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  • Life of a Salesman

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    Marine Le Pen’s partner had just left the country. A Jew of Algerian background, Louis Aliot had been dispatched to Israel to raise funds for the Front National (FN).

    Money was tight for the populists in 2012, and they were fishing for cash everywhere. Even from North African Jewish expats, sympathetic to the Front’s Islamophobia.

    “Bibi’s made a point of welcoming all manner of brownshirt,” Elie Schalit, my father said, as we ate Sukkot dinner. “He’s nostalgic for the old country.”

    The longtime security official, who continued to perform various diplomatic and military roles well into his retirement, knew Netanyahu well.

    He not only had worked with him, periodically since the 1980s, when Bibi first joined the foreign ministry. Elie had also known his father, Benzion, in Palestine, during the Mandate.

    “But why the FN?” I asked, sounding somewhat incredulous. “They’re the most overtly anti-Semitic of Europe’s right-wing parties. You’d think they’d push his Holocaust buttons.”

    “Because Bibi is imitating the affection his father, and his Irgun ilk, had for their former compatriots, the Poles, during the 1930s, who trained the IZL, to encourage the community to leave Poland.”

    Reading Anshel Pfeffer’s description of Netanyahu’s fidelity to his father’s politics in Bibi (Basic Books, 2018), it was not hard to recall my father’s harsh words.

    Friend of the Palestinians. Tel Aviv, April 2018.

    Contending that the Israeli premier’s politics are a direct consequence of his father Benzion Netanyahu’s influence, albeit via an American filter, the Haaretz reporter encapsulates what most members of Israel’s political echelon has always known about Bibi and his family.

    Benjamin Netanyahu is not so much an ideological innovator as a torch bearer, a salesman, for a lack of a better term, for his late father’s extremist politics, with all of their contradictory connections: Jewish but fascist, who fled anti-Semitism but was enamoured by anti-Semites.

    For anyone seeking to understand why Netanyahu’s government would ultimately give Poland a free pass to prosecute critics of its complicity in the Nazi genocide, and invite overt anti-Semites like Viktor Orban to Israel, Bibi’s history of the Netanyahu family accurately explains why.

    Pfeffer adds an interesting twist to what makes Zionism such a tragedy, to allude to Bernard Avishai’s 1985 book. Its revisionist exponents allowed themselves to follow the murderous logic of 19th Century nationalism to its fullest extent, to the degree that they would identify with Jewry’s own persecutors, far above and beyond the utility of repurposing their xenophobia.

    It would take the colonial context of Jewish settlement thousands of miles away from Central Europe, in Arab Palestine, to allow them to do that. The noticeable absence, albeit invisibility, of Arabs, throughout most of Bibi, is largely a reflection of that.

    For Benjamin Netanyahu the Palestinians, at their best, are a “diversion” according to Pfeffer – a fictitious people standing in for real Arab nation states such as Syria and Iraq, which, like Palestine, conveniently, did not exist as nation states until the first half of the twentieth century, largely as a consequence of Western imperialism.

    All it took for the Likud chief to enshrine their otherness in Israeli politics were the political campaigning tools he learned during his formative years spent living in the United States, where Netanyahu stayed through his graduate studies at MIT.

    A student of America’s soundbite culture (he even worked with coaches), Israel’s future prime minister learned to reiterate and link to maximum effect keywords such as “Arabs,” “Islam,” “terror” and “genocide” in his television appearances and books, first endearing himself to US media as a terrorism expert, eventually triumphing over a Shimon Peres-led Labour in the 1996 elections.

    Bibi hearts Trump. Tel Aviv, May 2018.

    Curiously, Pfeffer chooses to deemphasise Netanyahu’s propagandistic savoir-faire when discussing the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, which most Israeli analysts and historians agree paved the way for Bibi’s victory over Peres.

    Widely blamed for galvanising Israel’s extreme right to murder, Pfeffer singles out Ariel Sharon instead, rather than Netanyahu’s incitement of settlers, who were regularly calling for Rabin’s head. His rhetoric at the time was still fierce and he, more than anyone else, stood most to benefit from any tragedy. Realpolitik or not, it’s an unconvincing point.

    Pfeffer’s biography fully reflects the ethnic narcissism of Netanyahu’s politics. Palestinians have no real role in it, except as distant, impersonal foes engaged in a protracted conflict, who at best could be awarded limited self-rule. They as might as well be in Europe, along with the racist, anti-Semitic forces that helped accelerate Jewish immigration.

    Instead, they are primarily confined to Gaza, where, in Bibi’s last fifty pages, Pfeffer  recounts several Israeli campaigns in the territory – Summer Rains, Hot Winter, Cast Lead, Pillar of Defence and Protective Edge – into a little more than a single page, to demonstrate the premier’s disinterest in getting into it with the Palestinians.

    Only the latter operation, Protective Edge, gets any analysis, due to the fact that it was the most conventional, war-like conflict of Israel’s sojourns into the Strip following 2005’s Disengagement, in which Israel withdrew troops and settlers from the area. Though Pfeffer notes how many Palestinians were killed in the operation (over 2000), there is little analysis or commentary on what impact Protective Edge had on Israeli politics in the years following.

    The same criticism could be applied to the lack of his interrogation of the previous campaigns, too, all of which, particularly following the 2006 Lebanon War, were, in significant part, intended to restore the Israel Defence Force’s deterrence following its failure to defeat Hezbollah.  Without a doubt, the IDF’s periodic ‘mowing the lawn’ forays into Gaza have their own domestic logic. But the last decades’ campaigns have been particularly significant in building support for Netanyahu and his politics.

    The Palestinians might not exist, but Israel’s prime minister has nevertheless gone after the Arabs that matter to him, repeatedly interacting with regional counterparts for decades, both within and outside of Israel’s borders, taking a particular interest in engaging the Saudis. But the absence of any substantive discussions of these interactions in the book helps reinforce Pfeffer’s portrait of Netanyahu’s ethnocentric isolation, inside a country that, within its pre-1967 borders, is over 20% Muslim.

    For Bibi, this myopia is key to understanding the Likud chief’s personality. It is part and parcel of his profound dislike of non-Jews and Jewish liberals, which he developed growing up in the United States and then put into practice in Israeli politics, as though they were essential to Jewishness and Israeli national identity.

    The Netanyahu effect. Jerusalem, May 2018.

    An extension of Zionist anti-Diaspora sentiment, Netanyahu’s version, in Pfeffer’s view, is especially hypocritical, because of his reliance on right-wing American Jewish patronage. Without the support of Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Schneerson, and philanthropist Sheldon Adelson, where would Bibi be today? Their backing has been crucial to his success.

    The key, Bibi seems to suggest, is in recognising Netanyahu’s proclivity to contradiction. Repeatedly citing the premier for out and out lying (to the point of even negating major parts of his own books,) Pfeffer portrays Israel’s sophist-in-chief as being someone who routinely adjusts the truth to his own episodic requirements. That, in part, is how he has always won tight elections.

    The question is why someone so transparent could appeal to the hardscrabble communards that once defined Israel. Pfeffer doesn’t provide any answers, but the hints are there. Aside from the obvious cultural appeal of the worldview inherited from his father, his stewardship of the pro-market Likud to the Startup Nation era of instant tech millionaires and low unemployment helps.

    Perhaps, most tellingly, it is Netanyahu’s attraction to the laissez-faire ideology of Ayn Rand, as a student in the United States, that grounds it. Rand’s Jewish, albeit secular libertarianism, with its emphasis on rugged individualism, is a perfect metaphor for the isolated and lonely Israel of the present, forced to stake out and innovate not only economically but politically, as well.

    Photographs courtesy of the author. All rights reserved.

    Originally posted at Souciant Magazine.

  • Indefensible: Idlib and the Left

    Indefensible: Idlib and the Left

    This text was contributed to Freedom by Leila Al-Shami: British Syrian activist and writer, co-author (with Robin Yassin-Kassab) of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War. Leila’s blog on popular struggles, human rights and social justice from an anti-authoritarian perspective can be found here.

    On Saturday regime and Russian airstrikes intensified on Idlib in what appears to be a prelude to the long anticipated campaign to regain control of the province.

    Only a day before, thousands of Syrian men, women and children took the streets in over 120 cities towns and villages across the remaining liberated areas under the slogan ‘resistance is our choice’.

    They were demonstrating for their lives. Idlib is now home to three million people, a third of whom are children. Of the current population, over half have been displaced, or forcibly evacuated, to the province from elsewhere. Their options for fleeing the assault are limited. Borders are closed and there are no safe-zones left. They don’t want to be forcibly displaced from their homes. At the protests many held signs rejecting recent calls by UN envoy Staffan de Mistura to evacuate civilians to regime-controlled areas, where they could disappear into torture chambers or face forced conscription, as has happened to others before them. ‘Reconciliation’ in the Syrian context means a return to subjugation, humiliation and tyranny.

    Through signs and chants, the aim of the protests was clear: to prevent an assault by the regime and its backers, to show the world that there are civilians in Idlib whose lives are now under threat, and to affirm that they continue to refuse Assad’s rule. As-shaab yurid isqat al nizam (the people want the downfall of the regime) rang through the crowds, reminiscent of the early days of the uprising. They were not only protesting domestic fascism, but foreign imperialisms too – those of Russia and Iran – which have backed the dictator in his campaign to wipe out domestic opposition.

    Yet once again the calls of Syrian anti-war protesters were largely ignored by the western ‘anti-war left’. Instead of calling for an end to the bombing or supporting the victims of war, many have instead chosen to buy into the regime’s ‘War on Terror’ narrative that the aim of the assault is to wipe out militant jihadists. Such illusions should have been shattered on Saturday. Sham hospital in Has village, southern Idlib, was targeted by barrel bombs and missiles, taking it out of service. The hospital had been located underground, in a cave, in an ultimately futile attempt to protect it from aerial bombardment. According to the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations, three hospitals, two Civil Defence Centers and an ambulance system were attacked on 6 and 7 September in Idlib and northern Hama, leaving thousands without access to medical care.

    Extremist groups have a presence in Idlib – some have been sent by the regime itself following evacuation from elsewhere. Hayaat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS) with former links to Al Qaeda dominates much of the province with its 10,000 fighters. Yet far from being an ‘Al Qaeda stronghold’ HTS has failed to win support from much of the population which has continually resisted the group’s presence and hard-line ideology. At last Friday’s protests in Idlib city, HTS fired live ammunition to break up the demonstration. The crowd quickly turned on the militants calling them shabiha (an insult once reserved for regime thugs) and chanting “Jolani get out” – in reference to the group’s leader.

    Many on the ‘left’ claim that out of a population of three million individuals there are ‘no good guys left’ to support. Or believe the presence of a few thousand extremists is justification enough for razing Idlib to the ground and collectively punishing its residents. The invisible majority of Syrians who don’t use guns to wield power are dismissed as irrelevant. They choose to ignore those who have been resisting all forms of authoritarianism and are committed to creating a better future for their families, communities and society at large. They present a grotesquely simplified binary in which the choice is between Assad and Al Qaeda, as if the conflict and deep-rooted social struggle were a football match between two sides. The side they back is a fascist regime – because at least it is ‘secular’ – a regime which gasses children to death in their sleep, operates death camps in which dissidents are tortured to death and which has been accused by the UN of ‘the crime of extermination’. Anyone who resists a return to regime control is presented as an enemy and a legitimate target for attack. Freedom, democracy, social justice, dignity – they are goals to which only westerners should aspire. The rest should just shut up and make do.

    In this sinister and racist world view, everyone is either an Al Qaeda member or sympathizer. The fact that there are women in these conservative, rural communities that don’t dress like them, or have to courageously overcome numerous obstacles and threats to their safety in order to participate in the public sphere (as they did at last Friday’s protests) is presented as evidence of terrorist leanings, justification in itself for their annihilation. Instead of standing in solidarity with the courageous women in Idlib who are resisting both the regime and other extremist armed groups and fighting to overcome deeply entrenched traditional and patriarchal social mores, they would rather support a state which sent militia to carry out mass-rape campaigns in dissident communities, which inserts rats into the vaginas of female detainees. The dehumanization of Syrians has been so thorough that many struggle to believe that amongst the chaos and war-lords there may actually be ordinary human beings worthy of support – people like ‘us’.

    It is hard to understand how devastating bombing campaigns carried out by the Syrian state and Russia on densely populated residential areas, which have killed hundreds of thousands, can be ignored by anyone who claims to be ‘anti-war’. It seems Syrian lives are only meaningful if they’re destroyed by western bombs. Today’s ‘anti-imperialism’ is often used as a cover in support of totalitarian regimes, by people privileged enough to never have experienced what it’s like to live under them. Not content to ignore war crimes and other mass atrocities, attempts are also made to absolve the perpetrators from blame and deny that atrocities have occurred. Conspiracy theories, often originating in Russian state or far-right media, are circulated about chemical attack ‘false flags’ to white-wash regime crimes and justify the targeting of civilians and humanitarian workers. Syria has become a talking point to score political points without a second thought given to the real-life danger such false accusations place people in, or the deep pain and offence caused to the victims.

    In her recent book, Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution and the Rhetoric of Anti-imperialism, Rohini Hensman asks; ‘How has the rhetoric of anti-imperialism come to be used in support of anti-democratic counterrevolutions around the world?’ She argues that there are three kinds of ‘pseudo-anti-imperialists’. The first are those who believe that “‘the West’ has to be the only oppressor in all situations”, a “Western-centrism which makes them oblivious to the fact that people in other parts of the world have agency too, and that they can exercise it both to oppress others and to fight against oppression”. The second category consists of “neo-Stalinists” who “will support any regime that is supported by Russia, no matter how right wing it may be”. The third “consists of tyrants and imperialists, perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and aggression, who, as soon as they face a hint of criticism from the West, immediately claim that they are being criticised because they are anti-imperialists.”

    In support of her argument, Hensman gives a detailed overview of genuine anti-imperialism as opposed to ‘pseudo-anti-imperialism’ through case studies from Russia and Ukraine, Bosnia and Kosovo, Iran, Iraq and Syria. She shows how self-declared ‘leftists’ have repeatedly supported authoritarian regimes over people’s democratic struggles, spread anti-Muslim bigotry, built tactical alliances with fascists, spread conspiracy theories and Kremlin/state propaganda, and engaged in genocide/atrocity denial and victim blaming. Her book is a timely reminder that the narratives propagated around Syria, in which the far-left echoes the talking points of the far-right and places geo-politics over people’s struggles and lives, are emblematic of a much broader malaise.

    As bombs rain down on Idlib, few Syrians expect to see mass protests around the world in support of their cause or in defence of their lives. Those who claim a politics of ‘internationalism’ have abandoned them and retreated into isolationism or, worse, into apologia for fascism. Without addressing these issues the prospect of building an international movement against authoritarianism, imperialism, war and capitalism seems unlikely. In the meantime, we can expect the horrors which led the world to declare ‘never again’ to happen again, and again and again.

    Leila Al-Shami

    Featured image: protest in Idlib, 7th September 2018

    Originally posted at Freedom. 

  • The 2018 National Prison Strike: A Movement Making its Mark

    ImageOn August 21st, forty-seven years after the assassination of key movement organizer and theoretician George Jackson, prisoners across the country have once again begun mobilizing. Ranging from sit-ins to work stoppages, boycotts to hunger strikes, their actions have followed a nationwide call for sentencing reform, improved living conditions, greater access to rehabilitative programming, and an end to what strike organizers call “modern day slavery.”

    In the weeks leading up to the start of the strike, women and men held in prisons, jails, and immigration detention facilities in at least 17 states had confirmed their participation, a number that is sure to rise as news of the strike continues to spread. Such a high level of involvement in this strike suggests not simply the continuation of, but also a potential upsurge in a prison movement that, as an informational video has put it, is “self-organized, independent, and fighting against the brutality of the prison system.”

    Movement History, Making History 

    Initiated by Jailhouse Lawyers Speak (JLS), a collective of those providing legal aid and support to other prisoners, this year’s strike highlights the movement’s growing sophistication. JLS, which first announced the strike via Twitter, intentionally picked dates that bridge the anniversary of Jackson’s killing with the start of the 1971 Attica prison rebellion on September 9th.

    Previous national and statewide protests have demonstrated a similar political consciousness, indicative of organizers seeking to cultivate a sense of their movement’s place in history. The 2016 nationwide strike began on the 45th anniversary of the Attica rebellion (September 9th), the 2018 #OperationPush strikes in Florida coincided with the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday (January 15th), and the subsequent call for outside supporters to demonstrate fell on Juneteenth (June 19th), a holiday commemorating the emancipation of enslaved Africans in Texas following the end of the Civil War.

    These recent actions have been just a few of the coordinated protests that have broken out in the years since the 2010 work strikes throughout prisons in Georgia as well as the 2011 and 2013 Pelican Bay hunger strikes. Building on the lessons drawn from these and other protests, this national call prescribes a set of actions to take and a three-week window of time during which to take them, in order to deny prison officials the opportunity to preemptively lockdown their prisons in anticipation of a one-day refusal to work.

    Reflecting a growing operational flexibility, the national call also encourages those taking action to press concerns specific to their institutions, while also promoting a common set of ten demands. These demands include an end to felony disenfranchisement, poor prison conditions, racist over-charging and excessive sentencing, low — or in some instances, no wage — prison work policies, and repressive federal legislation like the 1996 Prisoner Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), a law designed to curtail the ability of prisoners to file federal lawsuits for violation of their constitutional rights.

    “Most of the demands are not actionable items that prison authorities are able to grant,” notes a zine promoting the strike. “The goal is not to hold out and win negotiations with officials, but to last those 19 days and punch the issue to the top of the political consciousness and agenda.”

    Although far from low-hanging fruit, these demands would still go a long way towards undercutting the inhumane and repressive environment in which many prisoners find themselves, and are thus worth the long-term struggle they would require. As an initial step in this struggle, organizers have made paramount raising public awareness about issues like the PLRA, which, while obscure to most, have significantly weakened any sense of prisoners’ rights.

    Poor Conditions and Prisoner Unity

    The need to raise public awareness about the repressive laws and harsh conditions facing prisoners across the country became even more apparent in April of this year following a bloody riot in Lee Correctional Institution, a maximum-security prison long considered the worst in South Carolina. While describing the riot as likely “gang-related,” officials also acknowledged that they made no efforts to intervene for some seven hours, thus leaving at least seven prisoners stabbed to death and dozens more seriously injured in the deadliest incident behind bars in the past quarter century.

    “Prisoners were placed in some really aggravated conditions,” said JLS spokesperson Amani Sawari, describing the events leading up to the riot. “They were placed on lockdown all day. They weren’t allowed to eat or use the bathroom. They were placed in units with rival gang members. And then their lockers were taken away, so they didn’t have any safe place to put their personal belongings, which really aggravated and caused tensions among prisoners — to the point where fights broke out, inevitably.”

    JLS has initially planned to release its strike call in 2019, but instead launched it just weeks after the Lee riot in an effort to shift the public conversation back to the systemic issues — like chronic understaffing, prisoner overcrowding, and generally inhumane conditions — that many critical observers point to as the central causes of the riot. Earlier this year, for instance, an investigative report found that as South Carolina has failed to allocate more money to hire new guard or make headway on other conditions issues, the number of inmates killed in the state’s prisons “more than doubled in 2017 from the year before and quadrupled from two years ago.”

    Considering these circumstances, JLS’s strike call should be seen as serving a dual purpose — shifting public attention back to the issue of the poor conditions behind bars, while at the same time redirecting the attention of prisoners back towards the need for unity. The potential of the latter was perhaps best exemplified during the Pelican Bay Hunger strikes of the early 2010s, as high-ranking prison leaders successfully hammered out an “agreement to end hostilities,” or protracted truce, as part of broader struggle against California’s routinization of solitary confinement.

    “One of the things we’ve noticed in a number of different states, right now I can tell you at least 8 different states, we’ve seen truces being made by gang members, street organizations I like to call them,” offered a JLS organizer during a recent interview. “We’ve seen a lot of truces, they’ve been made across the lines. Obviously, we still have some flutters here or there, but the more it’s getting inside the prisons about August the 21st, the more prisoners are getting to the table, the more prisoners are talking.”

    As the example of the Lee riot demonstrates, officials are all too willing to use the divisions amongst prisoners as a way to maintain control, even if these divisions devolve into violent conflicts. Consequently, forging a working unity across racial lines, religious persuasions, and gang affiliations is an essential aspect of prisoner organizing.

    Prison Slavery and Protracted Struggle

    The start of the 2018 National Prison strike also fell on the anniversary of Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, further connecting the ongoing prisoner-led resistance to the system of chattel slavery in ways both subtle and overt.

    Recasting mass incarceration as “prison slavery” — usually by way of the Thirteenth Amendment — is perhaps the growing movement’s most innovative intervention. This terminology speaks to the various deprivations experienced behind bars, the movement’s base in states throughout the former Confederacy, and its long-term objective of prison abolition.

    At the same time, “prison slavery” and its identification of poorly or unpaid labor as a central feature of mass incarceration, has helped organizers to attract the outside support of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Best known for its service-sector unionization campaigns, the group has developed various methods for supporting inside organizers through its Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC).

    These methods include using an outside contact available via cellphone to pass messages from one prisoner to another, as well as mailing newsletters with innocuous front pieces that belie organizing information printed in small type several pages later. These more creative methods have joined others, like word of mouth through prison transfers and well established prisoner-oriented publications, like the San Francisco Bay View.

    The IWOC was an early endorser of this year’s strike and has played a crucial role in helping to spread information about it. At last count, over 150 organizations have now endorsed the strike, and solidarity demonstrations have already taken place in over 10 cities. Dozens more are planned for the next several weeks.

    “From past strikes,” explained a JLS organizer, “what we did learn is that from the outside, the more people that tend to stand up, demonstrate from the outside, particularly demos at the prisons, what it does is it incites. It incites inside and this is why prisons have a problem against it.”

