from Angry Patriots, the fan club of Igor Girkin alias Strelkov: https://t.me/KRPRus/147.

Girkin-Strelkov, well known in Russia and notorious in Ukraine, Bosnia and Moldova, is a high-level FSB and GRU officer who was present in Transnistria in 1991, in Bosnia in 1994, and led the establishment of the “People’s Republics” of Donbass and Luhansk in 2014. He then organised the shooting down of the MH17 plane (298 dead), for which he has been condemned in an international court. For several years now, he has been denouncing the inadequacy of Putin’s efforts to Russify half of Ukraine, and has become an “opponent”, undoubtedly right-wing for the ultra-nationalists, but seen as “left-wing” by others who have passed him off as a “red soldier” wanting to “fight imperialism”, namely, first and foremost, Boris Kagarlitsky. Representing the critical ultra-nationalist wing hostile to Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, Girkin-Strelkov was arrested a week before Prigozhin.

His Angry Patriots movement is calling for Kagarlitsky’s cause to be united with Girkin’s, and there is no doubt that while there will be a lot of talk on the international left about Kagarlitsky’s defence as that of a “Marxist sociologist”, in Russia itself, perhaps more people will hear about it from Girkin and other red-browns, monarchists and “patriots”.

A completely different communiqué comes from the anarchist Telegram thread Netchaievtchina: https://t.me/nechaeveverywhere/3951?fbclid=IwAR3OwFd6n3LHQo97bVr4uaqlBwxZCkwL1nKVFJNevHeRHNnr2Bn-ioAdyKU .

These comrades, for they are our comrades, do not question the principle of demanding Kagarlitsky’s release, but see him as the key figure in the “dangerous myth of the revolutionary Donbass” and deplore the fact that the many activists threatened with death in prison, “ordinary activists” like Yevgeny Karakashev, threatened with death from brain disease, have no influential support and solidarity networks: In fact, these comrades fear that even less will be said about ordinary activists now that an broad campaign by the “amnesiac left” in favour of Kagarlitsky is being prepared.

Let us repeat: we must campaign for Kagarlitsky’s release. But is the terrible question of these Russian anarchist comrades legitimate? Yes, it is!

Boris Kagarlitsky, born in 1958, joined the Samizdat (‘self-publishing’, or dissident movement), around 1980, and was arrested in the last months of the Brezhnev era, then “pardoned and released in 1983” according to the Wikipedia article on him.

During perestroika, he was the best-known leader of the Moscow ‘New Socialists’ group. Together with an anarcho-syndicalist group and the “Marxist Platform” current of the CSPU, they were behind the Moscow Popular Front, an “informal” movement which, more or less beyond the control of its initiators, supported Boris Yeltsin’s election to the Congress of People’s Deputies and to the Moscow mayor’s office.

It was during this period that Boris Kagarlitsky became very popular with the radical left and far-left press in the West, such as the New Left Review and the journal Fourth International. The book he had been working on for years, Les intellectuels et l’État soviétique de 1917 à nos jours (Intellectuals and the Soviet State from 1917 to the Present Day), by far his richest, most original and most remarkable work, was published in English in 1988 (in French by PUF in 1997).

These years came to an end with the collapse of the USSR. During the putsch of August 1991, he and his group, like their anarcho-syndicalist and “CPSU Marxist” allies, adopted an abstentionist stance, not supporting the mass movement opposing the putschists, which Yeltsin later took over.

At the end of 1993, during the armed confrontation between the President of the “Russian Federation”, Boris Yeltsin, and his “parliament”, they sided with Yeltsin and took part in the fighting, losing with him – Kagarlitstky then spent a brief period in prison where he was beaten. This second choice placed its authors on the side of the so-called “conservative” or “National-Stalinist”, or even “Red-Brown” forces.

As a result of these events and these choices, the project to build a “Workers’ Party” in Russia, which they had been promoting, was aborted. Some withdrew, others embarked on a great career, like the former “anarcho-syndicalist” leader Andrei Isayev, who went on to become leader of the former official trade unions (still there today) and a supporter of Putin.

Boris Kagarlitsky began his career at the Russian Academy of Sciences. His international contacts contributed to his status as a “Marxist sociologist”, which we will take the liberty of contesting. In fact, his most original work is his first, on the Russian-Soviet intelligentsia. From the beginning of the Putin years, B. Kagarlitsky ran an “Institute for the Study of Globalisation and Social Movements”, then, with the rise of the Internet, he initiated the Rabkor website.

Their work consists of denouncing US “imperial” hegemony and highlighting the integration of Russia under Putin into global neoliberalism and the hegemony of finance. Kagarlitsky adopts formulas from authors of a completely different calibre such as Immanuel Wallerstein and Samir Amin. He provided some confirmations for Naomie Klein’s chapter in her book on the neoliberal ‘shock strategy’ in Russia after the 1991 putsch. There are no really original analyses here, none of the materials which the Russian workers’ movement and young people could have done with in those formative years of Putinism. Indeed, this lost left perceived Putins  ‘state-minded’ and nationalist aspects as a lesser evil, or even as a remnant of “socialism”.

As one contributor to the lively debates among Russian activists over the last few days put it: while convinced of his ‘collaboration’ with the ‘authorities’ – which, in Russia, everyone understands as meaning the repressive organs  – he nonetheless considers Kagarlitsky, like many others, to be ideologically completely sincere and explains that “…that’s the fundamental problem: ideologically, Kagarlitsky represents the vestiges (just vestiges? ) of the alterglobalism of the 1990s – first half of the 2000s, when planet Earth was enveloped in the tentacles of Euro-American capital, compared to which everything is secondary (…). Regimes like Russia or Iran, of course, don’t represent anything really good either, but in principle they are a lesser evil compared to the global financial neo-fascism (…). I think this is the most toxic idea circulating in today’s left-wing circles, and not only there.”

The “Kagarlitsky left” finds that an ugly Putin is better than a supposedly neo-liberal Yeltsin, and that national-statism does not only have its faults. anarchists and militant trade unionists rail against this, and young people trained in this way often find it excessive or too compromised. But this is the thingking which permeates the cultural habitus of many groups and currents on the Russian left. And it shows when it comes to making choices.

In 2008, as comrade Vladislav Starodubtsev, a Ukrainian activist with Sotsialnyi Rukh, recalls, Kagarlitsky welcomed Putin’s Georgian war, declaring that “the blow dealt to the United States opens up new prospects for struggle”.

During the massive demonstrations against Putin’s re-election in 2011-2012, he took a “sceptical” posture, according to the Russian comrade quoted above, speaking of a “petty-bourgeois, well-fed middle class” too far removed from the real “social movements”.

And so we come to the decisive moment: 2014.

Here, Kagarlitsky is the emblematic figure of what Ukrainian Vitalii Kulik calls “pink Putinism” https://politcom.org.ua/kagarlitsky-as-a-mirror-of-pink-putinism. He denounced Ukraine’s Maidan as “fascist”, of course, and told anyone who would listen that hundreds of thousands of workers had risen up in Donbass – a total fabrication. He called for a “Donetsk takeover of Kiev”.

