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  • Lou Andreas-Salomé vs. The Patriarchy

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    Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Audacity to Be Free

    Directed by Cordula Kablitz-Post, 1 hr. 53 min

    Cinema Libre Studios, 2016

    This biopic is not subtle. From its opening scene featuring a pyre of books and a frenzied crowd cheering as a manic speaker justifies the burning of Marx, Trotsky, Freud and “everything that is not German” followed by a romp through Lou Andreas-Salomé’s prodigiously intellectual life and her last days as a target of the Nazis, the film is as much about the pain of choosing a vaporous freedom as it is the flailing pursuit of fulfillment by a self-assertive, iconic woman.

    Born in 1861 in St. Petersburg, Russia, Louisa von Salomé, as she was known then, was as a small child adored by her father but singularly ignored by her mother, a member of the nobility who preferred the five sons that preceded Louise. As a teenager mourning the early death of her father, Louisa — soon to be called Lou — stays in bed reading Spinoza in preference to being confirmed. Soon enough, studying late into the night at the University of Zurich, the only European university admitting women at the time, she turns down a marriage proposal by telling her suitor it would be better for him to treat her like a man. The bulk of the film follows the playing out of that choice.

    Except for the Nazi hysteria featured at the film’s start, some stray supportive comments by her about a women’s movement, and the very real threat of the fascist state confiscating all of her drafts and voluminous diaries for the high crime of being a student of psychology and a practitioner of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis — papers which she of necessity destroys — there are no overt politics in the film. At one point she even tells Friedrich Nietzsche, one of her many failed lover-aspirants,“you want to change the whole world; I only wish to change my own fate.”

    What the film succeeds in doing — and where its real politics lie — is in portraying a brilliant, freely associating woman who blazes her own path through a largely oppressive and sexist culture almost a century before the rise of the modern feminist movement. Subsidized at first by her estranged and disapproving mother who insists she come to her senses and have a family, Lou rolls up her sleeves and ensures her financial independence from both men and her mother by writing more than a dozen books. If she doesn’t entirely succeed at being free — and what does freedom mean as an absolute in any repressive culture? — she doesn’t lack for the audacity to be free, as the film’s title states. Rather than love affairs, she preferred kameradshaften or fellowship with men and women.

    Her need to keep men at arm’s length and on her own terms is exemplified in a droll photograph taken of her sitting in a cart drawn by Nietzsche and Paul Rée, another aspiring lover. She holds the whip in hand, reminiscent, she says, of the legend of Aristotle and Phyllis, where Alexander the Great’s consort humbles the great philosopher by riding him bareback.  

    One scene is classic: Trying to open Lou up to sensuality and mediate her ferocious claims to rationality, as though that were a fair summation of her problem, Nietzsche introduces her to opium.  She likes it, but tells him “I don’t need a man for that.” Later, in a brawl with an increasingly abusive Nietzsche, she writes him off, quoting her totem Aristotle that “character manifests itself in behavior.”

    German filmmaker Cordula Kablitz-Post is the film’s director and co-writer, noting how “the promise [Lou] made to herself, at age 17 after her adored tutor proposed to her, to never fall in love was a defense mechanism against losing herself in a man.” A lifetime later, nearly invalided and under the shadow of fascism, working with a young scholar who would go on to be her literary executor, she said of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, her longtime and much-younger lover, that he was “the only man who seemed to have so much femininity. We complemented each other perfectly. Everyone should find the opposite sex within them.”

    To say she had relationships with men is to strain — or at least enlarge — the concept. Refusing for decades to engage in sex for fear of pregnancy and housebound slavery, she tells one aspiring lover in eschewing marriage and family that she has no wish “to be a broodmare” or be subordinated to him by law.

    In her late 30s, finally backtracking on her insistence to never physically take on lovers, she said she now agreed with Nietzsche, “that the Dionysian principle is much more intense than the Apollonian.”

    After Rilke becomes too clingy, she breaks off with him, saying “you can’t breathe without me, and I can’t breathe with you.” Chided by her biographer says she is self-absorbed and has “paid for it in loneliness,” her response is a flat “everyone is lonely.” When her biographer asks if her living unmarried so early in the century with a man wasn’t itself a big step toward liberation for a woman, she nearly spits out an “Ach, what has changed for us women since then?”

    What indeed!

    This film has played to much acclaim in Germany and is now poised to make its American debut. One final note: Much of what makes the film work is the score. Credit for the soundtrack goes to Judit Varga, a Hungarian composer and pianist living in Budapest and Vienna. As Koblitz-Post explains, “I wanted to work with a female composer to give Lou’s inner voice also an emotional expression by music.” She pulls it off.

    The film is currently playing in New York City at Manhattan's Village East Cinema and debuts in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Royal on April 27.

    Originally posted at The Indypendent. 

  • The roots of Venezuela’s crisis and the lessons for the left

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    Collapsing wages, food shortages, and rampant inflation have led to growing hunger and desperation in Venezuela. Recent videos illustrate just how desperate the situation has become, as hungry people chase down livestock in the fields to butcher it for its meat, or skin dogs and cats on the streets of Caracas. Violent food-related protests have erupted in various cities around the country, and the looting of grocery stores is becoming more and more widespread. Meanwhile, thousands of Venezuelans are flooding across the borders into neighboring countries.

    Maduro’s defenders on the left have basically turned a blind eye to this situation, claiming that mainstream reports are exaggerated, and assuring that the situation is the result of an “economic war” waged from the capitalist class and the United States. In their view, the current crisis is just another example of US imperialism and capitalist interference with a leftwing government in Latin America, a conspiracy to topple the socialist experiment by making the economy “scream” like Chile in 1973.

    Others admit Maduro deserves some of the blame, but claim he has been limited in his ability to act because of the fall in oil prices and a campaign of sabotage from the right-wing opposition. Supporting the current regime as a bulwark against imperialism and the neoliberalism of the opposition is still the best option, they assure.

    However, while it is true that Washington and local capitalists have long sought to undermine and overthrow the Chavez government, a closer look at the current crisis shows that a supposed “economic war” has very little to do with it. Nor does it have much to do with falling oil prices.

    In fact, the primary cause of growing hunger and desperation in recent years are the government’s very own policies, which are under direct control of President Maduro himself, and could easily be rectified if the ruling elites so desired. But the policies remain in place, and the reason is pretty straightforward: corrupt government insiders are benefiting enormously from them.

    As ordinary Venezuelans scramble to survive, Maduro and his friends are lining their pockets with oil dollars. Yet, inexplicably, many among the international left continue to give them their support.

    “Thieves with no ideology”

    At the crux of the crisis is Venezuela’s currency control system, which began under Hugo Chavez as a way to restrict access to foreign exchange, and ensure the government had enough dollars to import priority goods like food and medicine.

    Like previous attempts at fixed exchange rates in Venezuela, there was some corruption and abuse of this system under Chavez. But it wasn’t until Maduro came to power in 2013 that things really started falling apart.

    “A gang was created that was only interested in getting their hands on the country’s oil revenue,” says Hector Navarro, former Chavista minister and socialist party leader.

    “They are thieves with no ideology,” he added.

    Chavez’s former finance minister, Jorge Giordani, has said the same, estimating that some $300 billion have been embezzled through the foreign exchange system in recent years. Both Navarro and Giordani were long time members of Chavez’s inner circle, and mainstays of his cabinet until they became critical of Maduro in 2014 and were sacked.

    Longtime Chavista insider Mario Silva also warned about this very thing after Chavez’s death in 2013. In a leaked audio recording, he claimed that a group of corrupt officials headed by then Vice President Diosdado Cabello were gaining the upper hand within the government, and they were “bleeding” the country of its dollar reserves.

    This made Giordani’s dismissal in 2014 especially noteworthy, as he was the primary person in charge of keeping the currency regime in check, making periodic adjustments to avoid major distortions. Once Giordani was out of the way, the currency was allowed to get increasingly overvalued, greatly benefitting the “gang of thieves” and their foreign exchange schemes.

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    The basic scheme goes like this: those who can get access to foreign exchange at the cheap official rate set by the government, then simply turn around and sell those dollars on the black market for an extraordinary profit, or deposit them in bank accounts abroad. The greater the distance between the black-market rate and the official rate, the more profitable the scheme becomes.

    Since 2013, Maduro has allowed rampant inflation to continually erode the value of the currency, refusing to make any significant adjustments to the exchange rate. As a result, the going rate for dollars on the street is now thousands of times higher than the rate at which the government sells them, creating huge incentives for illicit activities.

    As a result, hundreds of millions of dollars have disappeared in goods that are never imported, infrastructure that is never completed, and briefcase companies that don’t exist. Instead of using the incoming oil dollars to pay for needed goods and services, government officials and their associates in the private sector simply abscond with them, leaving ordinary Venezuelans to deal with the consequences.

    Numerous examples have come to light in recent months. The common denominator in these cases is that those involved usually have close ties to the Maduro government—a necessary ingredient for acquiring dollars at the official rate.

    Even President Maduro and his vice president El Aissami have apparently gotten in on the fun. According to the former attorney general, a company owned by El Aissami was granted $120 million last year to import food from Mexico, while another $340 million were approved for a company with ties to Maduro.

    All in all, the two companies received nearly half a billion dollars at the official rate of exchange, which was only one percent of the real value of the dollar at the time. Whatever food they imported was then sold in Venezuela at more than twice the price they had paid in Mexico.

    There’s no wonder why Maduro and gang aren’t interested in fixing the distorted currency system. It allows them to funnel massive amounts of oil dollars into their own pockets, while profiting off food shortages in Venezuela.

    Squeezing the poor

    These same currency distortions are the primary cause of the current economic disaster. With so much of the oil revenue being misappropriated through the currency system, or sent abroad in the form of debt payments, there is very little money left over for the needs of ordinary Venezuelans.

    But instead of fixing the currency distortions, or defaulting on the debt, the solution for Maduro has been to impose austerity on the country. And he has done so at a level that would put any neoliberal government to shame.

    Since 2012, imports have been cut by over 65 percent, even amidst severe shortages of food and medicine. Social spending has also been cut drastically, with overall government expenditure reaching a lower percent of GDP than during the neoliberal years of the 1990s.

    The results of these cuts have been very predictable: a collapsing health system and widespread shortages of food and medicine. Infant mortality and maternal deaths have skyrocketed, and thousands of preventable deaths have occurred as basic medications and medical supplies are frequently unavailable to those whose lives depend on them.

    The lack of funds has also forced the government to ramp up the printing press in order to create the money they need to make up budget shortfalls. But printing money with no backing greatly exacerbates inflation, and erodes wages, sending people’s income downward while prices continue upward.

    Since 2013, wages have declined by more than 90 percent in real value as runaway inflation has been met with inadequate wages hikes from Maduro. The national minimum wage has gone from the equivalent of about $300 per month in 2012 to about $5 per month today. In other words, the roughly 40 percent of the Venezuelan population that earns the minimum wage is now scrambling to get by on less than $5 per month!

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    Meanwhile, food prices have continued to spiral upwards at an astounding rate. Though the government uses price controls to combat inflation, widespread trafficking of goods means they can seldom be found at regulated prices. With the drastic cuts in dollars approved for imports, business owners import goods with dollars they acquire on the black market, and, therefore, they sell the goods at black market prices.

    The result is that a single food item like a carton of milk or a pound of meat can cost as much as half the monthly minimum wage. Venezuelans often spend hours in line to buy food, only to find that their monthly salary will only afford them two or three items in the grocery store.

    As might be expected, this has caused growing hunger and malnutrition. Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans are now flooding into neighboring countries in search of basic necessities, or to start a new life there. Others attempt the risky and often deadly trip by boat to nearby islands.

    Workers are also leaving their jobs en masse as their salaries have essentially become worthless. As a result, major sectors of the economy are now critically understaffed, only worsening what is by far the worst economic crisis in Venezuelan history.

    A litany of excuses

    Maduro and his defenders point to a number of factors to deflect blame for this situation—from the “economic war,”, to low oil prices, to US sanctions. But none of these excuses holds much water.

    The capitalists and food traffickers that are accused of sabotaging the economy are actually just following the incentives set up by government policies, and are often well-connected insiders themselves. In fact, some of the worst food trafficking has been shown to be people inside the government, including the military, proving that the motivation is economic, not political.

    Meanwhile, it is the government and the government alone that controls the exchange rate, and the allocation of oil dollars, making this a fairly easy problem to solve. But despite constant calls to fix it, Maduro has insisted on maintaining an extremely overvalued currency, and has continued to hand over the oil dollars to those who squander them while cutting imports, wages, and social spending for the poor.

    As for falling oil prices, this has only exacerbated what Maduro’s policies were already causing. By the time oil prices fell in late 2014, the economy had already been contracting for three straight quarters, real wages had already dropped 80 percent, and imports had been cut by 25 percent. The growing inflation, food shortages, and currency distortions at the root of the crisis all began in late 2012, two years before oil prices had fallen.

    The same goes for US sanctions, which had a negligible impact until Trump imposed broader sanctions last year. By that time, Venezuela’s economy had been in a free fall for four straight years.

    In other words, it makes little sense to try to point the finger at things that did not occur until well after the crisis was underway. While sanctions and low oil prices have certainly exacerbated the problems, the truth is that Maduro’s own policies have ruined Venezuela’s economy far more than Washington or the opposition could have ever dreamed possible.

    Lessons for the left

    Venezuela’s collapse has some important lessons for the left. But in order to grasp them, there must be an honest accounting of what went wrong.

    Many have insisted on viewing the enemy of their enemy as their friend, and so have continued to defend the Maduro regime, and deny the extent of the current disaster. Insisting that things would be worse under the neoliberalism of the opposition, they ignore the brutal austerity that Maduro himself has imposed, and shrug at the fact that the country is now poorer in per capita terms than at any time in the last 40 years.

    But for those willing to take an honest look at the evidence, there is little point in trying to minimize the magnitude of the crisis, or the government’s role in it. Instead, we should attempt to learn about what went wrong, so that the left doesn’t keep repeating the errors of the past.

    The first lesson to be learned is that leftist projects in developing countries need to take the problem of economic development more seriously. Though Chavez placed much emphasis on social programs for the poor, and anti-imperialist alliances abroad, he did not give the problems of the domestic economy the attention they deserved.

    His approach to the economy generally involved the state taking over key sectors, with the notion that state control would remedy the problems of underinvestment by the private sector. Firms were often expropriated on a whim, and endless state-owned endeavors were launched without giving them careful thought or planning.

    This led to a very bloated state bureaucracy, widespread corruption, and a long-term decline in production in key sectors, which became a major drain on state revenues and economic growth. State owned enterprises often ended up in the hands of corrupt bureaucrats who made them into their own private domains, and then milked them dry.

    One notable example of this was in 2010, when Chavez launched a major offensive in the agricultural sector. Hundreds of large farms were expropriated, along with multiple food processing industries.

    Given that the farms and industries were often undercapitalized and unproductive, state intervention was the right approach. But most of the enterprises that were expropriated were then handed over to state officials and bureaucrats who had little preparation or oversight. The result was complete mismanagement, leading to a drastic decline in food production in the years that followed, and a worsening of food shortages.

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    The lesson here is that state takeovers of major sectors of the economy are not necessarily a good idea in poor countries with weak institutions. These types of interventions must take into account the organizational capacity of the state to administer enterprises without running them into the ground, especially in sectors that are so crucial to the national economy.

    One alternative might have been to turn control of these enterprises over to workers. And, in fact, there was a proliferation of community and workers’ organizations under Chavez. But the government did not do this in most cases, and here lies another important lesson for the left.

    While increasing worker power and control over production should be a major goal of any socialist project, to be successful workers and social movements must build organizational power that is independent from political parties and the state.

    In Venezuela, the communal movement was very much a state-sponsored initiative, with local communes and community councils usually following directives on how to organize from above. The extent of their power and control over production was decided by the government, not workers.

    This resulted in the communes being used as mechanisms of patronage and control rather than vehicles of liberation. Nowadays, members of these organizations get certain perks and benefits from the government, but come election time they are forced to vote for the government candidates to avoid losing those benefits.

    Finally, there is an important lesson here on the question of reforming liberal democracy. Though Chavez was justified in his criticisms of Venezuela’s previous two-party system, and the fairly exclusionary kind of democracy that existed in the country before 1998, in attempting to dismantle and transform this system, he ended up creating something even worse.

    Virtually all organs of the state, including the courts, the electoral body, and the military, were stacked with party loyalists, and yes-men that were valued more for their obedience than their competence. As a result, the institutions became rubber stamps for orders coming out of the executive. This was often justified by pointing to the fact the institutions were never really independent under liberal democracy either, and so the abuses under Chavez never seemed too consequential.

    However, when Chavez died, and Maduro’s “gang of thieves” gained the upper hand inside the government, there were no longer any checks on their power. The lack of any independent institutions allowed them to force out internal opponents, neutralize the congress, hold fraudulent elections, and form an all-powerful body that now runs the country as they please.

    Instead of making liberal democracy more inclusive and democratic, Maduro and gang have transformed it into a kind of authoritarianism that now deports journalists, jails union leaders, detains online activists, murders whistleblowers, and tear gasses the poor and hungry. What once was one of best electoral systems in the world has now been stripped of all the guarantees that ensured free and fair elections, allowing Maduro and gang to bend everything in their favor.

    All of this should serve as an important lesson for the left—that despite the major limitations of liberal democracy, having some checks and balances is better than none. Had Chavez allowed more room for independent institutions, and permitted real checks on the power of the presidency, Venezuela might not be in the mess it is today.

    As the country heads into another very questionable electoral process, the left should not throw its support behind the corrupt and authoritarian Maduro regime, nor should it support the US-aligned right-wing opposition. Our support and solidarity should instead be with the Venezuelan people, and their right to democratically elect their leaders. That is the only possible solution to the crisis.

     

    Chris Carlson is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research is on the sociology of development, with a focus on agrarian relations and structural transformation in the Global South.

     

  • Anatomy of a Flop

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    Looks to me that the ANSWER–IAC–UNAC rallies this weekend were a huge flop.  The biggest was in NYC on April 15.  The only article I could find that mentioned it was on a Chinese news service that said there was a protest of "hundreds." I saw one video of what I think was the whole crowd and it looked like 400 people. Hell, in 2003 we had hundreds of thousands. 
     
    In Washington, DC this past Saturday, it seems from this video there were about sixty marching; imagine, just sixty marchers in the national capital.  The video is narrated by medical doctor Margaret Flowers, who at one point (2:30) talks about a "staged chemical attack." In the Bay Area of California several hundred assembled.  In Chicago there were about twenty.  Their “big” rally, for some reason, is next weekend.
     
    On Friday there was one in New Haven.  Around six of us went to counter-protest with flyers.  We expected ANSWER would have 100 people. They had about 20. One guy was holding Assad and Russian flags and had a large picture of Assad on his lapel.  In Greenwich, CT, a Friday rally got front-page treatment in the Greenwich Times, but the article (and ten photos online) made it all seem pretty pathetic. They said sixty attended at one point or another, almost all being in their 70s. One photo showed no more than twenty people sitting among a lot of empty chairs. 
     
    A Los Angeles march had maybe eighty people with many Assad signs.  Clay Claiborne spotted among the marchers one “Baked Alaska,” a notorious racist who had marched with the rest of the crappers in Charlottesville several months ago.
     
    Remember, these rallies were the result of months of planning and organizing, with scores of groups sponsoring, and right after a bombing which should have gotten the blood up. What a farce.
     
    The NYC rally seemed to be a mish-mash of all leftist causes, not as Assadist as the other ones, but some carried his flag and photo-bombed the speakers. Judging from the posters and banners of most of the rallies they seemed to stress alarm at the U.S. bombing of Syria (which has been going on since 2014) and the illegality of the strikes (that was true enough).  But was there any sympathy in any of the rallies for the Syrians who were gassed, or the Syrians who were merely shot dead or blown apart by bombs?  Was there any condemnation in any of these “anti-war” rallies of Russia-Iranian warfare on Syrians? 
     
    People are ready to get out massively for certain causes like #MeToo and gun control.  Clearly they’re not inspired by an “anti-imperialist” leadership which thinks this is still 2003, that the Arab Spring was just a nuisance and whose minds reject observable facts and prefer conspiracies.  It’s time for new leadership and new ideas. One person to listen to is Syrian-American Ramah Kudaimi who spoke on Democracy Now! on April 16.
     
    Stanley Heller is Administrator of Promoting Enduring Peace and is active in RPM (Revive the Peace Movement Network, www.rpm.world).

  • Marx This Time

    ImageThe path taken by political life around the globe since the end of the Cold War appears as if designed to crush the liberal optimism with which this period excitedly began. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism manifestly disturbs a concept of peace understood in terms of sovereign states. Economic disquiet persists nearly a decade after a financial crisis highlighted the epochal decline that had occurred in the world economy after the post-Second World War growth boom. American populism has seized the allegiance of vast masses, led to a spontaneous storming of Wall Street, emboldened proud neo-Nazis to take to the streets, and wracked the nerves of liberals at home and abroad as it saw Donald Trump descend an ill-advisedly gaudy escalator to the White House.

    None of this appeared on the horizon in the heady days of Boris Yeltsin, Y2K, and Super Nintendo. As early as 1989, Francis Fukuyama, among the most influential neoconservative intellectuals of the period, gave voice to classical liberal enthusiasm (as opposed to the nominal liberalism of the DNC) in a manner that appeared to perform a transubstantiation of Marxism. Taking on the very Hegelian categories that had characterized historical materialism—most conspicuously, the ‘end’ or ‘goal’ of history—Fukuyama announced that, while there may well be a temporal future, the coming to be of a fully formed human society had already occurred. The terms in which he described the coming order were chilling and cartoonish at once. “We might summarize the content of the universal homogenous state as liberal democracy in the political sphere combined with easy access to VCRs and stereos in the economic,” Fukayama tells us. In other words, the spiritual education of the developed world is now complete. We have overcome ideology. After all, by his lights, “both economics and politics presuppose an autonomous prior state of consciousness”[1]—a state of contented capitalist consciousness.