    So the biggest thing that we can ask any of these groups or any organization is to hold some type of event, particularly an event that can get the radio’s attention, news media attention, anything that can get back into the jail cells and the prisons. The more radio programs that pick it up, the prisoners can listen to it. Particularly the prisoners that don’t have access to phones or internet access, they can at least get it while they’re listening to their radios or they can see it on television.

    As the strike proceeds, one of the more pressing questions is whether or not the strike itself, along with the outside support it inspires, will not just make it through September 9th, but also further the development of more movement organizations on both sides of the wall. These sort of organizations, like Pennsylvania’s Human Rights Coalition or the Free Alabama Movement in the Heart of Dixie, often come out of intense moments of struggle and are generally best positioned to carry the movement forward — particularly within a society too often willfully blind to what takes place in its name behind bars.

    Dr. Toussaint Losier is an Assistant Professor in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is co-author of Rethinking the American Prison Movement with Dan Berger and preparing a book manuscript titled War for the City: Black Liberation and the Consolidation of the Carceral State.

    Originally posted on the Verso Books blog.

  • Why Graduate Unionization Matters Even More in the Age of Janus

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    With the start of the new academic year underway, students and instructors will again enter into a millennia old relationship built on mentorship, trust and mutual respect. However, this school year, instructors will be walking into a very different classroom not because the this relationship has changed, but because the Supreme Court has signaled it does not politically support the casue of teachers advocating for working conditions that strengthen this bond.

    On the final day of its 2017-18 term, the Court upended 41 years of precedent established in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, the landmark case that cemented the collective strength of teachers by ruling against the concept of fair share/agency fees in Janus v. AFSCME Council 31. In doing so, as Justice Kagan noted in her dissent, “the majority has weaponized the First Amendment” against the labor movement. [1] But Abood created a false sense of security among us labor advocates who took fair share payers and even membership for granted. We forgot that the Court has not always been friendly to our cause and, during the Lochner Era (1905–1937), the Court invalidated many federal and state statutes regulating worker rights by arguing that they violated the “liberty of contract”, contending that government had no right to intervene in an arrangement established by two consenting parties no matter how unjust the relationship. [2] It was not until the New Deal Era did the Court finally abandon this principle, paving the way for pro-worker policies like minimum wage laws, however, it appears to have once again embraced this reasoning at a time when the country is returning to the socioeconomic inequality characteristic of turn-of-the-century America. But this regression also brings opportunity for progression. With Janus, teachers’ unions, and public-sector unions as a whole, can reorganize and rebrand their message for a new age and new generation.

    A fresh start might involve evangelizing to the generation most receptive to the message of unions in a place known for its progressive ideology. Since the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled in 2016 that graduate students at private institutions who hold teaching or research assistantships can be considered employees, there has been a flurry of graduate employee organizing nationwide. Prior to the NLRB’s ruling, there were 33 graduate employee labor unions, but in the two-year period since, 18 unrecognized unions have attempted to hold formal votes. [3] This rapid growth can be explained by a combination of forces: the socioeconomic concerns of Millennials, the corporatization of higher education, and the volatile political climate. Labor leaders throughout the country should take note since the same forces acting on the ivory tower are at play nationally and may portend hope for a movement whose relevance is being questioned by the very individuals it represents, such as Mark Janus.

    Millennials have come of age in a time of economic and political instability, specifically the Great Recession and the election of Trump. They benefited the least from the recent economic recovery, as average incomes for Millennials fell at twice the general population’s total drop and they are likely to be on a path toward lower incomes for at least another decade. [4] Despite the fact that Millennials have higher degree attainment rates of any generation, many are stuck in low-paid jobs, with the percentage of such young adults working in low-wage industries rising from 23% to 33% from 2000-2014. [5] Moreover, Millennials have some of the lowest rates of home ownership – 35.3% compared to an overall rate of 64.2% for all age groups – leading to delayed life milestones such as marriage and family. [6] Such a bleak economic picture may explain why Millennials overwhelmingly supported Democratic primary candidate Bernie Sanders and almost half have a more favorable view of socialism compared to capitalism. [7, 8] Millennials are also famously known for their socially liberal views including support for the rights of  historically marginalized groups and restrictions on hate speech with not only 40% supporting censorship of such offensive speech, but also participating in demonstrations against far-right advocates who seek to spread their message on college campuses. [9] Inflamed by the political rhetoric and policies of the Trump administration, the 2018 midterm elections have seen a bumper crop of Millennials and their allies running for political office with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York and Ayanna Pressley in Massachusetts amongst the most high profile candidates. In an age of Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and LGBTQ equality, Millennials are coming into political and economic consciousness just as they begin to eclipse Baby Boomers as the largest demographic and working age population.

    At the same time, universities have undergone a dramatic transformation. Just as low tuition and a booming postwar economy made higher education affordable to previous generations, the reverse is true for Millennials. The average cost of attendance has increased a whopping 260% since 1980, more than double the rate of all other consumer goods. [10] With student loan debt approaching $1.5 trillion, many Millennials are questioning the value of a college education, especially since as recent as 2012, half of all new college graduates were still unemployed or underemployed. [11] Perhaps equally alarming is that universities have adopted corporate attitudes with divestment in their instructors, central to university life, at the forefront. Between 2005-2015, the number of tenure-track faculty positions declined 1.3%, while the number of non-tenure track faculty, including adjuncts who work on a contractor basis with no benefits, grew by an unsettling 21.5%. [12]

    In what may amount to a silver lining, the growing corporatization of higher education has motivated more graduate assistants to view themselves as expendable employees and not just aspiring scholars. During my tenure as President of the Temple University Graduate Students Association (TUGSA), we experienced a dramatic increase in our union’s membership in large part due to the union’s ability to leverage the socioeconomic and political upheavals taking place within and outside the academy to promote awareness and advocacy. As a union that neither collects fair share fees nor mandates membership and has high turnover, continuous education and engagement with the graduate employee community was both central to increasing membership and a necessity to ensuring our survival – a practice more storied public-sector labor unions must now adopt in the age of Janus. Throughout my tenure, TUGSA consistently argued to students and administrators alike that graduate employees live perhaps the most precarious lives of all University employees thanks to not only a paycheck that barely qualifies as a living wage, but also the conflicting state in which employees simultaneously labor under the tutelage of an employer who also serves as an academic adviser capable of influencing one’s career well after graduation.

    One particularly acrimonious area of contention between the union and the University was the latter’s adoption of a zero-based budgeting model known as Responsible Center Management (RCM). Imported from the world of business and carelessly applied to a public institution, RCM required Temple’s constituent colleges for balancing their budgets based on student enrollment – a practice that is particularly devastating to liberal arts departments who have naturally lower enrollments compared to their STEM or professional counterparts. Consequently, RCM encouraged more expensive tenure track lines and even graduate assistantships, which carry tuition compensation and healthcare coverage, to be eliminated in favor of cheaper non-tenure track and adjunct lines. In fact, almost half of TUGSA’s grievances filed during my tenure were connected to RCM model, underscoring the importance of how management’s approach to finances have an indelible effect on the working conditions of their employees. Grievances ranged from unexplained terminations or non-renewal of graduate employee contracts (often the result of budget shortfalls) to transitioning graduate employees to adjunct employment during the later years to, in extreme cases, paying graduate employees under the table to circumvent collective bargaining requirements. The issues associated with RCM took on a social as well as economic justice component when it was revealed that the University was seeking to spend $130 million on the construction of a new football stadium in the heart of North Philadelphia – one of the poorest regions in the country. Consequently, the union allied itself with groups such as Stadium Stompers, arguing that such a project, which would cost nearly a quarter of the University’s endowment, would be much better spent on developing faculty and students as well as engaging in community development.

    Perhaps most importantly, when the union engaged in its latest round of collective bargaining last academic year, the leadership saw it as an opportunity to educate the graduate employee community of the flawed logic that was the University’s proposals. When Temple refused to waive student fees for graduate employees that amounted to almost $1,000 annually, or 5.5% of pretax income – a practice common at many universities – the union argued that the fee essentially amounted to an “employment fee” since one could not be a graduate employee without also being a student. In some instances, collective bargaining became an opportunity to unite the graduate employee community behind the long forgotten international graduate employee population, which was subjected to a special “international student fee” and whose families are not only barred by federal law from seeking employment, but also abandoned by the University who rejected the union’s proposal to extend subsidized healthcare coverage to dependents. Thus, TUGSA saw collective bargaining negotiations as an opportunity to construct a narrative that membership is more than just paying dues, it is about collectively taking ownership of working conditions, addressing issues of social and economic injustice for diverse constituents, and even owning a piece of the union. This narrative, which the broader labor movement must now wrestle away from antilabor groups, was essential to helping us secure significant pay increases. While the University did not accept all proposals at the bargaining table, even those vacated became a rallying cry to convince the entire bargaining unit to become more involved. Our motto continues to be that the union is you and me; better gains can only be made through a greater show of power and strength in the form of increased membership and engagement.

    There is no doubt that the Janus decision will embolden Right-to-Work champions now that fair share fees have been struck down in 22 states. And with the impending confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the highest court, Republicans will push this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cement their anti-labor agenda despite vocal public outcry and the spectacle of a kangaroo court that is Kavanugh’s nomination hearings. While it comes as no surprise that Kavanaugh prefers siding with the employers in labor disputes, what is particularly disturbing is his blatant disregard for the labor rights of vulnerable groups, who often most need organized protections. When workers at a meatpacking plant owned by meat wholesaler Agri Processor voted to join a union in 2005, the company refused to bargain, arguing that most of the employees could not be covered by collective bargaining law because they were undocumented immigrants. While the NLRB and the majority of judges for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected Agri Processor’s claim, Kavanaugh wrote the dissenting opinion in favor of the employer. [14] For labor activists, Janus will mark a new age in which the Court’s probable solid rightwing majority will be the spearhead for future attacks on labor. But the lessons for the labor movement are clear: As the nation moves backwards in terms of labor rights, we must move forward with a new strategy that leverages the current socioeconomic and political instability to mobilize and educate all individuals about the critical role unions play in advocating for justice and hedging against inequality. Millennials in higher education offer an avenue by which the labor movement can gain new adherents particularly as the movement continues to grey. And while anti-labor advocates may feel they have the upper hand, it is worth remembering that Millennials will be running for office, participating in public demonstrations, and influencing policy for far more years to come.

    Ethan Ake-Little served as President of TUGSA AFT Local #6290, the only graduate employee labor union in Pennsylvania, where he led the union’s fifth contract negotiations. A former high school biology teacher, Mr. Ake-Little is a Research Assistant and PhD Candidate in Urban Education at Temple University, where he is enrolled in the superintendent licensure program there.

  • Clever Corporate Criticism of U.S. Schools – by Gerald Coles

    ImageNote: In this guest blog, Gerald Coles, known for his work in literacy education and disabilities, describes capitalism's love/hate relationship with public education.

    U.S. capitalism has a hate-love relationship with the nation’s schools. On the “hate” side is a stream of complaints from business leaders and organizations about the many students, particularly in city schools, who fail grade-level achievement tests, are high school dropouts or, if they complete high school, do not have the academic qualifications for college and advanced-skills education. Given these educational failings, how will the nation’s economic system obtain the workforce needed for the 21st century economy?

     On the surface, this corporate complaining seems to have merit, however, if we pose the question of “how well are the nation’s schools serving U.S. capitalism?,” there is every reason to conclude that business leaders and organizations, despite their complaints, actually very much love the schools because, overall, the nation’s schools do a first-rate job educating and providing the array of workers capitalism needs. As importantly, the varied academic achievement outcomes provide capitalism’s leaders a major explanation of why vast numbers of Americans either work for wages insufficient to meet individual and family basic needs, have job insecurity, cannot obtain secure work, can only patch together several part-time jobs, have jobs for which they are educationally overqualified, and why so many workers lead financially precarious lives. Who’s to blame? Why, the schools, of course!         

    Fundamental to the corporate criticism of the schools for failing businesses and vast numbers of Americans is the view that in the 21st century high-skilled global economy, the nature of work is dramatically changing. That is, an increasingly greater number of high-skilled jobs now demand more workers with the education to do these jobs and schools have the task of providing the educated workers for them. An example of corporate blaming-casting is a report, sponsored by the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Defense Industry Association, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, expressing worry that the U.S. would not “sustain [its] economic leadership of the world because the nation’s schools were not providing the highly skilled workers” businesses need to win in the global economic combat.

    For businesses’ political surrogates, this perspective has been bi-partisan. President Barack Obama maintained: “The source of America's prosperity has never been merely how ably we accumulate wealth, but how well we educate our people. This has never been more true than it is today . . . education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity and success, it's a prerequisite for success.” This prerequisite was the aim of his Common Core State Standards, legislation devised "to ensure that students are equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills to be globally competitive.”

    Despite Donald Trump’s antipathy for all-things-Obama, he echoed his predecessor by expressing support for an educational “agenda . . . that better prepares students to compete in a global economy.” Equipping “America’s young people with the relevant knowledge and skills that will enable them . . . to compete and excel in lucrative and important [high tech] fields.”  Echoing her father’s vision, Ivanka Trump, “senior advisor” to the President, proposed closing the “growing gap between workforce and business needs and workers’ skills” by beginning  to teach tech in Kindergarten, thereby putting “our citizens on a pathway to a job.”

    Strong support for this vision of “education for the 21st century economy” has come from national teacher organizations. For example, arguing that new business imperatives underscore the need to fully-fund schools, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, asserted that “today’s public school teachers are on the front lines of our collective efforts to compete in the global economy.” Providing scholarly evidence for this view has been the work of many leading educational scholars, such as Linda Darling-Hammond, who advocated for schools in which all students, especially those living in poverty, have "access to an equitable, empowering education" that will enable them to "thrive in a technological, knowledge-based economy."

     

    High-Tech Jobs and the U.S. Economy Past and Present

    To appraise these purported “21st Century” business and employment imperatives, let's look first at the current proportion of high-tech jobs (commonly called STEM–science, technology, engineering, mathematics—jobs) in the U.S. economy. Calculating the proportion of these jobs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics determined that "depending on the definition, the size of the STEM workforce can range from 5 percent to 20 percent of all U.S. workers." Looking at the issue historically, we find that in 1850, around the start of the Industrial Revolution, top-skilled jobs made up about 10 percent of all work. Consequently, using the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ generous calculation, we can conclude that the proportion of STEM jobs has doubled, but it has taken over 160 years to do so, and these jobs still represent only a significant minority of overall jobs—particularly if the 20 percent estimate is high.

     With respect to the workforce the schools educate for these high-level jobs, a study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), concluded that the "United States has more than a sufficient supply of workers available to work in STEM occupations," thanks to increased student enrollment following forecasts of employment opportunities in these jobs: "For every two students that U.S. colleges graduate with STEM degrees, only one is hired into a STEM job." In computer and information science and in engineering, "U.S. colleges graduate 50 percent more students than are hired into those fields each year." Reviewing the “skills gap crisis,” the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a “global management consulting firm and the world's leading advisor on business strategy,” with clients in the world’s 500 largest companies, concluded it was “overblown. Putting the “crisis” in broad employment terms, BCG added, “Trying to hire high-skilled workers at rock-bottom rates is not a skills gap.”    

    Looking at the array of current and future work, according to job projections of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, approximately two-thirds of today’s occupations do not require post-secondary education. Although jobs not requiring post-secondary education will decline in the years ahead, by 2022 they will still comprise more than half of all new jobs that are expected to be created. Furthermore, of the thirty occupations with the largest projected employment increase by 2022, two-thirds—such as jobs in personal health care aides, home health care aides, retail salespersons, food preparation and service workers (which includes fast-food workers), janitors and cleaners, medical secretaries, insulation workers, and construction assistants—will typically not require post-secondary education.

    Another illuminating perspective is to compare STEM jobs in the 1950s with the present. In the 1950s, STEM jobs were about 15 percent of all jobs, a proportion that continued into the 1960s. Yet despite this relatively modest percentage, those years were a time when good-paying jobs expanded across the economy and the long-hailed U.S. "middle class"—defined as having a good wage, a house, vacation time, some savings, a retirement pension—was built. And profits accumulated as well. When Trump demands we “make America great again,” that is the time to which he looks back.

     However, given these relatively modest percentages of STEM jobs that persisted over decades and up to the present, why is it that now there is the corporate insistence that if American workers are to survive in the new economy, they must acquire advanced skills (STEM) education. In other words, between the height of the American Dream years—the 1950s and 1960s—and now, the percentage difference in STEM jobs has been about 5 percent, and perhaps less. Is it really possible that with just 5 percent fewer STEM jobs, the age of the American Dream was built?  Or, looking at the other side of the equation, how can we explain that the middle class was built with 85 percent non-STEM jobs, yet presently the middle-class is collapsing with about 80 percent non-STEM jobs?

    One major answer lies in the difference in organized labor then and now, and in the forbidden phrase: labor’s “class struggle.” Consider manufacturing jobs. Although there are not as many manufacturing jobs now as then—currently, there are slightly more than 12 million such jobs in the United States, compared with about 15–16 million in the 1950s—today's 12 million or so manufacturing workers should, by themselves, demonstrate an area of employment through which, as before, the American Dream could be reached. In other words, shouldn't the mantra be, “If you get a STEM education or a manufacturing job, life can be good (or, at least somewhat economically secure)?” The answer, unfortunately, is no, because, as a study by the National Employment Law Project illustrates, today's manufacturers can pay workers deficient wages, so why should they pay them more? In the 1950s, economist Robert Reich calculates, manufacturing job wages were significantly higher than the average wage: "Fifty years ago, when General Motors was the largest employer in America, the typical GM worker got paid $35 an hour in today’s dollars." Wages for manufacturing jobs have continued to drop over the decades, however, with many manufacturing jobs now paying less than a living wage. Currently, the median wage in manufacturing is $15.66 an hour, with approximately one-quarter of manufacturing workers earning less than $12/hour., and many earning just $10–$11/hour. For example, General Electric workers in Louisville, Kentucky, earn $13/hour making electric water heaters. Remington, the gun company, pays workers $11/hour in its Alabama manufacturing facilities.  

     

    Serving Capitalism Well

    Why does corporate America actually love the nation’s schools? Given U.S. capitalism's control of the American economy, the economic system’s educational needs are best served by ensuring that the nation's school achievement does not get out of hand; that is, schools cannot become too successful in producing well-educated graduates for purported but nonexisting vast number of STEM jobs. To accomplish this, the corporate successful answer is a simple one: Just provide enough funds to maintain the educational system that overall currently serves the economy well; ensure that taxpayers fund most of the schooling serving businesses; do not fully fund schooling for those poor or marginally poor American youth whose futures will fit well with the present and future jobs that will be predominant in the economy, namely, fast food, simple service, basic health care, low-skilled factory work; maximize profit by not contributing more to the public good than is absolutely necessary for business needs; and pay workers as little as possible, maintaining that the work and wages are commensurate with their educational levels and skills.

    Were the schools as a whole not serving the economy well, we can be certain that the nation's major corporations, such as Walmart, Dow Chemical, Goldman Sachs, Chevron, Microsoft, IBM, and Apple would be focused on duplicating the best educational outcomes in STEM education by providing schools with additional tax funds from the more than a trillion dollars these corporations have stashed in offshore tax havens. Similarly, were these corporations concerned that not enough poor children were being properly educated to meet employment needs, we should not doubt that some of these unpaid taxes would have made their way into these children's lives. 

     

    What To Do?

    Blaming schooling, teachers and students turns the nation's focus away from the reality of the array of jobs available and from U.S. capitalism's numerous ways for extracting ever-greater profits, such as paying the lowest wages here and abroad, reducing or eliminating an array of job benefits, outsourcing work, and creating an ever-growing temporary workforce. While all the blame is foisted on teachers, students, and Americans generally, the “failure of education” ideology is meant to keep the eyes of Americans on one message: YOU are responsible for yourself; getting a decent job and having a decent income depends solely on YOU; and if YOU don't have a good job and income it's because YOU haven't had the right kind of education, for which educators are to blame. Your problem is not a consequence of corporate policy, corporate greed, and corporate attacks on the public good, not a problem of how wealth is acquired and used. YOU and your teachers are the problem, and most of all, you are a problem for American business and America because YOU have failed to become part of the skilled workforce these businesses and the nation need.

    Teacher organizations, parents and older students must face the reality of never obtaining the reforms demanded because the schools are serving the capitalism well although capitalism is not serving vast numbers of people well. Consequently, it is imperative for teacher organizations and other social justice groups concerned with education to begin creating an opposition that explains how educational achievement is primarily contingent on what the economic system needs, which is far different from what American workers and families need. That is, schools serving capitalism well is not fully the same as serving all children and young people well. With respect to the curriculum, these organizations need to take up the very difficult but necessary task—surely a task that will meet strong corporate resistance–of insisting that “education” for the “21st century economy” is a legitimate goal, but that “education” must include comprehensive study of the actual working of that economy.  

           At the present time there has been an increased, critical spotlight on capitalism. “Capitalism” is no longer the word that cannot be uttered. For example, inquiring about American views on capitalism and socialism, Gallup Poll found that a substantial percentage of Democrats/Leaners (57%) had a more positive view of socialism than of capitalism, with the most positive view expressed among Americans 18 to 29. While Americans overall have a positive view of capitalism, the rating has declined over the last eight years, positive rating the lowest since 2010. Again, most significantly, public conversations about “capitalism’s” benefits and harms are increasingly in public and political discourse. Recently, for example, Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced of the “Accountable Capitalism Act,” which raises questions about the interests corporations serve. Education activist organizations might do well working to create similar legislation.

          The time is overripe for teacher organizations to frame schooling and school reforms within the context of that-which-must-be-named. Only by doing beginning to explain within this context how schools as a whole serve capitalism and why capitalism resists reforms and funds for reforms that would better educate more students, will teachers’ organizations begin to acquire a more successful leadership role in improving young people’s education, lives and futures.     