At the time, his institute and website received substantial funding – 3.2 million roubles according to Ukrainian sources https://www.nihilist.li/2015/03/31/kagarlitskij-vojna-i-politicheskaya-korruptsiya/?fbclid=IwAR2sKslj18hRiMO2eRyBrf-fxhcSUFzyYxjVzppnxz4k7b-BC9rPQKn4zHc – from the Russian authorities. Kagarlitsky’s group provided Western political intermediaries, in particular the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation of the German party Die Linke, and Britain’s Stop the War coalition (formed years earlier to oppose G.W. Bush’s wars), with conferences and biased information, in particular on the alleged “pogrom of the trade union house in Odessa” on 2 May 2014. A conference was organised in [occupied] Crimea in November 2014, with the participation of Kagarlitsky and Western activists including the British Richard Brenner. The general line of this event was that Russia must help the “Donbass uprising” to wrest from Ukraine all of its south and east – the “Novorossia” which Putin outlined in his speech on 14 April 2014. The Kagarlitsky centre also organised the promotion of the Borotba group https://europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article33625 , a real fake party, a Potemkin party to use a Russian metaphor, to make Western leftists believe that revolutionary communists with Che T-shirts were fighting “Ukrainian Nazis” in “Donbass”.

His relationship with Girkin-Strellkov was public, and the Kagarlitsky website interviewed him regularly. Contacts and meetings with Dugin’s Eurasian far right also increased during the Novorossia campaign. According to V. Kulik, during the summer and winter of 2014-2015, Kagarlitsky boasted that, using the resources of his now solvent Institute, he ran a “school for social activists” in Belgorod which sent its “pupils” to “work in the government apparatus of the people’s republics”. Yes, there where strikes, trade unions and the Ukrainian language were banned and torture chambers filled.

It is clear that there is a change between the warmongering line cloaked in vague “revolutionary” verbiage, which played a key role in 2014 in covering up Putin’s counter-revolution, and Kagarlitsky’s orientation from February 2022 onwards when Kagarlitsky condemned the “special military operation”. So did the No. 2 leader of the Russian “Left Front”, Alexei Shakhin, who emigrated to France (Left Front No. 1 leader Sergey Udaltsov did not change his line).

One Russian comrade points out that Kagarlitsky manages to say he was right in 2014 and also in 2022: ultra-bellicist imperialist in 2014, but opposed to the “special military operation” in 2022, for him there is a political continuity …

Clearly opposed to the war from 24 February onwards, Kagarlitsky is not for all that defeatist from the Russian point of view (even taking into account the obligation to speak in hushed tones). His condemnation of the war since 24 February has been based mainly on his denunciation of a dictatorial drift in Russia, which he sees as the means to this end.

The most hostile Ukrainian analysts link his position to the disgrace of Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s ideologist for many years and the mastermind of the propaganda operations surrounding the “Donbass” and the “Ukrainian Nazis” in 2014, who would therefore have been his mentor. This is not inconsistent with the postulate of a sincere position, for which Putin after turning his back on a phantasmatic “people’s war” in 2014 would have fallen into a trap allowing him to walk to dictatorship.

Not only are Girkin’s “Angry Patriots” supporters defending Kagarlitsky, but since his arrest he has received two public endorsements from the highest echelons, which indicates that there is a crisis at the top, a debate within the state apparatus, and that what is happening to him is part of this “Russian crisis” that has been open, particularly since the Prigozhin putsch.

So there was the support of Margarita Simonyan, the formidable TV presenter who, for example, called for Ukrainians to starve, whose Telegram channel, linked to a TV channel, described her arrest as “shameful, unnatural and disgusting”. https://t.me/russica2/52942

Then there are the statements by Sergei Markov, a Putinist figure who has been or is responsible for various parastatal foreign policy bodies and state control of “history”, denouncing his arrest as a “very serious political error” and, in passing, presenting him as an immense figure in the “international left-wing socialist movement” (sic), calling on the “presidential administration” to collaborate once again, and closely, with him and what he represents. https://t.me/logikamarkova/7471

Comrade Fred Fuentes, a Green Left activist from Australia, author of numerous articles and playing an active role in internationalist support for Ukraine, has circulated an article https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/solidarity-needed-russian-anti-war-socialist-boris-kagarlitsky calling for the defence of Kagarlitsky against repression, in which all the elements just presented are either ignored, passed over in silence or euphemised as past differences which must not alter the necessary solidarity. Fred Fuentes mentions Sergei Markov’s support for Kagarlitsky, describing Markov as an “eminent pro-Kremlin intellectual”. That’s a bit short-sighted: it was Markov who, on Russian television in autumn 2022, called for the nuclear bombing of European capitals, London in particular.

Girkin, Simonyan, Markov: it has to be said that the opposition to Kagarlitsky’s arrest has been voiced by representatives of sectors of the Russian state who are themselves in favour of the war, but no doubt find it ill-conducted and lacking in scope…

The question is therefore legitimate: are we defending a militant of the left, of the workers’ movement, or of the “forces of progress” as it is sometimes called, in the broad sense, whatever the differences, or are we faced with a factional struggle? If Girkin is not a “political prisoner” for us, is Kagarlitsky?

This question is inescapable, as is the answer given at the beginning of this article. But the worst thing would be to deny ourselves this questioning, to dismiss it as something we don’t want to hear – moreover, that would lead to not hearing, once again, what our Ukrainian comrades are telling us!

Only the truth is always revolutionary. And the golden legend of an eternal dissident who, after all, only made one big mistake in 2014, is a golden legend, an insipid mush that bears no relation to the truth, however hard it may be.

To question this golden legend is to revisit the whole history of the relationship between the ‘radical left’ and the USSR, which has now become Russia for more than three decades. The Kagarlitsky question is not a problem of individuals, but opens up a far-reaching historical, political and even moral question.

This is perhaps why it is so painful, and why it would be so easy to rush without conscience or reflection into a finally easy ecumenism, into a good ‘Eastern’ cause rediscovered with the campists. Nothing could be worse, because that would muddy the waters, whereas the global reality since 24 February requires us to clarify them.

No, we won’t be singing the praises of the “anti-war, anti-Putin Russian socialist” with the likes of Mélenchon or Corbyn, who have never taken a stand to save the men and women still to be saved – Igor Kuznetsov, Daria Polyudova, Yevgeny Karakashev, not to mention Maksym Butkevich.

And yes, we must demand in all conscience that Boris Kagarlitsky be released, because it is not up to Putin or any faction of the mafia oligopoly in power in Russia to judge him, and because he is part of our history in its most painful aspects, and we also have a duty to clear the air about it, so that we can have a future by coming to terms with the past, the whole past – the real past.

Vincent Présumey, 28 July 2023.

Translated from French by AN

Source: https://aplutsoc.org/2023/07/28/faire-campagne-pour-liberer-kagarlitsky-pourquoi-et-comment/

Ukraine and the abstraction of violence: my reply to Tom Dale

By: July 17, 2023
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I am thankful to Tom Dale for starting his discussion of my article “The Left and Ukraine: Two Pitfalls to Avoid” (first published by Labour Hub, reposted by New Politics) by describing me as having “long been one of the more nuanced socialist commentators on foreign affairs” and asserting that “no one can accuse [me] of delivering off-the-peg answers.” I’m afraid though that, right after this kind introduction, he accuses me of precisely what he had just asserted that no one can accuse me of.

He thus starts by reproaching me for falling into “a trap common amongst leftists seeking to reconcile their sympathy for Ukrainians with overarching opposition to the projection of Western hard power,” the said trap consisting in resorting to a “method” that “functions by means of abstractions” in relying on “key terms that only function within the argument by virtue of fundamental vagueness.” The problem, however, says Dale, is that “war is necessarily and brutally concrete.” Having lived through several years of civil war and Israeli invasions in Lebanon, my country of origin, I am well aware of what war is. It is Dale who actually displays a rather abstract idea of war, downplaying its brutality and ugliness in order to champion views generally upheld by warmongers.