    The Failure of Capitalist Recovery

    The situation almost thirty years later is dire. Even as the stock market rides a wave of Trump-era enthusiasm to the apex of an increasingly thin-skinned bubble, talk among the capitalist intelligentsia frets and shudders. Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration and, along with Paul Krugman, as representative a voice for the Left wing of mainstream policy making as one could hope for, has devoted much of his post-2008 publishing to a thesis about ‘secular stagnation.’ At a meeting of the IMF Economic Forum in 2013, five years after the crash and only four since the Recovery was officially announced, Summers sowed what he deemed productive doubt among his fellow elites. Musing cryptically, he said that “finance is all too important to leave up to financiers.” Having recourse to metaphor, he said that if the financial system is the power grid that helps run the economic system, then one would expect a panic—an outage—to bring destruction. The lights would go out. After the grid came back online, however, one would assume that the bulbs should burn just as brightly as before.

    This is far from how things turned out. Interest rates, which central banks slashed to zero or near zero in the middle of the crisis have remained there. And conditions are only now (a decade in) encouraging enough for Janet Yellen to consider moving them up even a small amount, the start date for that process kicked off ever farther into the future. Labor force participation has fallen steadily since 2007. In 2009, the CBO (which scores legislation and about which we heard a great deal during the Obamacare repeal fight) predicted that GDP today would be more than a trillion dollars higher than it is.[2] There is a persistent growth deficit in the US economy. Finally, since there is so much talk of inequality today: a decades long gap between wage growth and productivity continues apace.

    Continuing economic disquiet clearly indicates that there are structural failures in the capitalist system that stare down threateningly on the smooth functioning of our daily lives. This, along with the increasingly fatal effects of climate change and the election of Donald Trump, is the significant context for the growth of the Left in the United States, seen most clearly in the blind growth of membership in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

    It ought to concern us, then, that the Left is far from united when it comes to interpreting the economic landscape and charting a strategic path forward. Most Left accounts are focused on income inequality. By far the greater share of the gains made since 2008 have gone to a small segment of the population, bypassing the masses who must sell the hours of their day in order to survive. Across the ideological spectrum, a demand gap is understood to ultimately lie behind decline. Among Keynesians this is referred to as a lack of “effective demand.” Among Marxists, it is called “under-consumption.” Summers writes that “the main constraint on the industrial world’s economy today is on the demand, rather than the supply side.” It is certainly true that the wages of labor have stagnated since a successful assault on labor unions characterized the response to the last major economic disturbance, the Great Stagflation of the 1970s. It is also true that inequality was exacerbated by the crash. However, while it may go some way toward explaining some of the phenomena we see around us (especially in the political sphere) inequality alone is of little help in explaining the root cause of the crisis.

    The Fortunes of Value Theory

    Marxism has been very far from the mainstream of Left thought in the United States for over half a century. Nevertheless, the most interesting attempts to explain the causes of systemic crisis have recently come from a newly resurgent and sophisticated Marxist economists. In a world softly tucked into an order where representative democracy and VCRs could be enjoyed at the same time, Marxism appeared to be an anachronism. Things look differently in an age of secular stagnation.

    The Marxism that thrived in the preceding period was primarily the product of the academy. In the US, the intellectuals who associated themselves with the label were cultural critics. The so-called Frankfurt School was particularly influential. A band of German exiles, shaken by the abyssal moral failure of Auschwitz, formulated habits of thought geared to understanding the psychological conditions that had both prevented the emergence of socialism and allowed for the triumph of barbarism. Stationed in America in the midst of its post-WWII growth boom, the relevance of Marx’s political economy was opaque. The very core of his contribution to science, Capital, remained smooth spined and on the shelf. Meanwhile, the ideological structure of the Western world was torn dramatically to bits. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer mapped the authoritarian personality. Herbert Marcuse, with a turn to Freud, unpacked the failure of love. Erich Fromm anatomized human violence. And all were agreed that Reason itself, concepts taking hold of objects, was at best a self-defeating mistake, and at worse a violation.

    Mainstream economics, for its part, did more than ignore Marx. The classical tradition of political economy that Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Marx all took part in was thrown aside. The discipline was furnished with new premises: a notion of competition in which firms strive to serve consumers rather than struggle to ruin one another, a concept of utility devoid of need and inspired only by lustful desires, and assumptions about human reason and action that were very far from the everyday experiences of living and working with people. Atop this fiction was erected a vast, mathematical modeling system. Finally, the whole academic endeavor merged with industry, finance, and government.

    One might imagine that in the Soviet Union Marx’s theory would have fared much better. While it is true that the Soviet state funded scholarly research on the founders of scientific socialism and the revolutionary ferment that followed its founding initially inspired some of the most important contributions and elaborations of its theoretical achievement, the revolution’s Thermidor saw a theoretical retreat. The fate of Isaak Illich Rubin is a case in point. Dedicating himself to elaborating Marx’s theory of value, in 1924 he published a book length account of the structure of commodity fetishism in capitalist economies that broke similar ground to what Georg Lukács would in the same period. Less than decade later he was arrested and tortured. He endured a show trial and submitted a forced confession. He was dead by 1940. In the Stalinist period, the economist Leontiev signaled a shift in the Soviet political economy. The law of value, which Marx identified as the rule that regulates commodity exchange, was said to not apply to Soviet socialism in which “all labor useful to societies is rewarded by society.” As the core of Marx’s political economy had been pronounced inapplicable to actually existing socialism, there was little ground on which to build on his theory.

    In light of all this, engaging with Marxism today involves a rediscovery of Marx after the clutter of 150 years of history. That rediscovery begins with the concept of value itself. Like Smith and Ricardo before him, Marx understood the source of value to be human labor. He held that the “socially necessary labor time” required for the reproduction of commodities determines the ratio at which they exchange. This social construction of value was the common property that allowed very disparate things—apples and tables, cars and hats—to become commensurate. While socially constructed, value can only be represented in things themselves. It is the apple or the table itself that appears to have value. The social, historical scaffolding that allows value to appear at all is invisible and leads us to behave as if values inhere in things rather than the social relations we enter into as members of an economy.

    In the context of a money economy, it becomes possible to take the measure and means of payment of the social form of value and, as if by magic, cause it to expand. By investing money in means of production and buying the hours of workers, a capitalist can reap more value from production than she started with. The value of the means of production would transfer to the product in proportion to the extent they were used up in the process. The value of labor, however, is different. Labor adds value, but is not paid its full value. Value added is divided between the worker in the form of wages and the capitalist in the form of profit. The value-increasing process, then, is revealed to be a mystified form of exploitation.

    The labor theory of value and the model for the exploitative origin of profits it leads to is a central part of Marx’s critique of both the economics of his day and the system it is meant to describe. Nevertheless, it is not ultimately why Marx thought capitalism was inherently unstable. He found that as the capitalist production cycle iterated, a portion of the profit share was thrown back into production. Capital, as it were, would accumulate. Given competitive pressures, capitalists would invest in labor-saving mechanisms that would reduce costs, allowing firms to undercut one another’s prices. As a result, the value of the means of production would increase compared to the value of wages. However, since labor is the source of value added, the rate of profit would tend to decline. The third volume of Capital outlines a series of countervailing tendencies that offset this fall in the profit rate, but over time, Marx held that one should expect secular profitability decline in an advanced capitalist economy. The capitalist can increase the mass of profit even while the rate falls, but this only further advances accumulation.

    From the founding of political economy, it was understood that a tendency for the rate of profit to fall required explanation.[3] It was and continues to be an empirical reality.[4] The law of the tendency that Marx was the first to fully elaborate was even glimpsed by the right-wing economist Friedrich Hayek.[5] Besides being the most robust account of the phenomenon, Marx’s falling rate of profit thesis links his political economy to his political radicalism. According to his accounts, it is capitalism’s fantastic ability to make production more efficient that is the ultimate cause of its inability to maintain profitability over time. Production is its own limitation in a system of individual firms that seek profit maximization. Declining profitability can also be identified as a driver of the more proximate causes of crisis, such as the increased financialization of the economy, massive lending to home buyers, and the development of arcane, elaborate insurance instruments. If industry does not offer the best return per dollar invested, capital will seek speculative avenues.

    There are also political consequences to the fight to maintain the profit rate. One of the countervailing tendencies to the law that Marx identified was the ability for capitalism to push the wage share below the average standard of living previously operative in society. This is roughly the result of the neoliberal assault on the power of syndicalism that began at the end of the post-WWII boom in the US and Europe. Breaking working-class power and driving the wage share downward succeeded in stopping a precipitous fall in the profit rate. It did not, however, create a boom; it merely staved off the secular decline. As a result, the profit rate has been trendless since the 1980s.

    Since the Cold War, Marxist economists have largely abandoned value theory. Even Robert Brenner, who in 2006 published a book detailing how the falling profit rate at a global level was driving increasingly turbulent cyclical trends, is happy to abandon both the labor theory of value and the law of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. In fact, he dismisses the whole theory in a footnote.[6] The climate around Left economics, however, has shifted since then. The likes of Michael Roberts, Andrew Kliman, and Fred Moseley have rescued Marx’s value theory from its premature arrival in the dustbin of social science. With the publication last year of Anwar Shaikh’s magisterial Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crisis (the subject of the keynote address at the Historical Materialism conference in New York this year), an authentically Marxist framework for a new generation of Left theory is at hand.[7]

    Fighting the “Recovery”

    At the height of the Greek sovereign debt crisis, the newly elected Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras—a member of the far-left Syriza party—chose the neo-Keynesian economist and game theorist Yannis Varoufakis to go to Berlin to discuss terms for the country’s bailout. He met there with Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister, and a passionate advocate of austerity—a policy that involves the reduction in state-provided public services, everything from healthcare to trash collection, to ensure scheduled payments on debt owed to banks. According to Varoufakis’ memoir, the German finance minister spoke to him about how

    “the ‘overgenerous’ European social model was no longer sustainable and had to be ditched. Comparing the costs to Europe of maintaining welfare states with the situation in places like India and China, where no social safety net exists at all, he argued that Europe was losing competitiveness and would stagnate unless social benefits were curtailed en masse. It was as if he was telling me that a start had to be made somewhere and that somewhere might as well be Greece.

    My rejoinder was that the obvious solution was the globalization of welfare benefits and living wages, rather than the globalization of insecure working poverty. In response, he reminisced at length about a secret mission he had undertaken in the 1970’s and 1980’s, to liaise with the East German authorities on behalf of his Christian Democrat party. ‘The DDR people were not bad,’ he told me. ‘They had good intentions for the social welfare system that was not economically possible.’ The insinuation was perfectly clear.”[8]

    Crises tend to alter the political terrain. The Great Depression changed for decades the conditions of the class struggle, introduced mass unionization, and popularized Keynesian economics and state intervention in the economy. The Great Stagflation reversed this course. It used the state to crush the power of unions and reduce overall union density. It subsequently drove down the increase in wages relative to productivity. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher declared that “there is no society.” The state quickly came to be widely understood to be the most significant barrier to growth, rather than a condition for its possibility.

    The financial elites in Europe, at least, have decided that in a truly global labor market, the standard of living of the laboring population in the advanced capitalist countries must be reduced to a new normal. As is often pointed out, my own generation stands to make less money over the course of its lifetime than the generation that produced us. And this, for the first time since the Great Depression. Austerity policies at the state level threaten to drive national economies into prolonged recession and, in the process, impoverish the population.

    On the mainstream liberal Left, a very similar conclusion has been drawn. During his Google lecture, self-styled leader of the anti-Trump resistance and former Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton, Robert Reich, told his youthful tech audience that they are

    “part of the problem, […] and part of the solution. There’s been a great deal of job displacement and there will be more job displacement. […] But there are areas where we need your help. One is enabling people to live better even though they may have lower incomes.”

    This thought is frankly baffling. The suggestion seems to be that the fall in the wage share is inevitable and what tech companies ought to be in the business of doing is inventing machines that allow people to raise their standard of living while their share in social production decreases. No-one should be holding their breath for a solution to endogenously generated unemployment and underemployment being delivered by (the woke bros of) Silicon Valley.

    The challenge facing us is stark. There will continue to be an effort to lower the standard of living for the majority of Americans and our fellow workers around the world. The next crisis may well test the social limits of capitalism itself. In the face of this, it is natural for there to arise a social movement that seeks to expand the welfare state, provide healthcare to all Americans, provide housing to the un-housed, and cover other basic social necessities. These demands are reasonable and to the extent that they are met, will greatly improve the lot of workers.

    But they are not enough. Taken by themselves, they are alarmingly myopic. If they are not understood as demands to end the wage system of coerced labor and organize production for consumption, they amount to a crimped utopianism. Capitalism does not produce for consumption and does not stop producing when everyone’s needs are met. It cares little about needs; its only driver is profit. Ending the system that extracts value from value, then, ought to be the goal of modern socialism. The problems of distribution, productivity, and growth can best be handled in a system in which free people come together to produce goods for human needs.

    Originally posted at Konkret.la.

    1. Francis Fukayama, “The End of History?,” The National Interest, Summer 1989 ↩︎
    2. Andrew Kliman, The Failure of Capitalist Production (London: Pluto Press, 2011) ↩︎
    3. Maurice Dobb, “The Falling Rate of Profit,” Science and Society (Spring 1959) ↩︎
    4. Anwar Shaikh, “The Falling Rate of Profit as the Cause of Long Waves: Theory and Empirical Evidence,” in Alfred Kleinknech, Ernest Mandel and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds., New Findings in Long Wave Research (London: Macmillan, 1992) ↩︎
    5. Chris Harman, Zombie Capitalism (London: Haymarket, 2009), p. 67 ↩︎
    6. Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence (London: Verso, 2006), p. 15 ↩︎
    7. Anwar Shaikh, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crisis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) ↩︎
    8. Yannis Varoufakis, Adults in the Room: My Battle with the European and American Deep Establishment (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), p. 212 ↩︎
  • Intersectionality and Divergence

    Intersectionality and Divergence

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    Looking back on nearly 25 years of involvement in the LGBT movement, and 45+ years in the labor movement, I am struck by the way those paths have crossed, intertwined and separated over the long term. This arc took me into unexpected territory, where queer identities, once deeply hidden and guarded, have achieved wide mainstream acceptance and support, while organized labor, once powerful and self-confident, now struggles to maintain its existence.

    I went to work in my first union shop as a copy editor trainee at the Baltimore Sun in May 1969, barely a month before the Stonewall uprising that launched the queer activist movement into mainstream attention. At the time I didn’t identify as gay, but I understood that I had a gender issue; I thought even then that there was a relationship between gay/lesbian people and those who were gender nonconforming, although I would have been hard put to explain it. I know I felt a sense of satisfaction when I read about Stonewall.

    However, my attention, as a convinced socialist, was largely focused on becoming a rank and file labor activist; a few months later, at the age of 22, I was a founding member of International Socialists (I.S.), a group best known for its focus on working in labor to build a radical rank-and-file movement from below.

    In those days, the beginnings of labor’s long retreat were barely apparent – more a matter of slowed growth than serious defeats, or so it seemed at the time. In January 1970, when the Pressmen’s union went on strike against The Sun and Baltimore’s other local daily, the News American, all of the half dozen or so other unions (including my own, the Newspaper Guild) honored the Pressmen’s picket lines as a matter of course. We were out for almost 11 weeks, and neither paper tried to publish. The strike was settled in March, and all of the unions won hefty pay increases.

    While I wanted to become a rank-and-file leader, I was handicapped by the deep uncertainty and guardedness that came from having what seemed an unspeakable secret. Shame, stigma and isolation prevented me from developing any real confidence and held me back as an activist.

    I’m sure there were gay people at The Sun, and perhaps even other gender-nonconforming people, but if so they were as deep in the closet as I was. I had a few close calls, but I was never outed. I compartmentalized my queerness and was too afraid to try to connect with the growing queer movement. That was probably just as well – by the mid-70’s the organized gay and lesbian movement was increasingly unfriendly to gender-different people (“transgender” had not yet emerged as a widely accepted label). Gay men regarded trans women as an embarrassment, and lesbians often reviled transmasculine queer people as traitors who were seeking straight privilege.

    With both my queer self and my labor activist self blocked, I let those dreams fade away. I was embarrassed that while my I.S. comrades were going into industry to build rank-and-file struggle, I really wasn’t doing very much at all. I resigned from I.S. in 1976, figuring I just wasn’t up to it.

    Becoming a Rank and File Activist

    But life has a way of changing unexpectedly. In early 1977, almost on a dare, I applied for a copy-editing job at The New York Times, and much to my surprise, I was hired. What I found there was a much more promising environment for an activist. Guild Local 3, in New York, was much more highly politicized than Local 35 in Washington-Baltimore, with distinct left and right wings. Labor’s crisis in the mid-1970’s was intensifying, and the newspaper industry was in the thick of it. In 1975-76, the Washington Post broke the Pressmen’s union, and reduced the remaining unions there to a weakened state that has persisted ever since.

    NY Daily News Strike Picketer

    Elsewhere, publishers were emboldened and became more aggressive in demanding concessions from the unions. In New York, the Daily News forced a strike in June 1978 by the Newspaper Guild over the company’s demand for two-tier pay scales. Most of the unions honored the Guild’s picket lines, but crucially, the mobbed-up independent News and Mail Deliverers’ Union (NMDU), which organized the delivery truck drivers, scabbed. For two nights, there were wild, chaotic and violent confrontations on the picket lines, and a parked delivery truck was firebombed. The drivers stopped crossing the lines, but the strike was settled with major concessions by the Guild, including two-tier. This, in turn, sparked much anger in the ranks, and splits in the local leadership.

    I quickly got involved with the left wing of the New York Guild, and was elected shop steward on the Times’ Foreign News Desk in 1979. For most of the next 15 years, left-leaning reformers fought to oust the local’s conservative, business unionist leadership, with only limited success. The Membership Slate (later to be reincarnated as the Rank and File Caucus), won shop-level and local elections in 1979 and 1980, but soon broke up and was forced from office. We fought on for more than a decade but were not able to mount another serious challenge for power in Local 3, the largest in the international union. I became a chief steward, shop vice chairperson and local Executive Board member, shedding some of my guilty feelings and rebuilding my self-esteem. Despite the defeats in bargaining and in union elections, I felt I had begun to vindicate my earlier dreams of playing a significant part in a revitalized working-class movement. But my trans side was still hungry, and was not fed.

    First Steps

    My first tentative steps to connect with that part of me took the form of reading. In the mid-80’s, I devoured Renee Richards’s autobiography, and saw enough similarities there that I decided I was probably transsexual. But I quickly decided to keep that secret locked up. I was too afraid of the consequences of coming out, and those fears were well founded.

    Camp Trans was established across from the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival when transgender women were barred from attending. Photo: Mariette Pathy Allen

    In the 1980’s, transgender people (a term that didn’t come into widespread use until around the end of the decade) were perhaps at their lowest point as a community and a movement. We were shunned by gay and lesbian organizations striving for respectability, excluded from ride celebrations and parades, and denounced by many second wave feminists and gender normative gay men. As I grappled with the impulse to let my trans self out of its rigidly guarded cage, bolder spirits were beginning to pull together a movement. They coined the term transgender to cover transsexuals, cross-dressers and others who challenged rigid gender lines. They protested our exclusion from the larger queer community, denounced hate crimes like the killing of Brandon Teena, began to press state and local legislatures for anti-discrimination legislation, and even went to Washington to lobby Congress for federal protection.

    An Interesting Paradox

    Nearing my 50th birthday, I began taking tentative steps into this strange new world. I found an interesting paradox – I had been active for most of my adult life in the organized labor movement, which had potentially great social power, but enormous inertia. Trans organizing, still in its infancy, had almost no social power, but far fewer restraints. In the late 90’s, we made it up as we went along.

    Unions had dues-funded offices and staff that allowed them to survive in hard times, and to deliver gains to their members, although these were badly reduced. Their democratic structures allowed members at least the possibility of influencing the direction of the organization. But their history and relationships with employers and the state seriously crimped the possibility of genuine rank and file control.

    While relatively small volunteer-run LGBT groups were usually ultra-democratic, with few officers and no money or staff, they lacked social weight. The larger LGBT organizations followed the board-and-staff NGO model, in which “members” donated money or took part in events but had no say in setting policy or priorities. Boards of directors were generally self-perpetuating, and priorities and direction were heavily influenced by the foundations that provided much of the money. This remains a key factor in skewing activism away from confronting employers and the super-rich.

    Those differences mirrored another divergence – labor, although powerful, was (and is) under growing attack from employers, well-funded right-wing politicians, and even its supposed friends in the Democratic Party. Union membership and strike activity fell, and struggles were overwhelmingly defensive. Identity-based movements (women’s, LGBT etc.) also faced powerful enemies, but the overwhelming power of capital was not focused on destroying them. Instead, these movements increasingly focused on a narrowly defined liberal interest-group politics, striving to win inclusion within a competitive, hierarchical society. Demands became more focused on individual rights (reproductive autonomy, marriage equality, etc.) and less on economic equality and gains in the workplace. The needs of working-class women and queers were tacitly, but effectively, given lower priority.

    Bridging Labor and Transgender Organizing

    While I found all of this unfamiliar and sometimes disorienting, I managed to adjust, and spent much of the last 15 years or so fighting for transgender rights and inclusion.

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    Transgender pride buttons

    Sometimes there was overlap – in the early 1990’s, a few years before I came out, gay and lesbian workers at The New York Times began to organize for domestic partner benefits and protection against discrimination. Union contract negotiations were beginning, and some of them came to me for advice (by that time I was well known as a union activist). I helped them write and circulate petitions for their demands to be included in the bargaining; somewhat to my surprise, this was accomplished without much difficulty. About 10 years later, I pressed for inclusion of transgender people in the nondiscrimination clause of the union contract, again successfully.

