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  • Marx’s Capital After 150 Years: Revolutionary Reflections

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    What does it mean to celebrate and concretize for today Marx’s greatest work, Capital, Vol. I? Such a discussion is terribly important at this juncture, when we are in a new situation where even some sectors of the right have started to attack neoliberalism. The Brexit vote in the UK, the large vote for Le Pen in France despite her eventual defeat by a neoliberal candidate, and above all, the Trump campaign have placed on the agenda a new form of right-wing populism with neofascist overtones that breaks with some key features of neoliberalism, such as free trade pacts, somewhat more open borders, and “humanitarian” intervention.  At the same time, Trump as president has put forth an incoherent agenda that contains major continuities with neoliberal austerity and old-style militarism, above all in the attempt to gut Obamacare. 

    The open racism, misogyny, Islamophobia, and nativism that marked the Trump campaign have if anything intensified, while his administration has made only fitful gestures toward the economic nationalism and protectionism that helped to win him a decisive swath of white working class voters. Whether we are on the cusp of a new era of capitalism, or whether this is more of a rhetorical turn, remains to be seen, especially in the case of Trump. But at the very least, the ideological underpinnings of capitalism seem to be undergoing an alteration. This makes it more urgent than ever that we on the left target capitalism as such, root and branch, not merely one form or another of it like neoliberalism.[1]

    As we mark the 150th anniversary of Capital I, another ideological challenge to Marxism centers on gender and race, issues that have come to the fore even more since the election of Trump.  Within progressive circles that have opposed neoliberalism, especially in academia, some of the most prominent critics of Marx have claimed that he says little or nothing of value on race or gender and that therefore he is not a thinker of our times. From the Marxist side, this is sometimes countered with a sort of economic and class reductionism, but neither of these positions captures what Marx was really about, including in Capital.

    In response, I would note that Marx takes up gender in a revolutionary manner throughout his life, from the 1840s through his late Ethnological Notebooks. Here is what he says at one point in Capital I, referring to how capitalism undermines the family:

    However terrible and disgusting the dissolution of the old family ties within the capitalist system may appear, large-scale industry, by assigning an important part in socially organized processes of production, outside the sphere of the domestic economy, to women, young persons, and children of both sexes, does nevertheless create a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of relations between the sexes. (Marx 1976, 620-21)

    This “higher form” of the family is not the one that exists under capitalism, which does “terrible and disgusting” things to the family; it is what would come about only after capitalism’s transcendence.  While this passage is remarkable for its dialectical treatment of the family in and beyond capitalism, it is far from the only place where Marx discusses working women in Capital I. As Heather Brown argues in her Marx on Gender and the Family, “while many feminists have criticized Marx for not adequately dealing with gender in his work,” in the lengthy chapter on machinery, “Marx not only traces out the changing conditions of the male worker, but also gives significant emphasis to the role of women in this process” (2012, p. 90).  Nor does Marx deal with gender only in terms of working women, for in his early essay/translation on suicide, he centers the discussion on women from the middle and upper classes who are driven to suicide by oppressive familial relations (Marx 1999).

    Since the Black movement in the U.S. has never separated itself from Marxism to the extent that the modern feminist movement has — and the responsibility for that has to be shared by Marxists who ignored or minimized gender and sexuality — Marx’s writings on race are somewhat better known. In Capital, the most dramatic passage concerning race is this one, written just after our Civil War:

    In the United States of America, every independent workers’ movement was paralyzed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin. (Marx 1976, 414).

    I have taken up these points in my Marx at the Margins (2010) and in a more recent Jacobin essay (Anderson 2017).

    Two points follow from the above: 1) the frequent accusation that Marx writes only of the white male worker in Capital is demonstrably false; 2) everything I have to say from now on includes working people of all colors, genders, and sexualities. What, then, are some of the central points of Capital I and related writings from the same period, at least for a brief account like this?