I will here discuss his core arguments, those addressed specifically to me, leaving aside his critique of Noam Chomsky, who is the other main target of his article. Dale deals with two main issues, that of arms deliveries to Ukraine and that of NATO. I will address both of them here, seizing this new opportunity to clarify my position. Since the start of the Russian invasion last year, I have written various responses to critics belonging to the two opposite sides depicted in my latest article. Of all my critics, however, Dale has gone the farthest in the direction of what I characterized as the pro-NATO neo-campist position, getting actually quite close to the views held by Paul Mason whom I quoted in my piece. Since this kind of position seems to be gaining ground among left-wing supporters of Ukraine’s right to self-defense, Dale’s critique is a welcome opportunity to further discuss it.

1. Arms Deliveries to Ukraine: Dale reproaches me for having criticized a motion by the British union GMB, the main union active in the British military-industrial complex, of which he reproduces only one half of the passage that I quoted: “Ukraine is also fully entitled to seek to import the most modern and technologically advanced weapons systems from across the world to resist the attacks and regain its territory.” Had the motion consisted of only this sentence, I would not have criticized it. The problem, however, is the second part of the passage that I quoted: “Congress considers that Governments in the UK and other nations with advanced defence manufacturing industries have a duty to respond positively with the weapons Ukraine needs to defend itself.”

The crux of the matter is indeed the difference between what Ukraine is entitled to seek and what progressives agree that Western governments must provide it with. Ukraine is certainly entitled to seek any weapons that help it achieve a military parity with its aggressor. It is thus entitled to request advanced fighter jets, cluster bombs, and even—why not? following the same logic—nuclear weapons. I hope that I do not need to explain why the provision by the USA, Britain, or France of nuclear weapons to Ukraine would be completely foolish, creating the potential for a major crime against humanity and prompting Russia to strike Ukraine preemptively with “tactical” nukes.

Of course, Tom Dale does not go to that logical extreme of his argument, but it is already symptomatic that he mentions the provision by the U.S. of cluster bombs to Ukraine without expressing the slightest reservation, let alone criticism. The issue of cluster bombs is a good illustration indeed of the need for clarity about the kind of weapon deliveries by Western governments that left-wing supporters of Ukraine’s right to self-defense should be approving and the kind they should disapprove. It is quite worrisome that some of those supporters have drifted so far in espousing the views of Ukraine’s military and right-wing government that they now defend the provision of cluster bombs to Ukraine, a stance that disregards basic humanitarian safeguards codified in the Law of War. Progressives should be the most ardent defenders of such limitations to warfare instead of displaying lower moral standards than major outlets of Western mainstream liberal opinion, the New York Times included.

I have repeatedly explained the meaning of distinguishing between defensive and offensive weapons, like in the interview with my good friend Steve Shalom that New Politics published last December. Allow me to reproduce here the relevant passage:

It has been my position from the very beginning to put emphasis on the defensive purpose of arms deliveries to Ukraine. It is true that there are no clearcut boundaries between defensive and offensive weapons, but the clearest distinctions are of two kinds: one refers to the whole gamut of “anti” weapons: antiaircraft, antitank, antimissile, which are defensive by definition. I fully support the supply of such weapons. The other distinction refers to the weapons’ range. I don’t support NATO delivering to Ukraine weapons of a range that would allow its armed forces to strike deep into Russian territory. Not because it would be unfair: Ukraine actually has a full moral right to strike deep into Russia since the latter is extensively pounding Ukraine’s territory, thus blatantly committing war crimes in deliberately destroying Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure. …

What I wouldn’t support is NATO providing to Ukraine long-range missiles and planes, rather than just antimissile and antiaircraft weapons. Nor would I support NATO enforcing a no-fly zone over Ukraine. Such steps would be a perilous escalation of NATO’s involvement in this war, and no territory on earth is worth risking a major global war and a nuclear confrontation for its sake. Note that Washington itself is keen on avoiding that qualitative escalation, which is why it has been refraining from delivering long-range weapons to Ukraine.

The starting point is support for Ukraine’s right to get what it needs to defend itself and push Russian troops back from the territory they grabbed since last year’s invasion. What remains after that is a matter of concrete assessment of each case. For instance, I was and am still against the delivery of U.S. F-16s to Ukraine, which is what I meant by opposing the delivery of fighter jets by NATO countries. However, I do not oppose the delivery to Ukraine by its neighbors of the remaining MiGs that have been in their possession since the time of the USSR. Delivery of the latter does not change qualitatively Ukraine’s means and does not therefore represent a significant escalation (nor has it truly been seen by Moscow as such). It would only allow Ukraine to make up for the planes that it lost during the ongoing war, or that have become immobilized by lack of spare parts.

Delivery of F-16s, on the other hand, would represent a qualitative escalation of U.S. and NATO participation in the war. That is why the Biden administration itself has been very reluctant to provide such planes to Ukraine, and even though it has changed its position on the face of it, the fact is that its change of mind has only translated until now in training Ukrainian pilots, as other NATO countries such as the UK had already been doing. That’s why this move has been described as no game changer. An actual delivery of F-16s to Ukraine would carry a risk of provoking a vicious reaction by Moscow, which can be expected to do anything in its power to prevent their use (such as pounding Ukraine’s airports) and conduct further murderous onslaughts on the country’s civilian population in retribution.

The anti-NATO neo-campists hide behind the argument that the ongoing war is one by proxy between two imperialist camps in order to justify their blanket opposition to weapons deliveries to Ukraine, thus practically wishing for this country to be overwhelmed by the Russian forces, in full contradiction with the condemnation of the Russian invasion that they concede, lest they appear as supporters of Russian imperialism. Anti-Putin neo-campism, on the other hand, espouses the cause of Ukrainian maximalists by deliberately ignoring the fact that Ukraine is clearly being used as a proxy by NATO powers in order to cripple their Russian imperialist rival.

Had the ongoing war been solely an inter-imperialist war, even if only by proxy, I would have certainly adopted a stance similar to that of the internationalists who, during the First World War, called on soldiers of both sides to oppose the war even at the cost of their country’s defeat. However, the ongoing war remains at bottom until now an anti-imperialist war of self-defense on Ukraine’s side, even if it is indeed exploited by NATO powers for their own strategic interest. I oppose anything that might tilt the balance toward turning this war into an essentially inter-imperialist one.

A final consideration is that emphasizing Ukraine’s legitimate right to self-defense is actually much better for its cause than calling for quantitatively and qualitatively unlimited support for its military in pursuing long-term goals that involve a strategic defeat of Russia. The Ukraine government’s constant maximalist upping of the ante, though understandable, risks alienating public and working-class support for Ukraine’s cause in Western countries. That even a warmonger like British defense secretary Ben Wallace complained that Kyiv is treating its Western purveyors of weaponry as if they were Amazon should have rung the alarm bell for the Ukrainian rulers.