    I was also able to combine union and LGBT activism on a more sustained basis outside the workplace. I became the first transgender board member of Pride at Work, the LGBT constituency group of the AFL-CIO, in 2002, and worked with queer brothers and sisters to make sure that the labor movement threw its weight behind those insisting on local, state and federal anti-discrimination legislation that is fully inclusive of trans people. From 2009 through 2012, I was Pride at Work’s first transgender co-President.

    Looking back across this long arc, I see that social justice movements from below have opened undreamt-of hopes and possibilities, but at the price of a shady and corrupt bargain. The billionaire class offers a future in which all kinds of marginalized groups can believe that everyone, regardless of race, sex, sexuality, ethnicity, gender identity, etc., should have an equal opportunity to serve the moneyed elite. In return, the ruling class requires that we accept subordination, seek the favor of our “betters” to compete for scarce perks, and avoid raising demands for systemic change.

    Demonstrators shut down L.A. intersection to protest murders of transwomen (March 2015)
    Photo: Katie Falkenberg/Los Angeles Times)

    The “bargain” we are offered is a fraud. Trans people, along with other oppressed sectors, are far from achieving this promise of identity-based equality. With those others, we remain subject to economic discrimination and state and private violence. While some marginalized groups may see one or another of their own in a position of power, the elite reproduces itself and its general system of political and economic domination, while changing its internal composition only slowly, if at all. What do we need? The social power of the working class, the energy and innovation of long marginalized groups, in movements that demand wholesale systemic change, not piecemeal adjustments.

    Donna Cartwright is a member of Solidarity in Baltimore; she is active in labor, single payer and LGBT rights campaigns.

    Originally posted at the Solidarity web site.

  • Christian Socialism-From-Above

    ImageOn March 19th, 2018, Gov. Phil Bryant of Mississippi signed into law the earliest abortion ban in the United States, restricting abortions after 15 weeks in the entire state. The day after, the Supreme Court housed debate on the legality of a California law regulating speech at anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers, which required that they present information about affordable abortion, contraception, and prenatal care, and to display signs saying that they are not a licensed medical clinic, in cases where they are not. This has re-ignited debate over the appropriate stance for the left to take on abortion, and whether there is space on the left for anti-abortion views.

    As part of this discussion, a 2014 article by Elizabeth Bruenig (née Stoker), in which she lays out her belief system as a “pro-life leftist”, has resurfaced and sparked much debate on Twitter and elsewhere. While she has since expressed opposition to abortion criminalization, in this article Bruenig (who is Catholic) explains how abortion is “contrary to Christian ethics,” and should therefore be discouraged through social democratic measures aimed at reducing its necessity, such as universal healthcare, paid parental leave, and a state-supported child allowance. Bruenig presents this stance as bridging the divide between socialism and Christianity; however, her top-down approach to Christian socialism reflects a fundamental error about the role of religion in the lives of most believers, and ignores the rich history of Christian socialism-from-below, in which working class experiences and needs have been prioritized over the standards of church elites.

    The phrase socialism-from-above refers to a 1966 pamphlet by Hal Draper called “The Two Souls of Socialism,” in which he proposes a fundamental division between those who would seek to institute socialism at the hands of an elite minority (“socialism-from-above”), and those who promote a socialism by and for the proletarian masses (“socialism-from-below”). According to Draper, the defining characteristic of socialism-from-above is “the conception that socialism (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) must be handed down to the grateful masses in one form or another, by a ruling elite which is not subject to their control.” In Christian socialism, socialist theory is fundamentally linked with Christian morality; as such, if church hierarchies are allowed to determine all aspects of Christian socialist morals, the socialism in question will at least partially be determined by the rule of church authorities. In “Why I’m a Pro-life Liberal,” Breunig assumes that the morality of the Catholic church with regard to abortion represents the totality of Christian ethics, and that Christian socialism must follow by promoting measures to reduce the occurrence of abortion. In reality, however, the stances which Christians take on abortion are anything but homogenous, and do not neatly reflect the positions of church institutions.

    Polling results on religious attitudes on abortions vary widely, and survey questions have largely focused on whether it should be legal, rather than more abstract questions of its morality. However, a 2011 survey by the National Catholic Reporter found that 52% of Catholics believe that the authority to determine the morality of abortion lies with individuals, not with church leaders. Similarly, according to a 2017 Gallup poll, approximately 50% of mainline Protestants (ranging from 57-46%, depending on denomination) consider abortion to be morally acceptable. These numbers are significantly lower for evangelical Protestants, but still, from 13-27% of Baptists, Non-denominational Christians, and Pentecostals consider abortion to be morally acceptable. So even for evangelicals—who make up a minority of Christians in the U.S, albeit a vocal one—opposition to abortion is hardly unilateral. Among these three divisions of Christians (Catholics, mainline Protestants, and evangelicals), only in mainline Protestantism do official church statements condone abortion. However, few Christians in practice view church doctrine as a rulebook which must be followed exactly; as such, we regularly see disagreement from lay Christians even on subjects on which church authorities have clearly delineated positions. As such, actual Christian morality generally comes “from below” even for Christians without any socialist politics, and even in the Catholic Church, where official interpretations of the bible are meant to be determined by the Vatican rather than by individual Catholics.

    So if the ecumenical of U.S. Christianity, and of the Catholic Church specifically, is not wholly pro-life, why does Bruenig act as though Christian socialists must oppose abortion? Even the Catholic socialist tradition specifically, by and large, has not represented rigid adherence to canon law. The Brazilian theologian and former priest Leonardo Boff, an early proponent of liberation theology, was censured by the Church in 1985 for his book “Church, Charism, and Power”, which critiqued the church for its hierarchies, involvement in human rights violations in Latin America, and participation in class society. Don Primo Mazzolari, the Italian priest and anti-fascist partisan who preached about a “church for the poor” was suspended from preaching outside of his diocese, and had a magazine he founded cancelled by the Vatican. And Catholic Worker, the paper of Dorothy Day, perhaps the most widely known Catholic socialist, dropped from 150,000 to 30,000  subscriptions when she went against the church hierarchy by refusing to support Franco over the (largely anarchist and communist) Republican forces. The most important task for socialists, Christian or otherwise, is to be on the right side of history.  And while in many of these cases the Church eventually came around—Pope Francis recently made a pilgrimage to honor Mazzolari, and Day is currently a candidate for canonization—these examples illuminate a Christian socialist morality stemming not from the Vatican, but from everyday priests and lay people.

    Even among non-socialists, lay Catholics and clergy alike regularly rebel against social teachings that limit bodily autonomy in order to police social reproduction. According to a 2010 survey by the Guttmacher Institute, Catholics get abortions at about the same rate as the general population. While the Catholic Church’s official stance on homosexuality promotes celibacy in order to avoid sin, a “GLBT Ministry” of Franciscan priests in New York provides an affirming and inclusive space for queer Catholics. And in 2014, the National Coalition of American Nuns took a stance against the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, which allowed for employers to make decisions about employees’ access to birth control. Bruenig’s doctrinaire theologism attempts to “bridge the gap” with an imaginary Christian sector of the working class which is far to the right of most actual Christians.

    This misconception of working-class Christians is important, as it cuts to the core of a form of socialism-from-above that has recently become common within the social democratic milieu. In this form, the working class is assumed to be unilaterally reactionary and opposed to anti-oppression politics; as such, attempts to appeal to the working class end up embracing reactionary politics. Bruenig isn’t wrong to note that the majority of the U.S. working class is Christian, but her mistake lies in assuming that the best or only way to appeal to them is by abandoning core socialist principles. In reality, Christians are already working on some of the same issues as socialists; for instance, churches across the country have begun offering sanctuary to immigrants facing deportation, as ICE is less likely to perform arrests in “sensitive locations” such as places of worship. Politics aren’t formed in a vacuum, or through sharing the right thinkpiece, but through practice, in coalition with others. It makes sense to prioritize working with Christian comrades on the issues on which we agree, rather than attempting to win them over ideologically by sacrificing our own principles.

    Abortion is not a side project distracting from the “economic issues” on which socialists must focus; rather, the fight for reproductive freedom, including abortion rights, is an integral part of the class struggle. When abortion is discussed as a class issue, it’s often framed either in the terms of the economic factors which contribute to abortion’s necessity or in terms of the economic factors which restrict abortion access. Bruenig discusses the ways in which the need for abortion is often a matter of economic necessity, as justification for the social democratic measures which she proposes to reduce the need. Meanwhile, pro-choice leftists explain how abortion access is often limited by economic factors, and by policies such as the Hyde Amendment, which makes it so that state funding in the U.S. cannot be used to pay for abortions. But abortion access is an economic issue at an even more basic level, insofar as pregnancy and childbirth are an essential part of the social reproduction of the workforce under capitalism.

    First developed by Lise Vogel in Marxism and the Oppression of Women, social reproduction is the process by which the institution of the family reproduces the labor force, which in turn produces value. This idea is foundational for Marxist feminism because it explains how, even though reproductive labor does not directly produce value, it is an essential part of the capitalist economy. According to Tithi Bhattacharya:

    “Labor power, in the main, is reproduced by three interconnected processes:

    1. By activities that regenerate the worker outside the production process and allow her to return to it. These include, among a host of others, food, a bed to sleep in, but also care in psychical ways that keep a person whole.

    2. By activities that maintain and regenerate non-workers outside the production process–i.e. those who are future or past workers, such as children, adults out of the workforce for whatever reason, be it old age, disability or unemployment.

    3. By reproducing fresh workers, meaning childbirth.”

    It is, of course, the final process of social reproduction which is most relevant to this discussion. Pregnancy and childbirth is an essential part of ensuring that the workforce continues on and is able to produce value another day. As such, the right to abortion is the right to withhold one’s labor. This is a priority for us as socialists; we must oppose coercion into labor, particularly by means of economic necessity and/or state oppression, but also by soft power and social or interpersonal pressure.

    Breunig claims that her stance on abortion is left-wing insofar as it attempts to reduce abortion through social democratic means, rather than through criminalization. But by assuming that Christian socialism requires an acceptance of abortion as sinful, she contributes to stigma which ultimately makes abortion harder to access for those who need it. Ultimately, abortion is a medical procedure, and feminists believe that it should be treated like any other necessary medical procedure. Medical procedures are not usually fun—they are often stressful, even traumatic, and can sometimes be invasive. Insofar as abortion can be all those things, there is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to reduce the need for it, just as there is nothing wrong with wanting to reduce the needs of mastectomies through screening and prevention. In fact, Bruenig’s specific policy proposals are eminently reasonable, and her stated opposition to criminalization is of course appreciated. But in context, when pro-life leftists use their platforms to advocate for reducing abortions for moral reasons, it still contributes to a culture of stigma which ultimately makes it harder for people who need abortions to get them.

    There is a reason why abortion is treated differently from mastectomies; this is because of the stigma and moralism associated with these procedures. On the level of base/superstructure, this stigma exists because to get an abortion is to refuse the duty to reproduce the workplace. But the superstructure can also have concrete impacts; while stigma is not a direct material determinant of abortion access in the way that anti-abortion policies or healthcare coverage are, it undeniably has an impact on both abortion access and the experiences of people who have abortions. For example, while parental consent laws have the most direct impact on minors’ access to abortion, it is stigma and moralism that makes it so they can’t ask their families for permission, financing, or a ride to the clinic. And even though Bruenig disapproves of some of the more extreme tactics of anti-abortion activists—finding them unsuitable to a “culture of life”—she nonetheless plays into the moralism about abortion which leads to the harassment of women at clinics, and to violence against abortion providers. This is particularly egregious because, as has been shown, pro-life politics are not a requirement for Catholicism or Christianity in general, and Christian socialists have consistently resisted church authority in circumstances where church policies went against socialist principles.

    In developing a Christian socialism-from-below, then, it is important that we recognize the ideological diversity of the base of working-class Christians who make up this sector of the proletariat. While not all working class Christians are pro-choice, it makes no sense to reach out to those more conservative elements of the population at the expense of those working class Christians who have had or will have abortions. Ultimately, socialist politics cannot be proscribed an external authority, whether it’s a “vanguard” or the Vatican Council. Only through the united action of working class people of all religions, genders, and reproductive capabilities will we achieve proletarian liberation.

  • Massacre of Peaceful Gaza Demonstrators: An Israeli Crime Against Humanity

    ImageOn March 30, over 30,000 Palestinians – children, women, and men – gathered near the Gaza border with Israel. As they assembled several hundred yards away from the border fence, 18 peaceful demonstrators were gunned down by Israeli military snipers using live ammunition, with over a thousand reportedly suffering bullet wounds. Many of the demonstrators had come as whole families, with picnic supplies.

    The Palestinian protests continued for a second week on April 6, when Israeli snipers again used live ammunition, killing 10 demonstrators. Time will tell whether this turns into a new Intifada.

    March 30, 2018 showed Israel’s descent into unabashed crimes against humanity, carried out openly by its military, and defended afterwards equally openly by its political and military leadership.   

    While its military attacks on Gaza in 2006, 2008-09, and 2014 resulted in far greater loss of life, in these cases Israel claimed that it was hitting military targets and not deliberately aiming at civilians. (Of course, it did kill thousands, mainly civilians.)  In the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon, Israeli forces did not carry out directly the actual killing of thousands of Palestinian refugees themselves, but left that to reactionary Lebanese militias allied with them.  In March 2018, mass murder was openly carried out and openly defended after the fact.

    The idea for a peaceful demonstration near the border fence was launched by Gaza social media activist Ahmad Abu Artema, a political independent. It gained support from the Islamist Hamas movement, which has governed Gaza for over a decade. (Isabel Kershner and Iyad Abuheweila, “Confrontations at Gaza Fence Leave 15 Dead,” New York Times 3-31-18). Hamas promoted the event as a peaceful one: “Our orders are strict, to engage in peaceful forms of action,” stated Hamas official Bassem Naim (Piotr Smolar, “Dix-huit Palestiniens tués vendredi par l’armée israélienne: autopsie d’une répression meurtrière à Gaza”, Le Monde 4-3-18).

    In response to the announcement of the demonstration, Israeli spokespersons cried bloody murder, literally: “The Hamas leadership is risking your lives,” tweeted the ultra-reactionary defense minister Avigdor Lieberman (Kershner and Abuheweila, “Confrontations”). Retired general Yoav Galant told journalists that if demonstrators approached the border, they risked “a bloodbath,” while Army Chief-of-Staff Gadi Eizenkot warned of “the deployment of more than 100 elite snipers” (Piotr Smolar, “Dix-huit Palestiniens tués”).

    In the aftermath, Palestinians and their allies pointed to clear evidence that a large-scale massacre of peaceful demonstrators had occurred. Not one Israeli soldier was even wounded.  Israeli snipers fired at demonstrators who were well over 100 meters away from the border. The most Israeli authorities could claim was that some protestors had thrown projectiles toward them, but apparently without any of them reaching their targets, or having the chance of reaching them.

    For their part, Israeli leaders literally crowed at their “victory” over unarmed demonstrators: “Bravo to our soldiers,” wrote Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu (“Après un journée de protestation à Gaza, les Palestiniens enterrent leurs morts,” Le Monde 4-1-18)

    An ancillary effect of the Gaza massacre could be to bolster support for the Islamist Hamas movement among the Palestinian people.  Hamas is basically the Palestinian branch of the socially and politically conservative Muslim Brotherhood, which means that its charter says nothing about the elimination of social hierarches within Palestinian society. On women’s rights, for example, this document states, with more than a little nostalgia for the past: “The role of Palestinian women is fundamental in the process of building the present and the future, just as it has always been…”

    In contrast, the more secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)-inspired Draft Palestinian Basic Law (Constitution) of 1995 states, “Women and men shall have equal fundamental rights and freedoms without any discrimination.” Its 1968 version went further: “The Movement tries to liberate the individual from all social ills, especially the discrimination women face, the thing that hinders their potentials and effective contributions at all disciplinary levels.” This shift is also a marker of the PLO’s degeneration from a more liberationist movement to a corrupt out-of-touch bureaucracy that governs the West Bank in cooperation with Israeli authorities. 

    The essential conservatism and narrow partisan agendas of both Hamas and the PLO has led younger and more radical sectors of Palestinian society to demand an end to their feuds, while also searching for new perspectives and forms of organization from which to continue the struggle.

    Today, the people of the entire Middle East are tired of endless imperialist and civil war, and of the harsh repression that ended the Arab revolutions of 2011.  They are at a point where they can no longer take it, and the outbreak of protest elsewhere in the region – or something even more serious – is highly likely in the aftermath of the massacre.

    Inside the US, the political leadership has greeted the March 30 massacre with silence. Of 535 members of the House and the Senate, only three, Senator Bernie Sanders (VT) and Representatives Betty McCollum (MN) and Barbara Lee (CA) spoke out to condemn the massacre.

    Israel was also testing its weapons systems on human targets March 30, like the armed drones it used to spray teargas on the demonstrators. Israel produces its own drones, for itself and the world arms market, and March 30 served as a sort of advertisement. It has recently sold drones to Modi’s Hindu nationalist government India, where they are being used to suppress the people of Kashmir. Modi may now be interested in buying more.

    But most of Israel’s military hardware is of US origin, and is being spectacularly augmented under the unprecedented $38 billion ten-year deal for military assistance agreed to by the US in the waning days of the Obama administration. 

    Add to that the Trump administration’s unconscionable decision to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, thus recognizing Israel’s permanent occupation of the city that Palestinians claim as the capital of their future state, and it becomes more evident than ever that US imperialism stands behind Israel, from occupation to occupation, from massacre to massacre, and from invasion to invasion. 

    Moreover, both Egypt and Saudi Arabia, respectively the largest military and financial power in Arab world, have recently indicated their support for Israel, with Saudi Arabia confirming this in the aftermath of March 30.

    Thus, Netanyahu’s Israel seems to be riding high in its struggles against the Palestinians, confident of its impunity in suppressing and murdering them, and hiding behind its walls and military strength.  But this triumph is built upon sand, on the assumption that the Palestinian people will eventually give up and accept second-class status under Israeli occupation.

    The history of oppressed nations and peoples shows the opposite. Some 250 years ago, Poland was conquered and divided up among its neighbors, the Russian, Prussian, and Austrian empires.  It was proclaimed to the skies that Poland was dead.  It took nearly 150 years, but the Polish people never gave up. Nor did their allies on the left, among them Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, and the movements they inspired, like the Parisian masses who took on the monarchy in 1848, shouting as they marched, “Long Live Poland!” The Poles persisted, staging mass uprisings in 1830, 1846, 1863, and 1905, and also lending their support to liberationist movements of other peoples, as in the Paris Commune of 1871.   In 1918, as the three occupying empires crumbled, an independent Polish state arose again, proving how hard it is to eradicate the legitimate national aspirations of an entire people.

    Keeping that history in mind, we conclude: Long live Palestine, today and in the future!

  • The Red State Walkouts

     ImageWhen I write for New Politics, I tag my blogs with key words. I wonder how many other Left publications include "teachers unions" under "labor" or include "education" as a separate topic and run critical analyses—as we do?

    I explain in this just-out piece in Jacobin why the Red state teacher walkouts cannot be understood without noting how teaching as work and teachers as workers have been overlooked. The work they/we do is in education. It's a story about women's work and school reforms that have aimed to destroy the profession, globally. The story pushes against the mold of labor struggles in which union officials speak for workers and of national boundaries.

    If you like this article, please share it. And subscribe and donate to New Politics, which has consistently published critical work on education and teachers unions for a broader Left audience.

  • Postmodern Conservatism and Capitalism

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    Conservatives today have been deeply critical of what is often called postmodernism.  They have associated it with identity politics, political correctness, social justice warriors, relativistic “cultural Marxism” and a host of other evils.  For some conservatives, post-modernism is signifies everything that is wrong with contemporary society. University of Toronto Professor Jordan Peterson has characterized it as “dangerous” and “radical” and dismissed important authors like Derrida as “charlatans.” The National Security Council has claimed that “postmodern cultural Marxism” (whatever that means) mobilizes opposition to Donald Trump.  And right wing commentator Ben Shapiro has characterized Barack Obama the first “postmodern” President.

    Moreover, conservative criticisms of postmodern thinking are not relegated to its intellectual claims.  They are often directed against specific groups in society that are perceived as promulgating postmodern doctrines. Here, Jordan Peterson, now the number one selling author on Amazon, is perhaps the most articulate and comprehensive right wing critic.  He criticizes postmodern theorists and scholars for corrupting the youth of the West with “nihilistic” doctrines that “rip out their ethical foundations.”  Most particularly, he directs his scorn against postmodernism’s most pernicious product: identity politics. Taught that powerful institutions are marginalizing their identity, individuals become “hell-bent” on tearing down apparently oppressive structures without appreciating the valuable service they provide. This leads to growing social fragmentation, a sense of atomistic isolation from all other individuals and groups, and destroys the “substructure of Western Civilization” and its affiliated moral values.

    There is much that could be said defending postmodern intellectuals and theory from critics like Peterson.  To my mind it is clear that they do not have a particularly robust understanding of most of postmodern doctrines.  But here I want to raise another, more direct criticism.  Conservative critics often take various social groups who advocate for postmodernism to be responsible for social fragmentation and the alleged collapse of the Western tradition and its values.  Apparently a small cabal of university professors, activists, and students, is ripping apart the “substructure” of Western civilization one Derrida citation at a time.  However, these conservative criticisms all have a curious shallowness to them. By directing blame against easily targeted and reviled social groups like intellectuals (and, as we shall see, ethnic minorities), they either miss or distract from more powerful social trends which might play a far more significant role in what David Harvey calls the “production of difference” across society. In this essay, I want to discuss how capitalist societies actually produce the kind of social fragmentation and atomism these conservative critics decry. Moreover, I will suggest that capital plays a fundamental role in the production of what I call “postmodern conservatism.”