    This article is drawn from Gerald Coles’ Miseducating for the Global Economy: How Corporate Power Damages Education and Subverts Students’ Futures (Monthly Review Press, 2018). References for this article can be found in the book. He can be contacted at gcwriting@fastmail.com . 

  • French Labor’s Historical Defeat; U.S. Teachers’ Surprising Victories

    ImageAs the French get ready for the “rentrée” – the annual back-to-school/back-to-work day following the August vacation – social peace appears to reign in the land. The long-expected militant strikes and struggles against the neo-liberal counter-reforms introduced by President Macron early last Spring have failed to materialize. Surprisingly, the Macron government successfully force-marched its anti-labor, anti-welfare, pro-business agenda through parliament with little effective resistance by the unions and Left parties. Meanwhile, in the U.S., a wave of spontaneous teachers’ strikes spread from West Viriginia to other conservative ‘Red’ states, winning significant victories and surprising the media and the labor leadership. The contrast is surprising.

    In France, resistance to the arrogant, deeply unpopular Macron started off with a bang in March with student strikes and big demonstrations on the 50th anniversary of the 1968 student-worker rebellion, which, retrospectively, was seen positively here even in the mainstream media. Yet, unlike 1968 or even 2006, when spontaneous strikes and popular demonstrations forced the government to withdraw its program, the resistance, orchestrated by the unions, never got off the ground. Au contraire, the self-confident Macron, perceived as “the president of the rich,” continued fast-tracking a full menu of cuts in education, public services, retirement and worker benefits, all by executive decree (to be later rubber stamped by the legislature).

    Yet despite their publicized calls for “convergence” between strike movements among railroad workers, students, hospital workers, and civil servants, the French union leaders in fact kept the strikes local, fragmented by sector, and limited – all the while carrying on semi-secret talks with government officials. Even when the government bared its teeth and turned its brutal riot police and even Army units against non-violent student occupiers and peaceful mass demonstrations, the union leaders failed to call for action in solidarity with the beaten and arrested members of the students union. Big contrast with 1968, when police brutality against demonstrating students sparked the organization of a general strike of 10,000,000 workers, as TV documentaries regularly reminded us all during this luke-warm Spring offensive.

    A Paradoxical Comparison 

    A comparison with last Spring’s events on the U.S. labor scene may be suggestive. Here, despite Donald Trump’s far-right, anti-labor crony-capitalist reign, an unforeseen wave of militant, self-organized teachers’ strikes began spreading from one conservative state to another. And winning significant victories! Beginning in late February in the U.S., underpaid teachers in so-called Red States set off a wave of successful, mostly self-organized strikes, aimed at reversing years of neo-liberal budget cuts that had reduced both the teachers and their schools to poverty-level. In a totally surprising reversal, these teachers’ strikes, organized from the bottom up and largely circumventing the weak unions that claimed to represent them, won major wage increases for teachers and other public employees as well as significant budget increases for education.

    These victories have been won through a combination of tactics first employed in West Virginia. They included ground-up grass-roots organization, creative use of social media, forging alliances with parents and other workers (organized and un-organized) and ultimately by marching en mass on the seats of government for direct confrontation with the public officials (state governors and legislators) who have the real power to open the coffers and pay for these desperately needed reforms.

    The underpaid ‘Red State’ teachers, circumventing the usual narrow trade-union ‘professionalism,’ chose to struggle along broad class lines with other groups of workers (like school custodians) and for public goods that benefit all poor and working people. Woman power was the driving force in this movement. The teachers thus avoided being isolated by the usual conservative charge that they are merely defending “privileges,” a charge that in France is effectively aimed at the state railroad workers and public servants in general. The teachers thus succeeded in winning public opinion to their cause and were thereby able to face off against public officials, conservatives all, who know they will need these folks’ votes to win this November’s elections. All these gains were unprecedented, not just in the size of the raise but in their inclusiveness and interference in political decisions concerning budgeting and the preservation of public services. Although complicated, they were negotiated directly with the governments by self-organized groups of workers.

    The spread of the protests from West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kentucky, to Arizona – all Republican-dominated states with weak public sector unions – signaled the depth of frustration from teachers and parents over years of education budget cuts. The spark of this spring’s teacher strike wave against austerity leaped across state borders from one legal jurisdiction to another, in part thanks to the Internet and social media. In West Virginia, a private Facebook page [access limited to teachers] enabled theWest Virginia teachers, dispersed in rural areas, to come together, share opinions and information, and unite around tactics. And when the leadership of the two West Virginia teacher unions, the AFT and the NEA, publicly signed an agreement with the Governor and “ended the strike” without consulting the teachers, the strikers were able to unite on Facebook, continue their walkout, and denounce the phony deal to the media (who had already reported it and had to retract). Quoth the NY Times: “When they defied union leaders’ calls to end the strike on March 1, the strikers redoubled the pressure on lawmakers to deliver on their pay raise. The lesson, experts said, is that undermining public sector unions, as the Janus case seeks to do, will not guarantee labor peace.”

    Back to France

    Similar issues (defense of public services like universities and railroads) had also been raised in France as goals proclaimed by the unions’ leaders, but nothing significant was accomplished or even attempted. The government and media continued to scapegoat the railroad workers, considered “privileged” by the media because they still benefit from early retirement provisions won at the end of WWII –as if the real “privileged” groups were not the bosses and bankers!

    Meanwhile, the French media were playing this long-awaited spring offensive as a dramatic struggle between the French unions, personified by tough-talking Philippe Martinez, the leader of the militant CGT (historically affiliated with the Communist Party) fighting to hold onto “outdated labor privileges”, and Macron, the modernist, coolly trying to drag France into the 21st century and make her “competitive.” This epic wrestling match between the heavy-set Martinez with his big black drooping moustache, billed as the red-caped “Rabble-Rouser” and “His Excellency,” the slim, arrogant, aristocratic Macron (blue-caped). As we shall see, this fight turned out to be just as phony as professional wrestling on TV, with the CGT and the other union leaders going through the motions while throwing the fight in return for a seat at the table.

    teacher strikes

    French student strike

    The railway workers were indeed struggling to preserve an essential public service, which the government clearly had plans to privatize once the struggle was over. But the railroad workers remained isolated and grew discouraged, while the CGT kept a firm grip on the leadership tactics. The French union leaders failed to organize the promised “convergence” with other striking groups (hospital workers, civil servants, students) not even calling symbolic one-day demonstrations in solidarity with them. The stop-and-go strike partial railroad strike (grève perlée), organized by the CGT union leaders, never effective, dragged on for months, annoying commuters and exhausting the workers economically. Up to 80% of the engine-drivers were striking on any given day (and losing their pay), but thanks to an arrangement with the CGT, the SNCF railroad management was able to keep most of the trains running using managers as scab drivers! So the workers, not the SNCF, were loosing money.

    This was a demoralizing lose-lose situation for both workers and commuters, but the union leaders were unwilling to do the obvious: shut down the railroad in an open-ended strike and call out the other workers in solidarity. Nor did they allow General Assemblies of workers to take over, as in past struggles. Instead, the leaders met regularly with government ministers behind closed doors, sparring verbally in public while pulling their punches.

    Eventually the CGT and the other railway unions agreed to open negotiations with Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, who had said on record that he would hold talks only if the unions agreed to an EU-mandated opening of the railways to competition, the scrapping of the rail workers’ favorable retirement statute, paving the way for cuts in wages and conditions, and the privatization of the SNCF. However, the CGT had the workers continuing the stop-and-go strike all through the Summer, even after the parliament had passed the reforms, slowly bleeding out the last of their militancy.

    This historic sabotage of the workers’ struggle by the CGT should not come as a surprise. In 1936, during the factory occupations and massive nation-wide general strike that ushered in the Popular Front, the Communist Party, with its trade-union arm the CGT, proclaimed “You must know how to end a strike!” (“Il faut savoir terminer une grève,” Maurice Thorez). The Pop Front got some big concessions out of the bosses (like vacations and healthcare), but most of the salary gains evaporated with a year. A decade later, at the end of WWII, when the collaborationist French business class was disgraced and the Resistance still armed, the same Thorez (having spent the war in Moscow) told French workers to “Roll up your sleeves” and re-build capitalist France before making the “Revolution.” During the 1968 student/worker uprising, the CGT kept the workers and students apart and colluded with De Gaulle to end the general strike of 11 million employees, herding them back into their factories with mendacious reports that “all the other” units had already returned to work.

    What Common Denominator?

    Here again, the comparison between the French Spring offensive that wasn’t and the wave of successful self-organized teachers’ strikes in the U.S. is suggestive. The common denominator is the role of the union bureaucracy in each case. To be sure, French and American unions are quite different in their structured and historical cultures – the U.S. “business unionism” model vs. France’s syndicalist tradition and nation-wide unions. However, in both cases the interests of their leaders – of the labor bureaucracy as a social layer – may differ widely from those of the working classes in general and their members in particular. The modern labor bureaucracy, which depends on the national state for its legitimacy, is an integral part of the capitalist mechanism. This assures its place at the table and defines its designated role as a shill in the game of class struggle.

    A we have just seen, in France, where unions are legal, respected and heavily integrated into the state (receiving 80% of their revenue through various cooperative organisms), the tactics imposed by the union leaders effectively dis-armed and dis-organized the struggle of the workers, civil servants and students they supposedly represented. They went through the motions of combatting Macron’s neo-liberal reforms, while clinging dearly to their place at the government trough during this eochal pro-business economic transformation. The workers lost big, but the leaders held onto their jobs, helping the government make “inevitable” cuts and negotiating give-backs.

    In contrast, back in the U.S., the successful teachers’ strikes took place in the context of Red states where the nationally-affiliated NEA and AFT unions are either illegal (unrecognized) or marginal, with few members and little power. In West Virginia, as we have seen, the out-of-touch professional union leaders in the state capitol helped the pro-Trump governor put an end to the self-organized teachers’ walkout (technically not a “strike” which would be illegal) behind the teachers’ backs. The next day the NEA and AFT officials (as will as the politicians and the media) had egg on their faces when actual strikers, united through their private Facebook page, denounced the “agreement,” continued their job action, and went on to victory.

    In West Virginia, the bureaucrats were unable to stifle the rank-and-file, and the enormous power, courage and collective savvy of self-organized labor burst forth, inspiring others to do likewise. As the NY Times reported “Unions have tended throughout most of their histories to be forces that seek stability, not unrest … When they are weakened, we’re more likely to see the re-emergence of instability and militancy, and the kind of model that we’re seeing happen in West Virginia.” In some of the other states, the teachers did work with or through the official unions, but the teachers there were self-organized in their own caucuses and Facebook groups and were able to keep the upper hand.

    What Next?

    This week the French working classes are returning to their workplaces, but their heads are not held high. To this observer, it appears that they have suffered an historical defeat: the end of the fabled “French exception” to dogmatic Thatcherite neo-liberalism. The French exception was based on France post-WWII Constitution as a “Social Republic” conceived when the workers in the Resistance were still armed and the owners, most of whom had collaborated with the Nazis, were under suspicion.

    The Social Republic is now history, and the French business class, under Macron’s neo-liberal reforms, is getting ready to Thatcherize France with a vengeance and take its revenge after suffering 70 years of state regulations favorable to workers. They will succeed – unless the French rank-and-file workers take a hint from the W. Va. teachers and figure out a way to organize themselves autonomously. Let us hope that the U.S.wave of teacher Internet-connected self-organization which crested in the Spring, continues through the Fall, spreading to other states and inspiring other professions.

    Richard Greeman
    Montpellier, France

     

    “Don’t mourn, organize!”

    Most working people – French or American – understand that there is strength in unity and that without organization, labor can never successfully defend itself against capital. Why then is union membership down to 7‰ in both countries? Maybe workers are tired of fighting with one hand behind their backs, dominated by professional union leaders who make their livings pimping them to management for a price.

    One possible solution to the problem of labor’s domination by the fat-cat, class-collaborationist labor bureaucracy is simple. Starve the beast. Cut all union ties with government “support”. Have all union reps paid at workers’ wages. Limit mandates to a year or two and keep rotating officials back into the actual working class.

    Labor bureaucrats always justify their existence with the argument that labor relations are complicated and require their professional expertise. Nonsense. The teachers of W. Va. and Oklahoma have just proven them wrong. They were able to negotiate collectively the most complex issues to successful conclusion using common sense, class consciousness and democratic methods. Among those methods was transparency.

    The power of transparency was made clear 40 years ago in Poland, when the Solidarnosc leaders of striking workers at the Gdansk shipyard insisted on carrying out their negotiations with management over an open microphone audible to the great crowds of workers gathered below. Today, instead of passively accepting whatever their leaders tell them, the rank and file are able to get accurate information, discuss their goals on private Facebook pages and mobilize to fight for them in real time.

    Originally posted at L. A. Progressive. 

  • Brazil’s Racial Capitalism at a Turning Point

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    In February, I published an article in the International Marxist-Humanist reporting that the political scene was horrible in Brazil. Five months ago, I had in my mind how fascism was growing quickly under the hegemony of identity politics, especially with social movements’ fragmentation, and the increase of anti-communist thought, with slanders against Marx as totalitarian, Eurocentric and colonial. I said that all of this, in addition to the legacy of almost 15 years of Workers’ Party government that ended via an institutional coup d’état in 2016, was leading to the destruction – ideological and material – of the left.

    When I said it was horrible, I also had in my mind all the cuts in social policies imposed by the illegitimate Temer government and its allies that left thousands of professors without their salaries for more than four months and almost closed down my University; the setbacks in constitutional rights introduced by the most conservative Congress since the military dictatorship; the increase in killings of LGBT people and of violence against women and feminicide; the massacres in rural areas and the accelerating expropriation of lands from campesinos and traditional communities; the endless genocide of Black and Indigenous peoples that murders daily people like me — my age or younger — in the main cities of my country. I had in mind my 19-year-old Black communist comrade Nathalia, who killed herself last year because she could not support the pain of being a Black – and violated – woman anymore (such as many other students in my University in the past years).

    From February to today the situation worsened in a scary, barbaric way. The federal government still imposes harsh austerity measures that have deadly impacts on the working class – especially members of vulnerable groups. Despite the huge cuts in the public budget to social services, such as public health, retirement and education, on February 20th, the government decreed a federal intervention in Rio’s Public Security System – an unplanned extreme military measure that is estimated to cost 3.1 billion reais[1] (something around 1 billion US dollars, an amount that corresponds to almost half of the total public health spending – R$ 6.4 billion – in the Rio de Janeiro state budget proposal for 2018). The intervention is based upon a provision of the Constitution that is to be used as an ultima ratio in extreme cases and cannot be run by a military unit.

    There is no apparent reason for this intervention; Rio is not even considered one of the country’s ten most dangerous or conflict-ridden cities. In violation of the Constitution, moreover, the president declared that it is an intervention “of a military nature,” nominated a general from the Army to command the intervention. The government publicly characterized this effort as a “laboratory” for the rest of the country,[2] which means that it is an experiment tested in Rio that will be used in the whole country in the future. The federal intervention – which is currently scheduled to last until December 31 – opens a new chapter in the militarization of the lives of the working class in Brazil.

    The announcement of the intervention was accompanied by strategies to shield the authorities from any kind of accountability for what could happen as a result. At the meeting with the Council of the Republic, the general intervenor said it was necessary to give the armed forces “a guarantee allowing them to act without the risk of a new Truth Commission.”[3] For those who don’t know our history, the Truth Commission was installed in 2012 by the federal government – after huge pressure from civil society – to investigate accusations of torture, killings and other crimes committed by Brazilian Armed Forces during the last dictatorship when thousands of citizens disappeared or were executed.

    Thus, the more serious implication of this military policy is to protect human rights violators from accountability. This is even more shocking if we consider that a few months before the intervention was decreed, Congress passed a federal law that reverses one of the most disputed achievements of what we called the democratic transition: the law that transferred the judgment of crimes committed by the Armed Forces (including the military police) against civilians from the military to civilian courts. It means that all acts committed by military and military police officers will no longer be subject to the civilian courts. We call this law the state’s formal license to kill.

    Armed with a framework of impunity or safe conduct to violate our rights, days of intervention followed, with military vehicles on the streets, children’s backpacks searched by heavily armed soldiers, and killings of favela residents. To better illustrate the extent of state terrorism we are living in, I will provide you with a quick example: Less than a month ago, we saw a sheriff interviewed on a midday TV show stating that he would go to one of Rio’s favelas and “drown the ground in blood” in revenge for a policeman who was killed the day before. He also said, “No human rights organization or Facebook denunciation could stop the police entering and killing.” The next day, the police fulfilled this commitment, as citizens were killed or injured by bullets shot from helicopters, among them children and women, and this in broad daylight (a practice that has been repeatedly used in Rio’s favelas). No public authority – at the state or federal level –publicly condemned this attitude from the state police in Rio. This shows the present level of democratic rupture.

    While huge sectors of the middle class all over the country support the militarization of public security in an attitude of both alienation and despair, the media focus on other issues like the FIFA World Cup in Russia. Meanwhile, military intervention consolidates the state’s attacks on the rights, freedoms, and living conditions the working class. The level of state authoritarianism is rising in the context of deep precaritization and expropriation, where space has been created for the public expression of fascist discourses that preach the elimination of “the other” within civil society. Brazilian critical thinkers Guilherme Gonçalves and Marta Machado have been calling this phenomenon “authoritarian neoliberalism” and linking the rise of fascism and state’s terrorism to the wave of expropriations. They suggest that although neoliberalism – with austerity and privatizations – is not a new phenomenon in Brazil, there is something different in the face Temer’s regime gives neoliberalism[4]. I share their analysis and would like to argue that we are approaching a turning point. However, while the organized left is still confused about what is really going on with Brazilian representative democracy, there is also no common ground among socialist intellectuals.

    On March 14th, less than a month after military intervention was decreed in Rio, Marielle Franco was killed.  It’s still hard to believe. One of city council members who received the most votes in Rio’s history – the only Black and revolutionary socialist I can remember seeing occupying a political position in Brazil — was brutally murdered. Personally, it is still hard for me to talk about this:  I began my socialist activism when I was 16 years old in the student movement and soon joined the same tendency from the same party as she (Party of Socialism and Liberty-PSOL). We used to attend the same meetings and lived in the same neighborhood. I left the party over political disagreements in 2012, but a huge part of the activist I am today is influenced by her. Marielle was brutally killed with nine shots in a political murder in the center of Rio, the second biggest city of the country.

    Her murder – for which clear evidence exists that it was committed by well-trained state officers – was a clear attack not only on the Brazilian left, or on human rights defenders in general, but particularly on every Black proletarian woman who dares to fight in the political space of Brazil. To me, it clearly shows how social totality in terms of exploitation and inequality works at the present stage of capitalism – and how capitalism is intersectional in matters of class, race and gender through violent, direct expropriation. Also, it presents the clearest evidence that representative democracy is totally compatible with an authoritarian state for the working class and that the reformist option has failed.  Let me expand on this point by looking briefly at Marielle’s political life.

    As a member of Rio de Janeiro’s State Human Rights Commission for over 10 years, Marielle always fought within the established institutions. She worked tirelessly to defend the rights of Black women, Black and young people in the favelas, LGBTQ+ and other vulnerable communities, publicly denouncing extrajudicial executions and state violence. She was elected to the city council for the first time in 2016. Two weeks before her shooting, she had been appointed rapporteur for a special commission that the city council had created to monitor the ongoing federal intervention in Rio de Janeiro and the militarization of public security. She had been expressing herself publicly against it. Until today, we have no answers about who may be responsible for her murder and state authorities remain silent about it.

    After her shocking murder, the general feeling amongst the left and social movements is that of theoretical loss, disbelief, institutional rupture and profound hopelessness. Definitely, it seems that Brazilian capitalism achieved a point of no return.  Despite te wide expansion of formal rights for minorities, reality shows that there is no longer space for liberal human rights and there is no hope in building a better world. Socialists, human rights NGOs, Blacks, women, and LGBTQ+ movements are all shocked and each took her murder as a personal attack. All those fragmented sectors went together into the streets in what became absolutely massive demonstrations, with only one slogan: Justice for Marielle. During that month, the same feeling that paralyzed thousands of us made us feel the totality again. We all cried together at her funeral, and we were all called upon to rethink our political practices. Marielle’s murder also helped remind us that after almost 400 years under slavery and a total of 30 years under two different anti-communist military dictatorships, the relatively young Brazilian democratic tradition never really existed for us, the working class. Black, indigenous, and poor, expropriated of everything, we are survivors from a genocide that violently incarcerates en masse and kills more than 60,000 citizens per year — more than half of whom are youths (ages 15–29) and 77 percent are Black. Despite the expansion of formal rights achieved since the unified struggles that lead to the establishment of our democratic constitution in 1988, we had always been under classic neoliberal and neoliberal-developmentalist regimes that never aimed or were capable of achieving a real diminishment of inequalities and that had always used direct extraeconomic violence against us.

    The big inter-class agreement promoted by the Workers’ Party after Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva achieved power in 2002 worked by way of the cooptation of the major trade unions and the social movements that had been organized up to then. Neoliberal compromises with the support of financial capital for some mildly redistributive social policies were the primary condition for its maintenance and expansion. Gradually, while expanding formal rights and investing in inclusion-through-credit politics, Lula’s government rebooted the economy and assured economic growth by investing in commodities. However, as Alfredo Saad-Filho highlights, after the oscillation of the Chinese economy, the global crisis reached the periphery and the price of agricultural commodities and minerals plummeted. Brazil’s prominent new role in the global economy was evident, but since the crisis reached the country in 2013, it has become clear that bank concentration, high interest rates, and financialization of the social policies of the Lula Era would be insufficient for the protection of the financial system.[5]

    The improvement in the economy, which took place through Lula’s policy of mass consumption including the impoverished masses under the credit system, was followed by a big wave of formal rights for women and Black people, and their inclusion in public spaces, such as universities, through affirmative action. While the traditional left was not self-reflective on issues involving gender, race, and sexuality, downplaying those debates, the major Brazilian urban centers were flooded with theories linked to identity politics and with horizontal movements. These sought to overcome the “old and oppressive left,” and to achieve respect and formal recognition for minorities, and through this, opportunities for them to occupy higher social positions.