2. NATO: I have written a whole book on this issue, and I invite Tom Dale and anyone interested to read it as I cannot explain everything in each article I write. Dale clearly misinterprets my position on the relation between NATO’s enlargement and the Russian invasion of 2022. What he summarizes about Putin, I happen to have explained at length in my book and various articles and interviews. He writes:

In 2014, Putin wanted to prevent Ukraine moving closer to the EU economically, and to establish an open conflict to reduce the already minuscule prospect of Ukraine joining NATO to zero. By 2022, he also seemed to fear that increased military cooperation between Ukraine and the West threatened to make the country a tougher nut to crack in any future invasion, and hence harder to bully. He also claimed to have been concerned that anti-missile emplacements would in future be established within Ukraine, and that these could notionally be used to launch offensive missiles too. On both occasions, Putin likely wanted to shore up his domestic popularity (as previous “military operations” had done); demonstrate that popular, anti-plutocratic mobilizations, such as Ukraine’s 2013-14 Maidan Revolution, would not be tolerated; and give expression to a chauvinist Imperial vision of a greater Russia to which Ukrainians, whether they like it or not, by rights belonged.

I do not disagree with the above. But Dale slides from this correct characterization of Putin’s imperialist motivations into a defense of NATO’s opposite and much bigger imperialism. He basically reproduces in his critique the well-known arguments of the partisans of the Atlantic Alliance. The gist of his argument is indeed a defense of NATO:

Several analysts have suggested that a more consensual alternative to NATO might have been available during the 1990s…. But this suggestion has never been plausibly integrated with a full account of the motivations for Russia’s imperial revanchism. Unless such a structure contained the essential element of NATO—a defensive alliance including the United States that would be activated in the event of an attack by Russia—it could not fulfill the necessary deterrent function.

He therefore dismisses the position that I expressed in my article, which has been the main position of the antiwar movement since the end of the Cold War, namely that NATO should have been disbanded and replaced by collective security organizations such as the OSCE (which includes most countries of Europe and the former USSR) and the UN—a position that naturally implies that the latter two organizations be revamped and enhanced so as to be effective guarantors of world peace.

More seriously still, Dale postulates a “Russian imperial revanchism” that should have been taken into account since the 1990s, rendering necessary an anti-Russian “defensive alliance including the United States.” Dale is hence repeating the hawkish discourse of those who, in the wake of the USSR’s collapse, advocated NATO’s extension to countries formerly dominated by Russia. The Western rightwing “realist” worldview, most prominently epitomized in the 1990s by Zbigniew Brzezinski, was built upon a quasi-racist postulate of atavistic Russian imperialism.

In opposition to that, the progressive worldview argued that the reactions of nations are very much shaped by economic and political conditions, which is why progressives denounced the neoliberal “shock therapy” fostered by the United States in Russia in the 1990s, opposed NATO’s extension, and argued instead for its replacement with inclusive collective security organizations such as the abovementioned. (A detailed account of the period and these debates is provided in my book.) In sum, this is but another iteration of the old political dispute between the conservative perspective predicated on the postulate that the present is perennial and the progressive perspective arguing that another world is possible.

 

Gilbert Achcar is currently professor of Development Studies and International Relations at SOAS, University of London. His most recent book is The New Cold War: The United States, Russia and China from Kosovo to Ukraine.

Photo: Creative Commons

 

 

Black Candidates for President - Part 3

Four Black Presidential Candidates – 1968

By: July 14, 2023
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Clockwise: Charlene Mitchell, Eldrige Cleaver, Channing E. Phillips, Dick Gregory – all Black presidential candidates in 1968

This is the third of a series of article about Black political candidates for the two highest offices of president and vice-president of the United States. The idea of writing this series originally begun when Cornel West announced his candidacy, the story of Black political candidates for the highest offices take on a new significance in light of Kamala Harris’ current campaign. This is the list of candidates that we discuss in this series, though the four candiates of 1968 are discussed in one article.

  • George Edwin Tayler, candidate of the National Negro Liberty Party, sometimes known as the National Liberty Party in 1904;
  • Clifton Berry, of the Socialist Workers Party in 1964;
  • Charlene Mitchell of the Communist Party in 1968;
  • Eldridge Cleaver with the Peace & Freedom Party in 1968;
  • Dick Gregory as a write-in candidate in 1968;
  • Channing Emery Phillips as a Democrat, all in 1968.
  • Shirley Chisholm, Democrat, in 1972;
  • Angela Davis,  Communist Party for vice-president in 1984 and 1988;
  • Jesse Jackson, Democrat, for president in 1984 and 1988;
  • Ron Daniels, People’s Party candidate in 1992;
  • Cynthia McKinney, Green Party candidate 2008;
  • Cornel West, independent, in 2024;
  • Barack Obama, Democratic candidate in 2008 and 2012;
  • and finally Kamala Harris for vice president in 2020 for president in 2024.

We are currently (first week of August) editing these pieces. The essay on George Edwin Taylor has yet to be posted.

1968 – Four Black Candidates 

The annus mirabilis of the left around the world, 1968, saw four Black candidates nominated for president of the United States: Charlene Mitchell on the Communist Party line, Eldridge Cleaver with the Peace & Freedom Party, and Dick Gregory as a write-in candidate, and Channing Emery Phillips as a Democrat. the first three, each had a distinct political position and style, represented the same strategic approach, running on a minor third-party line. Charlene Mitchell’s campaign seems to have been intended to lift the profile of the Communist Party and to recruit to it, while both Cleaver and Gregory—who had been rivals for the Peace and Freedom Party nomination—sought to build the anti-war and civil rights movement. Phillips’ nomination was purely honorific in cognition of his work for Robert F. Kennedy and the Democrats. It was the bestowing of an honor, not a campaign. We examine these candidates’ experience to see what they can teach us.

Charlene Mitchell for President

We begin this discussion with the first Black woman candidate for president in U.S. history who ran in 1968 on the Communist Party ticket Charlene Mitchell. Her parents had been part of the great migration moving first to Cincinnati and then to Chicago where she grew up. At 13 she joined American Youth for Democracy, then the youth organization of the Communist Party. Three years later, in 1946, at the age of 16, she had joined the Communist Party that was then a thoroughly Stalinist organization at the height of its influence, when it had 75,000 members, received 100,000 votes for its candidates in national campaigns, and had a periphery of at least a million activists with which it was engaged. But later the party lost momentum, stalled, and began to crumble.

The Communist Party’s problems had begun before Mitchell joined. Thousands of members left the party following the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, in which the two totalitarian powers, Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union reached non-aggression agreement and subsequently both invaded and divided Poland, which led thousands of members of leave the party. In the 1940s, the CP overcame that setback and recruited tens of thousands of new members as it led both labor organizing drives and Black civil rights struggles. But then during World War II, it lost some Black members when it endorsed the labor union’s no-strike pledge and tried to restrain the Black civil rights movement, fearing it could interfere with war production.

Mitchell joined at the end of the war, during the party’s peak, but in the post-war period the party faced several crises. The new leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, gave a speech in February of 1956 denouncing Joseph Stalin for crimes against “fellow Communists and the Soviet People.” That was followed in October of 1956 by the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary to crush a workers’ rebellion against the Communist government there. These two events led tens of thousands of CPUSA members to tear up their membership cards and leave the party.

During this same period, the Cold War and the anti-Communist crusades of Senator Joseph McCarthy and others led many Communists to leave the party for fear of losing their jobs or even going to prison. So, in the decade of the 1950s, now an organization under siege, the CP declined to about 7,000 members, a membership riddled with FBI informers and divided into rival factions.