    Fetishism and Dehumanization

    One core theme is the theory of commodity fetishism, which centers on the dehumanization of the worker – and really of all human relations – under capitalism. As we know, capitalism features waged and salaried labor, where capital not the worker owns and controls the means of production. This creates a subject-object reversal, where the inanimate production apparatus becomes the active subject and the worker the mere object. (It’s as if the hoe, rather than being a tool controlled by the workers, jumped up and started hitting them, telling them to work faster.) Commodities produced in this manner have a “mystical character,” as they take on a life of their own, interacting with other commodities once they are separated from their producers. What develops is a social relationship not between people, but rather “between the products of labor” (Marx 1976, 164). What we reach ultimately is a situation, really a whole society, of “material relations between persons and social relations between things” (166). And the location where this is most pervasive is the capitalist workplace itself, where technology in the service of capital rules over the workers. These material relations between people and social relations between things not only form a distorting lens, wherein capitalism forces us to view human relations this way; they also form an actual reality. For here, he writes, social relations “appear as what they are” (Marx 1976, 166).[2] This dehumanization is an actual reality that the system encourages us to view in a matter-of-fact manner, as nothing unusual.

    But that is exactly the logic of capital that Marx wants to break us away from. How to do so? Obviously, we have to create a society beyond capitalism to escape its logic completely. However, we can also begin to transcend it theoretically, and it is very important to do so. It is important not only in terms of whether capitalism is permanent or can be replaced, but also because we don’t want to replace it by something similar or even worse.

    Taking account of the 20th century, long after Marx wrote, let me add that this dehumanization of the workers certainly does not change fundamentally if the capitalist production apparatus is controlled by the state rather than held as private property, as we saw in the Soviet Union and see today in China, or even in Cuba and Venezuela. Nor can dehumanization be eliminated by worker-owned coops, although these do point us in the right direction.

    A Visionary Alternative to Capitalism

    This takes us to the second point from Capital I that I want to single out here: Marx’s visionary theoretical alternative to capitalism. We can of course transcend capitalism theoretically by looking at non-capitalist modes of production. Marx looks briefly at European feudalism, where the raw exploitation of the working people, the peasants, was not hidden behind formal political equality and formal freedom of choice of occupation. Under feudal rule there was no distorting lens and exploitation was clear, with the King Donalds openly calling themselves by those titles, and calling the people their beloved children who needed to love and obey them … or else.

    Obviously, feudalism is not a positive alternative to capitalism. That positive form comes out of a type of dialectical imagination, where Marx takes revolutionary aspirations and trends inside the present order — like the Paris Commune of 1871 — and moves them much further, into a revolutionary communist future: “Let us finally imagine, for a change,” he writes, “an association of free human beings [Menschen],[3] working with the means of production held in common…” (Marx 1976, 171). In contrast to capitalism’s distorting lens of fetishism, “social relations … are here transparent in their simplicity” (Marx 1976, 172). Let me add parenthetically that linking transparency to justice and freedom is as old in philosophy as Plato’s cave, in whose shadowy recesses one experienced both injustice and an obscuring of one’s real situation. And of course Plato also advocated a form of communism, albeit a hierarchical and non-egalitarian one.

    As for Marx, he writes in the fetishism section of Capital that the distorting and obscuring lens of capitalism “is not removed” until the production process changes, “until it becomes production by freely associated human beings, and stands under their conscious and planned control.” That is communism in the positive sense.[4]

    I cannot underline enough that Marx’s critique of capitalism is forward-looking, from the vantage point of the not yet. In the same way, those who wanted to abolish slavery 200 years ago had to imagine an “impractical” future without slavery, given that the “great” civilizations of the past had exhibited mainly different varieties of slavery and unfree labor for the mass of the population, something that pro-slavery ideologists constantly mentioned.

    Permanent Unemployment, Technology, and Economic Crisis

    A third point I want to mention from Capital I that is particularly salient today is the massive unemployment that accompanies both the development and the continued existence of capitalism. As Raya Dunayevskaya argued, in lines that could have anticipated our recent electoral shock, “The failure to give ‘full employment’ to labor shakes the whole structure of capitalist society” (1988 [1958], 124). Marx develops this point at length in his discussion of the accumulation of capital.