    However, Workers’ Party government policies along with an alliance with bourgeois and conservative parties led to the reaffirmation of the country as a commodities/raw materials producer. This had the effect also of strengthening the most reactionary sector of the Brazilian bourgeoise, the rural landowners who control our agribusiness sector. Deeply white, conservatively religious, and violent, they are literally the figure of the Master, the old slaveowning class. Gradually gaining power during Lula’s government, they now control a parliamentary majority– and Brazilian states. The absence of a real agrarian reform and the absorption of militant leaders in the state bureaucracy weakened the major campesino – and revolutionary – movement we had in the countryside (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra) and fragmented all the others. The growing dependence on non-industrial and low-tech goods and the deindustrialization process were determinant to also weakening the Worker’s Party’s social base, found mostly among the traditional working-class, both trade unionists and landless peasants. An increasingly conservative mentality among the working people emerged in this context.

    Also, through an anti-corruption crusade against the Worker’s Party, the mainstream bourgeois media stirred up the urban middle classes, which already had economic, social, and political grievances. As Saad-Filho pointed out, since the first term of Lula’s government, the number of upper-middle-class jobs was declining, with 4.3 million posts paying between 5 and 10 times the minimum wage vanishing in the 2000s. In the meantime, the big bourgeoisie was doing very well, and the poor advanced quickly in some respects: even domestic servants got covered under the labor laws; the working-class could now travel on occasion in airplanes – and their children even go to the university! The upper middle classes felt squeezed economically and deprived of their historical privileged spaces. Since Lula’s election, they were also displaced from the state bureaucracy, which, as mentioned earlier and also highlighted by Saad-Filho, “had been populated by thousands of cadres appointed by the Workers’ Party and the left, to the detriment of ‘better-educated,’ whiter, and, presumably, more deserving upper-middle class competitors.”[6] These phenomena increased the colonialist-rooted hatred that the Brazilian white upper middle classes always had against the working-class. Thereupon, a deep fascist wave arose, with a racist and a deeply anticommunist core, masked inside an ultra-nationalist and pro-military intervention discourse.

    This formed the context of the parliamentary coup d’etat in 2016, which allowed an unelected government – the most unpopular in the world according to opinion polls – to approve a constitutional amendment limiting public spending for twenty years and a labor law reform that would universalize precarity. The result so far was, in 2017, a shrinkage by 7.6% of Brazilian family income, with 60.8% of this income affected by bank debt, and an unemployment rate of 12.4%. In a single year, from 2016 and 2017, the number of Brazilians living in extreme poverty increased by 11.2%, from 13.34 million to 14.83 million people. While profits of R$ 53.9 billion accrued to the four largest private banks in the country, approval for the Temer government sank to 3% of the population according to opinion polls.[7]

    At first glance – especially after my sharp critique above of Lula’s administration, it might seem strange to make this connection, but Marielle’s murder and Lula’s arrest had a lot in common.

    In a post-slavery society like Brazil (one of the 10 countries with the highest levels of social inequality in the world), the arbitrary prosecution and arrest of the first and only northern proletarian president, who was only semi-literate in his youth, and the murder of a Black lesbian councilwoman with favela roots are directly linked in the sense that these events represent the core characteristic of Brazilian racial capitalism, and – the aspect I want to highlight here – its expropriation-based essence.

    This kind of capitalism always worked as a huge form of disciplinatory rule over the working class. It doesn’t matter how hard our left tries to occupy spaces in representative democracy in order to reform it, to make it less damaging for the working classes, for we will never get rid of these crucial aspects in a capitalist society. You Black, you woman, you proletarian, don’t you dare to take part in politics! This is the message that Brazilian dominant classes pass to us.

    Is it only in Brazil that representative democracy and fascism work together in the same sentence? Despite the specificities of each social formation, which of course need to be considered, it doesn’t seem to me that this is a solely Brazilian phenomenon. And the state of the world today seems only confirms that the only way out must be international organization. In the Brazilian case, the necessity for international working-class organization to solve what appear to be “Brazilian problems” is becoming more and more evident each day.

    Lula’s arrest on April 7 can be a good barometer of working-class capacity to respond at the national level. He is the most popular president in Brazilian history and finished his second term with 90% favorability in the polls. He was sentenced to twelve years in prison for passive corruption with weak evidence, in a politically motivated trial – completely unfair if we take into account the political partiality of the judge and the deeply corrupt political scenario. Despite all the attempts to mobilize popular support against the arbitrary judgment and sentence, and after he was imprisoned, the working class simply couldn’t react. He has been imprisoned for four months now, with every chance that he will die there. The craziest part is this: He is still leading by a wide margin in voter preferences for the presidency in opinion polls. Unfortunately, however, no candidate endorsed by him or by the Worker’s Party has been able to achieve his level of popularity. The second candidate is the fascist ex-military Jair Bolsonaro (more on him below). I want to stress here that even with this level of popular support for Lula and with the fascist threat, the working class is at present unable to take to the streets in large numbers, let alone stop the country in a general strike.

    Social scientists still have trouble explaining this situation. Some of them blame a lack of political consciousness, or even the ‘subaltern nature’ of the Brazilian people. (Yes, some are still thinking in such terms.) I don’t have a ready answer either. What I can see is a mixture of terrible fear, suffering, poverty, lack of social support, and unemployment and precarity within the working class.

    When it comes to the fear factor, we cannot forget that Brazil is one of the counties with the highest levels in the Americas of killings of human rights defenders’ killings. Those numbers have also increased due to the political situation, with killings usually in the form of massacres. Usually, more than 4 individuals are killed in the same time, with involvement of state actors and huge levels of impunity. As already mentioned, racism and police brutality against Black people also have played a big role in the decline of democracy. Under the so-called wars on drugs, state racial terrorism, genocide, and mass incarceration, people living in the peripheries and favelas have just one concern, to survive. Between January and March 2017, a staggering one in three violent deaths in the city of São Paulo had a police officer as the perpetrator. When people in favelas try to hold street demonstrations in their communities, the same police that brutally repress demonstrations in the center of the city using non-lethal weapons instead attack them here with live ammunition.  In this context, there is no space for progressive debates or demonstrations of any kind among the working class – again, the majority of Lula’s voters.

    The same violent and repressive reality can be seen regarding gender and sexuality issues. Reported violence and killings are increasing rapidly. Brazil has been considered one of the most dangerous places in the world for transgender people.[8] This means that despite the rise of LGBT movements and feminism, the working class is becoming even more homophobic and conservative. In part, this is because those movements are primarily linked to identity politics and individualist activism and there is almost no dialogue between them and the mass of working people — the peasantry, the proletariat, and the “precariat,” whose conversion to Pentecostal alt-right churches has also been massive.

    In this year’s Brazilian presidential elections, scheduled for October, the scenario is completely frightening – please keep in mind that Lula is still in first place, with the double the poll numbers of the second candidate, despite languishing in prison. The second candidate is the fascist Jair Bolsonaro, already called the “Tropical Trump.”[9]Bolsonaro mixes racist and sexist hate speech in a religious, militarized and nationalist public discourse. To make matters worse, research demonstrates that this year we will have 71 military officers running in local elections in 23 of the 27 Brazilian states. At the time of my earlier article in February, I thought that a new path of military dictatorship was being built in the country – through democratic institutions and legal mechanisms. Today, the military is openly saying that “the time has come to get back in power by democratic means,” as stated by General Antonio Mourão, the high-ranking officer who has been organizing candidates to form a military caucus in the new Congress to support Bolsonaro. Unable to overcome their fragmentation and to coalesce in a unified coalition, none the socialist left candidates have been able to attain more than 1% in the pre-election polls.

    Surprisingly, new actors are emerging in this situation. In May, we were surprised by a weeklong truck drivers strike, which was able to shut down the country, as it suddenly provoked a supply crisis. It was a complex scenario for the traditional left to understand. The drivers are an autonomous precariat, fragmented and totally heterogeneous. They have the most diverse ideological composition – some of them were asking for a military dictatorship, while others called for Lula’s freedom. The bigger part of the traditional left labeled the strike non-progressivist, since it could be a lock-out made by entrepreneurs from the logistic sector. But the larger point is that the left was not able to explain why it would be a lock-out, and worse, didn’t try to join the strike to convince the workers and unite other categories in a general strike. They simply ignored the possibility that the lockout could turn into a real strike.

    Other movements of this kind – especially among the precariat – are popping up. The National Black Women’s Network is being reactivated in states such as Rio after 30 years and a huge number of Black women are running as autonomous candidates for parliament through the traditional left parties, in an attempt to change the political scenario.

    Favela dwellers and youth collectives still organizing demonstrations and trying to fight against militarization, human rights violations and for the right to live.

    I asked in February and I will ask again now. How long will our acts of bravery last? Can our fragmented and pragmatic efforts dispell an increasingly fascist national atmosphere? I don’t have an answer for the first question, but I am sure that for the second the immediate answer is no. Look where we have arrived via reformist pragmatism and fragmentation! In the middle of barbarism, building another society is urgent.  I don’t know if we will live to see it become a reality, but I can only fight – transforming my grief into a commitment to rebuild revolutionary internationalist Marxism; helping to reunite the working class; understanding the working class as it really is, diversity in unity. Recognizing and learning from our different survival strategies within the class struggle and hoping that a better future could be possible for all of us. I believe that the path to do this is understanding, as Tithi Bhattacharya writes, “Every social and political movement ‘tending’ in the direction of gains for the working class as a whole, or of challenging the power of capital as a whole, must be considered an aspect of class struggle.”[10] In this regard, I would like to highlight race and gender-based movements like the Brazilian Favela’s Mothers Movement against police brutality and militarization (Rede Contra a Violência) – from whose resistance we have so much to learn.

    I am convinced that the only way out for humanity now is found in the African expression, “Ubuntu,” as Marielle and our Black feminist tradition used to say – “I am because we are.” But I am also convinced that the only path to completely understand this saying is to fully grasp social totality, that is, capitalist totality. We cannot rely on solidarity for convenience, just momentary solidarity; we must understand that there is no “other,” that what we call solidarity with the other is in reality solidarity with ourselves – since no oppression, no expropriation, no exploitation is autonomous.

    Capitalism is individualizing but is not individualistic, capitalism is universal – in the sense of its ideology, domination and exploitation. It is a universal a priori and this universal, which is bourgeois, white, male, and heteronormative, is not – and never was nor will be – what we, the working class, need or desire. We need to build on a daily basis a universal for the future, with no national boundaries, with no borders, and with diversity in unity, as Marx pointed out 200 years ago.

    *****

    Rhaysa Ruas Da Fonseca is a young Afro-Brazilian attorney, researcher, and social activist based in Rio de Janeiro.

    [1] Actually, there is no transparency on the total cost of the measure. Despite being first announced as a deficit in the public expenditure for the security system – to be covered by the intervention – this is the total programmed spending guaranteed for the public security system in Rio in 2018. For the intervention alone, Temer freed up in March an additional 1.2 billion reais, which was added to the already existent spending to Rio’s 2018 public security. For more, see: https://g1.globo.com/rj/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/braga-netto-nega-passivo-de-r-31-bilhoes-na-seguranca-do-rj.ghtml

    [2] Cf. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/rio-could-be-laboratory-for-solving-brazils-crime-crisis/2018/02/19/242b6ff0-15a6-11e8-930c-45838ad0d77a_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.4cba00550678

    [3] Cf.  https://g1.globo.com/politica/blog/cristiana-lobo/post/general-vilas-boas-militares-precisam-ter-garantia-para-agir-sem-o-risco-de-surgir-uma-nova-comissao-da-verdade.ghtml

    [4] Cf. Gonçalves, Guilherme; Machado, Marta. Neoliberalismo autoritário em cinco atos: do salvamento de bancos à morte de Marielle. Revista Le monde Diplomatique.. EDIÇÃO – 129 | BRASIL, Abril 2018. Disponível em: https://diplomatique.org.br/neoliberalismo-autoritario-em-cinco-atos/

    [5] Saad-Filho, Alfredo. 2018. “The attack on Lula and threats to Brasil’s Democracy.”

    ___________________. 2016. “Overthrowing Dilma Rousseff: It’s class war & their class is winning.” FocaalBlog, 22 March. Available on: www.focaalblog.com/2016/03/22/alfredo-saad-filho-overthrowing-rousseff-its-class-and-war-their-class-is-winning

    [6] Saad-Filho, Alfredo. 2016. “Overthrowing Dilma Rousseff: It’s class war & their class is winning.” FocaalBlog, 22 March.

    [7] Data extracted from: Gonçalves, Guilherme; Machado, Marta. Neoliberalismo autoritário em cinco atos: do salvamento de bancos à morte de Marielle. Revista Le monde Diplomatique.. EDIÇÃO – 129 | BRASIL, Abril 2018. Disponível em: https://diplomatique.org.br/neoliberalismo-autoritario-em-cinco-atos/

    [8] Half of the reported killings of transgender people in the world occur here. Data from 2017 Report  “The Vicious Circle of Violence: Trans and Gender-Diverse People, Migration, and Sex Work”  the NGO “Trans Respect versus Homophobia. http://transrespect.org/en/tvt-publication-series/

    http://transrespect.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/TvT_TMM_TDoR2017_Tables_EN.pdf

    http://transrespect.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/TvT_TMM_TDoR2017_Map_EN.pdf

    [9] Phillips, Tom. The Guardian. 2018. “Trump of the tropics: the ‘dangerous’ candidate leading Brazil’s presidential race.”

    [10] Bhattacharya, Tithi, ed. 2017. Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. London: Pluto Press. p. 85.

     

  • Shenzhen Jasic Technology: Towards a Worker-Student Coalition in China

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    Last month students and recent graduates from more than a dozen mainland Chinese universities stood up in solidarity support with workers of Jasic Technology, a private company listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. The student activists include those from the Peking University, Tsinghua University, Nanjing University, and Sun Yat-sen University. They wore t-shirts with the slogan “unity is power” printed in bold red. They produced videos of public speeches and peaceful demonstrations in front of the Jasic factory in the Pingshan District of Shenzhen City, a key node of globalized production in South China. They tweeted open letters and blogs and photos via social media. In response, Jasic management retaliated against workers who initiated to establish a democratic union since this May and refused immediate re-instatement of dismissed workers, triggering waves of rights defense protests and social justice campaigns. As of writing, 14 workers were currently still being detained by local authorities, and 50 students were forcibly taken by the riot police, crushing the worker-student coalition.

    Labor disputes in China

    The conflicts between worker and management over punitive fines, wage deductions, and non-payment of social security benefits at Jasic are not an isolated case. Facing rights infringement and harsh treatment, aggrieved workers have resisted in numerous individual and collective forms. In 1982 China removed the right to strike from its constitution and the only official union organization is The All-China Federation of Trade Unions, an integral part of the government. Without the leadership of union, workers like Jasic have taken independent actions to defend their legal rights and interests.

    Government statistics indicate that, in 1996, 48,121 labor disputes (including individual and collective cases) were accepted for arbitration, involving 189,120 persons nationwide. The incidence of arbitrated labor disputes, along with mounting protests, has been growing rapidly. In the global economic crisis of 2008, when millions of workers were laid off, the number of cases skyrocketed to 693,465—nearly double from year ago, involving more than 1.2 million laborers across the country. Following a brief decline, since 2011, labor dispute cases have shot up annually, reaching an unprecedented 813,859 cases in 2015, as documented annually in the China Labour Statistical Yearbook.

    In addition to filing cases through dispute resolution mechanisms, workers have sought to strengthen their associational power to better protect themselves. Jasic workers had submitted their written intent to form a union in accordance with China’s Trade Union Law. They had prepared to engage in dialogue with management.

    On 1 August 2018, under the mounting pressure, Jasic executives quickly set up a union preparatory committee. From 2005 when the company was founded, Jasic, not unlike many other companies, had refused to recognize workers’ fundamental rights to unionize. On 20 August, Jasic called the first meeting to “elect” nine union committee members.

    How were the elections run? Who were the union chair and committee members? Apparently the Jasic management has controlled the sociopolitical space of organizing at the workplace level.

    A worker-student coalition

    For nearly two months now, a core group of university students, along with tens of thousands of fellow students from all over the country, have been supporting Jasic workers in their independent struggles against the repressive regime. This young cohort was born in the 1990s and early 2000s, when China accelerated its opening to the world and privatized its industries to enhance “flexibility” of work and employment in the market.

    In and through self-organized labor studies groups, internships, and waged work, the student activists understand deeper the urgent needs for more progressive legal reforms and fairer share of economic grains of direct producers. The effective use of digital media to present a united worker-student voice, despite removal and blockage of the content from internet by Chinese authorities, has drawn attention from academics and the wider public at home and abroad.

    High-profile labor insurgence has impacted social awareness of the students and far beyond. In recent years, a young generation of migrant factory workers at Foxconn (Shenzhen), Honda (Foshan), and Yue Yuen (Dongguan) have staged numerous strikes and protests to attempt to democratize their respective company unions. The workers’ demand for higher wages and better benefits are among the top priorities. As capital moves from coastal Guangdong to interior provinces to tap into cheaper labor and more abundant land, conflicts over unpaid wages and benefits and arbitrary dismissals may well increase across regions.

    University students share concerns about fair labor in an age of contracting and temporary work. They identify with Jasic workers that a functioning union that wins the trust and confidence of workers is a worthy effort of workers and students.

    The unyielding battle for social and economic justice from the bottom-up at Jasic and other workplaces has written a new page in contemporary Chinese society.

    *Jenny Chan, Assistant Professor, Department of Applied Social Sciences, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

     

  • Workers say no to Vietnam’s ‘Special Exploitation Zones’

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    On Sunday, 10 June 2018, thousands of people took to the streets in major Vietnamese cities—Nha Trang, Binh Thuan, Hanoi, and Ho Chi Minh City, among others. Academics, independent journalists, and overseas Vietnamese signed petitions to join in their protest against the Draft Law on the 99-year lease of the three Special Administrative and Economic coastal zones in Vietnam. Workers, too, went on strike in two industrial zones in Long An and Tien Giang provinces. These collective actions led to a concession from the government: it would delay the National Assembly’s ratification of the Draft Law to its next meeting.

    Why now, given that the idea of these three special economic zones was “old news”, having been announced in May 2017? It turns out that lack of transparency about the details of the Draft Law—made available only before a vote in the June 2018 session of the National Assembly—had triggered these massive protests.

    Only once the details became clear did protests begin in earnest. The protesters pointed to the risks of losing national sovereignty to China, alleged to be the key beneficiary of the Special Administrative and Economic zones scheme. While China is not mentioned in the 53-page Draft Law, the geopolitics of these three zones, spread from north to south, suggests otherwise: Vân Đồn (Quang Ninh province, bordering China), Bắc Vân Phong (Khanh Hoa province, ashore of the South China Sea), and Phú Quốc island (Kien Giang province, near the Sihanoukville Special Economic Zone in Cambodia, dominated by Chinese–Cambodian investment). Visas are to be waived for “citizens of the neighbouring country [China] sharing the border with Vietnam in Quang Ninh” (Article 55, Section 4), and for “citizens of the neighbouring country [Cambodia] sharing the border with Vietnam in Kien Giang province” (Article 57, Section 3). Who else would stand to benefit the most from both economic and administrative control over land, air, and sea lanes from these three zones?

    Indeed, why introduce more economic zones when Vietnam already has 18 economic zones, offering tax breaks and low rents, and which still have open spaces for foreign investors? A careful review of the text of this Draft Law reveals many ambiguities and raises grave concerns for the wellbeing of the Vietnamese workers and the environment for them, their families, and society at large.

    Here are some reasons for my concerns.

    First, the list of 131 approved businesses and industries for these three zones are not “green, high-tech, and knowledge-based” as stated goals; rather, they are completely the opposite. Technology transfer is mentioned only once in the 53-page draft law. Instead, hotels, tourism, casino, gambling and assembly work are prominently promoted in all three zones. Logistical controls over air, rail and sea transports are consistent with ongoing Chinese efforts to completely control the sea lanes in the Pacific Ocean.

    New routes will be open to foreign airlines to fly directly to Vân Đồn (bordering China) at discounted fees (Article 55); cargo containers can enter Bắc Vân Phong and get access to any port in Vietnam (Article 56); foreign owners of property in Phú Quốc (near Chinese investments in Cambodia) can keep secrets and manage their property using “international customs” (Article 57). Especially worrisome are the approved toxic industries on the list of 131 businesses (Appendix IV) such as military weaponry, chemical weapons, explosives, mines, dangerous cargos, serpentine (materials to make asbestos), radiation, nuclear energy, toxic waste treatment and imported industrial scraps.

    Other approved businesses allow imports and exports of protected and endangered species listed on the appendices of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES; Appendix IV). Moreover, Appendix V (Toxic List) approves 16 additional industries that are highly toxic (such as nuclear power, metallurgical and metal ores using toxic chemicals, chemical fertilisers, leather tanning, recycling waste, and coal gasification). How can any work safety and environmental monitoring take place in these high-walled enclaves (Article 3), when the owners (the Vietnamese government and foreign investors) can keep secrets on these zones as they see fit (Article 13)?