When in the 1960s the Cold War ended and a New Left arose, the new young activists were alienated by the Communist Party’s ongoing loyalty to the Soviet Union and orientation to the labor union bureaucracy and the Democratic Party. Leftists took their political activism elsewhere, mostly to liberal, anti-war candidates in the Democratic Party or, as the Sixties unfolded, to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Black Panther Party, or small Trotskyist and Maoist groups. This, then, was the general situation when Mitchell, who never publicly differed with or criticized the Communist Party’s politics (something she wouldn’t do until 1986) ran for president in 1968. She had to defend the CP’s history of deeply flawed domestic and international politics–such as the no-strike pledge in World War II and the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian Revolution. And she had to break through the persistent anti-Communism of politicians, the media, and much of the public that instinctively rejected a one-party dictatorship. She ran at the peak of leftist and social movements in the United States and around the world, which was ironically also the nadir of the influence of the CPUSA.

Charlene Mitchell did not expect to receive many votes, largely because of the onerous process of gathering petition signatures to get on the ballot. Nevertheless, she thought it important to get the Communist Party’s ideas before the public. Though there were also little support for the CP because it was not part of the radical movements and remained oriented to the labor bureaucracy and the Democratic Party. So, in 1968, as Black urban rebellions spread to scores of cities, anti-war protests grew into the hundreds of thousands demanding “Out Now!”, and the women’s liberation movement emerged, the Communist Party appeared on the ballot in only four states and Mitchell and her running mate Michael Zagarell, received a national total of only 1,000 votes. To put this campaign and the others we will consider into perspective, consider that Republican Richard Nixon won the election with 31.7 million votes, Democrat Hubert Humphrey came in second with 31.2 million, and George Wallace, notorious defender of racial segregation in the South, received almost 10 million or 13.5 percent of all votes cast. For Mitchell and the CPUSA, the campaign was a debacle.

Mitchell’s obituary in the New York Times says that “her candidacy put a new face on the Communist Party,” but that is overly generous. The results suggest that her campaign which generated so little resonance could not have advanced the Communist Party, the Black movement, or American society. Though her later defense of philosopher and fellow CP member Angela Davis may well have helped the party.

Davis had been arrested in 1970, charged with providing weapons used in the killing of a Marin County judge as three Black men on trial were also killed.. Mitchell organized Davis’ successful defense, and she was acquitted in 1972. Based on that experience Mitchell then established the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. 

One has to ask: What was the point of Mitchell’s campaign? Was it worth it? What did it accomplish? In 1968, Mitchell’s national total of 1,000 votes demonstrated that she and her party were utterly irrelevant in American politics. Her candidacy was too insignificant to label her a spoiler who might have jeopardized the Democratic Party candidate Hubert Humphrey. In any case, much of the left at that time disdained Humphrey and supported peace candidate Eugene McCarthy, or Robert Kennedy, who was assassinated during the campaign. Her campaign principally revealed the political  insignificance of the Communist Party.

Eldridge Cleaver for President

Far more interesting and somewhat more significant left third party candidates in 1968 were Eldridge Cleaver and Dick Gregory. Both Cleaver and Gregory were involved in the Peace and Freedom Party, an expression of the anti-war movement (“Peace”) and the civil rights movement (“Freedom”). Founded in 1967, through the collaboration of small far left parties like the International Socialists and the Bay Area Revolutionary Union and the Black Panthers, both Cleaver and Gregory vied for the nomination. The new party chose Eldridge Cleaver as its presidential candidate in California, but Gregory, who had left P&F,  nonetheless claimed to represent the party as a write-in candidate. We turn first to Cleaver.

Cleaver’s parents had migrated from Arkansas to California when he was a child, and he grew up in Los Angeles. He spent eight years in prison for rape and assault with intent to murder, from 1958 until 1966 when he was paroled. In prison, he read the Communist Manifesto. Out of prison, he joined the newly-formed Black Panther Party and soon became one of its leaders at a time when it had 2,000 members in several cities, a large following among young Black people, and a national reputation as a militant armed defender of Black rights and  revolutionary organization. His book Soul on Ice (1968), which he had written three years before in Folsom Prison to describe the Black experience, “the colonization of the Black soul,” was well received, as a result of which he gained a national reputation among left and intellectual circles. 

When nominated for president in 1968, Cleaver, as a leader of the Black Panther Party, had a real base in California’s Black communities. Beyond that, he represented the leftwing of the broader Black movement. Because he would not be 35 by the time of the election, some states disqualified him from the ballot. Still, he won only 36,571 votes, a minuscule percentage of the total. (I, then 23 years old, cast my first presidential vote for Cleaver that year.) A decade later, Cleaver had moved into the rightwing of the Republican Party, but the experiment of which he had been the public face was the token of what might have been a real mass party in America fighting for a foreign policy of peace and a domestic policy of freedom and justice. But few in the movement were prepared to break with the Democrats.

Dick Gregory for President 

Dick Gregory also ran his campaign for president as an expression of the Black freedom and anti-war movements. Funny, angry, and brilliant at political debate, he had a popular following as a stand-up comedian, author, and activist who was often on the frontline of the struggle.

Gregory was born into a poor family in St. Louis, Missouri. A track star at Sumner High School, he won a scholarship to Southern Illinois University, where he set track records  as the outstanding athlete of 1953. Drafted in 1954, he began his stand-up career in Army talent shows. In 1961, he got a big break when Hugh Hefner, publisher of Playboy magazine and a liberal, hired Gregory to perform at the Playboy Club. Gregory not only performed. He also produced LP records of his comedy act. Meanwhile, Gregory began to write; his book, Nigger: An Autobiography  (1964), eventually sold over a million copies.  

Gregory divided his time between his career and the civil rights movement; he was jailed several times, engaged in hunger strikes, and while trying to calm the situation during the 1965 Watts rebellion, he was shot in the leg. A fighter against racism and an opponent of the Vietnam War, Gregory felt that the movement had to become political and he was willing to start the process. In 1967, Gregory ran as a write-in candidate for mayor of Chicago against notorious machine politician Richard J. Daley.

Gregory then decided to run as an independent write-in presidential candidate, but he was also offered the ballot line of several small independent parties in different states, which he accepted. Listening to him speak at UCLA in May 1968, one can hear not only his acerbic comedy, but also his anger, and also his hope for the future based on the young people, whom he saw as the country’s greatest moral force. He won 47,097 votes, more than Cleaver’s 36,623 and Charlene Mitchell’s 1,000. Gregory remained a radical activist for decades.

All three of these campaigns shared the common problem of being either carried out by very small, weak parties, or as write-in campaigns. Perhaps an independent Black party might be much more successful, but it would have to be larger, stronger, and better funded than these were, since most voters feel they would be wasting their vote  on a small party. Mitchell’s campaign had the added problem that it was principally a campaign of the Communist Party, which was still viewed as a pariah by many, either because of the anti-Communist campaigns of the two previous decades, or because some voters of various races including many leftists, rejected the Communist model of an authoritarian state. Cleaver and Gregory, meanwhile, were each trying to give expression to the Black freedom and anti-war movements, but neither movement was  big enough, strong enough, or united enough to create the kind of party that they needed. 

Finally, Channing E. Phillips, a man much like Cornel West, was nominated at the Democratic Party Convention. Phillips, Brooklyn born and raised, served in the army during World War II and then studied at Virginia Union University and then Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School. He became a professor at Howard University and the pastor of Lincoln Temple, United Church of Christ. He was a local civil rights activist and headed up Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign in Washington, D.C. in 1968. After Kennedy’s assassination, Phillips was nominated for president as a favorite son candidate, receiving 68 votes, far behind Humphrey, McCarthy, and George McGovern.