    As capitalism develops, he writes, the amount of capital invested in machinery and other inanimate aspects (constant capital) increases, compared to that invested in labor power, in living labor, which he calls variable capital. In other words, capitalism is constantly eliminating workers as it moves to ever more complex and expensive technology. This changes what he calls the organic composition of capital, toward an ever-higher ratio of constant capital (mainly machinery) to variable capital (labor power in the process of production). This in turn leads to mass unemployment even in non-recessionary periods, creating what Marx calls “a relative surplus population” (Marx 1976, 789). This seldom means fewer hours of work, however, given “the condemnation of one part of the working class to enforced idleness by the over-work of the other part…” (Marx 1976, 789). The “industrial reserve army” of the unemployed, he writes, “weighs down the active army of workers; during the periods of over-production and feverish activity, it puts a curb on their pretensions” (Marx 1976, 792). However, beyond a certain point, as whole districts and neighborhoods are visited by mass unemployment, as the prisons fill up and homelessness increases, the situation can become explosive – even more so when, as now, the element of racial and ethnic oppression becomes part of the mix.

    The change in the technical composition of capital also has other negative consequences, this time for capital itself, even if it can manage to stave off the social unrest resulting from mass unemployment. As Marx notes in the chapter on machinery, since living labor is the source of value, as capital’s composition changes to the point of less and less living labor power being incorporated into the process of production, this also undercuts its ceaseless quest for surplus value and ultimately, profit. Because living labor is the source of all value, “It is impossible, for instance, to squeeze as much surplus value out of two as out of twenty-four workers…. Hence there is an immanent contradiction in the application of machinery to the production of surplus value” (Marx 1976, 531). This brief discussion in Capital I is of course related to what he develops in Vol. III, the tendency of the rate of profit to decline over time as capitalism develops.[5] And this of course is at the root of economic crises like the great recession of 2008, the effects of which have not completely ended even now.

    Globalization, Colonialism, and Capital Accumulation

    The fourth point I would like to emphasize is how capital accumulation devastates the global environment and the world’s people: “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake” (Marx 1976, 742). It is a system that will literally die without this. Not only does it need to extract surplus value off the backs of the working people, but the rate of surplus value extraction also needs to increase for the system to function without stagnation. Hence the obsession with economic growth.

    All this has particularly brutal effects in the colonies, as seen in Marx’s discussion of the accumulation of capital in Ireland by British capital. As the Irish were driven off their subsistence farms by British capitalist agriculture, the results were of genocidal proportions. Given the already precarious and worsening conditions faced by Irish peasants under the rule of British capital, when the potato famine struck in the 1840s, out of a population of only 8 million, 1 million died and 3 million emigrated.

    Ireland was not only an oppressed nation dominated politically by a foreign power, Britain. It was also a victim of a particularly capitalist form of colonialism, which radically uproots the entire local economic system, dispossessing the peasantry. As Marx noted repeatedly in Capital I, this turned the island into an impoverished agricultural dependency of British capitalism, all in the service of capital accumulation.

    Anti-Colonial Revolt and Working Class Revolution

    This takes us to my fifth and last point, an example of Marx’s theory of revolution in the epoch of Capital I, but not in the text itself. In 1867-70, just after Capital I came off the press, Marx came out strongly in support of the Fenian movement, a progressive form of Irish nationalism based among the peasantry rather than the upper or middle classes, and which kept a degree of independence from the Roman Catholic Church.

    In 1870, Marx wrote of how the Irish working people – both inside Britain as immigrant labor in capitalist factories and in in their home country under equally brutal colonial rule – were victimized by what would today be termed stereotyping and racism. This drove a wedge between English and Irish workers, to the benefit of capital, something he compares explicitly to race relations between the former slaves and the “poor whites” in the U.S. However, in a magnificent example of dialectical reason, Marx also saw an emancipatory side to these contradictions among the working classes. Thus, he wrote (in French) in early 1870 – in a little-known “Confidential Communication” of the First International – that an Irish agrarian uprising might serve as a “lever” to challenge the overwhelming power of the British ruling classes, which were the most powerful in the world at that time:

    Although revolutionary initiative will probably come from France, England alone can serve as the lever for a serious economic Revolution. It is the only country where there are no more peasants and where landed property is concentrated in a few hands. It is the only country where the capitalist form, that is to say, combined labor on a large scale under the authority of capitalists, has seized hold of almost the whole of production. It is the only country where the vast majority of the population consists of wage laborers…. The English have all the material conditions for social revolution. What they lack is a sense of generalization and revolutionary passion. It is only the General Council [of the First International, which Marx effectively headed — KA] that can provide them with this, that can thus accelerate the truly revolutionary movement in this country, and consequently everywhere…. If England is the bulwark of landlordism and European capitalism, the only point where official England can be struck a great blow is Ireland” (Marx 1985, 118-19, trans. amended, emphasis in original).