    Second, ambiguities and conflicting stipulations on privileges in these zones might prevent Vietnam from fulfilling ILO labour conventions promised in free trade agreements (FTAs). Especially important are ILO Conventions #87 (freedom of association), #98 (collective bargaining), and #105 (abolition of forced labour) required by the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (Chapter 15, EVTFA- [1]) and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (Chapter 19, CPTPP [2]). These FTA labour provisions are to be considered in the Labour Code Revisions to be submitted to the National Assembly by May 2019. [3]

    For instance, the exception clause in Article 5, Item 5 of the Draft Law states that if there were a conflict between international conventions and higher privileges offered by this Draft Law to foreign investors or corporations with foreign investment (a common practice by Chinese investors using Vietnamese fronts), this law will take precedence. However, Article 5, Item 6 states the opposite. This ambiguity will create problems in implementing this law—benefiting foreign investors, and weakening the unions that represent and protect workers’ rights.

    Third, foreign investors will have maximum control over their interests. Article 46, Item 2 permits them to recruit labour, exempts foreign experts/workers from permission to work for longer periods of time than in other zones in Vietnam, and uses their homeland laws and customs to govern their workers/employees (Article 6). What if these laws and customs contradict the rights and benefits of the Vietnamese workers? Overall, these privileges support a global pattern of Chinese migration to places where there are Chinese investment projects (such as Formosa company in Ha Tinh, Central Highlands bauxite, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and South Africa).

    Fourth, Vietnamese workers will have ambiguous or no protection for their rights and interests guaranteed in the Vietnamese Labour Code. Article 6, Item 1 mentions “the minimal rights of workers in the labour contracts” based on Vietnamese laws, but Article 46, Item 4, Point B and C give the Chairmen of these zones total discretion, such as to determine the “minimum wage” for these three zones (Article 46, Item 3). Who can guarantee that this level would not be lower than the national Minimum Wage law which is already not liveable? The chairmen also have the discretion to determine the levels of social insurance contributions and other social support for workers (Article 49). These ambiguities can release foreign investors from compliance with social insurance contribution for assembly workers in these zones.

    While this Draft Law does not rule out the application of existing Vietnamese labour laws (such as the Labour Code, Trade Unions, and Social Insurance laws), failure to mention these requirements—as implemented in other export processing zones—breeds ambiguity and weakens the role of the Vietnamese General Confederation of Labor (VGCL) to represent workers’ rights in their own country. A Deputy Director of the Institute for Workers and Trade Unions warned: “The VGCL’s operation is confined to doing what is prescribed in the law instead of doing what the law does not prohibit. Therefore, anything which is not clearly stated in the law is difficult for the VGCL… Union leaders are confused and fearful and do not know how to deal with problems which are not specified or ambiguous in the law.” [4]

    There are more loopholes in this 53-page Draft Law which give foreign investors virtual carte blanche control in these three “autonomous” zones. The Vietnamese workers and their children will be exposed to all types of toxic materials (Appendices IV and V) without protection by the VGCL nor work safety rights afforded to them in their own country. The promotion of casinos in these zones causes great concerns, knowing damages caused by the Boten casino in Laos (developed in 2003 and shut down in 2011 by the Chinese government) to the local residents.

    In sum, casinos and toxic industries are not “high-tech, green, and knowledge-based.” The ambiguities that promise “minimal rights for workers” will not engender sustainable development and technology transfer in Vietnam. The National Assembly should listen to their citizens’ concerns in their deliberation of this Draft Law. If this law is passed, unchecked toxic industries and ambiguous union protection will endanger generations of Vietnamese workers and their families and the environment for everyone—since pollution does, of course, drift.

    Examples from other ASEAN and South Asian countries (such as Boten casino, Myanmar’s Kyauk Pyu Special Economic Zone’s destroying local residents’ livelihoods, and the most recent Sri Lanka’s loss of their strategic Hambantota Port to China’s ownership for 99 years) should alert Vietnam to these risks. [5] [6] It should thus act in concert with these countries. Finally, solidarity with civil society organisations and global labour movements is needed to guard against the “race to the bottom” on workers’ rights.

    [1] http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/2016/february/tradoc_154229.pdf

    [2] http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/2016/february/tradoc_154229.pdf

    [3] http://www.ilo.org/hanoi/Informationresources/Publicinformation/comments-and-analysis/WCMS_620716/lang—en/index.htm

    [4] http://column.global-labour-university.org/2017/10/why-always-wildcat-strikes-in-vietnam.html

    [5] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-silkroad-myanmar-sez/chinas-10-billion-strategic-project-in-myanmar-sparks-local-ire-idUSKBN18Z327

    [6] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/world/asia/china-sri-lanka-port.html

    Originally posted at New Mandala. 

  • Don Trudell 1940-2018

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    There is no way that I am qualified to write a proper obituary for Don Trudell, a longtime member of the British IS/SWP who taught history and media studies at the American School in London (ASL) when I was a student there. I do not know where he was born, or went to college, or even his full name. The last time we spoke was in the early 1980s, and the last time I spent any significant amount of time in his company was when I was still in high school. Although I dined at his house a couple of times, and chatted with him after class on innumerable occasions, I can’t say that we ever became friends. But he was a singular individual and he left an indelible impression on how I think about the world.

    I found out that “Trudell,” which is what we all called him, had passed away when someone posted a link to his obituary in Socialist Worker. The obit offers useful information but only scratches the surface so far as conveying what an amazing teacher he was. There were a number of gifted educators wandering the halls of ASL in those days, such as Linda H. in English, whose love of poetry and literature was palpable, and Don J. in Studio Art and English, who turned me onto Philip K. Dick and who once threw a chair out the window. I should probably note that the window was already open, and that it faced a courtyard rather than a public thoroughfare. No one was hurt. But it was a different era and many of the teaching strategies that Don J. and others favored would probably get them canned in 2018.

    The first time I met Trudell was when I attended an afterschool event designed to help prepare eighth graders for the rigors of high school. He had been charged with the task of leading a mock class, and there were parents in the room as well as rising ninth graders. His talk was on “Law and Power in Eighteenth-Century England” or something equally ornate. But at the outset he told us that he would prefer to pose one or two general questions and then see where the discussion took us. As it turned out, his approach was rather severe. When he smiled it was out of a sense of irony. He listened to what everyone had to say with a kind of intensity that I had never encountered before. He began by asking a deceptively simple question: who should write the law? I thought I knew something about the world and took the bait. “Experts,” I said. “People who know what they are doing.” He responded by asking how exactly I knew who was an expert and who was not. I tried to defend my ground but his Socratic methodology led me to realize that I had no idea what I was talking about and that I had to go back to square one.  

    Some students were put off by his interrogative style but as soon as I could I started signing up for his courses. In a session on the Industrial Revolution I remember watching a student race out of the room when she realized that her fervent defense of nineteenth century factory owners was not exactly airtight. ASL mostly attracted students from upper income backgrounds and she seemed to believe that the powerful are always on the side of the angels. I also remember a substitute teacher who insisted we should memorize rather than deconstruct the assigned readings, and who refused to believe that our teacher took a different approach. “Why would he assign this material if he wanted you to criticize it?” he asked.

    From the SW obituary I learned that Trudell relocated to London at the end of the sixties. If memory serves he initially planned on pursuing a PhD in history. He was fond of writers like Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, and E.P. Thompson, but he was particularly keen on primary sources. He was the first teacher I encountered who assigned authors like Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx. I doubt whether I’ve ever met anyone who could dispatch a poorly constructed thesis as efficiently as Don Trudell. He was ruthless when it came to emphasizing the importance of clear terms, evidence, and logical argumentation, and he taught me to appreciate the value of close reading. He had a formidable intellect, as well as a sardonic sensibility, and I was by no means the only ASLer who found him hard to please.

    His teaching style may have evolved over the years. Socialist Worker describes him as having a “warm and friendly manner,” which does not quite mesh with my own recollections. In my experience he could be extremely charming but mostly what I remember is his trying to get us to think harder and to move past our own blinders. I have no idea what he was like as a husband, parent, or party member. I suspect he enjoyed teaching but also found it draining. Like many of us he was a bit of a performer. Only now as I write this do I realize how much of my own pedagogy derives from what I learned in his classroom.

    *Kent Worcester attended the American School in London from 1969-1977. His books include C.L.R. James: A Political Biography (1996), A Comics Studies Reader (2008; coedited with Jeet Heer), and Silent Agitators: Cartoon Art from the Pages of New Politics (2016).

     

     

     

  • Two Tributes to Jesse Lemisch

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    New Politics sponsor Jesse Lemisch died on August 25, 2018. He will be greatly missed as a radical historian, a friend, and a tireless fighter for socialism (and history!) from below.

    Here are memories from two friends.

    Marcus Rediker

    Rest in Peace, Jesse Lemisch (1936-2018), radical historian and fun-loving contrarian. I first met Jesse in 1978. I was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania who would study eighteenth-century sailors, just as Jesse had done so memorably in his famous article “Jack Tar in the Streets.” I visited him in his small Greenwich Village apartment. We sat on the sofa in one corner of the room as his wife, the brilliant feminist psychologist/neuroscientist Naomi Weisstein, wore headphones and pedaled a stationary bike in the other. Jesse was animated, funny, irreverent, brash, and helpful. It was a joy for me to sit and talk with the person who had done so much to give meaning to the phrase “history from the bottom up.”

    There was much to like about Jesse – his fierce intelligence, his endearing warmth, his larger-than-life spirit. He was a red-diaper baby and radical to the bone, a natural-born fighter. We worked together on various projects over the years. When his legendary dissertation, “Jack Tar vs John Bull,” was finally published in 1997, I wrote the introduction. That intro begins with a description of an adventure Jesse and I had as we searched the massive Hotel Rossiya in Moscow in 1991 for a group of Siberian miners who had come to the capital city to wage a hunger strike.

    It was my pleasure to dedicate my book Outlaws of the Atlantic to Jesse in 2015. I hope he knew how much he meant to me. I lament the passing of someone who showed us how to write history from below.

     

    Suzi Weissman

    This is terribly sad and shocking news. I adored Jesse and his penetrating, acerbic wit, his good politics, his view of most things cultural, his sense of history, his love for Naomi and his dear friend Joanne Landy. Jesse was funny, smart and warm. Where others cite his curmudgeonliness I saw intransigence on matters of principle, but always coupled with subversive humor. I already miss you Jesse Lemisch.

     

     

  • The Unbearable Centrism of Mainstream Documentaries

    ImageThe Obamas’ deal with Netflix is the culmination of a worrisome turn in contemporary documentary.

    Since the announcement in May of Former President Barack and First Lady Michelle Obama’s multi-year production deal to produce narrative and documentary films and series with Netflix, there has been remarkably little conversation about it. Admittedly, there isn’t any work to evaluate just yet, but the news does raise enormously important questions in and of itself.

    For example, isn’t it a bit hypocritical of the 44th President to be venturing into nonfiction media? As Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan recently reminded readers, although he “once claimed that he would be the most transparent president ever,” Obama was in fact “no friend to press rights.” Arguing that President Trump’s “aggression against reporters and sources” follows “the blueprint drawn by Obama,” she cites the litany of reprehensible moves made by the latter’s Justice Department that clearly set very dangerous precedents — including subpoenaing reporters’ phone records, and applying legal pressure to those covering government leaks. In addition, as CNN’s Jake Tapper has pointed out, the Obama White House “used the Espionage Act to go after whistleblowers who leaked to journalists…more than all previous administrations combined.”

    Obama’s disdain for journalists was also apparent in his obvious preference for highly contrived public relations opportunities over actual news interviews. In a 2014 piece about the former President’s sit-downs with Zach Galifianakis, Charles Barkley, Bill Simmons, Steve Harvey, and Jon Stewart, the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza quantified this disparity: “…Compare those appearances to the number of times Obama has sat down with more ‘traditional’ media outlets. The last time the Washington Post had an interview with Obama was in December 2009. The last time the New York Times had one was July 2013.” That same year, an analysis by the Columbia Journalism Review found a larger, more disconcerting pattern: “An exhaustive study of every official exchange Obama had with the press corps in 2014, supplemented by a review of daily press briefings and interviews with more than a dozen current and former correspondents and White House press secretaries, reveals a White House determined to conceal its workings from the press, and by extension, the public.”

    On top of his dreadful track record with the fourth estate, the former President’s status as the highest profile member of the Democratic Party raises further questions about any nonfiction work he and Mrs. Obama will be producing. Specifically: will it be Third Way propaganda dressed up as hard-hitting documentary?

    Speaking to the issue of potential bias at a recent Paley Center for Media event, Netflix’s chief content officer Ted Sarandos insisted that there would be “no political slant to [the Obamas’] programming.” But that can’t possibly be true: all art is political, implicitly or explicitly, whether we like it or not. What’s more, Sarandos is hardly a nonpartisan source of information here: he was a fundraiser for Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, and is the spouse of Nicole Avant, the President’s Ambassador to the Bahamas from 2009 to 2011. So can we expect that the Obamas’ newly formed “Higher Ground Productions” will reflect the same values and positions advanced by his Administration, or not?

    Realistically speaking, we’re likely to get at least some New Democrat puffery repackaged as “streaming content.” As such, we shouldn’t hold our collective breath for substantive critical analysis in any of these forthcoming documentaries. Indeed, the very idea that the former President would rigorously question the party lines on things like American imperialism, criminal justice, immigration, surveillance and encryption policy, and drone warfare, let alone income inequality, is laughable. If House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi asserts, “We’re capitalists, and that’s just the way it is,” then why wouldn’t that be the a priori starting point of an Obama-produced documentary on, say, economic issues?

    That the Obamas’ Netflix deal seems to have gone largely uncriticized probably has something to do with how effectively we’ve been conditioned for such an eventuality: this development is the logical culmination of a centrist turn that has been taking place within mainstream documentary culture over the past few years.

    Now, it has long been the case, as Cinema Politica co-founder and Director of Programming Ezra Winton has observed, that “among documentaries concerned with socio-political issues and subjects, some tend toward a more populist, liberal and feel-good variety, such as Waiting for Superman (dir. Davis Guggenheim, 2010), while others tend to be more radical (in form and/or argument), and are inclined to challenge, implicate and confront (subjects and audiences), such as Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (dir. Alanis Obomsawin, 1993).” Increasingly, however, on the whole, we’re seeing far more of the former than the latter. Writer Daniel Glassman puts it well in another, more recent article for the Canadian documentary magazine Point of View: “Documentaries now prize story arc, sentiment and sanctimony over thorough investigation and argument; it’s not expected that they play any important role in the information ecosystem. Their purpose seems to be to preach to the choir: tepid left sentiments for tepid left audiences.” [Full disclose: Point of View’s editor, Marc Glassman, is one of the author’s professors at Ryerson University.]

    If there’s any doubt that what Winton calls “liberal consensus documentaries” have sucked far too much of the air out of their corner of the media landscape, consider how low the bar is currently set for documentary impact. In a recent piece for The Ringer about “this amazing golden era of documentary,” for example, Sean Fennessey says this about the two highest grossing documentaries of the year so far: “Together, [Betsy West and Julie Cohen’s RBG and Morgan Neville’s Won’t You Be My Neighbor?] make a pair of political moviegoing experiences — a history lesson about sincerity and an art project about the law — using totemic figures to make their points” (emphasis added). Not only is it worrying that two touchy-feely hagiographies — of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and children’s television host Fred Rogers, respectively — might pass for political cinema in 2018, but their politics are obstinately centrist and middlebrow.

    RBG, for instance, is a righteous paean to Ginsburg as a second-wave feminist icon that insists on seeing everything through rose-colored glasses. By way of example, in his review of the film for the A.V. Club, critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky rightly notes that the reason “Ginsburg’s dissenting opinions…are much better known than her majorities” is because “her judicial stance has always been that of a pragmatist, a moderate, and a middle-of-the-road Democrat.” Unsurprisingly, then, RBG, has trouble “making a rousing appraisal of Ginsburg’s moderate record as the stuff of radical sainthood.” As he puts it, “centrism is still centrism, even when it’s dressed up with ‘Yas Queen’s and fire emojis.” Additionally, nowhere in the film do we find any critique whatsoever of things like the aged justice’s strategically high-risk choice to not retire during the Obama years, or her tone-deaf comments about Colin Kaepernick.

    Won’t You Be My Neighbor? does better by “Mister Rogers,” but has its issues too. For example, in the sentimental framing of its subject as a “lifelong registered Republican” whose work consistently cut against the grain of his party’s positions, the film (whether it means to or not) contributes to a dangerously wrongheaded fixation — specifically, what journalists Adam H. Johnson and Nima Shirazi have called “liberals’ obsession with the phantom reasonable Republican.” If anything, that’s the kind of preoccupation documentary media should be more ruthlessly interrogating, not propping up.

    And yet, the very same bill of goods is being sold in Peter Kunhardt’s treacly new HBO documentary John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls. The film “celebrates [the Arizona senator] as a relic of a past when ‘reaching across the aisle’ was still possible,” writes Matt Taibbi in his review for Rolling Stone. “[And its] extraordinary lineup of gushing interviewees — [George W.] Bush, [Henry] Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, etc. — is an implicit endorsement of this idea.” The Hollywood Reporter’s Inkoo Kang is quite right, though, when she says that the film’s “nostalgia for a more reasonable sort of Republican isn’t entirely earned.” For one thing, as Taibbi puts it, For Whom the Bell Tolls and McCain’s vision of bipartisanship really belongs to “the pre-Trump age when ‘the middle’ was still sought-after political territory, and the political class to which they all belong was not yet despised enough to make someone like Donald Trump a viable spite vote.” For another, as Kang notes, “McCain’s hawkish foreign-policy views…which barely get a mention, seem to assume that solutions are mainly to be found in an armory.”

     

    Appropriately enough, the centrist turn in mainstream documentaries is especially apparent when it comes to the issue of war. In his survey of the 2000-2010 decade for Cinema Scope, for instance, filmmaker Thom Andersen (who is best known for 2003’s Los Angeles Plays Itself) makes a special point of noting that, during the Iraq War, the American cinema “admirably [assumed] the role [that was] inexcusably abdicated by television.” Nieman Reports’ early praise on this front was even more specific: “Iraq war documentaries [filled] a press vacuum…[offering] alternative explanations for the war in Iraq and the news coverage of it, as well as [criticism] of the administration’s policies.” (emphasis added). Though not all of these works found an audience, it’s nonetheless worth remembering that some certainly did: Michael Moore’s 2004 opus Fahrenheit 9/11, for example, remains the highest grossing documentary of all time, and by an incredibly wide margin.

    Today, though, despite excellent work being done on the fringes, it’s far less clear that documentaries in the main are fulfilling the same essential, radical function that they did in the early 2000s. Worse still, the tenor has changed enough such that some projects are now even carrying water for apologists of the U.S.’s most divisive conflicts. The most obvious example here would be Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s recent PBS series The Vietnam War, which was seen by a whopping 39 million viewers. Despite an adulatory reception from critics, it is, to be quite sure, a problematic work. In a post at Public Books, for example, College of the Holy Cross emeritus professor Jerry Lembcke points out that, among other things, “The Vietnam War echoes Jimmy Carter’s ‘mutual destruction’ thesis that Vietnam and the United States were equally damaged by the conflict,” and “in promoting healing instead of the search for truth,” it “offers misleading comforts.”

    In a report for Inside Higher Ed, Colleen Flaherty enumerates further criticisms voiced during “A Fateful Misunderstanding: A Discussion of the Film Documentary The Vietnam War,” a panel at this year’s annual meeting of the American Historical Association. Evidently, participating scholars’ major point of contention was that “the documentary [includes only] two trained historians with military credentials but otherwise [relies] on witnesses — mainly U.S. veterans and their families.” In addition, as Flaherty explains, Burns and Novick’s documentary “avoids overt judgments about policy decisions that led to and prolonged the war, and instead takes what panelists described as an ‘elegiac’ and ‘conciliatory’ tone.” Among other things, the article also describes University of Chicago historian Mark Philip Bradley finding fault with the filmmakers for “glossing over…previous U.S. military involvement in Asia” and “framing…the war as a ‘tragedy’ rather than a series of ‘immeasurable and irredeemable’ mistakes.” (Fittingly, The Vietnam War’s cringe-worthy opening lines — “It was begun in good faith by decent people, out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War miscalculation” — have received a good drubbing, including at least one snarky comment that went viral on Twitter.)

    There’s a good deal of image rehabilitation going on in Liz Garbus’s new Showtime series The Fourth Estate as well. A behind-the-scenes peek into the New York Times’ coverage of the Trump Administration’s first year, the series is, as Variety’s Owen Gleiberman observes, keenly focused on “the nuts and bolts of [their] news process.” Given that it’s four episodes of this (for a combined total of around four-and-a-half hours), it’s hard not to get the impression that Garbus sees the “Gray Lady” as the gold standard and our best journalistic defense against the current regime. But especially after the “paper of record’s” historically disastrous and unforgivable role in the run up to the Iraq War — to say nothing of more recent blunders — perhaps what it really needs is to be knocked off its pedestal. Indeed, in a mixed-to-negative review of the series for, of all publications, the New York Times, Maureen Ryan opines that “not talking to higher-ups about gaps, blind spots and stumbles comes off as a missed opportunity.”

    To be fair, Garbus was given astonishing access to the Times, and it’s generally not advisable to bite the hand that feeds you. At the same time, though, a choice of subject or way shaping a project can often betray a filmmaker’s particular biases or leanings. Because The Fourth Estate offers, in Ryan’s words, “almost no substantive examination” of “the things that really aggravate the paper’s critics” (i.e. “emphasis, omissions and the sheer tonnage of certain kinds of coverage”), it definitely feels like a documentary by and for “Times partisans” who more or less share the subjects’ “defensive mindset.”

    Still, perhaps no recent documentary is quite as in the tank for the cause of centrist liberals as Greg Barker’s The Final Year. Coming full circle, the film follows Former President Obama, Former Secretary Of State John Kerry, Former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, and Former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes as they attend to various foreign policy matters in the months before the 2016 Election. Taking notice of the film’s “promotional quality,” Variety’s Scott Tobias writes in his review that “the Obama team was always expert at protecting and polishing its image, and the film happily acquiesces with a highlight reel of diplomatic missions.” But by the time we get to the ending that clearly neither Barker nor the Obama White House were expecting, the limitations of not only The Final Year’s approach but its subjects’ ethos have become painfully obvious to the viewer. As Chuck Bowen puts it in his review for Slant Magazine, “the film smugly bolsters a cliché of the Democratic Party: obsessed by symbolism and decorum, it misses the sea change in plain sight, and seems terrifyingly unable and unwilling to question its direction, message, and salesmanship.”