Considering that 1968 was the apogee of the social movements of the second half of the twentieth century, the experiences of the four Black candidates that we have considered were disappointing. Many factors no doubt contributed to their failure to find a mass following. They were Black in a racist society where many white at that time would have refused to even consider a Black candidate. These candidates stood on the leftwing of American politics, and even though that was the time of its greatest strength, the left still represented only a small percentage of Americans. The two-party political system and state laws, the difficulty of other parties getting on the ballot, was a serious obstacle. The media often marginalized third party candidates and frequently denied them a role in debates. Finally, of course, the capitalists put up vast sums to support the major party candidates, while the opponents could only raise small amounts from the occasional wealthy donor and the grassroots of the movements.

The next part in this series will look at the experiences of two Black women candidates, Shirley Chisholm for president and Angela Davis for vice-president in the 1970s and 80s.

The next article in this series will look at the experience of Shirley Chisholm

[Thanks to Bill Fletcher and Michael Letwin for reading and commenting on this article. I alone am responsible for the views expressed here and for any errors. – DL]

Ukraine and the violence of abstraction

By: July 10, 2023
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Gilbert Achcar has long been one of the more nuanced socialist commentators on foreign affairs. In particular, he has considered the difficulties associated with the use of Western hard power in situations where one function of that power has been to protect human life or progressive formations. Whether one agrees or not in any given case, no one can accuse him of delivering off-the-peg answers.

Nonetheless, in a recent article on Ukraine for Labour Hub (and re-posted on New Politics) Achcar falls into a trap common amongst leftists seeking to reconcile their sympathy for Ukrainians with overarching opposition to the projection of Western hard power. The method of these commentators is unsatisfactory because it functions by means of abstractions: not the sort of abstraction which is unavoidable as a part of any theoretically grounded argument; but the reliance on key terms that only function within the argument by virtue of fundamental vagueness.

The problem to which this method is applied, however — war — is necessarily and brutally concrete. When the reconciliation between suspicion toward Western hard power and Ukrainian interests fails, it is typically Ukrainians who lose out. The first and most fundamental areas in which this method operates concerns the supply of weapons.

Achcar on military aid

Achcar criticizes a motion passed by the British trade union GMB at its conference last month. The motion held that “Ukraine is . . . fully entitled to seek to import the most modern and technologically advanced weapons systems from across the world to resist the attacks and regain its territory.”

Achcar says this is

“tantamount to supporting quantitatively and qualitatively unlimited arms deliveries that would enable the Ukrainian military to escalate the war and thereby increase the risks for Ukraine’s population as well as for the whole world. . . . Ukraine’s legitimate cause is thus used to dignify what is basically a thoroughly pro-NATO militarist stance.”

Naturally, this raises the question of what quantitative and qualitative limits Achcar proposes to set. A ten-point program at the article’s end provides no real answers, simply supporting “Ukraine’s legitimate right to self-defense and for its ability to acquire defensive means from whichever source available.” In the piece, he neither defines nor explains by example what weapon systems he considers defensive and offensive. There is no generally accepted definition of this distinction. In crude terms, a weapon is offensive when the forces using it are moving forward, and defensive when they are repulsing an attack or retreating. Ukraine used similar weapons during its successful offensives to retake Kherson and Kharkiv last autumn, as it had defensively until that point. The operational theory of “active defense” suggests that offensive tactics are necessary component of defensive warfare.

Achcar accepted in a February article for The Nation that Ukraine should be supported to retake territory up to the pre-24 February 2022 line. (He refers to certain “above-mentioned limits” that ought to apply to any NATO escalation, but it is not clear which of the limits he has discussed in the article, whether technological or geographical, he is endorsing, since his remarks on some of these are equivocal.)

Regardless, this poses a problem for his position: clearly weapons that could be used to push Russia back to that line could also be used to go beyond it. The problem arises theoretically from an attempt to limit the state of Ukraine’s gains through the qualitative means supplied to achieve them, which is a fundamentally bad approach. Because Ukraine is so reliant on supplies of Western ammunition and finance, the reality is that the West exercises strong control, irrespective of how high-tech Ukraine’s weapons are. If Ukraine regains all its land up to the border of Crimea, and if, hypothetically, the US judges that incursion into Crimea would present an unacceptable risk of nuclear escalation, it can use its control of the ammunition pipeline to prevent further Ukrainian operations. Limiting Ukraine’s qualitative technological edge only decreases the prospect of Ukraine reaching any goal whatsoever – either an efficient defense or regaining more ground. The appropriate mechanism for limiting quantitative territorial gains, if this is the objective, is quantitative limits on supply of ammunition. (There is also no guarantee that the pre-2022 Russian-held areas of the Donbas will be taken last. Ukraine recently liberated a village it had not held since 2014.)

The problem with Achcar’s approach – which seeks to link certain varieties of armament to escalatory risks, based on an unsustainable distinction between offensive and defensive equipment – is demonstrated by one case in which Achcar has been specific. In a March 2022 article for New Politics, Achcar opposed “the delivery of air fighters” because they are “not strictly defensive,” and would “risk significantly aggravating Russian bombing.” But if Ukraine received no new aircraft at all, its air force would inevitably be entirely neutralized, especially because only Russia manufactures spare parts for its legacy equipment. Ukraine would therefore be limited by existing stocks of parts among friendly nations, and allegedly – although some reporting leaves room for doubt – cannibalizing the jets that have been sent from Poland and Slovakia for spares. The consequences for its defense would be severe, which is why the US has greenlit the delivery of F-16s by third parties. The announcement is not proven to be linked to any particular Russian escalation: the blowing of the Kakhovka dam just over two weeks later seems more likely to be linked to the brewing Ukrainian offensive in that vicinity, which it seemed designed to render more difficult. That the reservoir’s water level had been allowed to get so high suggests that there had been a standing intention to blow it up – it was just a matter of when.

As this suggests, it is not clear that Russia’s escalations are primarily linked to the supply of certain technology from the West, rather than Russia’s own frustrations with its failures, however caused. It would be strange to think that, were it not for the West supplying arms, Russia would be meekly willing to accept defeat without seeking to escalate in response. Consider that the intensification of long-range attacks on civilian infrastructure in October 2022 appeared to correspond to the appointment of General Sergey Surovikin, who is notable for his preference for such tactics. In turn, Surovikin’s appointment may have been prompted, or at least brought forward, by Ukraine’s successful attack on the Crimean Bridge, which took place earlier the same day, and involved no known Western input.

Furthermore, even if the decision to send the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) in Spring 2022 did cause Putin to escalate attacks on Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure several months later, it was nonetheless the correct strategic decision: first, because it was a necessary component of relieving artillery pressure on Ukrainian lines, and stabilizing them; and second, because the West was able to counter-escalate by supplying more and better anti-aircraft systems, including NASAMS and PATRIOT. Not all escalation is undesirable: on the contrary, escalation that an opponent cannot match is the principle means for any warfighting party to achieve its objectives. It is certainly quicker and surer than the alternative, which is to hope that the opponent runs out of steam. In this sense, allowing Ukraine to achieve ascendancy of escalation, within certain bounds, is desirable.

Chomsky on military aid

Comments by Noam Chomsky raise structurally similar issues, in much more problematic form.