    Stressing that the British ruling class was composed of landlords as well as capitalists, he added:

    In the first place, Ireland is the bulwark of English landlordism. If it fell in Ireland, it would fall in England. In Ireland this is a hundred times easier because the economic struggle there is concentrated exclusively on landed property, because this struggle is at the same time national, and because the people there are more revolutionary and angry than in England. (Marx 1975, 119, emphasis in the original)

    Thus, a peasant revolution in Ireland sparks a working class revolution in England, somehow connected to revolutionary events in France. (Recall that Irish revolutionaries maintained close ties to France.) This agrarian revolution in Ireland would presumably spread to the English working class via Irish emigrant labor in the English industrial centers.

    This is Marx’s mature theory of revolution and capital accumulation at a specific juncture, Britain and Ireland in 1870. The argument about revolution emanating from Ireland is not taken up explicitly in Capital I.  Instead, Marx’s most prominent conceptualization of the process of revolution in Capital I is posed at a more general and abstract level,[6] where he focuses only on technologically developed countries like Britain in what many regard as the true conclusion[7] of Capital I:

     Along with the constant decrease in the number of capitalist magnates, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation grows; but with this there also grows the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers and trained, united and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production. (Marx 1976, 929)

    Over time, all these developments of (1) productive forces and (2) a united working class become “incompatible with their capitalist integument.” Next comes the death knell of “capitalist private property” where “the expropriators are expropriated.” In a nod to the Hegelian dialectic, he adds: “Capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a natural process, its own negation. This is the negation of the negation” (Marx 1976, 929).

    Capital I thus ends with a dialectical thunderclap.

    How might we reach that point today, when the various contradictions of capitalism that Marx writes about are deeper than ever, and yet so are the contradictions inside the movement against it? But that is why we need to undertake this type of discussion, not only on the nature of capital but also on its alternative in a positive sense, even as we hit the streets again and again in our expressions of discontent and revolutionary aspiration.

    And we need to do so very concretely, not in the empirical but in the dialectically concrete sense. How can the universal of free and associated labor, of communism in the modern democratic sense, be achieved through the actions of a working class unified across all races, genders, and sexualities? And yet that universal form of anti-capitalist revolution will necessarily take on a different coloration depending upon the social, ethno-racial, and political context in which the expropriation of the capitalist magnates by the working classes can come onto the historical agenda and then actually fulfill its aims.

    In my discussion of Capital I and related writings in this article, I have focused upon two main types of revolution, (1) the abstractly sketched notion of a united working class rising up against a centralized capitalist economic apparatus and (2) the notion of a British working class divided by the ethnic condescension of the English toward the Irish, but also connected, at least potentially, to the revolutionary aspirations of the Irish people.  As I intend to argue in another study that will be a further development of this one, Marx discusses — or at least hints at — three other notions of revolution in Capital I: (3) revolution from both above and below during the Civil War and Reconstruction periods in the U.S., imbued with the dialectics of race and class, (4) revolution against the state and moving toward freely associated labor in the Paris Commune of 1871, and (5) agrarian revolutions in non-Western communal villages connecting to working class revolutions Western Europe.

    Thus, there are multiple notions of revolution in Capital I, two of which have been taken up here.

     

    References:

    Anderson, Kevin B. 2010. Marx at the Margins: Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    _______. 2017. “Slavery, War, and Revolution,” Jacobin (May 16) (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/civil-war-marx-slavery-capital-race-reconstruction).

    Brown, Heather. 2012. Marx on Gender and the Family: A Critical Study. Leiden: Brill.

    Chattopadhyay, Paresh. 2016. Marx’s Associated Mode of Production: A Critique of Marxism.New York: Palgrave.