    Capitalism and the Production of Difference

    In The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels characterized capitalism as a revolutionary mode of social production where “all fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.”  In capitalist societies “all that is solid melts into air.”  This brilliant formulation is tantalizingly rich with insight about the impact capitalism can have in destroying old social relations, replacing them with new ones, and then in turn eliminating those.  Later, Marx would elaborate on this position more concretely. In the Grundrisse Marx claimed the production of surplus value, the unpaid labor time added to objects which allows them to be commodified and sold at a profit,

     “…requires the production of new consumption requires that the consumer circle within circulation expands as did the productive circle previously.  Firstly quantitative expansion of existing consumption; secondly, creation of new needs by propagating existing ones in a wide circle; thirdly, production of new needs and discovery and creation of new use values.”

    What Marx was describing in the Grundrisse was nothing less than the origins of social fragmentation taking place on a global scale as capitalism grew in strength.  Throughout Capital and other works, he elaborates on this theme. Most notably, Marx discusses how the introduction of money as the primary medium of exchange in traditionally oriented societies transforms the way individuals interact within them.  From seeing one another as common members of a community, they gradually transform into egoistic and competitive consumers pursuing their own particular desires. In other words, capitalisms and its mediums transformed traditional societies into those characterized by alienated modern individuals concerned only with their own identity and its private satisfactions. Moreover, since all individuals now competed with one another for position and capital, everyone became increasingly concerned with power.  Where before power had been relegated to the top of the social hierarchy, in the apparently equal realm of liberal society, everyone was expected to acquire power in order to get ahead.

    Years later, David Harvey developed this same idea geographically, vividly describing how capital both creates new geographies only to tear them down shortly after.  Capital produces a new set of factories, service centres, and centres of production to create new moral values.  This is its moment of greatest triumph—capital has successfully eliminated the old in order to market and sell the new. But what Harvey calls the “paradox” inherent in this process is that these same centres of productions then post a barrier to the development of new ones designed to create new economic and by extension moral values. So eventually capital tears down the very geography of the old to build the new, transforming landscapes and communities as it goes. 

    We can develop this line of thinking even further.  Capitalism must inevitably destroy old moral values in order to continuously create new ones through what Joseph Schumpeter called a process of “creative destruction.” It has no use for traditional mores, since they pose a barrier to the creation of new values and the set of commodities affiliated with them.  Moreover, I would claim that since we frame our identity in relation to the world around us, these new values and commodities lead to social fragmentation through the creation of new identities.  Capitalism establishes new ways of being in the world, commodifies them, and gradually dissolves the social fabric that once existed in more homogenous traditional societies.  Moreover, in an accelerating attempt to destroy space through time (as Harvey puts it), modern global capitalism also brings the world closer together, unbalancing the traditional legitimacy and identity of the “nation-state.” It does this through moving factories from the developed to the developing world to take advantage of low labour costs, relocating private assets to off shore tax free havens, or creating zones for the “free” movement of labour such as the European Union, and a host of other trends. 

    The power of these movements is undeniable.  But as we have seen recently, there has been a dramatic pushback against these trends.  Some of this has come from the left.  But in the final section of this article, I will try to account for how capitalism precipitates the rise of what I am calling “postmodern conservatism.”  Postmodern conservatism is highly dangerous because, rather than critically examining the root causes of social fragmentation in capitalist processes, it directs its rage against the most vulnerable in society.

    Postmodern Conservatism

    Post-modern conservatism draws on the philosophical heritage of Edmund Burke, Joseph De Maistre, Lord Devlin, Michael Oakshott, and other conservatives.  These figures located the root of social fragmentation not in capitalism and social processes but in the ideology of liberal rationalism. They argued that liberal ideology, developed and disseminated by intellectuals fascinated with abstractions, were establishing a world where respect for traditional society and its values was being abandoned.  In its place, they erected a kind of atomistic individualism, where each person was concerned to pursue their own desires without interference from others or respect for traditional values.  As the late Robert Bork—Ronald Reagan’s erstwhile favorite for the Supreme Court—put it, progressive liberals had no interest in “particularity-respect for difference, circumstance, history, and the irreducible complexity of human beings and human societies.”  Against this, these classically conservative thinkers argued that individuals should respect traditional authority and be distrustful of pretentious “rational” intellectuals.

    There are virtues to this intellectual tradition; for instance, Edmund Burke’s staunch criticism of imperialism based on its tendency to destroy long standing cultures and traditions. However, these virtues are not shared by post-modern conservatism, which is the contemporary bastardization of this right wing intellectual tradition, vastly empowered through modern technologies such as digital media and deeply radicalized. Emerging largely on the internet in in the mid-2000s, postmodern conservatism embodies what Wendy Brown characterizes as a politics of resentment.  It aggressively denounces allegedly "progressive" doctrines formulated by intellectual elites who claim to have some privileged understanding that lets them arbitrate issues of facts and values with objectivity.  Against this, post-modern conservatism radicalizes the positions of Burke, Oakshott, Bork and others that the traditional “common sense” understanding of the heartland should be taken as authoritative.  It is the average person in the heartland, the man on the “Clapham omnibus” to invoke Lord Devlin, whose moral values should be accepted as authoritative. Not because his values are demonstrably more valid. Postmodern conservatism, with its reverence for “alternative facts,” its dismissal of different opinions as “fake news,” and its distrust of intellectuals, has shown little concern for epistemic validity.  Postmodern conservatives want their values accepted because that is what tradition dictates and what most “regular” people value (though apparently not enough to win a majority of votes in the United States).

    Conclusion: The Roots of Postmodern Conservatism in Capitalist Processes

    This is in part what makes postmodern conservatism so dangerous.  Postmodern conservatism blames unpopular “elite” groups like intellectual and marginalized communities such as LGBTQ groups and ethnic minorities drawn to developed countries with the promise of jobs for the fragmentation of society.  In practice, this means that post-modern conservatives have mobilized ethnic identity to push for a retrenchment of tradition, and its affiliated moral values, against the demands of both liberals who believe in objective truth and post-modern leftists who want a more pluralistic society.  The irony here being, of course, that postmodern conservatives have developed their own form of identity politics. Postmodern conservatives such as Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, or “illiberal” democrats such as Janos Ader of Hungary, have directed the outrage produced by social fragmentation against vulnerable identities who allegedly don’t belong.  Against the power of globalizing capitalist trends, they have demanded a return to a kind of state oriented corporatism in which national capital is insulated from global competition by putting restrictions on competition, foreign goods, and the “free” movement of labour through immigration. This, combined with repressive domestic policies clamping down on progressive groups and “alien” identities, is meant to abet social fragmentation and help postmodern conservatives feel great again. 

    Postmodern conservatives have failed to see that capitalism itself is the greatest source of social fragmentation and value creation in the world.  The attempts to insulate national capital from globalization, even if successful, cannot stop this trend.  It is inherent in the nature of capital to revolutionize society in a manner conducive to accumulation through the creation of new moral values and the destruction of the old. Moreover, postmodern conservatives fail to see that they themselves are the product of such trends.  Indeed, as Harvey, Brown and others have observed, the modern fixation of identity and the emphasis on identity politics is itself partly the product of capitalism.  Through establishing a society in which alienated individuals are seen as responsible for pursuing their private pleasure in competition with others, the political mobilization of identity can become a locus for pursuing social power.  In some cases this can be an extraordinarily progressive effect—for instance, when historically marginalized groups push for an “equal share of the pie.”  However, in the case of postmodern conservatives, capitalism, combined with new digital technologies, has wrought a cabal of truth- denying nationalists aggressively pushing for the retrenchment of their traditional identity, values, and authority.  These are the same values and positions of authority which capital itself helped dissolve while maintaining the basic hierarchy integral to capitalism.

  • A Working Class Mayor Is Something To Be

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    Review: Winning Richmond: How a Progressive Alliance Won City Hall by Gayle McLaughlin. Hardball Press, 2018.

    Well before the Trump era, U.S. presidents from both major parties failed to address urban problems or made them worse. Congress, state legislatures, and governors weren't much better. The job of fighting poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation shifted to the municipal level, where activist mayors have tried to mobilize the limited resources of local government on behalf of neglected constituents and causes.

    When the U.S. Conference of Mayors met in San Francisco several years ago, the SF Chronicle congratulated its members for “shaking up the national agenda” by “tackling issues like climate change, education and police brutality.” In his keynote address, then-President Barack Obama proclaimed that “mayors get the job done. It’s not sufficient to blather on—you actually have to do something.”

    Under Obama’s successor, creative municipal leadership has become part of widespread resistance to federal attacks on immigrants, union members, and the urban poor. But in cities across the country, powerful private interests and the politicians they support still stand in the way of progressive initiatives. To overcome corporate opposition and “get the job done,” mayors or city councilors must take a nontraditional approach to running for and holding office.

    Union or community activists hoping to capture city hall will find a good role model and much practical advice in Winning Richmond. This new book is Gayle McLaughlin’s memoir of her 14-year career as mayor and city councilor in Richmond, California. Set in a state where politics is much dominated by men and women who are rich, famous, and/or corporate-connected, McLaughlin’s story is a case study in working class leadership development, female empowerment, and grass roots base building.

    Located in the East Bay near Oakland and Berkeley, blue-collar Richmond was once notorious for its street crime, gun violence, poverty, and pollution. During McLaughlin’s tenure in office, the city acquired a far different reputation—for battling Big Oil, Big Soda, Big Banks, and the landlord lobby. Today, this majority minority community of 110,000 is cleaner, greener, safer, and more equitable because it hired a top-notch city  manager and police chief, boosted the minimum wage, adopted rent control, curbed police misconduct, defended immigrants, and sought increased tax revenue and environmental justice from its largest employer, a Chevron refinery.

    The Richmond Council, New and Old

    As McLaughlin reports, the group she co-founded to achieve these goals—the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA)—now has a super-majority of five on the city council. All five of these RPA leaders are people of color who supported Bernie Sanders in 2016; four come from immigrant backgrounds and two are under 30. One is a black Latina lesbian and Teamster public employee. One is a retired public school teacher, also a union member. Three others are advocates for tenant rights, renewable energy, and immigrant women, respectively.

    This rainbow coalition didn’t gain office or influence overnight. In fact, when McLaughlin, a white newcomer from Chicago and member of the Green Party, won her first election in 2004, she became the lone progressive on the city council, for the next four years. As she recalls in her memoir, “the political culture was vastly different from anything I had ever encountered.”

    All six of Richmond’s black and Latino city councilors, including the mayor, were corporate Democrats backed by Chevron. On issues like promoting renewable energy or improving refinery safety, she had, at most, only one reliable ally, then Richmond city councilor and now mayor Tom Butt.

    “I was a working class person consciously representing the voices of many people living in a system dominated by the rich…,” McLaughlin writes. “One of the first things I realized was that I wasn’t going to get anything done without an organizing campaign on each issue.”

    This realization—and how the RPA acted on it—informs McLaughlin’s account of her inside/outside role as a catalyst for change, mobilizer of public opinion, and ally of constituent groups.

    A Durable City-Wide Formation

    Too many would-be reformers, once elected, don’t want to break with business as usual or build anything other than a personal fan base for future electoral campaigns. In contrast, McLaughlin never stopped being a movement-builder.

    The result is a durable, city-wide political formation, with its own elected leaders, a dues-paying membership, a year-round, multi-issue organizing program, and candidates who run as a slate, committed to a common progressive agenda. Whether they are Democrats, Greens, or independents, all RPA candidates run “corporate-free.” They refuse all business contributions, relying instead on Sanders-style small donors and local public matching funds.

    Last year, McLaughlin stepped down as a Richmond city councilor so she could pursue a long-shot campaign for lieutenant governor of California. Her purpose was not to become the next Gavin Newsom (Governor Jerry Brown's longtime understudy and would-be successor). But rather, she wanted to “encourage others to build local political power in their own cities” and a “powerful, independent network of progressive forces across the state.”

    Despite her working class background and her long record of mayoral activism on behalf of labor causes, only the United Electrical Workers (UE), a small national union with just a handful of California members, has endorsed her. Most big unions have gotten behind state senator Ed Hernandez, a wealthy southern California doctor and corporate Democrat who does favor single-payer health care. Even the California Nurses Association, a reliable past supporter of the RPA and Ralph Nader’s biggest union backer when he ran for president in 2000, fell in line behind Hernandez because of his single-payer stance. Much to the chagrin of rank-and-file nurses who favored McLaughlin, CNA officials wouldn’t even grant the progressive independent from Richmond a candidate interview.

    Backed by Our Revolution

    Undeterred, McLaughlin has traveled the state, winning the enthusiastic support of nearly 35 California affiliates of Our Revolution (OR), the activist network spawned by Sanders’ presidential campaign. In January, national Our Revolution responded to this grassroots sentiment by endorsing her as well. In late April, Our Revolution President Nina Turner is due to appear at California events on behalf of McLaughlin and the OR-backed Assembly campaign of RPA leader and Richmond city councilor Jovanka Beckles.

    If more California union members—not to mention their organizations—got behind her, McLaughlin’s labor-oriented candidacy (like Sanders’ in 2015-16) wouldn’t be viewed as such a long shot. But, of course, being an “outsider” who is vastly out-spent is not a new experience for the winner of four consecutive elections in Richmond, including the 2014 contest in which Chevron spent more than $3 million to defeat McLaughlin and the RPA.

    Anyone else of modest means—a tenant, a worker, a union or community organizer—who hopes to succeed in electoral politics against the usual well-funded foes (i.e., corporate lawyers, doctors, bankers, developers, and other multi-millionaires) will be much inspired by McLaughlin’s story.

    Steve Early belongs to the Newspaper Guild/CWA and the Richmond Progressive Alliance. He is the author of Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City from Beacon Press. He can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com.

    Hear speakers from the Richmond Progressive Alliance at the Labor Notes Conference, April 6-8 in Chicago.

    Originally posted at BeyondChron.

  • An Inside Look at How Pro-Russia Trolls Got the SPLC to Censor a Commie

    An Inside Look at How Pro-Russia Trolls Got the SPLC to Censor a Commie

    Image“An Orwellian destruction of meaning and words — so many absurdities; absurdities stacked on absurdities,” Alexander Reid Ross told me. Fox News had just declared him the leader of a nasty smear campaign, aided by the “far-left Southern Poverty Law Center,” that aimed to make television personality Tucker Carlson and his guests out to be “fascists.” So far, so normal, but it was the specific charge that shocked and awed the communist author who once lived in Russia: “McCarthyism,” with white nationalists’ favorite host, and those who come on his show to agree with him, the victims.

    Ross’s ironic sin, which he spoke to me about in an hour-long phone call, was writing a series of articles about a topic he wrote the book on: fascist entryism, or efforts to normalize far-right politics and infiltrate left-wing discourse. In particular, he noted the shared affinity for the Kremlin and its talking points among the fringe right and a subsection of leftists, and he detailed how Russian state media was facilitating a popular, “anti-establishment” front against the foreign and domestic enemies of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad, platforming right-wing nationalists alongside those who self-identify as progressive internationalists.

    Max Blumenthal is a fixture in this, found almost every week defending Russian foreign policy on platforms such as RT and Sputnik, a track record detailed in Ross’ last article. The son of Hillary Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal, he has admitted to accepting a free trip to Moscow, where he attended the same RT anniversary party in 2015 as U.S. General Michael Flynn — Trump’s former national security advisor is under investigation, in part, for failing to disclose he was paid $45,000 for his appearance . In Moscow, Blumenthal spoke on a panel, “InfoWar: Will there be a winner?” with Charles Bausman, editor of the website Russia Insider and the author of articles such as, “It’s Time to Drop the Jew Taboo.”

    Blumenthal has also been a repeat guest on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News broadcast, where he functions as the network’s useful leftist, defending President Trump from claims he colluded with Russia or benefited from its interventions in the 2016 election. His last appearance was to defend RT from the charge that it’s Kremlin propaganda.

    I don’t know Blumenthal well, but we have met before: six years ago at a bar in downtown Brooklyn where a single, square artisanal ice cube displaced what ought to have been $6 of gin in my $12 cocktail. It was a birthday party for a mutual friend who I no longer follow on Twitter.

    It was with some surprise, then, that I received a call on March 13 from the SPLC’s bemused general counsel, Jim Knoepp, regarding a peculiar legal threat Blumenthal had sent to the civil rights organization. That threat named me as a “shadow author” of an article I did not write by a man I did not know on topics we had never discussed.

    Blumenthal would repeat this claim in an interview with Ed Schultz, an RT anchor who enjoyed previous stints as a conservative on talk radio and a liberal on MSNBC. “It’s very clear,” Blumenthal asserted. “This wasn’t by one writer. This was by a cabal of people who have been trying to suppress dissent.”

    It only took $20, Blumenthal added, to pay for the threat of litigation that got the article by Ross pulled by the SPLC, the civil rights group apologizing for hurt feelings but not actually conceding any error in fact. The piece is now hosted elsewhere.

    “I don’t think it was even being read,” Ross said when I spoke to him. What was being read were the claims being made about it. The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, for instance, alleged that the SPLC had “published an article claiming that anti-war activists in the left were in an alliance, and were basically the same as, neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers.”

    This viral mischaracterization was why the SPLC retracted the piece. In its apology, the group said that some of those named in the article had protested that they had been “falsely described… as white supremacists, fascists, and/or anti-Semites.” It continued: “Because neither we nor the article’s author intended to make any such accusations, we took it down while we re-examined its contents.”

    Ross, himself a seasoned anti-war activist, hadn’t called anyone names, but rather detailed how some who purport to be his comrades had begun echoing, and sharing platforms with, far-right extremists. A secessionist conference in Moscow, for example, saw activists such as Joe Lombardo, of the United National Antiwar Coalition, declaring opposition to the “destructive manifestations of the ‘new world order’” in a statement cosigned by Andrey Kovalenko, leader of the Eurasian Youth Union, a wing of Aleksandr Dugin’s “National Bolshevik” movement — basically Russian nationalism fused with German fascism — and Yana Lantratova, head of Putin’s Council for Civil Society and Human Rights. A UNAC write-up of the conference highlighted the presence of “a leading anti-Zionist writer,” Israel Shamir, a Holocaust denier and associate of WikiLeaks.

    Ross told me it was the convergence of left and right rhetoric on the war in Syria, especially, that led him to begin investigating the origin and spread of pro-Russia talking points on opposite poles of the political spectrum. “Something in my stomach churned,” he said. The conspiracy theories about first responders and child refugees — the former “terrorists,” and the latter “PsyOps” — were “getting so far fetched, and then I realized that’s part of the issue.” Debunked as fast as a new theory is spawned, these insta-conspiracy theories mirror Moscow’s strategy of muddying the waters rather than trying to come up with a logical and internally consistent counter-narrative.

    “The networks that are denying it are just making it confusing,” Ross observed. “But there’s nothing really that confusing here.”

    Though I did not write Ross’ article, a month before I had written an exposé for The Daily Beast on “Redfish”, a new “grassroots” media company, led by an associate of the Voltaire Network, a far-right conspiracy website that the company’s chief credited with informing her Syria reporting. The company is almost completely staffed by known agents of Moscow’s propaganda apparatus.

    Blumenthal had appeared on Redfish, interviewed by his friend and Redfish employee, Rania Khalek, and was unpleased when this platform was revealed to be a “wholly owned subsidiary of Ruptly,” itself a subsidiary of the Kremlin. He has since gone on to help produce features for RT; Khalek has also gone on to openly work for the Kremlin-backed network and its affiliates. (The Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics says reporters should, “Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived”; “Refuse gifts,” including “free travel”; and, “Disclose unavoidable conflicts.”)

    Why an unrelated journalist’s name might show up in a threat of litigation over someone else’s article makes a little more sense if one accepts that Blumenthal is in the business of selling state-sponsored conspiracies to a diminishing audience of cranks. It’s also vital, for understanding, to know that this sort of propagandist is unconcerned with making their counter-narrative coherent or even internally consistent; it often just feels like trolling — like Blumenthal rebutting claims of a left-right-Kremlin axis by turning to Bill Moran, a former editor at Sputnik turned lawyer for the dregs of the reactionary left and right. Indeed, Blumenthal’s attorney previously represented “alt-right” e-celebrity Cassandra Fairbanks, the Bernie Sanders supporter turned “alt-right” Trump voter who Moran worked under at the Russian state outlet (employees there were instructed to promote “false flag” conspiracies about the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons).

    The SPLC would not provide me a copy of the legal threat that Moran sent to them, their general counsel instead reading me the parts that, flatteringly, detailed my extravagant role in a conspiracy theory. But I did receive a copy of a separate legal document demanding the preservation of all my “potentially relevant” web history.

    Stating as fact that an author is a fraud who outsources their writing to a freelance journalist is defamatory, but that’s one of the lesser ironies here. Blumenthal’s record of slandering those less fortunate than him speaks for itself, and here I do not mean slander of journalists, who should accept that as the cost of doing journalism.  No, it’s Blumenthal’s record of pushing conspiracy theories about children and rescue workers and others living in the worst war zones the 21st century has yet seen — eagerly picked up by Russian state media; always debunked and unceremoniously discarded — that is the scandal that can’t be purged.

    *****

    When a UN aid convoy was bombed on its way to what was then rebel-held Aleppo, Blumenthal was quick to suggest the account of the first responders was unreliable. In an October 2, 2016 piece, he implied the White Helmets, a favorite target of Russian missiles and conspiratorial defamation, were part of a false-flag conspiracy, having “pinned blame squarely on the Syrian and Russian governments. In fact, a White Helmets member was among the first civilians to appear on camera at the scene of the attack, declaring in English that ‘the regime helicopters targeted this place with four barrel [bombs].’”