    Broadly speaking, this is a salient point for mainstream documentary culture to consider,  as it’s very far from clear that the centrist turn is making inroads with audiences. For example, in an article from June about RBG and Won’t You Be My Neighbor? as “surprise hits,” the New York Times included an important caveat from IndieWire’s Tom Brueggemann. Putting things into perspective, he noted that their box offices performances, at that point, paled in comparison to the films of odious conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza: 2012’s 2016: Obama’s America ($33.4 million), 2014’s America: Imagine the World Without Her ($14.4 million), and 2016’s Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party ($13 million). As of this article’s writing, however, both RBG and Won’t You Be My Neighbor? have outgrossed Hillary’s America. RBG, though, is still trailing behind America, and both still have quite a bit of work to do before they catch up to 2016.

    But, of course, documentaries don’t just exist on the center-to-far-right spectrum. Though they may get overshadowed by this more narrow range of work, there are what Winton calls “radically-committed documentaries” being made both within and without the mainstream. His aforementioned nonprofit Cinema Politica, for example, “supports and screens alternative, independent, and radical political film and video” through its “network of community and campus locals.” They offer a curated, subscription-based streaming service that greatly expands the audience for such work as well.

    The work of Laura Poitras is also about as radically-committed as you can get: even before her jaw-dropping 2014 Edward Snowden documentary CITIZENFOUR, she found herself unjustly placed on the Department of Homeland Security’s watchlist for 2006’s My Country, My Country, a revealing look inside U.S.-occupied Iraq. Moreover, her “filmmaker-driven documentary unit” Field of Vision, which “commissions and creates” short works, has quickly distinguished itself as one of our most thrilling and vital platforms for documentary filmmaking. In addition, Ava DuVernay’s Oscar-nominated 13th and Brett Story’s critically acclaimed The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, both released in 2016, are examinations of the prison-industrial complex that come from filmmakers who publicly self-identify as prison abolitionists. [Full disclosure: Story is another of the author’s professors at Ryerson University.]

    There’s even more on the horizon. Among others, Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?, an essay film about white supremacy from Travis Wilkerson (who is best known for 2002’s An Injury to One), will bow in theaters this fall. Like all of his work, the much-buzzed-about new film is made “in the tradition of the ‘Third Cinema,’ wedding politics to form in an indivisible manner.” Robert Greene’s Bisbee ‘17, a timely look at the Bisbee Deportation of 1917 and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)’s role in the event, will have a national release before the year’s end as well. The magazine Jacobin is also involved in the production of a new documentary about socialism in America, which has apparently had impressive access to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Socialists of America member who won a startling victory in the Democratic primary in New York’s 14th congressional district.

    That said, resolutely leftist films do often face an uphill battle against mainstream documentary’s centrist turn. For one thing, “radically-committed documentaries” don’t usually have the resources for promotion and advertising that many “liberal-consensus documentaries” do. Netflix, for example, spent $2 billion on marketing in 2018, so it’s likely that Obama productions in the offing will get a proportionally larger push than anything coming from the margins. For another, as this article has endeavored to point out, radical perspectives have become more the exception than the rule in mainstream documentary, with liberal centrism dominating political discourse in films and series. This state of affairs makes it appreciably harder for alternative voices and stories to be heard by those who need to hear them.

    But American audiences, like the American electorate, can and must reject the ideas we’re getting inundated with in favor of more revolutionary ones. The Obamas’ impending Netflix documentaries will probably tell us what we want to hear in an effort to make us feel good, but what our times call for instead is something else entirely: an activist-minded cinema devoted not to the Democratic establishment but to the people.

    *Daniel Clarkson Fisher is a Toronto-based writer whose work has appeared in AlterNet, New Politics, PopMatters, Bright Lights Film Journal, Nonfics, Tricycle, Religion Dispatches, and Diabolique. He is a student in the MFA in Documentary Media program at Ryerson University, and member of IWW Educational Workers Industrial Union 620.

  • Globalists vs. Internationalists

    ImageQuinn Slobodian. Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Harvard University Press, 2018. 381pp.

    Neoliberalism is dead, if it ever existed at all. Centrists and so-called moderates dismiss it as nothing more than a slur bandied around by leftists. On the left on the other hand, neoliberalism is at times portrayed as mere free market fundamentalism, or simply as a return to capitalism as it was intended, before the post-war social democratic hiatus. Thatcher and Reagan, the thinking goes, along with Milton Friedman and his “Chicago Boys”, wanted to unleash the full power of free markets’ self-regulating force.

    These stories have had a long life, but they might be misleading caricatures, or at best tell only a very partial story, as Quinn Slobodian’s sweeping intellectual history of neoliberalism illustrates. Globalists is the work of an historian that relishes the opportunity to excavate, like an archaeologist, the fossils of an idea. In this genealogy of neoliberalism, a sweeping travelogue meandering through European intellectual history from the interwar period onwards, the roots are not to be found in a resurgent West’s fear of Soviet Communism during the Cold War, claims Slobodian, but rather in the more gentile central Europe of the late 1920s. The Austro-Hungarian empire has collapsed, and in a continent of new nations, a group of economists sees in this “world of walls” a menace to an international market that should lead to convergence across nations. Always the magnanimous one, economist Ludwig von Mises envisions, as recounted in the book, a world in which European workers earn less, but also in which “Hindus and coolies” would earn more.

    Slobodian defines neoliberalism as an ideology devoted to finding extra-economic ways to protect the global economic order, to encase—rather than to unleash—market dogmas in a solid international institutional and juridical edifice. They formulate the idea that the realm of dominium, property rights, should be more important than imperium—a country’s sovereignty. Governments should act as gardeners, Hayek would write, tending to the flows of capital and trade, keeping the environment ideal for markets to thrive. Hayek’s garden would be protected by regulating structures, “establishments which are the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design”, in the words of 18th century philosopher Adam Ferguson. Scholars of neoliberalism, from Michel Foucault to Loïc Wacquant, had long understood that it operated as a reconfiguration—rather than a retreat—of the state. Slobodian’s book however adds a historical perspective, detailing how this ideological battle was waged through a clear strategy of lobbying in international institutional settings, pushing newly decolonized countries to relinquish economic nationalism, “kicking away the ladder” that had allowed the West to develop. One of the more interesting conceptualizations Slobodian credits to neoliberals in his book is the notion of “xenos rights” of capital, namely the “rights to safe passage and unmolested ownership of their property and capital, regardless of the territory.”

    The term “neoliberalism” itself was coined through much debate at the Walter Lippmann Colloqium, organized in Paris in 1938, and it might have been helpful for readers of Slobodian’s book to learn more about one of the conveners, philosopher Louis Rougier, if only because his perspective is central to understanding the Franco-German roots of neoliberalism. At the heart of his thought and of that 1938 meeting is the idea that laissez-faire economics—i.e. Manchester Liberalism—and planisme were two sides of the same medal: “mystical doctrines”, as he would define them. Channeling ordoliberals, Rougier would write that “constructive liberalism implies a juridical order in which free competition would be enshrined, a juridical order in which the formation of trusts would become impossible, just as much as trade union tyranny, which imposes employment and salary conditions contrary to the balance of the labor market.” Rougier’s intellectual history almost mirrors Wilhelm Röpke’s, to whom Slobodian dedicates many pages. Röpke, a committed culturalist and racist, supported apartheid South Africa in the name of his belief in the fundamental difference between races, and the superiority of European civilization (sic) over Africans. Rougier collaborated with the Vichy regime during World War II, reason for which he would be barred from attending the first meeting of the Société du Mont Pélerin—founded by Röpke and Hayek—in 1947. He would later join in the 1970s Alain de Benoist’s GRECE, a neo-fascist and culturalist European group of intellectuals, to whom our contemporary nativist right owes a significant intellectual debt.

    The trajectories of people like Röpke and Rougier hint to an unresolved tension amongst neoliberals, and one that Slobodian does not linger on enough, arguably. How come people that share a similar vision of the global economy—across a similar spectrum, at the very least—differ so much in their view of the world? How can neoliberalism make room for both Wilhelm Röpke and someone like Pascal Lamy, director-general of the WTO from 2005 to 2013, and who could not even remotely be suspected of harboring racial supremacist ideas? How come amongst neoliberals, equally committed to a free and encased global market, some are so attached to national sovereignty, like Brexit ideologue Douglas Carswell or Alternative for Germany’s Alice Weidel, while others, like European Union MP Guy Verhofstadt or philanthro-capitalist George Soros long for a post-national world? Perhaps an answer to this question also lies in the evolution of neoliberalism in Europe.

    In Slobodian’s book in fact, neoliberals appear as somewhat uninterested in liberal democracy. Their main concern is the defense and securing of dominium rights over the fluctuations of politics played out on national stages. However, for a particular school of neoliberalism emerging in France, liberal democracy appears quite clearly as the condition of realization of a free market economy. They could be labeled the “idealist” branch of neoliberalism, covering their economic ideology with a veneer of high-minded liberal values. The Fondation Saint-Simon, a think tank started around historian Pierre Rosanvallon and economist Alain Minc in 1981 illustrated this evolution. Minc would coin the term of “circle of reason” to describe themselves, and more broadly the neoliberals across the right and left that were committed to their agenda. In recent years, this distinction between French and German ordoliberalism was seen in the EU’s reaction to the Greek government’s resistance in 2015. For both Emmanuel Macron and Wolfgang Schaüble, respectively finance ministers of France and Germany at the time, the outcome of the crisis would have been the same from the start: the submission of Greece to EU’s supra-national rules. Whereas Schaüble took the part of the bad cop, proudly showcasing his ordo-intransigence, Macron could play the good cop, covering the submission and impoverishment of the Greeks in the honey-tongued language of European liberal values. “We cannot let elections affect economic policy”, Schaüble would tell Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis during their first Eurogroup meeting, channeling the book’s cast of characters.

    By situating the neoliberal movement as a globalist one, intent on creating a fully integrated world economy shielded from political change, one can see through Slobodian’s book the specter of the nativist backlash we have witnessed in recent years. Far-right movements have rebranded themselves as those more likely to protect people from the globalists—those that break walls and want to bring to the West “the standards of life of Hindus and coolies”, to circle back to Mises’ earlier words. Neoliberal globalists are coherent, claim the Steve Bannons and Marine Le Pens of the world: they want xenos rights of capital, which impoverish national economies; they also defend xenos rights of immigrants, who change national cultures and replace native populations (sic). The populist right contrasts to that a return to idealized national economies of the past, a shattering of the international juridical apparatuses encasing global market flows, to protect people from globalization. There is an apparent pernicious coherence in their reasoning.

    Although the author does not enter into contemporary political debates, his book can be read as a defense of the nation against neoliberal policies. If neoliberalism places dominium rights over imperium, countering it will mean flipping that hierarchy and replacing at the center of political life the rule of the state over property and capital rights. This does not have to be a sclerotic statist and nationalist imperium. For Spinoza, as defined in his Tractatus Politicus, imperium is nothing more than “the right determined by the power of the multitude.” The first step against neoliberal hegemony might be to shatter the preeminence of dominium.

    However, whenever one tries to theorize the nation from the left and to appropriate it as an emancipatory political unit, many within its ranks raise an eyebrow. Going down that line, they say, you will play perfectly into the hands of the nationalists. They have more experience with that form. Granted, the horrors of 20th century nationalism in Europe have made Europeans weary of any claim about nations. But the most radical decolonial movements are not averse to embracing that category, in Africa or South America. The greatest ideological victory of neoliberals might very well be the idea that any attempt to break the encasing of markets in an oppressive global order is, regardless of conditions, a reactionary and conservative move. Seen that way, there is, indeed, no alternative.

    Yet the nation does not have to be a nativist nightmare. The populist rights think it is coherent in choosing to curb all xenos rights—of both capital and humans. A vision of the nation by the left would grant unalienable xenos rights to human beings, freedom of movement and settlement for all those wishing to do so. This way, no risks of confusion with the crypto-fascists, who pretend to defend the downtrodden as long as they have the right name or the right passport, only to foster conflicts between people that would have every interest in uniting politically. These unalienable xenos rights for humans would have to go along with a serious dismantling of the inalienability of Hayek’s xenos rights for capital. Disentangling freedom of human movement from the freedom of capital movement could be a way to free ourselves from the liberal capitalist mindset, which treats every human as capital.

    This would have the beneficial consequence of stopping the political blackmail that consists in capital pitting regions of the world against each other in a race to the bottom. Economist Dani Rodrik theorized at the end of the last century the “trilemma” of international political economy: one can only have two out of national sovereignty, global economic integration, and democratic government. But as Slobodian’s book makes clear, global economic integration in its neoliberal form cannot allow for democracy, because it is precisely predicated on protecting the market from democracies.

    Political constructivism beyond the nation-state is possible, but history shows that upheavals of that magnitude, namely changing people’s perspective of their communities of belonging and purpose, is usually a long and violent process. With which political resources could we organize a truly democratic global government, and in how much time? Those suffering the effects of neoliberalism across the world do not have that much time. This is why one is forced to sneer at suggestions like some recently seen in the media, suggesting the imminent demise of nation-states. The hope could instead be to have inter-national movements, where the convergence of standards of living does not happen at the lowest common denominator for the majority, as Ludwig von Mises would have wanted. Internationalism, in this sense, becomes the true opposition to globalism. There is nothing mystical about this nation, it is just the perimeter on which collective sovereignty is exercised, just one product of historical contingency like others. But the one that seems to be at this historical juncture the most useful in effecting progressive change in the world. The question then becomes how to organize inter-national rules and inter-national solidarity, an effort in building true internationalism for everyone—not just globalism for elites.

  • Marx and Marxism in Berkeley in 1968

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    Berkeley (California) was probably a unique political-cultural milieu in the U.S. in the 1960s, both before and after 1968. It was part of the larger political-cultural scene of the San Francisco Bay Area from 1945 onward. The Bay Area at the time was a relative backwater in the U.S., compared to the East coast. The area had, however, seen one of the biggest general strikes of the 1930s, when the Communist Party-influenced ILWU (International Longshore Workers Union) helped bring San Francisco to a halt in 1934, including mass street battles with the police.

    As late as the 1970’s, prior to the serious beginnings of gentrification, San Francisco was still something of a “labor town” where capitalists and politicians had to tread softly. In 1945, the poet Kenneth Rexroth and others had laid the foundations of the later San Francisco Renaissance with a gathering of poets and radicals that reached into the 1960s, when it was challenged and overwhelmed by the hippie counter-culture. In 1951, the anarchist poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in San Francisco’s North Beach area, had founded City Lights Bookstore, a center for books and poetry available in few other places (and still in existence).

    Across the Bay from San Francisco, Berkeley was a somewhat different but related cultural-political scene. One of the differences was, of course, the main campus of the University of California system, which by the 1960s had over 20,000 students. UC Berkeley had famously purged its own radical professors during the McCarthy era (late 1940s/early 1950s), a kind of liberal house-cleaning intended to keep at bay right-wing witch hunt forces such as HUAC (House of Un-American Activities Committee, a congressional investigative body) by doing their dirty work for them. In 1960, there were major riots against HUAC in San Francisco, in which Berkeley radicals participated, effectively ending HUAC as a force.

    Berkeley was a city (population 100,000) where Communists, ex-Communists and other radicals from the 1930s and 1940s could to some extent “lay low” during the period of McCarthyite reaction. The city saw the (1948) origins of Pacifica radio, in which many such types found a home during the 1950s emergence of FM broadcasting, featuring not only jazz and classical music but also poetry and serious news programs not available elsewhere. Cody’s Bookstore, another iconic scene, was started in the 1950s, and by the late 1960’s occupied a large building on Telegraph Avenue, south of the campus, where it remained for decades, one of the best bookstores in the U.S.

    By the early 1960s, Berkeley and San Francisco were increasingly swept up in the emerging black civil rights movement. By 1964, there were mass demonstrations in both San Francisco and Oakland against racial discrimination in hiring, and some Berkeley students went to the Deep South in the summer of 1964 to help with voter registration of black people. When they returned, they brought with them the outlook and organizing methods learned in the South, for movements both on and off campus. This led directly to the origins of the Free Speech Movement in Fall 1964, in which 800 Berkeley students ultimately occupied the administration building, demanding the right to have political tables on campus, including for organizing off campus. They won. Their arrests became a national and international flashpoint. Sproul Plaza, the main campus area for tabling and leafleting, became something like a major Athenian agora in which two dozen political and cultural tendencies vied for influence.

    Both interesting and significant was the fact that, amidst such ferment, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the main national group of radical students, never gained a foothold in Berkeley, in contrast to many other U.S. campuses which lacked such a varied political and cultural scene.

    The national elections of 1964 were a major turning point. The “great liberal” Democrat and “peace candidate,” Lyndon Johnson, overwhelmingly defeated a right-wing, war-mongering Republican, Barry Goldwater, in an election in which both the civil rights movement and the then-emerging Vietnam War were major issues. Within a few months of his landslide victory, Johnson escalated the bombing of North Vietnam, an unsurpassable education by events for the 1960’s generation then coming of age. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. invaded the Dominican Republic to put down a radical uprising there, warning of possible “Communist influence” from the nearby Cuban Revolution, which was then consolidating itself and was (seemingly) oriented to exporting revolution throughout Latin America and beyond. New Deal Democratic Party liberalism never recovered from these and other developments.

    I became a student at UC Berkeley in the spring of 1966, above all to maintain a student draft deferment, as the American troop presence in Vietnam reached 500,000. I was bored by the classes and dreamed of expatriating to Paris. There were daily political rallies on the main campus plaza, overwhelmingly left-wing and anti-war. I was anti-war but mistrustful of the Maoist, Trotskyist and vaguely Third Wordist groups that partly set the tone. The Chinese “Cultural Revolution” was then in ascendance, which many Berkeley students and ex-students rather naively assumed was a counterpart of the cultural revolution then taking shape in the Bay Area, centered in the “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” of the burgeoning hippie scene in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.

    In 1966, UC Berkeley offered no courses in Marx and Marxism per se, though that was mainly beside the point because, especially to hostile outsiders, led by newly-elected California governor Ronald Reagan, much of the “Berkeley” experience at that time seemed a 24/7 immersion in Marxism. A number of the speakers haranguing the noontime crowds on Sproul Plaza were from self-styled Marxist groups, such as the often spellbinding Peter Camejo (Socialist Workers Party) or the recovering left-liberal Bob Avakian, also a great demagogue, and not yet the jefe maximo of what became today’s Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). The junior philosophy professor Richard Lichtman, with a humorless rapid-fire but competent delivery, began offering courses on Hegel and Marx around this time. Two of the highly talented theorists of the political science department, John Scharr and Sheldon Wolin, taught Marx and Lenin in their classes. Professors of German and Russia history (Gerald Feldman, Martin Malia, Carl Schorske) were not sympathetic to Marxism per se, but could hardly avoid dealing with it. In 1969, after Lichtman was denied tenure, the philosophy department brought in the eminent Polish thinker Leszek Kolakowski to teach Marx, though by the time he arrived he had already turned away from the Marxist humanism for which he had become famous in Eastern Europe. The opening lecture of his undergraduate Marxism class was packed with student militants, but Kolakowski’s talk on the origins of the dialectic in the neo-Platonic thinkers of late antiquity, above all Plotinus, quickly cleared out the room. I stayed; it was a great course on a history of which I was, to put it mildly, unaware, of the philosophical expressions of the great medieval and Renaissance-era millenarian uprisings.

    It was actually an offhand comment by a maverick anthropology professor named Ernest Becker that inspired me to read, over the summer of 1967, the three volumes of Isaac Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky, which (in the slang of the day and since) “blew my mind.” I was not specifically taken with Trotsky’s politics, aside from the obvious anti-Stalinism, nor Deutscher’s spin on them, but by the sweep of his life as an activist, writer and speaker. I was already receiving English translations from the Socialisme ou Barbarie group in France, and other “ultra-left” writings such as Ida Mett’s pamphlet on Kronstadt, from S ou B’s fraternal group in Britain, Solidarity. I set out looking for a group with some variant of these politics, and a friend pointed me to the (then) Independent Socialist Clubs (ISC), which called for the working-class overthrow of every government in the world. I had found “my people.”

    Perhaps the most accomplished Marxist on campus at that time was actually Hal Draper, who by then worked in the acquisitions department of the library (as a result of which Berkeley had an outstanding collection of working-class and socialist history). Draper had emerged as a firebrand speaker at mass rallies during the Free Speech Movement, earning respect as the “one person over 30” (in the trope of that time) who could be trusted. Draper was the grey eminence of the ISC (later renamed International Socialists (IS). He also gave public talks for the group, and wrote a widely-read pamphlet “The Two Souls of Socialism,” contrasting Marx and Engels (socialism from below) with an array of (in Draper’s view) then popular “socialism from above” figures ranging from Fidel Castro to Mao to Herbert Marcuse. Because of Marcuse’s World War II work for the OSS (Organization of Strategic Services), the predecessor to the CIA, the ultra-Stalinist Progressive Labor Party (with a negligible presence in Berkeley) ran a campaign against him called “Marcuse: Cop-Out or Cop?.”

    These campus goings-on could hardly be understood separately from the larger mobilizations and events of these years: the mass anti-war march in San Francisco of spring 1967 of perhaps 100,000 people, the fall 1967 Stop the Draft Week demos at the army induction center in downtown Oakland, involving thousands, or the (less successful) attempts to halt the troop trains in western Berkeley. Nor could they be separated from the (above mentioned) hippie counter-culture developing across the bay in San Francisco. Fall 1967 also saw the giant March on Washington DC, during which the poet Allen Ginsberg tried to levitate the Pentagon with Buddhist chants.