    Cutler, Sofia, Sarah Farah and Emanuel Guay. 2017. “Neoliberalism in Crisis” [Interview with Kevin B. Anderson and John Bellamy Foster]. 3:AM Magazine (July 13) (http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/neoliberalism-in-crisis/ )

    Dunayevskaya, Raya. 1988 [1958]. Marxism and Freedom: From 1776 Until Today. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Hudis, Peter. 2012. Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism. Leiden: Brill.

    _______. 2016. “Trump’s Electoral Victory Signals Dangerous Turn in Capitalism.” Pluto Press Blog (Dec. 6). (https://plutopress.wordpress.com/2016/12/06/trumps-electoral-victory-signals-dangerous-turn-in-capitalism-by-peter-hudis/ )

    Jacques, Martin. 2016. “The Death of Neoliberalism and the Crisis in Western Politics.” Guardian (August 21). (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/21/death-of-neoliberalism-crisis-in-western-politics )

    Marx, Karl. 1962. Das Kapital, comprises Marx-Engels Werke, Vol. 23. Berlin: Dietz Verlag.

    _______. 1976. Capital, Vol. I. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin.

    _______. 1985. “Confidential Communication.” Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 21. New York: International Publishers, 112-24.

    _______. 1999. Marx on Suicide. Edited by Eric A. Plaut and Kevin B. Anderson. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

    Ollman, Bertell. 1993. Dialectical Investigations. New York: Routledge.

    Kevin B. Anderson teaches at University of California, Santa Barbara and is the author of Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism (1995) and Marx at the Margins (2010/2016). He is a member of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization.

    [1] I discuss these issues at somewhat greater length in a recent interview (Cutler et al. 2017). There have been several other discussions of these points, but would like to single out in particular Jacques (2016) and Hudis (2016).

    [2] The German term Marx uses here for “appear” is erscheinen, a form of appearance that reflects a phenomenon’s underlying essence, as opposed to scheinen — “appear” in the sense of “seem,” with overtones of an appearance that is merely illusory (Marx 1962, 89).

    [3] The two existing translations of Capital I were carried out before gender neutrality became the norm in intellectual discourse; therefore, translators rendered the gender-neutral German term Mensch as “man,” when they could as easily (and more accurately) have written “human being,” taking account of the fact that German has a distinct term for the male person: Mann.

    [4] Several recent books have shown the centrality of this alternative to Marx’s work as a whole, chief among them Peter Hudis, Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism(2012) and Paresh Chattopadhyay, Marx’s Associated Mode of Production (2016).

    [5] Actually, Marx wrote the drafts of what is now Vol. III before Vol. I, but Vol. III was not published until over a decade after his death, by Engels in 1894.

    [6] Bertell Ollman (1993) has underlined the various levels of abstraction Marx employs.

    [7] The block quote that follows is from the last lines of chapter 31 of the present English edition; it is followed by the rather anodyne chapter 32, on white settlers in North America.

    This article was originally posted at The International Marxist-Humanist.

     

  • The Campus Antifascist Network’s United Front Against Fascism

    ImageSince Donald Trump’s election in November, 2016, more than 150 university campuses in North America have been postered or fliered by white supremacist, neo-Nazi, or white nationalist groups.  Most common have been flierings by American Vanguard, a Neo-Nazi formation with paramilitary characteristics, and Identity Europa, a self-proclaimed white nationalist fraternity founded by a former acolyte of Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

    The fliers seek to recruit college students into an aspirant fascist movement.  Common themes are white victimization at the hands of racial minorities and immigrants; the dominance of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy; white racial purity and fear of foreigners; and rejection of so-called “cultural Marxism,” a term first popularized on the right in the 1980s by anti-semite and Holocaust denier William Lind.  As used by groups like Identity Europa, “cultural Marxism” is a catch-all to describe tolerance of other cultures, respect for religious difference and diversity, especially for Jews and Muslims, gender equality, and a cosmopolitan intellectual and political outlook on the world.