    “This account,” he added, “remains unconfirmed by both the UN and SARC, and no evidence of barrel bombs has been produced.”

    The White Helmets are a featured target of 21st Century Wire, an alternative-to-news site founded by an editor of Infowars, the far-right conspiracy website. Their writer, Vanessa Beeley, has frequently accused those who rescue survivors of airstrikes of being an arm of al-Qaeda, staging incidents to spur Western intervention against Assad.

    Blumenthal’s work on the topic has revealed nothing that couldn’t have been found, earlier, in her archives; a year before his first piece on the White Helmets, Beeley told Sputnik that the “Soros-sponsored” group “demonizes the Assad government and encourages direct foreign intervention.” Much is made of the fact that a volunteer rescue organization filling the void left by a state only operates in areas where there is no state; where there is no state, there are extremists, ergo those who dig out children from bombed buildings are extremists too.

    That these rescue workers have been the target of a concerted propaganda campaign is not news; that discrediting them serves the interests of those bombing them is not either; and that those who volunteer for the White Helmets, and survive, risk arrest and torture, like Abdulhadi Kamel — Amnesty International notes he was forced to record a “confession” that aired on Russian media claiming he was an actor paid by Turkey, Europe and Saudi Arabia — is not in dispute. Words have consequences, and they are weaponized in areas of conflict, but some who purport to do journalism, not propaganda, are blithely unconcerned about the impact of the false things they have claimed, never bothering to correct them.

    Contra notions of a false flag, for example, the United Nations soon confirmed that the aid convoy to Aleppo was, as that volunteer said in English, hit by barrel bombs dropped from a Syrian regime helicopter. The attack, according to the UN, was “meticulously planned” and “ruthlessly carried out.” There was no equivocation, but Blumenthal neither updated his piece nor acknowledged the finding elsewhere. Why bother? By that point, weeks later, no one remembers any details — it’s the broader narrative that sticks.

    Blumenthal is prolific when it comes to inverting victims and perpetrators of war crimes. In January 2017, for example, he was quick to blame the contamination of Damascus’ water supply on anti-regime militants in the Wadi Barada valley — and to attack the mainstream media for not saying that. “The Guardian,” he complained, “can’t bring itself to name Al Qaeda in Syria, waits til the last line to mention it poisoned Damascus water supply with diesel.”

    A UN report on the incident did not mince words, and Blumenthal was proven wrong again. “Syria’s air force deliberately bombed water sources in December [2016], a war crime that cut off water 5.5 million people in and around the capital Damascus,” the UN found, as Reuters reported.

    Blumenthal never got around to correcting the record.

    History would soon repeat, again. When the Syrian regime once again used the nerve agent sarin against a civilian population, Blumenthal once again turned his sights to the Guardian, mocking the “pro-rebel” correspondent who had reported on the chemical weapon massacre from the site itself, Khan Sheikhun.

    In a July 7, 2017 article for his self-funded Grayzone Project, Blumenthal and his associate Benjamin Norton likewise cast doubt on the guilt of the only party known to have possessed and used sarin in the Syrian conflict. “More than 30 people were killed in that attack under circumstances that were shrouded in mystery,” they wrote, citing a report from Sy Hersh that claimed sarin wasn’t used at all.

    A week earlier, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons had already confirmed “that people were exposed to sarin, a chemical weapon.” A subsequent report from UN investigators squarely blamed the regime.

    There is no mystery around what happened next: nothing.

    Blumenthal also attacks children in Syria with the zeal of an Infowars reporter going after survivors of a school shooting.

    “Bana Alabed [and] the White Helmets build on a grand tradition of pro-war psy-ops,” Blumenthal has written, referring to an 8-year-old girl who once lived in the besieged, eastern half of Aleppo (his colleague, Rania Khalek, once even doubted that). Bana’s mother, Fatemah, created a Twitter account for her daughter to publicize their plight — and that child has since joined a long line of children who survived atrocities only to have their experience, and even their existence, called into question. Blumenthal’s friend and collaborator, RT’s Dan Cohen, has also taken the fight to besieged teenagers in Eastern Ghouta.

    Blumenthal refuses to cast the plight of children outside the narrative that the U.S. is itching for regime change in Damascus, after seven years of allegedly trying. The implicit premise is that there is a dearth of victims in Syria, so P.R. firms must create them. To bolster this claim, Blumenthal has promoted the work of Caitlin Johnstone, an Australian astrologer who advocates a left-right, anti-establishment alliance “against the deep state” with the likes of Mike Cernovich, a “pick-up artist” turned contributor to Infowars (he was also no fan of the SPLC article).

    But these targets of slanderous conspiracy theories are safely foreign and distant. And unlike American bloggers, dead Syrians don’t have lawyers.

    *****

    When I spoke to Ross, he was somewhat befuddled — he, the anti-fascist author of a censored article on the threat of far-right entryism, was the one guilty of modern-day McCarthyism. This, by virtue of the fact he detailed the media platforms that right-wing, authoritarian state generously provides to outright fascists and some on the left who share their positions on the world outside of the U.S.

    In its report on the controversy, Fox News only added to the confusion. “A source close to Blumenthal mocked the [SPLC] article, pointing out that it attempts to portray an appearance on [Tucker] Carlson’s show as a negative, despite the fact that it’s among the most popular cable programs in the country.”

    It’s a “‘disgusting, backhanded McCarthyite smear’ against Fox News,”  the source stated, according to the report.

    “I’ve been called a neoconservative, McCarthyist liberal enemy of Fox News — we’re talking about Fox News here, which has relentlessly attacked left-wing journalists,” Ross told me. “Fox News bleating about McCarthyists from the left is the height of absurdity.”

    As for the Fox News regulars who have piled on, from the left, Ross notes the bitter irony. “They’ve been content just to label me — to namecall, to use their platforms and influences to silence me,” he said. “It doesn’t seem very journalistic.”

    He thinks there needs to be a conversation, and that there needs to be accountability, noting those who want neither were also, “from June 2016 to the elections, constantly calling any attempts to talk about Russia ‘McCarthyism’ or the ‘new red scare’ or the ‘new cold war.’”

    These were some of the same people who miscast Ross’ piece and were uncritical at best when it was removed. Like Greenwald, for instance, the journalist best known for publishing NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden. A Pulitzer Prize winner, what he says still carries weight on the left, and what he suggested was that the SPLC article engaged in a vulgar conflation; that it said “anti-war activists in the left” were “basically the same” as Nazis on the right. But this was the danger that Ross was illuminating — the conflation of those who are supportive of Russian and Syrian government war efforts with the anti-war left. And rather than say leftists and fascists were the same, he detailed when and where a few who claim those labels say the same thing.

    When a white supremacist killed a left-wing protester in Charlottesville, North Carolina, Greenwald composed  a principled defense of free speech. But when an anti-fascist communist has his journalism purged after conspiratorial legal threats from an alt-right champion’s lawyer, no principled defense of speech can be found but a meek suggestion that there must have been something to it.

    On another occasion, when a college pro-Palestine group chose to not to invite Rania Khalek to speak at their event, Greenwald, Blumenthal and Noam Chomsky alike all signed an open letter proclaiming it a threat to discourse. “It runs contrary to the possibility of people learning from one another, changing their minds, and educating one another,” the letter stated.

    No one purged her work, even when it was flawed.

    Where, then, is the defense of unpopular speech — and on the left, Ross’ position is a dissenting one — in the face of an organization buckling to the pressure of online mobs and the threat of pending litigation? “I find that the people behind these lawsuits are truly so odious and repugnant, that creates its own motivation for me,” Greenwald once said of civil rights activists seeking to hold a neo-Nazi responsible for inciting violence; he was motivated to provide the defendant counsel, to which all are entitled and which lawyers of principle have long provided, however unsavory the client. But where’s the defense, on principle, of civil speech, published by civil rights organization, that its harshest critics are fully entitled to counter on platforms that are readily available to them?

    Where’s the left, in general? Missing in action, perhaps, because the subject is unsettling: these fascists are not your friends, but some of your friends may have partied with them. But even those don’t buy the thesis, yet — that the Russian government pursues its interests abroad; those interests are pursued with the help of the media properties it owns; the left should be wary of those who say those interests are its own — should absolutely reject attempts to shut down the conversation with appeals to the state.

    Consider also that the right, historically, has been the perpetrator of McCarthyism, not its victim. Misuse of the term to silence left-wing dissent, however, has a long tradition: Murray Bookchin, a socialist writer, called it “McCarthyism in reverse” — and it was used then as now by reactionary elements looking to silence their critics to the left. In practice, “McCarthyism” today means “shut the fuck up,” and it is being used by those who invoke its specter to deplatform and censor others.

  • Teacher walkouts in Oklahoma and Kentucky challenge GOP legislatures

    Kentucky school districts shut todayTeachers in Oklahoma and Kentucky massed in their respective state capitols on April 2, to demand GOP legislatures revoke  bills damaging to education passed in virtual stealth. The spark plug in Kentucky is a group of activist parents with teachers, #SaveOurSchools Kentucky.  In both states the movement has been organized outside the official teachers unions, using social media as well as traditional organizing techniques of talking with colleagues and neighbors about the issues. Another struggle of teachers is simmering, near boil, in Arizona.

    Each of these movements has characteristics that emerge from their specific political (and geographic) setting, but they share an amazing energy and a commitment of teachers to be heard. These struggles cannot and should not be pushed into the mold of traditional strikes.  Videos of the protests show that this is a movement of women, both in the ranks and the leadership. My longer, fuller analysis of what these struggles portend for labor and national politics is in the works.  In the meantime, you can learn what I think the media, corporate and Left, are getting right – and wrong – when you follow me on Twitter and Facebook.

  • Like Our Lives Depend On It

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    Teenagers in this country are under constant attack.

    Whether it is their taste in music, fashion, or, it seems, simply wanting to attend classes without the fear of meeting their sudden death in a hail of bullets, there are always commentators who are willing to wag their fingers in disapproval. The demands placed on kids, when you think about it, are outrageous.

    Yet here we are, watching these teenagers lead a movement to end school shootings in our time. It is a cause that they should never have had to fight in the first place, but it is a fight that this group of kids seem determined to finish. It is incredible to watch, and within the context of the other radical actions being taken by teachers in West Virginia and Oklahoma; graduate students in Illinois, Toronto, and the United Kingdom; and a working class that also seems to be finding its voice, we could be witnessing a new era in agitation for social, political, and economic change.

    All that said, however, the wheels started coming off a bit today.

    —

    Given control over the Guardian US for the day, the editorial staff of the Stoneman Douglas Eagle Eye published a manifesto of their demands for what should happen in the wake of the massacre at their school. One of the proposals is good and necessary, most of them are acceptable as harm reduction, and two of them are absolutely awful and a threat to marginalized folks. Regrettably, they also are silent on several salient issues raised the mass murders perpetrated by Nikolas Cruz and others that need to be addressed.

    The best suggestion of the manifesto is the proposal to fund more research and care for mental health in this country. Stating that “[s]chools specifically should receive more funds in order to hire more psychologists and guidance counselors who can aid students suffering from PTSD, depression and other debilitating mental illnesses,” this has the potential to be transformative, especially in communities of color most afflicted by violence. This has become so vital that communities in the Chicago area are funding their own mental health services.

    Unfortunately, this demand came after probably the worst suggestion in the document: a call to weaken patient confidentiality for those under treatment for mental health. They wrote:

    As seen in the tragedy at our school, poor communication between mental healthcare providers and law enforcement may have contributed to a disturbed person with murderous tendencies and intentions entering a school and gunning down 17 people in cold blood.

    We must improve this channel of communication. To do so, privacy laws should be amended. That will allow us to prevent people who are a danger to themselves or to others from purchasing firearms. That could help prevent tragedies such as the Parkland massacre.

    They could not be any more wrong about this. This notion is specifically rebutted by mental health professionals all over the place. Further, there is absolutely no indication that the murderer who attacked their school would have been prevented from purchasing a weapon given the fact that he refused further mental health treatment from the school in 2016. In fact, people with mental illness are more likely to be the victims of violence than they are the perpetrators. The only thing that giving police carte blanche access to people’s mental health information would do is undermine medical professionals’ ability to treat their patients and create what amounts to a registry of mentally ill folks across the country.

    Given the increasingly fascist nature of the current American government, is that something you really want to give the ghouls running things?

    The other proposal is more conventional if just as galling: spending more money on school security, specifically hiring more school resource officers. Writing, “We believe that schools should be given sufficient funds for school security and resource officers to protect and secure the entire campus,” they go on to state that the one school resource officer they had hesitated because he lacked backup and it cost lives. Given that at least three deputies were present while the shooting was still ongoing, it’s questionable as to whether throwing more cops at the problem would have stopped this murderer.

    What’s more, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund produced this brief as part of a coalition in 2013 in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary about hiring more police to defend schools nationwide. Unsurprisingly, the brief concludes that more police is no answer to this problem. Given that schools already inequitably punish Black and brown students more than white ones, the only thing that more school resource officers will do is reinforce the school to prison pipeline.

    The rest of what they propose is essentially standard liberal public policy around gun control, which is adequate as harm reduction but nothing else. Things like raising the minimum age to purchase firearms to 21, banning certain types of weapons, and universal background checks are all sound suggestions for harm reduction, but they do not fundamentally address the violent foundations our society is built upon.

    One aspect of this was on display when the perpetrator of the Stoneman Douglas massacre was arrested, as he was wearing the shirt of his JROTC team during the massacre, and he was on a JROTC marksmanship team funded by grants from the National Rifle Association. Given that JROTC is a military indoctrination program for children and potentially against international law, and given that a third of all mass shootings from 1984 to 2016 were perpetrated by military veterans while making up no more than 13% of the population during that time period, it seems obvious that the harm inflicted by this country’s imperial activities overseas inevitably rebound home. This did not get addressed in this manifesto.

    Another thing that the Eagle Eye’s editors did not broach is the issue of intimate partner violence. The most common denominator between all of these massacres is the perpetrator was an abuser, including this one. While you could argue that expanding background checks would serve to catch these murderers, it ignores the number of abusers who never face criminal sanction for their actions. This oversight is even more baffling given that there are existing legal approaches to reduce the risk of gun violence from domestic abusers.

    While convincing the Guardian US to present these bitter pills to their mostly liberal and middle class readership would not have been easy, there was no better moment than now to force these painfully hard discussions out into the open. That this was not done can only be seen as a lost opportunity.

    —

    Given the issues with the solutions outlined in the Guardian piece, socialists and other allied community organizers would be absolutely correct in calling these proposed policies what they are: tools that would be used by a state that is steeped in reaction and repression to further oppress marginalized communities. We can all laugh at a buffoon like Dinesh D’Souza for his abominable stance towards the Parkland students, but it should be known that there are likely hundreds just like him at institutions such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco, and Explosives or in police departments nationwide who would love nothing more than a carte blanche to run into the East Side of Detroit or the South Side of Chicago and start kicking in doors.

    As the murder of Stephon Clark at the hands of Sacramento Police shows, such a license is one that could end up deadly for people of color.

    Another worrying trend comes out of the March For Our Lives in Greensboro, North Carolina. There, the local branch of the North Carolina Piedmont chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) sought to table at the event alongside the myriad other groups who would be at such an event and had gotten permission to do so. Late on Friday night, however, they received an email from the organizers of the Greensboro march informing them that they would not be allowed to table at the event. This was due to the “advice” of “legal partners”, who also advised that the Greensboro chapter of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) should be prevented from tabling at the event as well.

    It is unknown who specifically advised the local March For Our Lives organizers to rescind DSA and ISO’s permission to table, but if the national-level coordination is any indication, it is a group like the Los Angeles-based public relations firm 42West, which has been handling PR for the march nationwide. While NC Piedmont DSA and Greensboro ISO both proudly participated in the march, the fact that organizations who were in early and frequent contact with the Movement For Our Lives organizers in Greensboro — ISO especially — were not allowed to table and hand out their literature shows that this nascent movement is in danger of being steered towards a dead-end liberalism that will do little to fix the problem of gun violence.

    If such steering were to be successful, it would repeat the errors of 2006, where the Democrats very adroitly stole energy from the anti-war movement to win the midterm elections. And with big-money organizations, like Moms Demand Action and Everytown USA that are bankrolled by the billionaire former Mayor of New York City Mike Bloomberg, helping to steer this conversation towards a carceral vision of gun control, it is entirely possible that history will repeat itself and a vibrant protest movement will get shunted into a political blind alley only to be betrayed at the first opportunity.

    The Democratic Party would like nothing more than for this to remain a moment, an outrage that lasts just long enough to help deliver it gains in this November’s election. But if the lessons of the labor movement’s engagement with the Democratic Party can bear any lessons at all for these organizers, it should be that campaign rhetoric dies a hard and lonely death once the bright lights of the horse race have dimmed.

    —

    When all of this is considered, the impulse amongst leftists to see moves like this and dismiss the movement out of hand will be strong. We know where this road leads, and it is nowhere good.

    But for this, the stakes are high. They are high because of the wide reach of gun violence, and the potential for solutions to this problem to actually exacerbate the issue. Gun violence that comes from a policeman’s bullet rather than a bullied — or bigoted — high schooler still leaves families with loved ones to bury and communities to mourn. The only thing separating Darren Wilson and Jeronimo Yanez from Nikolas Cruz and George Zimmerman are uniforms and geography.

    The approach from socialists and their comrades in community struggle, then, must be different.

    Remember who we are talking about.

    This moment sprung from a former classmate walking into their high school and killing 17 of their friends, and wounding 17 others. The students who were shot and survived face the possibility of a long and arduous physical recovery, and that is to say nothing of the psychological toll that such an event has on every survivor, as detailed in this harrowing 2015 article in the Washington Post.

    We are not only talking about kids, but kids who have been through a trauma that most of us will never experience. Through all of that, they are working to build a movement because the aforementioned Adults In The Room have been derelict in their responsibilities to keep these kids safe.

    Organizers use many tools in their work. One of those tools is empathy. We should, without question, demand that the policies advocated by this movement be holistic and understanding of the role that a racist and reactionary state plays in gun violence domestically and overall violence abroad. It is possible to do this, however, while keeping in mind that discussions on these topics are generally circumscribed by local school boards and constrained by curriculums handed down from the same state governments that have been increasingly dominated by the far right since 2010.

    We live in a society whose ideas are reactionary at best, and it takes time and struggle for people to unlearn them. Most of us adults did not come to leftist politics until long after we left high school, and we still make many mistakes even now. Have some patience with them.

    Let the youth lead on this one.

    Every socialist organization either has a youth branch — the Young Democratic Socialists (YDSA) for DSA or Socialist Students for Socialist Alternative — or a dedicated cadre of young people who emerge from leftist formations on college campuses. These are the folks who should be leading the conversations with their peers on how to make this moment into a movement, and one with transformative potential.

    This is part of why Bryan wrote this guide that was republished and distributed to every YDSA chapter. These students do not need to be condescended to, but they do need guidance and mentorship. If you have not been brought up in a political household, organizing is not something you have much experience with. This means engagement, and it means fair-minded criticism.

    This is something that has already borne fruit, as some of the student leaders from Parkland sat down with their peers from the South Side of Chicago after the media’s coverage of the Stoneman Douglas massacre was compared to its wholesale neglect (or luridly exploitative coverage) of gun violence in communities of color. As Mariame Kaba has been saying since February 14, “What resources have you developed? How are you offering these resources to newly engaged and emerging leaders? What opportunities for one on one engagement are you offering in your communities right now?”

    This movement is growing beyond the initial organizers.

    With hundreds of thousands of people in the streets nationwide and no formal organization aside from some general talking points and imagery provided to those electing to take action under the March For Our Lives banner, it is abundantly clear that this movement is growing beyond any kind of meaningful control of the people it started with if it hasn’t done so already. This is not to say that what these young people are saying is unimportant, but as with Black Lives Matter the movement has grown well beyond any kind of effective direction from its originators.

    This does not mean these leaders are irrelevant, nor does it mean that they should be immunized from criticism. That three Parkland survivors spoke in Tel Aviv without discussing the brutal and ongoing violence of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, especially from state-sanctioned private colonists, is something that needs to be noted and criticized.

    —

    In gun culture parlance, “printing” occurs when the outline of a concealed handgun appears through the clothes the person carrying concealed wears. It is a moment where the potential for violence bleeds through the careful and frequently expensive efforts to hide it. This frequently happens when the weapon being carried is too big for the clothes being worn or the holster it is placed in.

    American life is filled with violence, but most of us tune it out. When we read about the police violence that wreaks havoc in urban communities, we dismiss it as being something that comes part-and-parcel with urban life since Black life is cheap. When the news details the devastation from the bombs being dropped by American and Saudi planes in Syria and Yemen, we are complacent as it is something that is happening Over There™ and not in our own communities. Even when we bear witness to extreme acts of hatred here at home, most typified by the 2015  Mother Emanuel AME massacre that claimed the lives of nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, our commentariat are quick to reassure us that this isn’t in any way in keeping with the American Values™ have been put place since the Founding Of Our Republic™.

    But it is in moments such as this one, or the massacres at Columbine, or Virginia Tech, or the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, or Sutherland Springs in Texas, or Las Vegas that the violent roots of the American experiment we have been all too willing to ignore begins to print upon our collective psyche. The massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School is one more instance where the outline sharpens a bit more, and the obvious becomes a bit more so to a few more people.

    What the students of Parkland — in coalition with the students and victims of American violence both here and abroad — are attempting to do is nothing less than the cutting back of the bloody roots of the American project. That is a tall ask of kids who should be preparing for college, going to their proms or ring dances, and gearing up for another summer lost to the laughter and love that characterizes what it means to be young.