Early in the conflict, in interviews for Current Affairs and the Intercept, Chomsky opposed sending “advanced weapons.” In an interview with Bill Fletcher Jr., he seemed to identify the Javelin man-portable anti-tank missile system as “advanced” – the system was vital, along with the British-Swedish N-LAW, in the salvation of Kyiv during the early weeks of the war. In April 2022, during the debate over whether to send the GMLRS, Chomsky told the Global Policy Journal that those calling to send more weapons were effectively working to “prolong the conflict.” When the GMLRS, which would qualify as “advanced,” was sent, it allowed Ukraine to systematically destroy ammunition dumps and command posts, and thereby stabilize their defensive lines. (During the interview with Fletcher Jr, presumably inadvertently, Chomsky quotes wrongly from a White House press release, in such a way as to introduce the phrases “advanced weapons” and “advanced anti-tank weapons,” which appear nowhere within it.) Chomsky’s policy at the vital, early stage of the war, is best read as a proscription on weapons that proved vital to save Kyiv – though his vagueness will save him from accountability in the eyes of some.

Subsequently, the term “advanced” disappeared in interviews with Owen Jones, Meduza, and New Politics. Speaking to Meduza, Chomsky goes so far as to support “any weapon of protection.” He also appears to offer a broad caveat that supply of matériel should be limited by nuclear risk. Indeed, this is also the policy of the Biden White House. We can infer that Chomsky has a different assessment of the nuclear risks associated with a given sort of equipment than Biden, but Chomsky never has the courage to say in precise terms what equipment these considerations should prohibit, and hence allow the consequences for Ukraine of refusing to supply them to be evaluated. Abstraction functions as a means of evading responsibility.

Similarly, Chomsky never identifies what an advanced weapon is, what a weapon of protection is, or if there is such a thing as an advanced weapon of protection. He never specifies how one is supposed to know whether a given system will be escalatory, except through it being advanced. (Similar to Achcar, the only thing he specifically doesn’t want to send is jets – although these have now been promised.)

While Achcar’s position is much preferable to Chomsky’s, both adopt forms of words that allow them to sound critical notes on arms supply, but which are too vague to compel accountability for any particular restriction (except of military jets), and its likely or real consequences. They should be more specific. When their specific recommendations have not been followed, as in the case of jets, they should make a sober assessment of the consequences, both in terms of Ukraine’s improved capacities, and Russia’s real response. This means engaging in detail with military reality, on both a technical and strategic level.

Cluster munitions have now been approved for transfer to Ukraine on a stop-gap basis, and there have been recent reports that ATACMS munitions for the GMLRS (M142 HIMARS and M270) may join them. We may therefore be approaching the point where, qualitatively, Ukraine has close to the full range of ground-based materiel it has publicly requested. Even in terms of aviation, only the Typhoon, F-18, and latest F-16s (rather than the mid-life update model currently on offer), and certain air-launched missiles are at issue. It is understood that F-35s will not be provided in order not to expose them to Russian radar profiling and human intelligence collection. The United States does not sell the F-22 and there are not enough Swedish-made Grippens available.

There can be no doubt that several key decisions on the supply front have been taken too late. The few leftists who have called in advance for the GMLRS, F-16s, Storm Shadow, ATACMS, etc. have distinguished themselves through a clear commitment to Ukraine’s cause, and an understanding of its needs, to which the capitals of the NATO powers have only latterly acceded. Each delay has been a lost opportunity for Ukraine to exploit qualitative edge in both offense and defense. We cannot know what lives they have cost, in pursuit of the false hope that limited quality of armaments was a tool to manage escalation that could be used whilst securing adequate battlefield outcomes.

Achcar on NATO and “collective security organizations”

A second sort of abstraction is revealed in Achcar’s call to replace NATO with “collective security organizations such as the OSCE and the UN.” These organizations exist, but have been entirely powerless to do anything about Russia’s invasion. The anti-NATO variety of neo-campist identified by Achcar have a ready answer to this problem: they insist that, were it not for NATO and its so-called “aggressive expansion” (in fact, a series of small countries close to Russia joining in order to seek a measure of protection), Russia would not have invaded Ukraine in the first place, in which case the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the UN would be adequate.

The truth is that there were several drivers of Russia’s invasions. In 2014, Putin wanted to prevent Ukraine moving closer to the EU economically, and to establish an open conflict to reduce the already minuscule prospect of Ukraine joining NATO to zero. By 2022, he also seemed to fear that increased military cooperation between Ukraine and the West threatened to make the country a tougher nut to crack in any future invasion, and hence harder to bully. He also claimed to have been concerned that anti-missile emplacements would in future be established within Ukraine, and that these could notionally be used to launch offensive missiles too. On both occasions, Putin likely wanted to shore up his domestic popularity (as previous “military operations” had done); demonstrate that popular, anti-plutocratic mobilizations, such as Ukraine’s 2013-14 Maidan Revolution, would not be tolerated; and give expression to a chauvinist Imperial vision of a greater Russia to which Ukrainians, whether they like it or not, by rights belonged.

Thus, he had a variety of motivations. Between 2014 and 2022, Ukraine was therefore in a difficult position. On the one hand, clearly increased military cooperation with the West would antagonize Putin. On the other, failure to cooperate with the West at all would leave Ukraine in its 2014 position: wholly unprepared to resist unilateral assaults on its territory. Ukrainian leaders were acutely aware that, in that year, Russia would have been able to overrun it completely, had it wished to do so. In the subsequent eight years, however, domestic reforms and external military cooperation allowed it, against every expert prediction, to preserve the autonomy of its domestic democratic order when the full-scale assault did come. Because there were multiple factors driving Putin’s aggression toward Ukraine, it wasn’t possible before 2022 (and it still is not possible now) to say that the full-scale invasion would not have happened anyway, and that Ukraine would not have hence been rapidly subordinated to Moscow.

This is the nature of the inter-state system: under ordinary circumstances, state actors are bound by no de facto institutional limits, hence their behavior is unpredictable, and hence it is rational to undertake security-seeking behavior by way of precaution. It is part of the tragedy of that system that sometimes these structural incentives produce inflammatory spirals. Sometimes, diplomacy can short-circuit such spirals by giving each side confidence in the other’s future behavior. But this is not possible when one party has shown a willingness to disregard formal agreements, as Russia did with respect to both the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, and the first Minsk agreement. Clearly, even once a formal treaty is signed, that power’s assurances cannot be relied upon. It would be irrational for any state not to take precautionary measures under such circumstances.

In the absence of NATO, could collective security organizations such as the OSCE and the UN have prevented the invasion of Ukraine? No one can assert this with confidence. Even if a collective security organization had been able to give Putin assurances over the possible deployment of anti-missile batteries, it would not have dealt with the tension between the dynamics of liberal modernity in Ukraine, which were pushing it closer to the European Union, and Putin’s authoritarian imperialism, based as it was on denial of Ukraine’s existence as a distinct nation, and the assumed right to set limits to its politics. It was this tension, crystallized in the issue of Ukraine’s potential accession to the European Union, that provoked the initial invasion in 2014.

There is every reason to think that this fundamental tension remained at the forefront of Putin’s mind. His apparent interpretation of the fundamentally-vague Minsk II agreement, as reflected by demands articulated through the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics in 2015, would involve measures that, in one summary “would in effect destroy Ukraine as a sovereign country . . . introducing a constitutional Trojan Horse that would give the Kremlin a lasting presence in Ukraine’s political system and prevent the authorities in Kyiv from running the country as an integrated whole.” As Putin continued to press for the implementation of the agreement (as he purported to understand it) during 2021, it is likely that he retained the objective to dominate Ukraine’s internal politics.