    In early spring 1968, the Tet offensive in Vietnam, though it was militarily defeated, ripped away the last vestiges of the U.S. claim that it was “winning the war,” which no one in Berkeley had taken seriously for years previously. The Orwellian statement by a U.S. officer “We had to destroy the village to save it” summed up the outrages being committed there to “defend democracy,” supposedly embodied by the corrupt militarist clique then ruling South Vietnam.

    The 1960s radical black movement was present in Berkeley above all through the Black Panther Party (BPP), which had been founded in Oakland in 1966 and quickly gained national notoriety for armed public demonstrations (entirely legal under the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, but which terrified the “establishment”, which never imagined the constitution extending to black people). BPP founder Huey P. Newton was in jail from Fall 1967 until 1970, but other talented leaders such as Eldridge Cleaver (whatever his other problems) and Bobby Seale spoke at Sproul Plaza and elsewhere on the campus. I remember Cleaver in 1968 telling a meeting to “get down” with the thought of “Big Daddy Karl Marx.”

    A mass registration campaign throughout California in 1967 succeeded in getting the newly-founded antiwar Peace and Freedom Party (PFP) on the statewide ballot with over 100,000 signatures, a development carefully monitored in the White House itself, as a sign of the disintegrating Democratic Party. The 1968 PFP convention nominated Cleaver for president of the United States. Shortly thereafter, however, he and other Panthers were involved in a shoot-out with police, and Cleaver had to flee the U.S., first to Algeria and then to France, where he was granted asylum by Giscard d’Estaing. (The PFP later nominated Dr. Benjamin Spock, of liberal child-rearing fame.)

    My own real education in Marxist politics was provided by older members of the ISC and the internal education meetings we had on China, where we read books like Harold Isaacs’ classic The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, and on the Russian Revolution. As a result of this education, combined of course with involvement in the unfolding of the broader left movement, I was, age 21, able to hold my own in study groups in the county jail in December 1968, against older speakers from the Stalinist PLP, and others. The hippies who had been arrested with us looked on in awe at such “head trip” debates, and one of them later said “That ISC really educates its members.” Which it did. (I remember a new arrival from Cornell taking me aside and saying “In Ithaca, you just had to be against racism and imperialism. Here in Berkeley, people want to know where you stand on Norman O. Brown’s theory of polymorphous perversity vs. Freud’s genital organization before they’ll even talk to you.”)

    Berkeley was occupied five times in 1968-1969 by the National Guard and by the Alameda County sheriffs. Twice in summer 1968 there were confrontations on Telegraph Avenue, just off the campus; in Fall 1968, 80 people (myself included) occupied the philosophy department building, and were arrested; in February and March 1969 there were violent confrontations over the demand for a “Third World Studies” program for black, brown and Asian students, and finally in May 1969 there were even larger confrontations over the mass appropriation of (off campus) university land for what became “People’s Park,” during which the police shot and killed one guy throwing rocks from a rooftop. When asked at a press conference why the sheriffs had fired buckshot at the crowds, Alameda County sheriff commander Frank Madigan replied laconically “We ran out of birdshot.”

    Such, then, were the local, national and international contexts for my encounter with Marx in Berkeley, 1968.

    Originally posted at Insurgent Notes.

  • How Prisons Serve Capitalism

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    I once asked a class at a prison in Washington State how they would describe the relationship between capitalism and incarceration. “They get you coming and going,” someone quickly offered.

    Perhaps he had in mind the legal financial obligations that are levied against many people upon their conviction.1 He also could have been referring to the exorbitant costs of commissary supplies. In January, Florida prisoners announced a strike to protest their conditions. Among their grievances, the high cost of commissary, including $17 for a case of soup and $18 for tampons.2 Or maybe he was thinking about the lengths his loved ones went to communicate with him. Since being asked to write this review, I’ve paid $53 to the telecommunications company Securus so that a friend incarcerated in New York could call me—a $3 activation fee in addition to a $50 deposit in his account for future collect calls—and $50 to JPay, a subsidiary of Securus that bills itself as “the most trusted name in corrections,” so that I could email with people incarcerated here in the Northwest. This money is on top of my regular acquisition of stamps and envelopes to maintain traditional forms of correspondence with incarcerated friends who do not have email access.

    That prisons incarcerate almost exclusively poor people is a truism. Less discussed is that imprisonment keeps people—and communities—poor. Although overwhelmingly government-run, the US penal system extracts wealth from people least able to pay and, by making them pay, it keeps them in its grip.3

    People often misread the role of economics in giving the United States the world’s largest prison system. Surely, many commentators insist, the whole enterprise must be driven by profit; why else would the country lock up so many people for so long in conditions so cruel? Capitalism is a central character in the story of American punishment—but not because the criminal justice system is an elaborate pyramid scheme. A summary review of the half-century expansion of police and prison power shows that debt, violence, and prison have served primarily political purposes in the context of deepening economic inequality. More than profit, capitalism generatesmisery from its poorest subjects.

    While it has a long history, the braiding of debt and punishment has become a core feature of how criminal justice has anchored the American state since the early 1970s. In her new book, Jackie Wang dubs this development “carceral capitalism”: a draconian model of economic governance that approaches Black urban communities with a mixture of debt and police violence. Carceral capitalism turns police, prosecutors, and courts into creditors, lessors, and debt collectors. Capitalism, Wang shows, integrates the punitive state through debt. For many people, debt itself is a form of punishment.

    Examining how police power grows through the imposition of debt and the deployment of new technologies, Wang wants readers to understand the role of incarceration in “the dynamics of late capitalism.” As city and state governments themselves are squeezed for funds, they pick the pockets of the poor to pay their bills. From the debtors’ prisons of 17th-century America to the high-interest legal financial obligations of today that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, to be in debt is to be exposed to the government’s power to punish. One means for city and state governments to keep the funds flowing is to prey on those who already occupy the economic margins, and novel technologies have elaborated ever-more sophisticated ways of tracking their quarry.

    Still, focusing too closely on the technological innovations of finance and debt obscure a more profound transformation. The story of debt that Wang traces says more about broader trends in contemporary American capitalism, including its urban political economy, than about carceral injustice.

    The idea of “carceral capitalism” suggests a different way of naming the convergence of finance capitalism and the punitive state that has seen so many people sacrificed to cops and cages. Scholars and activists have offered terms such as “mass incarceration,” which emphasizes the rapid growth of imprisonment since the 1970s; the “prison industrial complex,” which is often misread as an economistic focus on prison labor or the small number of private prisons; or the “carceral state,” a clunky phrase that focuses on the state form but makes no mention of the economic transformations precipitating or propelling industrialized punishment.

    No single phrase can capture the complex integration of the state, private actors, and impoverishment that is made manifest through the 10 million people that annually pass through America’s jails, the more than 1.5 million held in prisons and detention centers on any given day, the 4.5 million on parole or probation, and the uncounted masses daily stopped, frisked, harassed, and surveilled. But the concept of “carceral capitalism” offers a way to synthesize the parts that have made the United States the world’s biggest jailer.

    Today, elites gain political and financial rewards for imprisoning groups of people. The roots of this system can be traced to a political-economic project aimed at preserving capitalism’s racial inequalities: the quelling of the rebellions of working-class Black communities in the 1960s. A deeper look into this history places the repression and disappearance of racialized labor at the center of the story. To full understand carceral capitalism, then, it is necessary to look at the history of labor and joblessness in Black urban neighborhoods.

    Throughout the 1960s, Black working-class people rose up against racial capitalism. Their uprisings also catalyzed similar rebellions in Puerto Rican and Chicano communities. Police brutality was invariably the spark. Yet the tender had been provided by decades of housing and employment segregation that saw Black (and Latinx) communities overwhelmingly housed in squalid conditions and chronically under- or unemployed. In Watts, Detroit, and Newark; in Plainfield, NJ, Cambridge, MD, and Waukegan, IL; and in so many other locales, the fires were lit by the same arsonist: patterned segregation upheld by routine if spontaneous police violence. The National Guard helped local and state police arrest 10s of thousands of people in these long, hot summers. In response, metropolitan police forces increasingly began to resemble the National Guard in weaponry and authority.

    The crisis of worklessness led many people to protest in the streets or join organizations ranging from the Black Panther Party to the Urban League, the Communist Party to the NAACP. The government, however, responded to these groups and the crisis by expanding the legal rationale and physical capacity for incarceration. It was not debt, as Wang highlights with regard to the contemporary period, but war that explained the imprisonment of the period: wars on communism, crime, drugs, gangs, and guns.4

    Debt has become a form of repression for those rendered obsolete by globalizing capital. A number of analysts within the 1960s-era Black freedom struggle recognized the looming challenge. Jack O’Dell opined in a 1967 issue of Freedomways that the response to urban rebellions of the 1960s augured a dangerous trend: “Despite certain concessions to civil rights and a number of important court decisions favorable to the defense of civil liberties, militarism and the military presence are rapidly becoming the main features of governmental power in American life.”5 Three years later, in his book Who Needs the Negro?, sociologist Sidney Willhelm warned that automation caused increasing worklessness for Black communities that would have to be addressed—either through public works programs or increasing authoritarianism, social democracy, or state violence.6

    Soon after, the US incarceration rate began its inexorable climb.

    Punishment came to preoccupy the state in response to Black working-class protests against the racism of 1960s capitalism. Once local and federal government entities redirected public coffers toward punishment, it was only a matter of time before private companies tried monetizing racist and political repression—much as they have done with housing and employment segregation. Their literal and ideological investments in punishment are fundamentally parasitic: punishingly extractive themselves, they are yet still dependent on the motivation of external entities. State policy, and state funding, drives their actions.

    As elites responded to labor crises in communities of color with mass incarceration, prisons accelerated worklessness itself. The idea of rehabilitation had always existed uneasily with the punitive mission of incarceration. As prisons became filled with more Black and Brown people, antiracist rebellions erupted within prison with an urgency that matched their urban counterparts. Talk of rehabilitation all but disappeared. Longtime wardens lamented the “new breed of inmate” entering their custody and lobbied for greater severity in punishment.7 Removing work was part of increasing the prison’s severity. “Prison provided inmates with few opportunities to constructively pass the time they were sentenced to serve,” journalist John McCoy wrote in a 1981 photo-essay on Washington’s Walla Walla prison. “Jobs were few.” Those that did exist tended to be make-work activities that offered neither gratification nor meaningful training.8

    The expansion of punishment under neoliberalism has exacerbated the warehouse prison. Less than half of the 2.3 million people currently incarcerated do any work in prison, and the vast majority of those who do work inside work for the prison itself: sweeping the halls of the cell block, cleaning the kitchen, assisting one of the scant programs available to prisoners. Idleness is a feature, not a bug, of American punishment. Conservative criminologists and reactionary politicians soon replaced even the idea of rehabilitation with incapacitation. “Incapacitation doesn’t pretend to change anything about people except where they are,” writes geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore in her trenchant study of California prisons.9

    Much of the current scholarship on the carceral state has added more data points to the insights Black radicals offered in the 1960s and 1970s, investigating its metastasization as a reflection of disciplining an unruly, politically militant Black working class. Although there are significant differences in the literature, including how to weigh economic transformations in relation to explicit political repression, there is an emerging consensus that the rise of mass incarceration needs to be understood as the elite response to politically rebellious Black and Brown communities at the advent of neoliberalism.10

    The phrase “carceral capitalism” raises a question: how do capitalism and carceral power not just coexist but come to constitute each other? Debt is a necessary but insufficient explanatory variable in understanding how carceral capitalism comes to exist—and what it would mean to abolish it. Wang celebrates the utopian, “prophetic dream” of abolition, to which we must add concrete organizing efforts to reduce the scale and scope of the punishment system. Recognizing that carceral power is a measure of American inequality, abolitionists have pursued full employment, universal health care, educational equity, and restorative justice alongside an end to prisons, jails, and immigrant detention and deportation.

    Carceral power exceeds the framework of finance capital and technological innovation around which Wang builds her argument. Rather, carceral expansion is a form of political as well as economic repression aimed at managing worklessness among the Black and Brown (and increasingly white) working class for whom global capitalism has limited need.11 The generative theorizing of Carceral Capitalism needs to be put in further conversation with the empirical work on the political economy of prisons.

    Police and prisons have expanded in both quantity and meanness over the last half century to enable the brutal management of (potentially) rebellious workers made obsolete by the increasing globalization of American capitalism. But perhaps, in the depths of the Trump era, buoyed by the hunger and labor strikes that increasingly dot the American carceral landscape, the demands for full employment and universal health care, the civil disobedience actions aiming to halt the detention and deportation of immigrant workers, we can start to see the abolitionist horizon come into focus.

    This article was commissioned by Destin Jenkins.

    1. On legal financial obligations, see Alexes Harris, Pound of Flesh: Monetary Sanctions as Punishment for the Poor (Russell Sage Foundation, 2016). ↩
    2. The claim about the price of a case of soup can be found in “FL Prisoners Call for Operation PUSH to Improve the Lives of Incarcerated People and the Communities We Come From,” an open letter from Florida prisoners, reprinted in Jerry Iannelli, “Florida Prisoners Plan Huge Strike for Civil Rights on MLK Day This Monday,” Miami New Times, January 9, 2018. PolitiFact Florida tried to investigate the accusations of price-gouging; information provided by the state’s Department of Corrections showed prices to be much lower, though still marked up. See Allison Graves, “Claims about Prison Price-Gouging Decry $17 Soup, $18 Tampons,” Politifact Florida, January 22, 2018. ↩
    3. On the community costs of incarceration, see the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Forward Together, and Research Action Design, “Who Pays? The True Cost of Incarceration on Families,” September 2015. ↩
    4. In his Pulitzer-winning book, James Forman adds the “war on guns” to the list of interrelated domestic wars targeting the Black urban working class since the 1970s. See James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux: 2017). ↩
    5. Jack O’Dell, “July Rebellions and the ‘Military State,’” in Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell, edited by Nikhil Pal Singh (University of California Press, 2010), p. 154. ↩
    6. Sidney M. Willhelm, Who Needs the Negro? (Schenkman, 1970). ↩
    7. For an example from Washington State, see the comments of Walla Walla Warden Bobby J. Rhay, quoted in Charles Stastny and Gabrielle Tyrnauer, Who Rules the Joint? The Changing Political Culture of Maximum-Security Prisons in America (Lexington Books, 1982), p. 81. ↩
    8. John McCoy and Ethan Hoffman, Concrete Mama: Prison Profiles from Walla Walla (University of Missouri Press, 1981), pp. 134–135. ↩
    9. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press, 2007), pp. 14, 21. ↩
    10. See, for instance, Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime (Harvard University Press, 2016); Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy (Pantheon, 2016); Julilly Kohler-Haussman, Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America (Princeton University Press, 2017). For critical debates on these questions, see Alessandro De Giorgi, “Five Theses on Mass Incarceration,” Social Justice, vol. 42, no. 2 (2015); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “The Worrying State of the Anti-Prison Movement,” Social Justice blog, February 23, 2015; and Orisanmi Burton, “Diluting Radical History: Blood in the Water and the Politics of Erasure,” Abolition, January 26, 2017. For an activist attempt to synthesize these issues, written by a longtime political prisoner, see David Gilbert, Our Commitment Is to Our Communities (Kersplebedeb, 2014). ↩
    11. Michelle Chen, “Is the Opioid Crisis Leading to a Spike in the White Incarceration Rate?” The Nation, March 7, 2018. ↩

    Originally posted at Public Books.

  • A Marxist theory of music: it’s all in the groove

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    Much analysis of modern music focuses on lyrical content, but how can we understand modern musical forms? What relation do they have to the capitalist world in which they’ve developed? To answer these questions Kate Bradley interviewed Mark Abel, author of Groove: An Aesthetic of Measured Time.

    Is it fair to say that Groove is a defence of popular music from a Marxist perspective? Could you summarise your argument in brief?

    It is a defence of popular music, but in the first place it is an attempt to explain why the music of our time sounds the way it does. In studying music, I hold to the Marxist principle that cultural phenomena are shaped by the material practices of the society that produces them. Culture also tends to get naturalised so that it seems to most people that things couldn’t be any other way. In the case of music, what I call ‘groove music’ is so ubiquitous that we are tempted to think that it’s just the way that music is, but it’s important to have a historical picture which can show that groove arises in music around the beginning of the twentieth century, initially in America. In turn, it represents an intensification of an aspect of music – meter – which dates from only a few hundred years before that.

    What is your definition of ‘groove music’?

    ‘Groove’ is a word used by musicians to describe the way that the different layers of music, the various instruments and voices, lock together to produce a tight overall rhythmic feel. Although all musical ensembles need to be coordinated in time, I argue that groove is unique to the popular music of the twentieth (and twenty-first) century and is not a feature of ‘classical’ music or folk or traditional musics. My analysis of groove identifies four characteristics: strict metronomic timing; a highly structured meter; backbeat – an emphasis on the off-beats of the meter; and syncopation. Other musics might display one or two of these, but not consistently all four.

    Your argument seems to hinge on how different people experience time, especially people of different classes and historical periods. Why do you think time is crucial to understanding music?

    Time is an obvious place to start for a materialist understanding of music because time is a feature of both social life and music. I think it is reasonable to assume that there is a close connection between musical time and social time, and that the way that a society organises the lived experience of time finds its expression in the language of music. Historically, we can see this happening as the temporal structures of music (how rhythm is organised) change as a result of developments in society.

    So, the emergence of meter – represented by the time-signature in Western notation – can be traced to the urbanisation of European society, as the rhythms of daily life begin to be organised less around the natural phenomena of sunrise and sunset varying with the seasons, and become governed instead by the measured time of the newly invented clock. I identify the intensification of this into ‘groove’ with the penetration of measured time still further into people’s lives with monopoly capitalism, as clock time became standardised across the world, and as workers were increasingly subjected to the discipline of clocking on and off and time and motion studies. Underlying this is Marx’s insight that value in a capitalist economy is determined by abstract labour time. Abstract time is at the heart of social reproduction under capitalism and I describe groove as an “aesthetic of measured time”.

    You criticise thinkers like Theodor Adorno for their retreat from the experience of time that most people have, and you suggest that the most dialectical approach to understanding music actually embraces ‘reified’ or ‘abstract’ time – the conception of time used by capitalists to measure and exploit workers’ labour. How does this work? How can listening to or making popular music help to fight back against capitalism?

    It’s important to note that I am heavily influenced by Adorno’s materialist approach to music. From him I take the powerful idea that music’s meaning is found in the way that society’s material processes become embedded in the very language and form of music. But Adorno hears only alienation in the rhythm of the popular music of his day, and advocates instead modernist composers who avoided any sense of meter or rhythmic regularity in their music. This is part of a general intellectual revolt in the early twentieth century against the stultifying effects of industrial capitalism and its cult of abstract time on society, but simply turning one’s back on measured time is not a realistic option for most people.

    This is where a class differentiation enters the analysis. It is striking that both groove music based on measured time and modernist trends which reject it emerge at the same historical moment. Modernism is the preserve of a section of society’s cultural elite (albeit a radical one) while groove comes from below, circulating amongst workers and ordinary people. Making use of abstract capitalist time has a parallel in the organised working class movement. The first proletarians tried to refuse the tyranny of the clock by being late and skiving. By the late nineteenth century trade unionists had learned that the only way to make gains was to fight the bosses on their own terrain – accepting the discipline of measured time, but using it to fight for a shorter working day.

    I don’t suggest that listening or making groove music helps the fightback against capitalism. Nor do I say that groove music is proletarian music. Art doesn’t match up neatly to class interests. But I do defend groove music against high-brow criticism as a valid aesthetic response to the experience of capitalist society.

    Marxist critics of pop music have pointed to capitalist control of the music industry – say, ‘manufactured’ pop like the music made by Justin Bieber or X Factor winners – and have said that it is used to distract people, to exploit musicians to make more money for their bosses. What do you think of this argument? It is possible that some groove music is just the sound of capitalism?

    That is certainly arguable and is essentially Adorno’s position – that groove music is simply the music of capitalism and we should reject it. But this relies on a view of culture as a tool wielded by the capitalist class. I think we need a more dialectical conception. In the first place, as I have explained, the music of our society cannot, in one sense, be anything other than the music of capitalism. That is central to a materialist understanding of art and culture. But in incorporating and manipulating the nature of time in our society, groove music does not merely reinforce capitalism. Musicians are taking an aspect of society and treating it aesthetically. Abstract measured time becomes the object of free play rather than utility. I believe we are attracted to it because we sense that through music we have taken control – albeit temporarily – of an aspect of our existence which normally dominates us. An oppressive aspect of the world becomes a means of artistic expression.

    It is true that not all groove music does this successfully, and that much popular music is churned out purely to fill the catalogues of Spotify and Apple Music. But nonetheless it’s important to recognise the degree of autonomy involved in the best of it.

    In Groove, you criticise the term ‘black music’ and suggest that ‘groove’ music is not African in descent. Why? Is there no case that some music – for example, grime or hip-hop – might only be possible due to a uniquely ‘black Atlantic’ experience (as Paul Gilroy has argued) that has happened because of the conditions of colonialism and racism experienced by people of colour?

    There is no doubt that black Americans have played a huge role in the development of groove music and that it is an important part of black culture. Because of this, many people have argued that the rhythmic quality I describe as groove is African in origin. I don’t think this is true. In the first place, groove as I define it is not simply a feature of those genres of popular music commonly thought of as ‘black music’. In any case, the concept of ‘black music’ is problematic. At the level of musical language, it’s not really possible to talk about different music corresponding to different social groups except in the most conditional and contingent way.

    But secondly, groove is not a feature of traditional African musics. Today, globalisation means that African urban popular musics have adopted the groove principle, but the traditional music of Africa is not organised on metrical lines. The notion of on- and off-beats on which both backbeat and syncopation rely is absent, making this music more akin in its temporal organisation to European music before the development of meter.