    It is inevitable that mistakes will be made given the nature of this undertaking. Much as we have learned through them, these young activists and leaders need to learn themselves, and we should be open with our knowledge and our hearts.

    The lives of so many depend on it.

    Originally posted at The South Lawn.

  • 50 Years After 1968: Student Strikers Attacked Again

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    Not an April Fool’s joke. Here are the facts: Four days ago (March 29) the ultra-conservative Dean of the Montpellier University Law School was summoned to police headquarters, interrogated, hauled into court, and held over in jail for arraignment by the Chief Prosecutor – all on the complaint of nine student strikers, who claim to have been brutally assaulted with Dean Philippe Pétel’s active complicity while ‘occupying’ a school auditorium.

    The students, backed by live videos, described Dean Pétel encouraging masked thugs with wooden staves to burst into a Law School auditorium and violently expel a few dozen students who were ‘occupying’ it as part of the University-wide student strike. The thugs were videoed brutally beating students, even on the ground, and several were injured. The thugs then returned to the antechamber, where a counter-demonstration of conservative anti-strike law students including Pétel and several other faculty, was waiting. The Dean was videoed congratulating the bulked-out masked aggressors, whom no one was able to identify as students. The building was locked, but Pétel had the key to the antechamber from which the attackers issued. The complicity of other faculty members present is under police examination, and one has been arrested. [1]

    Within hours, the Law School attacks were all over the social networks, and student strikers, human rights groups, civil rights lawyers were busy organizing demonstrations and protests for the next day, framing it as a ‘fascist aggression.’ This epithet is less of an exaggeration then it may seem, as the tradition of law students supplying the thuggish muscle for extreme-right groups here in France goes back for over a century (as I recall from my student days in Paris opposing the Algerian War). As we all know, student striker complaints of police brutality normally go unheeded, and protests against them may bring down even more police punishment. Deans who ‘stand firm’ against occupiers get promoted. How then to explain this “man bites dog” reversal in Montpellier University (founded 1279)?

    Today in France, twelve universities are already on strike, and the social and labor situation is heating up rapidly. Here in Montpellier, Université Paul Valéry, the Liberal Arts University, just voted an open-ended strike and blockade of classes at an outdoor General Assembly attended by over 2,000 students. So far, the mood has been temperate. Support for the strike is near unanimous, but there is deep division over the tactic of blocking classes, especially among first-year students who are worried about their exams (which will probably now be put off). Some profs are offering their courses on line and a radical ‘free university’ called “Vincennes 2.0” in memory of Paris in May 1968 has been set up. The local high schools are also full of agitation, with two or three “on strike” and riot cops hanging around and making arrests. The situation is tense.

    What’s At Stake for the Macron Government?

    The paradox in this story is not the Dean Pétel’s more-or-less traditional role in the attack[2], but the Prosecutor’s outlandish decision to hold a venerable Law Dean in the clink. To be sure, Pétel, a youngish cocksure neo-conservative, was ‘asking for it.’ He at first openly bragged of his role, oblivious to circumstances and the consequences, and made the national TV news and the front page of the big Paris papers. But my guess is that the order to lock him up came from Paris. In centralized, hierarchical France the Prosecutor answers to the Prefect who answers to the Minister of Justice who answers to the President. President Macron, who has laid down a major long-term challenge to both the students and public service workers, wants to push through his reforms as quickly and as smoothly as possible. The social situation is heating up, and Macron is too smart to polarize the situation further and waste political capital on a far-right loser. He also wants to be seen as impartial and as willing to strike his enemies on the Right as on the Left (as he no doubt will when the student and worker struggles really heat up).

    The immediate issue for the university students is President Macron’s educational ‘reform,’ which like all of his ‘reforms’ will be imposed buy administrative decree, rather than through the legislative process (which normally includes lengthy discussion and amendments). Macron seems to prefer ruling by decree, although he has a solid majority of followers in the National Assembly, having split and evinced the parties of both the Left and the Right. All his moves seem carefully timed, and perhaps he fears delay. Macron prefers the ‘fast track’ method, and his authoritarian, technocratic style definitely pisses off many many French people, but especially “the people,” who have long been fed up and are suffering cutbacks while the super-rich get subsidies (sound familiar?).

    Macron has already pissed off France schoolteachers, on whom he is imposing – without discussion – yet another new K-12 national curriculum so confusing that nobody can figure out how to implement it. Meanwhile classes are huge (35 students), young people are getting harder and harder to teach, and support for teaching, supplies aids etc. is being cut way back. At the university level, the goal of Macron’s reform is to introduce “selection” in university admissions, which traditionally have been open to all who have earned the classical Baccalaureat diploma and the end of secondary school (just like the New York City colleges a generation ago).

    France now has five million students, and thanks to constant cutbacks, there aren’t enough places for about 20% of the incoming class. Hence the creation of ‘competition’ and U.S.-style admissions offices at each school. Moreover, although all French universities are under the administration of the national Ministry of Education, Macron wants to make them ‘competitive’ with each other, like in the U.S. So some schools will be “easier” to get into, but their degrees will be “worth” less. Both these ‘reforms’ are obviously unfavorable to underpriviledged students, and favorable to the privileged. They are by definition “unpopular.”

    Macron has also laid down the gauntlet to public service workers  including to the venerable CGT railway workers union whose militancy is legendary. Last Spring, despite militant protests, Macron succeeded in pushing through, by decree, his reformed Labor Code, taking away seniority rights and legal protections enjoyed by private sector workers and making it easier and cheaper for bosses to fire them. This Spring, instead of relying on the traditional divide-and-rule precept, Macron proposes to take on both the five million students and the five million public sector workers (about 20% of the total labor force) together. He may have bit off more than he can chew, especially with the general population in a hostile anti-government mood and ready to support these popular struggles.

    For in attacking the public sector workers’ alleged ‘privileges’ and proposing to dismiss them in large numbers, Macron is effectively attacking precious, popular public services which are used by the large numbers among the popular classes. Trains, subways, hospitals, social services, public offices, roads, etc. These services have all been subject to cutbacks, which make life harder and lines longer for regular folk, and now it is obvious to all that Macron is downgrading them in preparation for privatizing them to sell off cheap to corporations, as has already happened to the French Electric Company, the French Gas Company and to most of the French Post Office.  They fear he will privatize the SNCF French railroad as Margaret Thatcher, his spiritual guide, did to British Rail (which is now expensive, dangerous and mostly late).

    March 22: the First Skirmish

    The social struggle got off to a militant start last week on March 22 (also the date of the attack on the Montpellier Law School occupiers) with 180 demonstrations by students and public workers across France. Air flights were down by 30%. Over 5,000 railway workers from all over converged on Paris, held a march during which they set off loud industrial firecrackers, and then conducted a spontaneous mass General Assembly where they pledge to go beyond the announced schedule of staggered strikes planned by officials of the three railroad unions, beginning April 3.[3] The day began with a huge morning demonstration of students converging from all over the Paris region. The students then joined up with thousands of various public service workers demonstrating under their union banners, and this demonstration ultimately merged with the railroad workers. Hundreds of thousands are said to have been in the streets.

    Remarkable, too, were the spontaneous actions of autonomous groups known as “March-Headers” (Tête de cortège) who come together at the very front of the legal, planned, well-organized and policed demonstrations with the aim of break the mass movement out of the routine of being led around like sheep by union organizers, subjected to prescribed slogans on signs and loudspeakers, and then sent home with being about to express themselves. Their goal is to bring together students and workers, younger and older people, workers from different sectors and to encourage discussion and self-organization.

    Many of these activists, young and old, are veterans of the struggles of 2016 and 2017, recognize each other today, are forming networks and have experience in self-organization. Although they are also characterized as “black-blockers,” whose role has often been divisive and provocative, the March-Headers movement seems to me promising in its push to open up political space for anti-government, anti-system demonstrators to come together, exchange ideas, build relationships and learn self-organization through direct action. 

    Heretofore, big official protest movements in France have been kept separate, divided into interest groups, and regimented by union officials whose basic tactic has been to space out useless, symbolic one-day national mass mobilization until people got tired, summer vacation arrived and the government won. To be sure, spontaneous (and sometimes violent) wildcat movements have often broken out of this straightjacket. But today’s students, union members and others are much more open to coming together spontaneously and to linking through social media.

    “From One Wild May to Another?”

    Fifty years ago, in 1968, the highpoint of the French May Revolt was the conjuncture of the student movements occupying the universities and the organized working class occupying the factories under the discipline of the Communist CGT and other unions: the “student-worker uprising”, as it came to be known. But to those who lived it, the conjuncture never quite jelled, as the union leaderships mostly kept the workers barricaded inside the occupied and their student supports outside, minimizing contact and exchange. A big disappointment, as recalled by a number of 1968 activists questioned by Mitchell Abidor in his lively just-published book of interviews May Made Me (AK Press, US; Pluto, GB). Perhaps today’s student and worker activists are ahead of the game and will not let themselves be ‘divided-and-ruled’ like previous generations. Also, today they have the advantage of social media which allows them to bypass the establishment media, get out their information and organize themselves in real time.

    Here in Montpellier, the movement augers well. The student strikers at Paul Valéry have invited workers, homeless, elders into their assemblies and have received worker support and interest . Their action committees include not just students, but professors and campus workers as well. This is a good start. Moreover, they have harnessed social media to the extent of being well informed about what is happening locally and in touch with other universities. The record number of people that attended the last General Assembly (up to 2,500) is in part attributable to organization through social media (which are sometimes blamed for keeping people at home behind a screen.)

    Ironically, both this first mass demonstration and the Montpellier Law School incident took place on March 22. That date marks the 50th anniversary of the 1968 student occupation of the Administration building of Nanterre University which eventually set off a national general strike that shook de Gaulle’s authoritarian regime and send the General scurrying to Germany for Army support. Might something similar be in store for Macron’s France today? The public mood is somber, after long years of high unemployment, stagnant wages, neo-liberal chipping away of hard-fought social support systems and privatization of social services under Sarkozy (now also on trial!) and the “Socialist” government of François Hollande.

    The echoes of the May 1968 uprising reverberate in the air. A website calling itself lespaves (cobblestones) has issued an international “call to converge in Paris on May 1st” with the slogan: “They are commemorating May ’68. We are re-starting it!”[4]

     

    [2] Personal recollection: In Hamilton Hall during the first night the April 1968 Columbia Unversity occupation, we were informed that Dean David Truman was making the rounds of the fraternities and dorms, organizing gangs of jocks to drive out the occupiers.

     

  • From Jackson to Richmond: How Radical Mayors Left Their Mark

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    Well before the Trump era, U.S. presidents from both major parties failed to address urban problems or made them worse. Governors, members of Congress, and state legislators didn’t perform much better. So the difficult job of fighting poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation shifted to the municipal level, where activist mayors have tried to mobilize the limited resources of local government on behalf of neglected causes and constituents.

    When the U.S. Conference of Mayors came to San Francisco several years ago, our local paper, the Chronicle, congratulated its members for “shaking up the national agenda” by “tackling issues like climate change, education and police brutality.” In his keynote address to the group, then-President Barack Obama proclaimed that: “Mayors get the job done. It’s not sufficient to blather on—you actually have to do something.”

    Under Obama’s successor, many municipal leaders—even some pretty crummy ones—have joined “the resistance” to federal attacks on immigrants, union members, or the urban poor. But, in cities across the country, powerful private interests and the local politicians they support still thwart progressive policy initiatives.

    To overcome corporate opposition and “get the job done,” left-leaning mayors or city councilors must take a nontraditional approach to running for and holding office, as Socialist Alternative leader Kshama Sawant has done in Seattle. Two new books about making change in smaller cities are worthy of close study by anyone hoping to push their own city hall in a similar left-wing direction.

    Winning Richmond: How A Progressive Alliance Won City Hall (Hard Ball Press) is Gayle McLaughlin’s memoir of her 14-year career, as mayor and city councilor, in Richmond, California, a blue-collar community in the Bay Area whose largest employer is a Chevron refinery. Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi (Daraja Press) is a collection of essays, interviews, and programmatic statements, co-edited by Kali Akuno and Ajamu Nangwaya. From various political perspectives, near and far, the book documents the municipal insurgency led by the late Chokwe Lumumba, an African-American radical, now succeeded, as mayor of Jackson, by his son, Antar.

    Old Guard Politicians

    Mississippi and California aren’t much alike but the demographics of Richmond and Jackson share one thing in common: both cities are 80% non-white and voter registration is overwhelmingly Democratic. In both majority minority communities, corporate Democrats of color long ruled the roost, thanks to strong backing from local developers and manufacturers, other downtown business interests, and socially conservative black churches.

    Richmond’s old guard took its first hit from the left when Gayle McLaughlin, a white newcomer from Chicago and Green Party protégé of Peter Camejo, unexpectedly won a city council seat in 2004. As she recalls in her memoir, “the political culture was vastly different from anything” she had previously encountered as a movement activist. All six of Richmond’s black and Latino city councilors, including the city’s African-American mayor, were business-oriented Democrats backed by Chevron.

    On issues like promoting renewable energy or improving refinery safety, McLaughlin had, at most, only one reliable ally; when she was elected mayor in 2006, she was still the only Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA) member on the council. “I was a working class person consciously representing the voices of many people living in a system dominated by the rich,” she writes. “One of the first things I realized was that I wasn’t going to get anything done without an organizing campaign on each issue.”

    This realization informed the work of the RPA, which McLaughlin co-founded and describes in the book, and her use of city hall as a catalyst for change, mobilizer of public opinion, and ally of constituent groups. When she became mayor, Richmond was best known, in the Bay Area, for its street crime, gun violence, poverty, and pollution. During her eight years in office, the city acquired a different reputation—for battling Big Oil, Big Soda, Big Banks, and the landlord lobby. 

    Today, Richmond is a cleaner, greener, safer, and more equitable place because its new leaders hired a top-notch city manager and reform-minded police chief, boosted the minimum wage, adopted rent control, curbed police misconduct, defended immigrants, and sought increased tax revenue and environmental justice from its largest employer, a Chevron refinery.

    Once elected, most politicians just try to maintain a personal fan base for future electoral campaigns. In contrast, McLaughlin never stopped being a real movement-builder. She remained accountable to the RPA, a multi-racial political formation, with its own elected leaders, dues-paying membership, and year-round, multi-issue organizing program. And she helped inspire younger activists who also became successful candidates for local office by relying on Bernie Sanders-style small donations and local public matching funds, rather than corporate contributions.

    As a result, Richmond Progressives now have a super-majority of five on the city council (that McLaughlin left last year to run for Lieutenant Governor of California, as a progressive independent). All are people of color who supported Sanders in 2016; four come from immigrant backgrounds and two are under 30. They won by running as part of RPA slates, committed to popular reforms like rent regulation and the requirement that landlords have just cause before evicting tenants.

    A Southern State Capital

    The political landscape of Jackson—the state capital and largest urban center in Mississippi— was equally challenging for activists who turned their attention to municipal politics after prior involvement in civil rights activity, black nationalist causes, or other radical organizing.

    When criminal defense lawyer Chokwe Lumumba, co-founder of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM), gained a Jackson city council seat in 2009, it was, he reports, “my first election to anything.” As Lumumba noted later, his seven opponents, all black as well, had few ideas about how to:

    “overcome decades of economic divestment, de-industrialization, suburban flight, a declining tax base, chronic under-and un-employment, poorly performing schools, and an antiquated and decaying infrastructure.”

    In a contest between an “outspoken revolutionary nationalist” and what Jackson Rising contributor Kamau Franklin calls “the politics of careerism and moderation,” voters in Jackson Ward 4 opted for beginning “the process of transforming local government into a vehicle for economic and political change, guided by the principle of self-determination.”

    Four years later, according to contributor Carl Davidson, Lumumba again caught “Jackson’s political elite off guard” by making “use of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to run as an independent in the Democratic primary for mayor, defeat the incumbent, and force a run-off…which he then won overwhelmingly.”

    Lumumba’s brief tenure in office illustrated not only how city hall can become a laboratory for visionary ideas, but also the fiscal constraints and legal restrictions facing modern day “sewer socialists.”  Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sankara visited Jackson and then interviewed the new mayor in February, 2014, just several days before his sudden death of heart failure at age 66. In Jackson Rising, Sunkara recalls that:

    “Lumumba had just passed a one cent local sales tax to fund Jackson’s infrastructure. The taps ran brown and many roads were in disrepair…{T]he Environmental Protection Agency had threatened action if waste water systems weren’t upgraded. There was nothing especially radical about the tax, except for the fact that Lumumba took his case to the people, explaining the situation and winning consent for the measure in a referendum.”

    In a special election held six weeks later, Lumumba’s son, Antar tried to succeed him. He lost to a black minister, who soon ditched his predecessor’s plans for recycling measures, city-supported cooperatives, and more exercises in participatory democracy to help Jackson residents re-shape public policy.  Several contributors to Jackson Rising tell the story of how the MXGM and Cooperation Jackson, an allied initiative, rebounded from this tragic set-back.

    One vehicle was a “Jackson Rising: New Economies Conference,” held in May 2014, which brought together 500 participants, including organizers of a community land trust and other cooperative ventures like recycling and laundry businesses, a five-acre urban farm, and a worker-owned construction firm. The city continued to attract activists, like the many co-founders of Cooperation Jackson, who, according to reporter Katie Gilbert, “moved to Jackson from cities outside of Mississippi” to be part of a “new society experiment” which “tries to help people unlearn the lessons the old economy taught them and train them to be democratic in every aspect of their lives.”

    Last summer, Antar Lumumba ran again for mayor in a field of sixteen Democrats. This time, he defeated, without a run-off, the floundering incumbent, Rev. Tony Yarber.  Lumumba won 55% of the primary vote—ten thousand more ballots votes than his father received four years earlier, making the general election a shoe-in.  His primary competitor was state senator John Horhn who, according to Gilbert, raised the specter of a state-takeover of Jackson “if the city’s finances didn’t take a few steps back from the edge of potential bankruptcy, if crime didn’t abate, and the schools didn’t improve their outcomes.”

    There was understandable rejoicing on the left, locally and nationally, about MXGM’s comeback and the new mayor’s post-election declaration that he was going to make Jackson “the most radical city on the planet.” Behind the scenes, Gilbert reports, activists continue to debate whether their focus should be “to capably govern the city or to altogether re-imagine it,” a project continually hampered by “the very real problem of insufficient resources.” 

    Meanwhile, since Mississippi state legislators and its Republican governor also conduct public business in Jackson, pre-emption is a big threat right within the city limits. As Rukio Lumumba, sister of the current mayor notes in her Foreword to Jackson Rising, conservatives in state government have already diverted some of the city’s new sales tax revenue in other directions.  Nor is there much legislative enthusiasm for amending state law that currently restricts cooperatives to farms, utilities, and credit unions, categories not broad enough to permit wider development of a “solidarity economy” in the city or state.

    In addition, GOP legislators have proposed that Jackson be stripped of control over its airport and related commerce and that downtown business interests be allowed to shape development plans. The latter arrangement—par for the course elsewhere—would have eventual electoral consequences. As Akuno argues, “the forces behind the gentrification of Jackson are deliberately trying to dilute the numerical strength of the Black working class in order to change the political character of the city.”

    Despite the wealth of information and insight in Winning Richmond and Jackson Rising, each book has some puzzling omissions. In her memoir, McLaughlin barely mentions the critical behind-the-scenes work of Richmond’s professional city manager Bill Lindsay or former police chief Chris Magnus, who turned the RPD into a widely acclaimed model for community policing. Changing local law enforcement behavior, even under a progressive city administration, is no easy task. As the first Mayor Lumumba explained to Sunkara, it took careful maneuvering to get Jackson Police Chief Lindsey Horton more “in line with our vision” of how “jobs and other programs could reduce the need for crime.” While McLaughlin does describe the key role of progressive unions in supporting the RPA, the Akuno-Nangwaya collection sheds little light on the backing that both Lumumbas received from the Mississippi Alliance of State Employees (MASE), which includes Jackson city employees whose labor-management relations were improved as a result.

    Set in a state where politics remains much dominated by rich, famous, or corporate-connected Californians, McLaughlin’s story stresses working class leadership development, female empowerment, and grass-roots base building instead. Anyone else of modest means—a tenant, a worker, a union or community organizer—who hopes to succeed in electoral politics against the usual well-funded foes (i.e., doctors, bankers, corporate lawyers, developers, and other multi-millionaires)—will be much inspired by the former Richmond mayor’s compelling personal story.

    Similarly, the MXGM experience shows how patience, persistence, and deep roots in the community can pay off—not just at the polls, but in day-to-day organizing and political consciousness raising around a wide range of issues. In Jackson Rising, Chokwe Lumumba warns of the tendency among some urban activists to “put their movement on hold and to rely exclusively on the mayor and the mayor’s staff to get things done for the people.” As these case studies of Richmond and Jackson demonstrate, electing left-wing mayors has a lot more impact if their campaign supporters remain mobilized, post-election, and don’t leave the governing to them.

    Steve Early is a member of the Newspaper Guild/CWA and the Richmond Progressive Alliance. He is the author of four books, including, most recently, Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City from Beacon Press. He can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com.

  • An unforgettable five-day Freedom Fast culminates with 2,000-strong Time's Up Wendy's March through the Heart of Manhattan!

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    A fast, when done in protest, is a call to arms. While eminently non-violent, it is a battle cry, issued in a whisper.

    For five days last week, nearly 100 farmworkers and their allies fasted outside the offices of Nelson Peltz’s hedge fund investment firm, Trian Partners, at 280 Park Avenue in Manhattan. They did so because Wendy’s has not only refused to join the Fair Food Program — widely recognized as the only human rights monitoring program to have successfully eliminated forced labor and sexual assault in the agricultural industry — but has shifted its tomato purchases from Florida to Mexico, where slavery and sexual assault remain all too common, and workers are intimidated into silence by a culture of violence, fear and corruption. 