Several analysts have suggested that a more consensual alternative to NATO might have been available during the 1990s, including M.E. Sarotte. But this suggestion has never been plausibly integrated with a full account of the motivations for Russia’s imperial revanchism. Unless such a structure contained the essential element of NATO – a defensive alliance including the United States that would be activated in the event of an attack by Russia – it could not fulfill the necessary deterrent function. (A defensive alliance not including the United States could theoretically fulfill a similar role, but only if the component countries significantly expanded their defense spending, military-industrial base, and combat power.) Similarly any “security guarantee” that Ukraine would be able to rely on would necessarily have the same qualities. Even if Russia were to sign such a guarantee itself, for face-saving purposes, everyone would understand that the instrument’s real function was to provide a defensive alliance for Ukraine against Russia. No one seriously believes that the United States might invade Ukraine. Because war requires an industrial foundation, that real alliance would inevitably be reflected in networks of production, just as NATO is.

Membership in NATO has never carried with it any obligation to become involved in extraterritorial, non-Article 5 operations, still less those of the United States. But the reality is, irrespective of any formal arrangement, as long as the Russian threat persists, Ukraine will feel a substantial pressure to participate in these – as it did in Afghanistan and Iraq – in order to strengthen its relationship with the material guarantor of its security.

The notion of any “collective security” organization that meaningfully incorporated Russia, and hence gave it institutional say over the deployment of the organization’s resources, would not be able to perform the functions for which is needed. The very notion of a “collective security organization” is an abstraction whose insufficiency becomes clear as soon as it meets the particular realities of Russia’s desire to dominate its neighbors. Like the notion of “defensive” weapons meeting the reality of war, although well-intentioned, it has the effect of confusing readers, and preventing a thorough engagement with Ukrainian reality.

Adolfo Gilly, Great Latin American Left Intellectual, Dead at 94

By: July 5, 2023
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Adolfo Gilly in his forties.

Adolfo Gilly, one of the great Latin American left intellectuals of his time, has died at the age of 94. He lived his life on the left as an activist and analyst offering his interpretation of the most important events in Latin America and especially in Mexico. As Tony Wood writes in the recently published Adolfo Gilly, Paths of Revolution: Selected Essays, a book that provides an excellent overview of his career, “Adolfo Gilly has lived many lives: leftist militant, journalist, political prisoner, public intellectual, historian.” And, we might add, led them all well. While he began as a Trotskyist revolutionary, Gilly later became a supporter and advocate of mass movements political and social from below, but throughout his life maintained his humanistic, democratic, and radical ideals.

Born in Argentina in 1928, Gilly helped create the Workers’ Revolutionary Movement (MOR), but at the end of the 1940s he moved toward the Trotskyist Fourth International (FI). In Latin America, the FI was dominated by the tenacious, daring, and later in. his life rather bizarre figure of Juan Posadas. The FI sent Gilly to Bolivia in 1956, shortly after the Bolivian Revolution of 1952 in which the Trotskyists of the Revolutionary Workers Party (POR) had played a central if ultimately disappointing role. From 1960 to 1962 he worked for the FI in Europe, mostly in Italy. Then in 1962, following the Revolution of 1959 he was sent to Cuba, but he became persona non grata because of his critical articles. From 1964-1966 he was in the Guatemalan Revolutionary Movement November 13 (MR-13), but the government’s fierce repression forced him to flee to Mexico to save his own life, but shortly after his arrival he was arrested, tried and imprisoned by the Mexican government. He was held from 1966 to 1972 in Lecumberri Prison where he wrote his Marxist history of the Mexican Revolution, La revolución interrumpida (The Interrupted Revolution) published in English as The Mexican Revolution), the book that won him the reputation of Marxist historian of Mexico and first rate intellectual.

When released from prison, Gilly went to Europe and worked for the FI there, but as he writes in an autobiographical essay, he found the work alienating. Disillusioned with Posadas, he returned to Mexico and joined the Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT), a quite exciting small but growing left party in the late 1970s and 1980s. But when Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, son of the legendary president Lázaro Cárdenas, broke with the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Gilly supported his presidential campaign and then with the founding of the Party of the Democratic Revolution, he became an advisor to Cárdenas. When the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) led the Chiapas Rebellion in 1994, Gilly became a supporter of the movement and interpreter of the events. An academic in Mexico, Gilly’s professional career has been as peripatetic and as stellar as his revolutionary experience, teaching at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and at the University of Chicago, Columbia, NYU, Stanford, Yale, and the National Humanities Center.

I remember when in June of 1971 I picked up Gilly’s La Revolución interrumpida in El Sótano bookstore on the Alameda Central in Mexico City and then read it on the bus back to San Diego, California where I then lived. I found the book’s analysis of the revolution, footnoted throughout with references to Karl Marx and other socialists, to be a revelation. I was not the only one. Octavia Paz, the great leftist Mexican poet shared the same view, that Gilly had made a major contribution. Only later did I learn that Gilly had written La Revolución interrumpida while he was in prison. Fifty years later it remains for me—on the shelf with a dozen other excellent histories—the most important book on the subject. It turned me into a lifelong reader of and admirer of Gilly, even when I sometimes disagreed with him.

Gilly wrote two other major books on the Mexican Revolution and its history. For Gilly, the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940) represented the end of the revolution. His book El cardenismo, una utopía mexican (Cardenism, a Mexican Utopia) explains and examines Cárdenas’ attempt to create a kind of state-supported peasant socialism in Mexico. While it does not have the magisterial character of La Revolución interrumpida, El Cardenismo is full of interesting anecdotes and raises important questions. Finally, in this trinity of his major books, his monumental Felipe Ángeles, el estratega (Felipe Ángeles, the Strategist), a biography of the Mexican general who served the revolution. Gilly was fascinated with this hombre congruente, that is, this man of integrity, who though himself not a revolutionary, placed himself at its service. Beyond these three major histories of the Mexican Revolution Gilly wrote constantly, essays on the revolutionary movement in Central America in the 1980, on Mexican politics, and later on the Zapatistas in the 1990s and beyond.

Through these writings in Paths of Revolution you can see his evolution from Trotskyist revolutionary, to enthusiast for Lázaro’s and Cuauhtémoc’s left-nationalist populism, to champion and advocate of the Zapatista indigenous rebellion. His political evolution, I think, can be explained by the fact that for the first fifty years of his political life—from 1928 to 1979—revolution seemed on the agenda or at least a possibility, while from 1980s until today, though there have been many important social upheavals, neoliberal, conservative, reactionary, or authoritarian regimes have predominated. So, it seems that Gilly made the decision to support movements, parties, and leaders who might advance radical social and political causes as long as no new revolutionary opportunity presented itself, or until it did.

There is much more to say about Gilly and his work, hundreds of articles and various other books, but for now we say: Adolfo, thank you, we salute, and we will miss you.

Sources 

Adolfo Gilly, Paths of Revolution: Selected Essays. Edited with an Introduction by Tony Wood Translated by Lorna Scott Fox  (New York: Verso, 2022).

Francis Mulhern, Lives on the Left: A Group Portrait (New York: Verso, 2011). Adolfo Gilly, “What Exists Cannot Be True,” pp. 167-184.

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