    A range of different musical cultures, both African and European, came together to synthesise Western popular music in America. But it is my argument that its central distinguishing feature – groove – was new and was shaped by monopoly capitalism.

    Which is more important for assessing the value and politics of music – how it was produced, its aesthetics, or the contexts in which it is received?

    While it’s obvious that people’s feelings about music are shaped by the conditions under which it is experienced, I think it’s important to oppose the view, common among postmodernists, that the listener can freely determine the meaning they take from music. As a Marxist musicologist (for want of a better term) my focus is to try to understand how musical meaning is encoded in the language of music.

    But it’s also not a coincidence that groove music emerges with a new, more collective way of creating music, one based on improvisation, or ‘jamming’. This is completely different from both the classical model where the composer sets out the entire piece in advance, and the folk model in which traditional tunes are handed down. Although my definition of groove doesn’t depend on it, I think there is something special about a group of individuals coming together to create a groove, something that is lacking, for instance, in music created by a single person using the tool which is the epitome of measured time – the computer.

    What are your favourite kinds of music, and do you think this reflects the value system implied in Groove?

    I got interested in this area when, as a musician, I realised that the rhythmic skills and mind-set I needed to play funk, soca and r&b were of a different order from the classical training that I had received. Ever since, I have been attracted to music that isn’t just groove music, but puts groove centre-stage. I’m fascinated by salsa and Cuban-derived music and also have a soft-spot for reggae and dub. And it seems to me that jazz is the arena which provides the greatest opportunities for the generation of collectively improvised grooves.

    There’s a line from Debord’s Society of the Spectacle which I quote in the book in which he describes a liberated society as one based on the free play of “autonomous yet federated times”. It seems to me to sum up the politics of improvised grooves perfectly.

    Groove: An Aesthetic of Measured Time by Mark Abel is published by Haymarket Books.

    Originally posted at RS21.

  • In Memoriam: David McReynolds, 1929-2018

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    Early Friday morning, socialist, photographer, and lifetime War Resisters League member David McReynolds — committed pacifist + socialist — passed peacefully at the age of 88. David was on WRL staff for a large part of his life and remained within our community long, long after. 

    Presente.

    As written by WRL Member Ed Hedemann.

    David McReynolds died at 1:30 am, August 17th, a day after being brought to Beth Israel ICU in Manhattan. He had suffered a fall in his apartment and apparently never regained consciousness.

    I first met him during a trip from Austin to NYC in 1970, and three years later joined him as a member of the War Resisters League staff. Though we would periodically differ on tactics and politics, he could always be relied upon as a brilliant, challenging, blunt thinker, speaker, and writer, who many times came up with projects — some resulting in his arrest — that would help propel WRL's militantly pacifist message to the wider public.

    For those who don't know, David was on the WRL staff for almost 40 years (1960-1999), a long time member of the Socialist Party, who ran for Congress in 1958 and 1968, President of the United States on the SPUSA ticket in 1980 and 2000 — the first (I think) openly gay candidate for President — and for the U.S. Senate from New York in 2004 on the Green Party ticket. An internationalist and former chair of the War Resisters' International, he traveled extensively, many times to war-torn countries, once getting arrested in Red Square during an anti-nuclear protest in 1978.

    Born in 1929 in Los Angeles, he moved to the East Village in 1956 and began working for Liberation magazine, before joining the WRL staff. An avid photographer, a collection of his photos can be found at http://www.mcreynoldsphotos.org/. All his life he adored animals, most especially cats (sadly, Shaman, his cat — seen in the photo — died shortly after David was taken to the hospital), was a dedicated member of the Bromeliad Society and many other groups that I don't have time to research before this quick post.

    Heartbreaking.

    Originally posted at the War Resisters League website.

    Ed will be writing a more comprehensive memoriam for the Winter 2019 issue of New Politics.

  • The Fires This Time and Their Implications for Ecosocialists

    Image“Deindustrialization.” That’s a word you virtually never hear in the debate around global warming. Not surprising. It’s a word that’s loaded with negative implications: economic collapse, mass layoffs, falling living standards. Who wants to think about those, let alone think about this as a strategy of suppressing CO2 emissions?

    Imagine suggesting to the next oil driller, auto worker or airline flight attendant you run into that the only way to stop global warming is stop producing oil, park the cars, and ground the airplanes. Even the word “degrowth” is beyond the pale of thinkable thought in mainstream discourse. Yet we had better start thinking and talking and organizing around this strategy because, as is becoming more and more apparent, deindustrialization is the only means to avert global ecological collapse. If we do not organize a rationally-planned partial but very substantial deindustrialization of the overindustrialized nations of the North including China, Mother Nature is going to do it for us in a much less pleasant manner and we will face the prospect of the collapse of civilization in this century.

    If humanity had taken serious steps to reduce emissions decades ago in the 1980s when climate scientists began warning us (as the New York Times magazine of last weekend reminds us) then perhaps we wouldn't be in the fix we're in right now. But we didn't and haven't and so now scientists tell us we face a CLIMATE EMERGENCY. For decades the developed economies of the world and the rogue party-state of China have ignored the threat of global warming and kicked the can down the road on the assumption “dangerous” global warming is not imminent or not much of a threat to them at least in the near future. After all, we in the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere have not suffered so much because the heating is more extreme at the poles than the temperature latitudes. The Arctic and Antarctica are melting very fast, with immediate and dire implications for the whole world. And global warming is hitting the neo-tropical Middle East, India and Africa very hard. But in the U.S. all the media talks about is increased flooding along coastlines, more frequent droughts in the West and Southwest, more fires in the west and so on.

    But this summer, the belt of furious fires all around the northern hemisphere from California to Greece to Japan which cost the lives of hundreds has finally  grabbed public attention, even the media. I don't know if this is the first time that the Times even published an article on global warming on the front page (above the fold) but I believe this is the first time it has explicitly blamed global warming for the fires this time in a top-of-the-page headline. And this is only the beginning. As climate scientist Michael Mann is quoted in the lead editorial of the Times of August 10th: “What we call an ‘extreme heat wave’ today we will simply call ‘summer’ in a matter of decades if we don’t sharply reduce carbon emissions.”

    Yet from the first warnings of scientists and the first efforts to come up with plans to restrain emissions, all efforts to reduce emissions have been subordinated to maximizing economic growth: Whatever we do, we MUST NOT slow economic growth. Or, as George Bush Sr. put it: "We will never sacrifice the American way of life." So instead of simply imposing rationing of fossil fuels, suppressing vehicle production, grounding civilian aircraft (all of which President Roosevelt did during WWII), all mainstream efforts from the voluntary curbs of Kyoto in the 1990s to the cap & trade schemes of the 2000s to the carbon tax schemes of today, have been explicitly premised on the assumption that they must not impede growth. In other words, they were all designed to fail. Which they have. In result, as global economic growth soared since the 1980s, so have emissions. So now what?

    We certainly can't expect any change from the powers that be. So long as we live under capitalism, governments, industries, industrial unions, as well as most workers and consumers will continue to prioritize growth over saving the planet because, given capitalism, what else can they do? The planet may collapse tomorrow but degrowth or deindustrialization would mean I’m out of a job today. This is how we drive off the cliff to collapse — “unless” (as the Lorax said) . . .

    Unless we change the conversation. Unless we get people to start thinking about and talking about and working for a viable alternative to the market-driven collapse of civilization. Our job, as ecosocialists is to put forward a practical plan to slam the brakes on emissions, an EMERGENCY RESPONSE TO THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY. This plan has to begin with brutal honesty:

    1. WE CAN’T HAVE AN INFINITELY GROWING ECONOMY ON A FINITE PLANET. This growth-till-we-bust logic “worked” in Adam Smith’s day. But today, this is the road to collective suicide. All mainstream efforts to suppress emissions while maintaining economic growth have failed. The only way to suppress emissions is to suppress emissions: impose firm caps, impose rationing regardless of the impact on the economy. We have to say this, and hammer this point home relentlessly. People and planet have to take priority over profit or we’re doomed.
    2. WE CAN’T SUPPRESS EMISSIONS WITHOUT CLOSING DOWN COMPANIES. Suppressing emissions means closing down the producers of those emissions – the oil companies, auto manufacturers, power plants, chemical companies, construction companies, airlines, etc. According to the EPA in the U.S. the largest generators of CO2 emissions are transportation (28.5%), energy (mainly electricity generation) 28.4%, manufacturing 22%, construction 11%, industrial farming 9%. We have to say to people “Sorry, but lots of companies, beginning with fossil fuel producers but also fossil fuel-based companies will have to be shut down or drastically retrenched. It’s either that or your children are going to burn up in an uninhabitable planet.” This is the only way to suppress emissions in brief window of opportunity we still have left. There is no other alternative.
    3. WE NEED TO SOCIALIZE THOSE COMPANIES, NATIONALIZE THEM, BUY THEM OUT AND TAKE THEM INTO PUBLIC HANDS SO WE CAN PHASE THEM OUT OR RETRENCH THEM. ExxonMobil, General Motors, United Airlines, Monsanto and Cargill can't put themselves out of business even to save the planet because they're owned by private shareholders. Either we save the companies (till the planet collapses) or we take them over and put them out of business or reduce their production to sustainable levels.
    4. IF WE CLOSE DOWN/RETRENCH INDUSTRIES THEN SOCIETY MUST PROVIDE NEW LOW- OR NO-CARBON JOBS FOR ALL THOSE DISPLACED WORKERS AND AT COMPARABLE WAGES AND CONDITIONS. Corporations, typically limited to one line or field of production, like oil production for example, can’t be expected provide new jobs in an entirely different field for displaced workers and have no mandate to do so. Society has do this. Otherwise those workers will not be able to see their way to joining with us to do what we have to do to save them and their children.
    5. WE HAVE TO REPLACE OUR ANARCHIC MARKET ECONOMY WITH A LARGLY, THOUGH NOT ENTIRELY, PLANNED ECONOMY, A BOTTOM-UP DEMOCRATICALLY-PLANNED ECONOMY. The environmental, social and economic problems we face cannot be solved individual choices in the marketplace. They require collective democratic control over the economy to prioritize the needs of society and the environment. And they require national and international economic planning to reorganize and restructure our economies and redeploy labor and resources to those ends. In other words, if humanity is to save itself, we have to overthrow capitalism and replace it with some form of democratic eco-socialism.

    This is the public conversation the whole nation and the whole world needs to be having right now. There is no other alternative. It's up to us ecosocialists to motivate this conversation because no mainstream organization is willing to risk challenging the government, capitalism, unions, workers, and consumers, let alone taking them on all together. Yet the abject failure of all mainstream approaches opens the way for us to put forward more radical approaches to a mass audience. Awful as things are at the moment, this presents a huge opportunity to ecosocialists. But we really need to get moving on this, develop educational materials of all kinds from videos to bumper strips, organize forums, teach-ins, write opinion pieces, and develop ecosocialist politics within the rapidly growing 48,000-member Democratic Socialists of America, and so on.

    Richard Smith is a founder of SystemChangeNotClimsteChange.org and a member of the New York City chapter of Democratic Socialists of America and the national DSA Climate and Environmental Justice Working Group.

    A version of this article first appeared as a contribution to a thread on SCNCC.net, a discussion forum.  If you would like to see the whole thread and join the discussion, click here.

  • Mexican Independent and Democratic Auto Unions Form a New Federation

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    Mexico’s auto workers are for the first time forming a national federation in what is a very significant development both for Mexican labor and for Mexican society as a whole. Ten organizations representing over 25,000 Mexican workers have committed to the new organization.

     

    There have been conversations between Mexican auto industry unions for 20 years, and there have been good relations between the oldest independent auto unions, SITIAVW of Puebla and SITNISSAN of Morelos, but until recently the conversations have included some CTM auto unions that were trying to legitimize themselves as relatively independent. The CTM unions have now dropped out of the conversations, and the truly independent and democratic unions are moving to formalize their alliance and found a legally recognized federation.

    SITIAVW (Independent Union of Workers of Auto Industry VW) is a founding member of the new federation, along with SITAUDI, SITNISSAN (the independent union of Nissan-Cuernavaca, Morelos), STIMAHCS (an auto parts union affiliated with the FAT), los Mineros (miners) of Bombardier Hidalgo (aerospace and auto parts), SNTGT (General Tire), SINTB (Bridgestone Tire), SEGLO (logistics services) and the newly formed SITGM (Goodyear Mexico) of San Luis Potosí.

    SITIAVW and SITAUDI are independent, single-factory unions based in Puebla, SITIAVW with over 10,000 members, SITAUDI with somewhat less

    The addition of auto parts unions and rubber worker unions is an important move, since for every auto assembly worker it is estimated there are at least twice as many parts and component supplier workers.

    The project is sponsored jointly by IndustriALL and IG Metall, and the project organizer is José Luis Rodríguez Salazar, a former president of SITIAVW. Find here a link to a recent IndustriALL article about the struggle of the union at Goodyear.

    This is an incredibly important development in Mexican labor, as the auto, auto parts, tire and aerospace industries are one of the biggest, most important and most advanced industrial sectors of the Mexican economy. The leading role of SITIAVW in this is due to their long history of independence, democracy and militancy, earning them the best contracts in the industry and the respect of the entire labor movement. The project director is also widely respected, as he led SITIAVW through some of its most difficult struggles during the Vicente Fox sexenio (six-year term) and is the only SITIAVW president to have been re-elected and to serve more than one term.

    Equally important in the leadership of this initiative are los Mineros, a powerful national miners union whose leader, Napoleón Gómez Urrutia broke with the corporativist labor movement (CTM, CROC, CROM, allied in the Congreso de Trabajo or Congress of Labor) fifteen years ago and embarked on militant organizing and collective bargaining campaigns, challenging the biggest, most powerful Mexican industrial conglomerate Grupo Mexico, expanding their jurisdiction to aerospace and auto parts, aiding progressive independent organizing projects like CAT-Puebla and CFO on the border.

    Gómez Urrutia was falsely accused and threatened by the Mexican government and has been living in exile in Canada for over ten years, but has been elected Senator on the list of MORENA, the reform party whose presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador was just elected president. Gómez will return to Mexico to take his seat on September 1, giving the independent labor movement a powerful voice in the Senate. Los Mineros have an affiliation agreement with the United Steel Workers (USW), which represents workers in Canada and the United States.

    This is happening at a time of historic change in Mexican politics, with the defeat of the presidential candidates of the PRI and PAN by López Obrador or AMLO, the founder and leader of MORENA, who was elected in a landslide. This could mean the reform of Mexico's labor laws. The independent labor movement is working to take advantage of this opportunity to become a leading force in Mexican society.

    *Jeffery Hermanson has been a union organizer with ILGWU/UNITE, the Carpenters and the Writers Guild of America since 1977. He was the Field Representative in Mexico for the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center from 2000-2003 and currently works with the International Union Educational League.

     

     

     

  • NYC DSA's Endorsement of Cynthia Nixon: A Reply to Dan La Botz

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    I appreciate Dan La Botz' well-reasoned article, but do not agree with his conclusion.

    As usual, Dan's argument is judicious and clear, courteous to other points of view. Such civility is essential to maintaining the health and vitality of a diverse big tent organization like the Democratic Socialist of America (DSA).

    Those of us like Dan who have spent many decades in Left political organizations have adopted our core political ideas from diverse philosophical and life experiences. We however share a commitment to building a global democratic socialist movement based on the working class majority. The differences are chiefly tactical.

    Today we democratic socialists face great challenges, but at the same time are confronted with rare historical opportunities.  A large fraction of U.S. residents, concentrated in the Millennial generation, are open to democratic socialist ideas, and many seem willing to commit themselves to long-term political struggle.

    DSA is therefore growing rapidly, and is attracting attention in progressive circles and media. Dan correctly identifies the possibility that aspiring progressive politicians may court DSA endorsement and/or even take out a membership card, without a genuine commitment to the full range of democratic socialist values.

    I would argue the flip side. DSA's decision (not an uncontested one!) to support the Bernie Sanders campaign in the Democratic primaries was eventually responsible for laying a foundation for this surge in membership. Sanders was not, and is unlikely to become, a member of DSA; his version of "democratic socialism" is close to Nordic social democracy; and he would never submit to DSA "discipline." Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose primary victory was supported by and very useful to building DSA, is of course using Justice Democrats and Sanders to project herself nationally to support other progressive insurgents.

    To be provocative, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez illustrate the most promising scenario that will help DSA build a much stronger and more diverse democratic socialist movement, including embedding that movement and winning more allies and recruits from the broader progressive movement. I think that those like Dan who argue that the current Democratic Party leadership cannot or will not be able to accommodate that surge are correct. But in order to create the "dirty break" needed to supplant the Democratic Party in the two-party system with a real Left alternative based on the diverse working class – with DSA as a core component – we have to decisively defeat that DP leadership. Nixon's challenge to Cuomo, even if defeated, forms part of that tactic.

    Paul Garver is a retired union official and a longtime DSA member.

     

  • Youth and Our Future: An Era of Superficial Outrage Politics?

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    Many would like to believe that this American period of rampant national-conservatism is nothing more than a short stay in Republican purgatory. It is a reassuring idea that in a few years, as today’s progressive youth becomes a large part of the electorate, the United States will become a shining example of tolerant and progressive prosperity. Just as neo-conservatives envision a global American hegemony built on capitalism and military strength, some progressives have adopted a belief that the United States is destined to reach national political moksha with strong welfare, a prosperous middle class, and minority rights; the nasty racists and homophobes, the “deplorables”, will soon be outnumbered so vastly in the face of common-sense political ideology that the right will simply cease to exist. Unfortunately, this prophecy has proven a myth for millennials—and the nascent Generation Z doesn’t appear to have better prospects.

    Millenials were supposed to be the generation who would sweep away the conservative baby-boomers that elected neo-liberal career politicians like Ronald Reagan and George Bush for good. The results have been disappointing. While a 2017 Pew Research study indicates that millennials are more Democratic and more progressive than any generation before them, another Pew study indicates that millennials have by far the lowest rates of eligible voter turnout. For millennials in a world of increasing globalization and interconnectedness, where tech-savvy young people have the means of truly understanding the injustices around them, it may seem surprising that so few are willing to take the simplest step to better the world in their vision. Regardless of one’s personal agreement with their beliefs, it is clear that many millennials can’t be bothered to put in the time to vote.

    But even if millennials exercised their right to vote, our time of increasingly overt plutocracy raises questions over the utility of voting in the first place. The capitalist erosion of democracy isn’t unique to the modern United States. Through uncountable channels, institutions, and even ideas, the ruling class maintains a cultural hegemony that prevents deviation from the current window of acceptable moderate beliefs: the Overton window. From the sham of the American Dream to the illusion of choice in mainstream media, capital’s power perverts young Americans’ political lives. Sometimes, capitalists dispense with the pleasantries and tell elected lawmakers how to vote. The existing system was built by magnates and executives and continues under their supervision. Given that, it’s not surprising that it’s incredibly hard for any real progress to take form so long as it plays within the existing rules.

    Within the system prescribed by the ruling class, young progressives lack the interest or the will for bettering society. It seems that millennials are more content having it be known how progressive they are, rather than actually effecting the change they claim to want. This phenomenon, dubbed “virtue signaling”, can take many forms—among them, making true but ostentatious statements on low-hanging political fruit. For example, most of the criticisms of Trump I hear on campus are of his latest sex scandal or constant vulgarity. While his antics show his questionable personal character and morals, they hardly constitute terrible politics. More convincing attacks might be on Trump’s rollbacks on numerous critical environmental protections, or his continued expansion of U.S. imperial interests abroad, or his support for warmongering state sponsors of terrorism like Saudi Arabia.

    If young people aren’t even digging into issues that will matter dearly to them in the future, but instead raging at the potty-mouth of one man, then it’s a far reach to assume that they’ll suddenly become well-informed and engaged citizens when they grow up. It’s easier to make broad political statements that lack substance or a need for background knowledge than to actually change society, and that has created a precarious political situation for today’s youth. What will happen when another neoconservative de-regulationist comes along, but this time with slightly more tact? Can millennials be trusted to support ideologically sound candidates, if nearly 70% of their disapproval for Trump stems from his personality issues rather than his policy?

    Today’s voting-age youth grew up during a shift where the political question for individuals in America became one where information and opinions flowed from the top-down. It began with the rise of right-wing conservative talk shows on mass-media channels like Fox in the early 2000’s and simultaneous development of platforms like Youtube and Facebook that allowed for uninformed and often untrue opinions to spread at a breakneck pace. The product was that already-busy Americans were presented with an accessible form of political media that treated them as equals and required little background or deep thought to consume. The simplest topics to discuss are personal matters that everyone can relate to, as opposed to often complex and unclear matters of policy. What we get now is coverage of inane personal issues: Obama using Grey Poupon mustard, or Trump’s typos on Twitter. Sardonically amusing to watch, perhaps, but this type of reporting detracts from education of the public on substantive matters. Now, we have a falsely conscious mass of voting youth who believe they are politically involved when they point out the president’s spelling errors.

    The appeal of widely disseminated yet poorly constructed political beliefs has created opportunities for academic frauds like Stefan Molyneux and Jordan Peterson, just as it catalyzes vitriol against Trump. From the top, FoxNews is relentless in its polarizing barrage of patriotic right-wing propaganda and race relations are at an all-time low in the United States. Youth involvement is only now beginning to rise, but young progressives’ responses still come only after a specific issue has personally affected them. Young progressives are loath to act meaningfully outside of the riggings of the established system, and the most they can give in the standard political arena is occasional moral support. We are headed directly towards an era of superficial outrage politics, if we aren’t already there—and young people are fine with it.

    *Jack Zhang is a sophomore at Phillips Exeter Academy. His columns on youth politics and global student issues have appeared in the Boston Herald and Dissident Voice. He can be contacted at jzhang2@exeter.edu.