    And they did so because Wendy’s is structured in such a way that Mr. Peltz is the single most important decision-maker in the company. Mr. Peltz’s Trian Partners is not only the company’s largest shareholder, but Mr. Peltz is also the Chairman of Wendy’s Board of Directors, his son and partners at Trian are members of the Board, and Mr. Peltz is the head of the Board’s committee on social responsibility. For all intents and purposes, Mr. Peltz is Wendy’s and Wendy’s is Mr. Peltz, particularly when it comes to the question of social responsibility and, specifically, ending violence against women.

    And so, for five days, nearly 100 farmworkers and their allies fasted outside Mr. Peltz’s offices in the heart of Manhattan, broadcasting their call to action to all who would hear their demand: Wendy’s, stop sexual violence in your supply chain, now, by joining the Fair Food Program!

    And on the fifth day, their call was answered. The fasters’ battle was joined by nearly 2,000 consumers, a crowd as, at once, fierce and joyous as any that has ever taken the streets of midtown Manhattan in protest. With a wildly successful “Time’s Up Wendy’s March,” the Freedom Fast came to a close, the fasters broke bread in a beautiful nighttime ceremony, and a new chapter was written in the story of the Wendy’s Boycott and the Campaign for Fair Food…

     

  • Beyond Fake News

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    1. “All Governments Lie”

    As 1950s investigative reporter I.F. (“Izzy”) Stone famously stated: “All governments lie.”[1] Fake news has historically been the weapon of the rulers, especially when in need of excuses for military aggression.

    The mainstream media have traditionally gone along with the official line. For example, in 2003 in order to invade Iraq, the Bush administration falsely asserted that Saddam Hussein was complicit in the September 11, 2001 attack on the U.S. and that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction. Despite public evidence to the contrary, the mainstream media propagated what was soon revealed to be fake news. Fifteen years later, the U.S. is still mired in Iraq.

    Similarly, in August 1964, the Johnson administration deceived Congress into voting a blank check to escalate the war in Vietnam by playing up a fake news story about two North Vietnamese naval attacks. This emergency “Bay of Tonkin Resolution” was the legal basis for eleven more years of particularly bloody, unwinnable war wreaking havoc on millions of Vietnamese civilians North and South. Only two Senators, and writers like I.F. Stone questioned the fake news.

    The first North Vietnamese “attack” was a brief skirmish between U.S. destroyer Maddox patroling close to the territorial line. It later came out that the U.S. vessel fired first damaging the smaller two Vietnamese PT boats, which may have fired back as a single bullet hole was found in the hull of the Maddox, otherwise undamaged. Since this incident failed to generate sufficient war hysteria, LBJ came up with a second attack, this one, as Sec. McNamara, later admitted, was entirely imaginary. But it did the dirty job.

    The classic historical example of fake news is the famous “Ems telegram” of July 1870 when Prussia’s Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck tricked French Emperor Napoléon III into declaring war on Prussia, by leaking to the newspapers a provocatively insulting telegram adressed to the French Emperor. The Prussians were already mobilized and prepared to fight; the French, hardly at all. France was soon over-run and Napoléon III captured.

    The paradox of today’s situation is that Donald Trump, arguably the world’s biggest liar, has appropriated the term “fake news” to discredit the New York Times and other “legitimate” mainstream media. Up until Trump’s declaration of war, the “failing” Times had consistently backed up the U.S. government’s lethal lies, including Bush’s WMDs, JFK’s “secret” Bay of Pigs attack on Cuba, and LBJ’s fake news Bay of Tonkin attack. Today, since Trump declared them “public enemies,” they are at least fact-check official pronouncements more, and Trump gives them plenty of opportunities. At least as far as the Administration is concerned, the mainstream media have stopped acting like lap dogs, although they are still hardly watch dogs on issues like “national defense.” Long before Trump came along, people were growing more and more cynical about the establishment press’ elitist bias, and Trump’s accusations of “fake news” seemed plausible to many.

    To add to the confusion, foreign governments like Putin’s Russia have injected fake news stories designed to spread confusion, discredit the Democrats and aid Donald Trump to win the 2016 election. The Kremlin’s propaganda machine has also managed to bamboozle a large section of the western Left into supporting Russian aggression in Ukraine and Syria with fake news characterizing the White Helmets volunteers in Syria as CIA operatives and presenting Bashar al-Assad as a progressive anti-imperialist leader. Amid all this confusion, who to believe? Many Leftists active in the blogosphere have naively assumed that if the U.S. imperialists are lying, the Russians must be telling the truth. In their indignation at frequent U.S. aggression, they have succumbed to the fallacy that “the enemy of our enemy is our friend.”

    But I.F. Stone had it right in the first place: “all governments lie.” In 2016, Putin’s Petersburg troll factories obviously did inundate U.S. social media with disruptive posts designed to discredit the U.S. system and help Trump win the election. This is just business as usual. Remember that in 2014, it was the U.S. under Obama who massively intervened during revolution in Ukraine in order to impose hand-picked candidates on the new government. What’s new? Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia and America are back to playing Cold War propaganda games. Back then, America sponsored Radio Free Europe and the CIA financed anti-Communist intellectual journals, while Stalin’s Communist agents financed The Daily Worker and influenced a whole generation of writers including Hemingway. During the 1930s Hitler had supporters all over the U.S., and Mussolini’s fascist government spent millions buying up French newspapers and flooding them with Italian propaganda designed to soften up France for the coming invasion.

    Today, Putin’s trolls manipulate social media and the blogosphere. Big deal. How many Americans actually believed the crude, ungrammatical, mechanically-produced Russian postings on which the Kremlin spent a few million dollars during a campaign when U.S. billionaires, using the most sophisticated PR firms, were spending billions? Few today believe the Russians actually succeeded in influencing the outcome of the election.

    The real scandal behind the release by the Russians (among others) of the Democratic National Committee’s secret emails was the truthful news that the Clinton leadership was secretly sabotaging the primary campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, the surprizingly popular socialist insurgent threatening their noe-liberal hegemony. Ultimately, the DNC’s vicious and ultimately fatal interference in the U.S. electoral process, the open Primary, did more to get “President” Trump elected than Russian interference. How many voters who went for Bernie Sanders in the primaries ended up voting for Trump?

    With his hypocritical accusations of fake news, Trump has seized upon a classic populist demagogue’s bullying tactic — ridiculing his critics, accusing them of lying, and discrediting their liberal world-view as an elitist conspiracy. By declaring war on the mainstream press (which remains devoted to the ‘normal’ capitalist political establishment in whose name it excoriates Trump’s excesses) and by raising the issue of “fake news” perhaps Donald Trump has inadvertantly done the American public a favor.

    Is “cynicism” about governments (which all lie) and the media (which generally support them) all bad?  Maybe the public will start thinking more critically about what we’re told by T.V. ‘experts’ (always the same ones). Maybe we’ll start taking seriously the warnings persecuted whistle blowers like Chelsea Manning and marginalized investigative journalists like I.F. Stone (whose writings have been anthologized), Noam Chomsky[2] and The Intercept.

    One can hope, for example, that the next time a U.S. administration goes to the brink of war over some phoney pretext backed up by fake news about inexistant WMDs  or imaginary attacks, people, and even the media, will start asking questions before it is too late. And if the truth is revealed before the blood starts flowing, the chance are that it will be thanks to the Internet and sites like WikiLeaks.

    2. Fake News and the Internet

    Mainstream media pundits frequently blame the Internet for this latest epidemic of “fake news” that is allegedly destroying our democracy. As we have seen, to some extent this is just “the pot calling the kettle black.” On the other hand, the algorithms that control the flow of information on Internet social media tend to favor sensationalism and exaggerate the importance of the two ends of the political spectrum.

    Let’s look at one obscenely egregious example of fake news concerning the grieving teenage survivors of the 2018 Parkland, FL. Valentine’s day shooting, many of whom had spoken out in favor of gun control. On Feb. 20, a homemade video accumulated more than 200,000 views overnight by slandering David Hogg, the handsome, articulate student spokesman and his fellow-students as “crisis actors” hired to do the bidding of left-wing activists. Of course many of these “hits” were propagated by the pro-gun, right-wing, viewer networks and conspiracy sites like Infowars, which went one step further by suggesting that the mass shooting itself was a “false flag” operation orchestrated by anti-gun groups. Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio pundit, took up the accusation: “Everything they’re doing is right out of the Democratic Party’s various playbooks. It has the same enemies: the NRA and guns.”

    So yes, social media, eager for maximum number of clicks, does encourage sensationalistic fake news and wild conspiracy theories, but they are part of a continuum which includes right-wing pundits and highly organized, well financed, propaganda machines from from think tanks like the American Enterprise to Fox News to far-right Sinclair Media’s billionaire buyout of local radio stations and newspapers across the country.

    It has now been revealed that billionaire Republican donor and Steve Bannon acolyte Robert Mercer gave $15 million to Cambridge Analytica, a voter-profiling company which promised to give him Internet tools “that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior […] the firm harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission.”[3] Their idea was that the Trump campaign could target specific messages to specific profiled by analysing this Facebook data.

    Again, I doubt this tactic won many voters for Trump, but it reminds us that Facebook and other social media get rich by selling advertising space to anyone who’s willing to pay. To quote the Times: “Facebook makes money by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please.” The beauty of this lucrative business model is that unlike the press and broadcast media, who must pay writers, actors, reporters for the content they broadcast, we users supply Facebook with all its content — and our personal information — for free.

    To what extent do the thousands of internauts who click on these fake news stories actually believe them? Impossible to tell. Many of these clicks simply reflect the extent of existing networks — whether of gun lovers, racists, or Putinite anti-imperialists — acting as echo chambers. Others merely mirror the momentarily curiosity of folks who like to surf the Net. In any case, according to the latest studies, the largest influence on people’s beliefs remains personal conversations with their family, friends, neighbors and colleagues.

    3. Fake News and the Big Lie

    As Hitler proclaimed, if you repeat a big lie over and over again, people will believe it. The bigger the lie the better:

    “The broad masses of the nation in the primitive simplicity of their minds more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes” (Mein Kampf, 1925).

    By “these people” Hitler meant the Jews. The irony is that Hitler’s first and biggest lie was that the “Jewish conspiracy” was responsible for all of Germany’s problems, including military defeat in WWI. When you tell a big lie, it helps if you accuse your opponent of doing the same thing. Stalin for example accused his rival Trotsky of conspiring with the Nazis at the very moment he himself was preparing to sign the notorious 1939 Stalin-Hitler Pact. In our time Trump, who proclaimed that Barack Obama was a Kenyan and calls global warming a “Chinese Hoax,” delights in re-tweeting all kinds of fake news items while delegitimizing the fact-checkers and blanketly accusing them of propagating “fake news.”

    Of course the Big Lie technique works best when the Big Liars have the power to dominate the media — plus gangs of bullies on the street to back it up, as Hitler proved in the 30s. Today such bullies can also dominate social media and intimidate others through threats and the use of trolls and bots to amplify their voices. Trump’s labeling of the mainstream media as “fake news” is a bullying tactic designed to disrupt reasonable discourse and discredit all attempts to bring out factual truths that contradict the rulers’ Big Lies. It also lends credibility to all kinds of far-out secret conspiracy theories. But there are conspiracies, powerful ones, and most often they are hidden in plain sight, right out in the open.

    Let’s take one example. What is the biggest Big Lie of the past half-century? Climate denial: the persistant fake news that global warming and catastrophic climate change are myths cooked up by a conspiracy of liberals, left-wing scientists and/or the Chinese. Of course today, the visible effects of global warming (droughts, floods, forest fires, ice melts) can no longer be hidden. So we have Scott Pruitt, the head of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency, proclaiming that global warming is good for us (as he removes environmental regulations).  So since global warming has actually appeared, the updated Big Lie is that human activity — specifically burning coal and petroleum — has no negative effect on the climate, despite increasingly pessimistic and near-unanimous testimony of climate scientists predicting imminent catastrophe if we don’t cut back.

    This is a life and death, existential question for the future of humanity. Yet the independent scientists are not believed, and their conclusions routinely dismissed by world leaders who continue to push for more fossil fuel production, to block even the feeblest attempts to limit it (e.g. the Paris agreement), and to fight bloody wars over the domination of petroleum-rich countries. As Hitler reminds us: “The grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.” The “conspiracy of expert liars” in the case of climate change includes the petroleum corporations, the government and the mainstream press who have been suppressing or obfuscating the truth — although the facts have been “nailed down” for nearly half a century.

    Already in the 1970s, scientists working for the petroleum giant Exxon were warning management in private memos about impending climate catastrophe, as was recently revealed by the nonprofit news organization Inside Climate News. “More damagingly, the company set a model for the rest of the industry. Today, scientists who say the exact same thing are ridiculed in the business community and on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal.” [4] Exxon, rather than change its business plan, chose the path of disinformation, denial and delay – just like the tobacco industry faced with the evidence of cancer. But the petroleum lobby proved to be far more powerful than the tobacco lobby.

    Like Hitler’s Big Lie about the Jews, big petroleum’s climate denial lie is backed up by bullies who intimidate potential truth tellers. For example, the geology departments of the major research universities are largely funded by petroleum money, and so professors who want to keep their jobs and their grants are hardly encouraged to speak out on the necessity to stop burning oil. Similarly the major media, dependent on advertising revenues from petroleum and related industries (auto, highway construction, agrobusiness, shipping), are roped into the climate-denial “conspiracy of expert liars.” So it is hardly an accident that although weather reporting fills up more than 20% of news broadcast time in the U.S., TV “meteorologists” avoid such tainted “politicized” expressions as “global warming” and the “greenhouse effect” and devote almost no air time to the causes of the increasing climate chaos whose consequences they are describing.

    As for government, oil states dominate the U.S. Congress; the White House has been controlled by oilmen since at least LBJ; Exxon CEO Tillerson was Trump’s first Secretary of State; and Oklahoma oil-lobbyist Pruitt rules the EPA. Pruitt, who made his career as a paid “expert liar” for the oil companies and who is not very bright, apparently actually believes climate denial, and so this month he naively proposed a “public debate” on the forbidden topic. Pruitt’s great idea was promptly quashed by the White House as such a public debate would be a “damaging spectacle, creating an unnecessary distraction from the steps the administration has taken to slash environmental regulations.”[5] Any such public debate would inevitably implicate the military, a major consumer of petroleum, whose primary mission has long been to protect (and if possible expand) U.S. petroleum interests around the world and whose massive budget depends on serving the global interests of the petroleum lobby.[6]

    4. What is it about oil?

    Why do these powerful leaders, special interests, and institutions conspire to lead the planet to self-destruction by any means necessary, including war and fake news? Alas there is only one possible answer to this question: to preserve the wealth and power of that fraction of the capitalist 1%-ers whose wealth is tied up in carbon deposits beneath the soil.

    Why, since they are so rich and powerful, don’t they even now reverse the course of denial and domination they chose in the 1970s and invest their capital in renewable energy sources? The answer is that their vast wealth takes the form of fossil minerals in the ground whose value can only be realized when they are burned. At the pump a gallon of gas may be worth two or three dollars. In the ground it is worthless. As with all commodities, the value of carbon deposits is based on what financiers call “futures” – the expected price they will bring when brought to market at some future time. If governments make the decision to save the planet by going renewable before it is too late, that “future time” of sales and profits will never come. The buried minerals will become what economists call “stranded assets.” Their monetary value, on which the wealth and power of the petroleum corporations depend, would rapidly sink and with it the price of petroleum shares. Petroleum shareholders would soon be as broke as the owners of buggy whip factories the year after Ford introduced the Model T.

    Naturally the carbon interests are desperate. For them — and for the military industrial complex which they dominate — there is no turning back. They can only go forward into increased petroleum production, taking their profits now while leading the rest of us like lemmings over the cliff of climate catastrophe. They can have no thought for the human future. Only for petroleum futures. Hence the need to keep repeating the same Big Lie of climate denial. Hence the need to silence all opposition from what the Bush administration — on the eve of invading oi-rich Iraq — disdained as the “reality-based community.”

    So, as we have seen, behind the hysteria around an alleged fake news epidemic – popularized by liar-in-chief Donald Trump – and behind the mainstream denigration of so-called “conspiracy theorists” there is a very real and very powerful capitalist conspiracy, perfectly legal, “hidden” in plain sight. But rather than denouncing it, most liberal pundits tend to blame fake news on the ignorance of the masses and the evils of social media which they accuse of destroying liberal democracy. As if the liberal imperialism of so many Democratic administrations under the thumb of the petroleum lobby had not already discredited that notion.

    Today’s anti fake news campaign is so much the signature tactic of the Trump administration, that the Republican Party is actually sponsoring the annual presentation of the Fake News Awards, attacking journalists from the Times and CNN. Meanwhile the liberals in the mainstream press, blind to the big picture, wring their hands and blame the unwashed public for its cynicism and susceptibility to sensational tales.

     5. Back to cyberspace

    Once again, we observe that the Internet is a two-edged sword with advantages and disadvantages for the two opponents in the class struggle: the 1% and the 99%. On the one hand the Internet is so vast that you can find any amount of far out political opinion and crazy conspiracy on it, and well-heeled right-wing groups in particular can manipulate the algorithms of social media in such a way as to appear more popular and influential than they may actually be. These deceptions are small potatoes compared to the mammoth decades-long conspiracy of silence imposed by corporations, governments and major media, in order to suppress the truth of profitable carbon-fueled climate catastrophe. Big deal if high schooler David Hogg becomes a “crisis actor” for 24 hours in one dark corner of the Internet, and Trump gets his rocks off in the wee hours of the morning retweeting warmed over Fox News bullshit and insulting his critics.

    In the same news cycle as the fake news “crisis actor” Parkland high-school smear, came the story of the underpaid teachers of West Virginia, where collective bargaining is illegal, who were able to use a Facebook page to organize and win an eight-day, statewide strike. Through person to person and online communication, the teachers were able to  win over the sympathy of the parents, unite with other school personnel (bus drivers and janitors), spread their movement to teachers in neighboring states and force the conservative State Legislature to grant a 5% raise to all state workers, not just teachers.

    This remarkable page of U.S. labor history bodes well for the future. It also reminds us of the power of social media to overcome obstacles of geographical isolation, lack of information, bureaucratic foot-dragging and institutional obstacles. Thus, thanks to their Facebook page, teachers in 55 dispersed counties were able to unite, receive information about politicians’ lies from teachers in the State Capitol, reject the surrender agreement made in their name by their (suddenly recognized) unions, and address their just and popular cause directly to the legislators, whose positions were certain to be remembered the following November. Awesome!

     

    [1] Personal disclosure: “Izzy” was my boyhood hero, role model as a writer and mentor as a young man. A star reporter for the then-liberal New York Post and The Nation, Stone was blacklisted in the 1950s and barred from press conferences. With the help of his wife Esther he began to produce a newsletter in their garage , I.F. Stone’s Weekly, for about 5,000 loyal subscribers (including my parents) who paid $5 a year for eight pages a week of top notch investigative journalism which was later recognized by multiple awards. We got a bargain and the Stone family lived moderately well throughout the McCarthy period.

    [6] The same is true for the power of oil dictatorships like Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Putin’s Russia, even Venezuela, not to mention the imperialist powers like the U.S., France and Britain who still dominate their former colonial possessions. Apparently the carbon-based sectors of the capitalist economy have taken control of the world economy and the world state system, which is becoming more and more militarized and repressive as the ecological, financial and political crisis deepens.

     

  • Brazil: Marielle’s death was not just more of the same

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    On 14 March, Marielle Franco, a city councillor in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, of the Socialism and Freedom Party, was assassinated. In a piece originally published on the website of the Brazilian New Socialist Organisation (NOS) and republished here from the website Esquerda Online, Giambatista Brito argues that her death marked a new low in the country’s descent into political repression following the coup d’état of 2015. Translation by Max Leak.

    The death of Marielle Franco was one more killing in the violent capital of a violent state within a violent country in violent Latin America. But it was not just more of the same. It wasn’t a random slaying, a killing over “suspicious behaviour”, a firefight, death following from assault, or anything so typical as these. It wasn’t everyday violence which killed Marielle. These were four bullets to the head, fired very proficiently in a premeditated attack. The bullets which took the life of Marielle also took that of Anderson [Anderson Pedro Gomes, her driver], but we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that these bullets were meant solely for her. Anderson, a precarious worker like so many others busting a gut to help feed his family, was an unreplaceable loss to his loved ones, but he, in an assassin’s lexicon, was “collateral damage” – she was the “target”.

    There has been no shortage of voices affirming that Marielle was killed for being a woman, for being black, for being a favela dweller, and for being LGBT. And yes, this much is true. But it’s also important to say that this is just one part of the truth. Women, black people, favela dwellers, and LGBT people are killed in Brazil every day. This death forms a part of that reality, but that reality is not the last word. Women, black people, favela dwellers, and LGBT people are killed because, in the daily brutality of Brazilian existence, their lives are seen as worthless. Marielle could not possibly be seen thus, and the assassins knew it. They waited two hours outside a meeting she was attending before they killed her. Those who took her life did it not because her life “was worth nothing”, but because, to them, her death was worth a great deal.

    It has also been said that she was killed for being an activist and a defender of human rights. And once again, this is true, but once again, that is not the whole truth. Brazil has been killing community leaders, peasant leaders, indigenous leaders, Afro-Brazilian leaders, left, right and centre since forever. Chico Mendes, Zé Maria do Tomé, Dorothy Stang, and an endless list of such men and women. Marielle’s death forms a part of that list, but that, too, is not the whole story. Marielle was one of the principal voices in the fight against police violence and the power-grab of the federal government in Rio de Janeiro.

    Everything said up till this point is true, but even together they aren’t sufficient, nor do they give an image of the gravity of this pitiless slaying. This was not just “more of the same”, and if we fail to understand that, we run the risk of being caught up in the discourse and the narrative of those who want us frightened, divided, on our knees – and, if not this, dead.

    They killed a PSOL (Socialism and Freedom Party) councillor, an elected leader of the socialist left, and that is, indeed, new. Brazilian democracy was always very violent, but it had never yet done something like this. It was different from, for instance, Mexican democracy, where 111 mayors have been killed over the last 12 years, the great majority assassinated in cold blood. It is true that, here too, in cities gripped by drug trafficking, albeit in small proportions compared with what’s faced by our brothers in Mexico, political candidates are even elected officials are killed as part of disputes over power and territory, as criminal enterprises lash out against rivals who have involved themselves in politics. But this is not a case of that. It’s necessary to clarify that a rubicon has been crossed here. The death of Marielle was an assassination with openly and overtly political motives, and one which may very well have been carried out by agents of the state.

    Until the night of the 14 March, the elected councillors of big capital cities were “big fishes” to an extent that protected them from murder. We are not facing “just one more” of the many murders committed against our people over continual years. Not a bit of it. This was a first. And that fact is why the squares and streets of the whole country were occupied, even putting some in mind of the protest movement of June 2013.

    This movement must grow larger and more potent, with a unity of the socialist left and the other movements that have arisen. If it does not, then either, on the one hand, the narrative of “tackling violence” will win out, with the strengthening of the federal government presented as an escape, or, on the other, this kind of event will become routine, and after Marielles, there will be Sônias, Marcelos, Renatos and Guilhermes too.

    This was not “more of the same”, and it cannot be responded to as such. Indeed, this would be a bad moment to allow any discourse of division to gain ground among us, or to ask for silence from any voice of indignation, no matter who they are or where they come from. It is not the time to allow space to an “apolitical” discourse of any kind. We need the courage to fight in unity against those with power, who are advancing against us.

    For our dead, not a moment’s silence, but an entire life of struggle. Let these not be empty words.

    Originally published by rs21.

  • Janus and the Rank-and-File Strategy: A Reply to La Botz

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    Dan La Botz's article “Trump and the Labor Movement” in the Winter 2018 of New Politics is based on an oral presentation, with the limitations that go with oral presentations. For example, La Botz simplifies the plaintiff’s argument in Janus to the point of missing what is key and unique in it. He states, “The conservatives argue that the union forces workers to financially support political causes with which they may disagree, and so violates their free-speech rights.” This was the issue in the 1977 Abood case.

    At that time, the Supreme Court ruled that unions in the public sector could not use dues to support political candidates or causes. They also ruled that workers who were covered by a collective bargaining agreement but chose not to join the union could be required to pay their 'fair share' of the cost of administering the collective bargaining agreement and providing representation. That's the part the rightwing wants to overturn via the Janus case.

    What’s new about Janus is the argument that, in the public sector, a union’s contract demands are political speech. Improved wages and benefits, pension fights, merit pay versus across the board raises, etc., all involve questions about how public resources will be spent. Therefore, the plaintiffs argue, unions should not be able to require anyone to support that kind of speech if they don’t agree with the union’s position. Or, as I’ve put it to stewards in TWU, Mark Janus might say he does not want a raise because he would prefer the money that would go for his raise go to paving his street. (More likely, he wants a raise for himself, but not for the person working next to him.)

    This is different from what “political speech” is commonly understood to mean and needs to be teased out. (Teachers in West Virginia have just shown that there is some validity to the argument that demands for a raise are political speech. Validity to the argument, not to the solution the right seeks.)

    Will a ruling against the unions lead them to become more independent and militant? Don't count on it. In a post-Janus world, a likely response for public sector unions in many states will be to bind themselves even more closely to the Democratic Party. They’ll figure that electing friendly Democratic governors and state legislators is the surest way to protect themselves from loss of dues check-off, limits on what they can bargain over, etc.

    Rank and File Strategy

    La Botz wrote:

    The left’s program for labor for many years has been the building of a rank and file movement to transform business unions into democratic and militant organizations. Many leftists entered the unions in the 1970s with a variety of strategies, everything from working with “progressive” union officials to trying to create a revolutionary alternative to existing leadership. The rank and file strategy aimed at organizing workers to challenge the existing union leadership and transform the union into a class-struggle organization. One group, the International Socialists, had a goal of uniting rank and file groups in different unions, as well as in the social movements, into a small, mass revolutionary socialist party. This strategy—though subsequently disconnected from building a revolutionary organization—was carried by the IS when it merged with other socialist groups to form Solidarity. Not only Solidarity, but also the International Socialist Organization and more recently the Democratic Socialists of America have also sometimes adopted this strategy.

    The rank and file strategy existed precisely to overcome the union bureaucracy and to make it possible for workers to come together to fight the employer. That meant taking up shop-floor grievances, organizing contract campaigns, and running for local and national office, always with the goal of a more democratic and militant union. Building up such a labor movement was at the center of a conception of building a socialist labor party. As Kim Moody, who most articulately explained the theory, writes, “The notion of a bridge between rudimentary class consciousness or trade-union militancy and socialist consciousness is the cornerstone of transitional politics and the rank and file strategy.”20

    I was a member of Solidarity (or a predecessor group) for about 30 years. I think this is a good thumbnail statement of the rank-and-file (R&F) strategy as practiced by the IS and later Solidarity. La Botz makes the important points that the strategy had become “disconnected” from party-building AND that it remained connected to the development of socialist consciousness. (Looking back, I don’t think we had a decent theory about how that transition from trade-union militancy to socialist consciousness happens.) I’d like to add an element the summary leaves out.

    The R&F strategy as I understood it (and worked to apply it in the Transport Workers Union in the 1980s and 90s) was about building the capacity (organizational and political) of workers to fight the boss regardless of who the officers were. Our focus was not on winning control of the union in order to pursue the fight so much as it was on building the networks on the job, and a membership caucus, that could enforce some control on the job and take the initiative to push back against management — whether the union’s officers wanted to or not. That said, we learned that we couldn’t avoid trying to win office and control of the union. Our supporters among the rank and file expected it of us. So, the strategy became one of “here’s the best way to reform the union and make it more democratic and militant,” but that’s not where we started. It seems to me that there might be some value to the “build organization to fight the boss,” as opposed to the “build organization to win control of the union to fight the boss” approach in the right-to-work economy we are heading for.

     

     

  • “60 Minutes” Airs Dreadful Segment on Prince Salman

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    Hopefully this piece will be a bit of help to those demonstrating against Prince Salman’s #TrillionaireTour of the U.S.  (Aramco, the kingdom/Saudi family-owned oil company is valued at $2 trillion.)  Another piece I wrote about Saudi Arabia and the colleges that take Saudi elite money is at The Nation.

    Millions of people saw “60 Minutes” on Sunday March 18 or saw it online.  It featured an interview with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman.  It was just awful.  The journalist who interviewed the prince was Norah O’Donnell.  The segment consisted of a bunch of softball questions mixed with admiring views of his offices and Saudi shopping malls. 

    O’Donnell tells us that the prince is “cracking down on corruption.”  How are we to know this?  We do know he arrested a bunch of billionaires and princes, kept them locked up in a hotel for months without bail, and only let them out when they forked over huge sums in settlements.  The prince said it all was a matter of Saudi law, but we (and the Saudi people) never heard what they were accused of and what laws they supposedly broke.  As far as we can tell they never had access to lawyers.  Were there any judges involved or was it all up to Salman?  O’Donnell never asks. Is there anything like “due process of law” in any of this?  

    Prince Salman says he got $100 billion out of the people arrested.  Where did this money go?  The prince is widely known to spend lavishly on houses and paintings etc.  His brother, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., bought a $12 million mansion in Great Falls, Virginia, and flies around regularly in a Boeing 767 at $30,000 an hour.  Who pays for all this?  Is there a division between the funds of the monarchy and that of the government of Saudi Arabia or is it all in one big pot?

    Is my carping just cultural blindness, a Westerner ignorant of sharia?  I confess I do not know Islamic Law, but I strongly suspect sharia doesn’t allow such high-handedness.  Salman’s “anti-corruption” drive sounds more like a good old-fashioned shakedown.

    O’Donnell then helps him along and frames this in language an American can understand.  She suggests that the prince’s goal was to show “there's a new sheriff in town?”  He replies “Absolutely.” 

    O’Donnell and Salman go into the question of whether Saudi Arabia is “harsh” and “intolerant.”   His response (and he said the same thing to flatter New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman last year) is to agree, but claim that the harshness only started in 1979 as a reaction to events in Iran. That sounds preposterous, but let’s say it’s all true. What has Salman changed? In her introduction O’Donnell said, “his reforms inside Saudi Arabia have been revolutionary. He is emancipating women.”  Emancipation is a rather big word.  It usually means freeing people from slavery.  So what is the nature of this “emancipation”?  

    Well, women will be allowed to drive (in June).  Women can go to soccer matches. They don’t have to wear headscarves in public (except “60 Minutes” does air video online where O’Donnell’s crew shows how religious police stopped one of them and told her to cover up her hair). Some students (given permission from their university head) are willing to speak on camera.  They can vote in municipal elections and it will be easier for them to start businesses. Anything else?

    What about getting rid of the guardianship laws?  O’Donnell briefly brings them up.  She says, “But there have also existed these guardianship laws that, in order to travel, a woman has to get the permission of a male in her household. It seems so throwback.”

    Prince Salman answers, “Today, Saudi women still have not received their full rights. There are rights stipulated in Islam that they still don't have. We have come a very long way and have a short way to go.” A “short way” to go, he says.

    Except the guardianship laws involve much more than travel.  In 2016 Human Rights Watch had an article about the laws in a piece called “Boxed In.” It starts: “In Saudi Arabia, a woman’s life is controlled by a man from birth until death. Every Saudi woman must have a male guardian, normally a father or husband, but in some cases a brother or even a son, who has the power to make a range of critical decisions on her behalf.”

    A guardian needs to give permission for a woman to marry, to apply for a passport, or to study abroad.  If a woman is abroad she needs to live with a male guardian.  It’s legal for employers to require a guardian’s permission before hiring a woman.  And get this, if a woman was in prison, a guardian has to give permission for her to be freed and allowed home!  

    In the interview the question of “intolerance” never goes past women’s rights.  O’Donnell doesn’t ask if the prince intends to make it legal for Christians or Jews to practice their religion openly in the kingdom.  More importantly she never raises a question about the situation of Shia Saudis and their gross mistreatment.  Nor does she ask about critics of the monarchy’s religious practices like Raif Bidawi who is in prison for ten years and sentenced to 1,000 lashes for ideas written on his blog. Capital punishment is unmentioned, not even the case of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, the Shia cleric who was beheaded in 2016 and whose corpse was never returned to his family.

    They talk briefly about the war against Yemen, the massive bloodletting which she minimizes as a “quagmire.”  He gives a reason for his bombing campaign.  He talks about the insurgent group Ansar Allah commonly called the Houthis.  He refers to them only as “this militia.”  He says, “this militia was conducting military maneuvers right next to our borders and positioning missiles at our borders.”  As a justification for war this is transparently false.  In the early years of this decade the Yemeni group Ansar Allah was busy fighting other Yemenis.  It wasn’t the slightest threat to Saudi Arabia.  In the U.N. Security Council resolution of April 2015 many charges against the “Houthis” are laid out, but threats to Saudi Arabia are not even mentioned. 

    The prince further justifies his war by talking about missiles coming from the “miltia” and says, “I can't imagine that the United States will accept one day to have a militia in Mexico launching missiles on Washington D.C., New York and LA while Americans are watching these missiles and doing nothing.” When he said that I immediately thought he was plagiarizing what Netanyahu said about Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Actually it’s worse.  The handful of missiles that were sent into Saudi Arabia were launched long after the Saudis bombed Yemen.

    O’Donnell does ask him if he admits that there has been a “humanitarian catastrophe” in Yemen.  She talks about 5,000 dead civilians (a number far too low. UNICEF back in 2016 said over 10,000 children had died from effects of the war.).  Salman’s answer is that it’s all the “militia’s” fault.  O’Donnell doesn’t press him on this. She doesn’t talk about the one million cases of cholera in Yemen in 2017.

    They next focus on Iran and Salman says that Iran’s Ayatollah, Khamenei is the “new Hitler.” He says the comparison is valid because Iran is trying to “expand.”  Incredibly Norah O'Donnell then asks, “Does Saudi Arabia need nuclear weapons to counter Iran?”  I found that staggering. She brings it up, not him.  I’m not saying she’s giving him ideas, but she’s legitimizing the notion that an aggressive absolute monarchy should have atomic bombs.

    Later they talk about schools and “extremism” and Salman blames it all on the Muslim Brotherhood. Absurd.  This excuse has never been brought up before in all the years of complaints about the content of Saudi textbooks And why, as scholar Juan Cole points out, have the meager projects of ecumenism with Shia under the last king come “undone” under their reign of Prince Salman’s father?  Why was the Saudi Mufti for the Interpretation of Muslim Law not chastised or dismissed for declaring that Iranian Shiites are not Muslims?

    What about the extremism of Saudi Arabia being an absolute monarchy with all state councils being merely advisory to the king?  As Mehdi Hasan points out in his fine piece on The Intercept, O’Donnell never raises the question of democracy or elections in Saudi Arabia and appears to be “positively giddy” at the prospect that Salman will rule the country for another 50 years.

    As O’Donnell’s segment concludes she says, “Just as American society transformed during the 1960's, the Saudis are in the midst of their own cultural revolution.”  Piffle.

    What if O’Donnell had grilled Salman like another “60 Minutes” reporter, Leslie Stahl, did when she interviewed Madeline Albright in 1996 over the Iraqi sanctions or as Stahl did when questioning Betsy DeVos about education just a couple of weeks ago?  Could it have swayed more Senators to support Bernie Sanders’ bill to shut down U.S. support for the U.S. war on Yemen?  That bill was narrowly “tabled” just two days after the “60 Minutes” broadcast. Unfortunately, we’ll never know.

     

    Stanley Heller is host of the TV program “The Struggle” and Administrator of Promoting Enduring Peace.  He’s written the book The Uprising We Need.

     

  • History, Solidarity Come Alive in Unprecedented UIUC Strike

    ImageAmidst an upsurge of militancy among educators in places like West Virginia and the UK, graduate students in the US Midwest carried through the longest strike in University of Illinois history.

    Members of the Graduate Employees’ Organization, which represents about 2,700 teaching and graduate assistants on the U of I Urbana-Champaign campus, started withholding their labor on February 26 and did not pack up their picket signs until a tentative agreement was reached with the administration on March 8. They voted at the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center that night, and the union announced the next day that the agreement was approved by 98% of voting members.

    The strike was over. In addition to securing a raise and improving healthcare coverage, the union obtained contract language protecting tuition waivers for graduate student employees. The latter had been a major sticking point in negotiations and became a major impetus for the strike.

    “Before the strike the administration wanted to bust our union,” said Marilia Correa, a PhD student in history and the co-president of GEO. “I believe they were committed to changing the language on tuition waivers to weaken our union. Together, we stopped their efforts. We stayed out for a long time.”

    During that time, union members tried a variety of tactics. Dozens occupied the president’s office on March 6.

    Not the university president, nor the chancellor, nor the provost, had ever been to a single bargaining session with GEO, Correa said.

    “Since they refused to meet with us, we went to them,” she added.

    Using the hashtag “#occupyUI” on Twitter, GEO announced members brought their sleeping bags and would stick around until they got a fair contract.

    The union tweeted that police were stationed at all entrances once the occupation was underway, and police prevented a professor from entering the building to join the demonstration.

    Officers and union members did not have any clashes with police, though, Correa confirmed.

    The lack of confrontation prevailed even though Andreas Cangellaris, vice chancellor for academic affairs and the university provost, sent a message to students advising them to “please contact the department that offers the affected class or call the University of Illinois Police Department” if they had “concerns” or experienced “any difficulties” during the strike.

    In addition to the occupation, members continued picketing entrances to several buildings on campus until the union reached their tentative agreement with the university, Correa said.

    Historical Precedent Serves as Inspiration for Unprecedented Action

    The 2018 GEO strike started the same week that 150 years prior Illinois Industrial University, the precursor to UIUC, opened its doors to students. While the duration of the late February-early March strike was unprecedented for UIUC, the graduate student workers had several examples in history, recent and otherwise, to draw inspiration from.

    Lecturers were in their second of a strike against pension cuts and the privatization in the United Kingdom when graduate student employees in Illinois hit the picket lines on campus. As the GEO strike neared its end, Oklahoma teachers – who, like West Virginia educators, have been some of the lowest paid in the country – announced that they would walk out of classrooms on April if they were unable to get a raise. In West Virginia, teachers defied restrictions on the right to strike and rejected the initial agreement between their official union leadership and the state legislature.

    “Administrators all around the world are trying to make education more profitable,” Correa said about the concurrent struggles. “We all need to push back on this effort no matter where we are. Education is not supposed to be a product for profit. It should be accessible to all. Our fight in Champaign-Urbana is a fight for access to education, and so is the fight in West Virginia and the UK.”

    Educators in West Virginia were able to draw inspiration from the stories about militant miners who made news during their state’s infamous “coal wars” in the early 20th century, which culminated in the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest armed uprising since the Civil War.

    Likewise, graduate students in Urbana-Champaign could draw on a militant labor history of their own.

    Illinois is notably the grave site of the Haymarket Martyrs of the late 19th century who helped popularize May Day as an international workers’ day after labor organizer August Spies made remarks before being hanged that have been etched into labor history.

    “If you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labor movement – the movement from which the downtrodden millions who toil in want and misery, the wage slaves expect salvation – if this is your opinion, then hang us! Here you will tread upon a spark,” he said, but here, and there, and behind you, and in front of you, and everywhere, flames blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out.”

    Those metaphorical flames Spies spoke of rose about a century later in Central Illinois, about an hour from Champaign, where in 1995 an estimated one in four households were directly affected by strikes against A.E. Staley, Bridgestone/Firestone and the equipment manufacturing giant Caterpillar, as historian Sharon Smith documented. Decatur, Ill., Smith noted, was termed a “war zone” by those in the labor movement at the time. Those strikes, as Smith suggests, occurred following workers’ struggles against the three industrial titans that had started in the early 1990s, when many graduate students now attending the state’s premiere public institution were kids.

    The UIUC campus itself also has a recent history of labor unrest.

    In 2009, the GEO staged a strike that lasted a single day.

    As with the more recent and protracted work stoppage, tuition waivers were the “focal point” back then too, according to Kevin Taylor, who was a master’s student in philosophy and a GEO steward at the time.

    “Because a place like U of I relies so heavily on teaching assistants” – in fall 2015, the school ranked among the top 10 universities nationwide wherein TAs teach the most classes – undergraduate students often formed a stronger bond with graduate students than they did with professors, Taylor said. “They saw us more than they saw them.”

    Seven years later it was the non-tenure track faculty’s turn to withhold their labor, which they did for two days in April 2016, after more than 18 months of negotiations failed to produce an agreement on issues like multi-year contracts and reappointment notifications.

    Shawn Gilmore, who was president of the Non-Tenure Faculty Coalition Local #6546 when they organized their two-day action, said then that his union had “a lot of solidarity” with the GEO when they went on strike several years prior. Gilmore said his union worked with the secretarial pool to process room switch requests for classes that would be affected.

    Correa said that this time around many organizations not affiliated with UIUC offered space to professors who did not want to hold classes in picketed buildings.

    Gilmore, who is now secretary of NTFC Local #6546, said his organization urged the university to bargain with GEO in good faith during this last strike.

    “While we are prohibited from striking in solidarity,” Gilmore said during the recent graduate employees’ strike, “we have provided support for our fellow unionists in GEO, including donating to their strike fund, supplying materials, food, and strategy support, and by urging our members to participate in their pickets, and honor the buildings they are striking as fully as possible, while still honoring our collective bargaining agreement. GEO has clearly expressed its members’ concerns and now is exercising its legal option to strike. NTFC had to do the same in 2016 to settle its first contract; the parallels between these situations, as well as the faculty strike at UIC in 2014 and faculty strike at UIS in 2017, are striking. It is fair to say that GEO’s struggle is our struggle.”

    Assistance from other unions was not limited to UIUC campus – or even to the Midwest. The union representing graduate student workers and undergraduate tutors across the University of California system, UAW Local 2865, which organized its own two-day strike on UC campuses in 2014, contributed $1,000 to the strike fund GEO created.

    Closer to home, GEO members on the University of Illinois-Chicago campus, along with several allied organizations, carried out a solidarity action on March 6, distributing letters addressed to three members of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees, calling on them to settle a fair contract with graduate employees in Urbana-Champaign.

    Challenges Faced, Lessons Learned 

    Solidarities aside, the term “labor struggle” remained apt in the organizing work GEO activists did before and during their ~11 day action.

    The hardest part had to do with educating the entire bargaining unit about the strike, Correa said.

    “Although we have many members who are engaged with the union, many grad workers have many responsibilities and are not able to always stay connected with the union so closely,” she said. “Thus, we had to go on office visits and tell people about the strike and what was at stake for all graduate workers. These visits required a lot of time from members.”

    Despite this, the word spread. By the first day picketing had effectively shut down Lincoln Hall, one of the most frequented buildings on campus.

    Correa, whose doctoral research has focused on Latin American dictatorships, said graduate students on campus showcased what great things can come from collective action.

    “Before the strike the administration wanted to bust our union,” she said. “I believe they were committed to changing the language on tuition waivers to weaken our union. Together, we stopped their efforts. We stayed out for a long time. This was the longest strike in U of I’s history. This long strike showed me that we can combat injustice together.”

    James Anderson is an adjunct professor working in Southern California. He is from Illinois but now tries each semester to cobble together classes to teach at various colleges and universities in Southern California. He has worked as a freelance journalist for several online news outlets.

    Originally posted at ZNet.