    A parallel tactic used by neo-fascist movements are campaigns of harassment, intimidation, smears and bullying of progressive faculty and students.  Since last November, Drexel University Professor George Cicciarello-Maher; Princeton University African-American Studies Professor Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor; Trinity University Professor Johnny Williams; Stockton University Professor Adam Miyashiro; Syracuse University Professor Dana Cloud; Dartmouth University Professor Mark Bray, and University of Nebraska-Lincoln Professor Amanda Gailey, have all been targets of coordinated attack campaigns because of their public anti-racist or otherwise progressive scholarship or social media commentary.  In the case of Yamahtta-Taylor, an African American woman, on-line death threats, threats of rape, racial slurs, and slurs against her sexuality caused her to cancel two public lectures.  In the cases of Cicciarello-Maher and Williams, both were put on temporary “leave” by University administrations that caved to right-wing intimidation and bullying.

    The most significant organizing tool by the new fascist movement, however, has been efforts to force Universities to allow fascist speakers a presence on campus.  This campaign began with a horrific flourish in August when Richard Spencer, neo-Nazi founder of the alt.right movement, helped lead a march of torch-bearing fascists across the University of Virginia campus.  The march brought together disparate elements of the U.S. fascist movement that had come to Charlottesville to participate in the next day’s “Unity Rally.”  That is the rally in which protestor Heather Heyer was murdered when James Fields drove his car into her.

    The Virginia march was the “kick off” to a coordinated alt.right effort to seize University campuses as spaces for fascist thought, ideas, and organizing.  Since then, Spencer has successfully spoken at the University of Florida and is scheduled to speak at University of Cincinnati.  Other campuses, like Ohio State University and Texas A & M, have refused Spencer a platform.  In response, Spencer’s legal team has sued, arguing that public universities are obligated to represent all political viewpoints under the First Amendment. Critical, generally, to the alt.right’s attempts to inculcate fascist ideas on campus has been using “free speech” and First Amendment claims as both cover and protection.

    It was in response to such events that the U.S.-based Campus Antifascist Network was formed this summer.  Initially a group of approximately 40 U.S. scholars, the Network grew exponentially after Charlottesville.  More than 450 people now subscribe to the Network’s google group; nearly 2,000 participate in its Facebook page.

    From inception, CAN has dedicated itself to a unity politics.  Its mission statement defined fascism broadly as an attack on multiple vulnerable populations, including Muslims, Jews, immigrants, racial minorities, LGBTQ+, indigenous and differently abled.  Its central organizing principle was a “united front” vision: “CAN looks to mass counter-mobilizations and broad-based coalitions as key to the fight against these forces. We have diverse political views on multiple issues, but are united in our commitment to stopping fascist intimidation from taking root in our campus communities.”

    In practice, this has meant several things.

    Each time CAN members have confronted fascist or alt.right threats at its campuses, its members have worked to build the broadest possible coalitions.  For example, CAN members at California State University Fullerton organized against a speech by Milo Yiannapolous by working in close coalition with students who are trans, queer, non-binary, alternatively abled, undocumented, and students of color, or who self-identified as belonging to any number of a combination of those communities.  At the University of Michigan, CAN members used a united front approach to protest the appearance of pseudo-social scientist Charles Murray, author of the notoriously racist The Bell Curve.  CAN members coordinated a collective effort agreed upon by representatives of different groups as equals, with an understanding that not all groups have to agree on political matters beyond the need to fight white supremacy and its fascist tendencies.

    In both of these instances, unity politics were an important strategic alternative to create the widest mobilization and minimize the chance for spontaneous disruptions or adventurism by small groups.

    CAN has also undertaken direct defense of faculty under attack by the alt.right. It has formed a Defense Committee appointed to respond immediately and directly to faculty under siege.  CAN has organized support and petitions of support for several of the aforementioned faculty under attack: Mark Bray, Adam Miyashiro and Amanda Gailey.  CAN also sent a letter to University of Florida President Kent Fuchs asking the University to refuse Spencer a speaking engagement. This was consistent with CAN’s position that speakers or organizations openly embracing fascist ideas and politics (Spencer gave the “Heil Hitler” salute at an American Enterprise Institute meeting in Washington D.C. last November should not be given a platform to speak.

    Because so many North American campuses have been fliered, CAN has taken a grassroots or bottom up approach to organizing, encouraging faculty and students to build their own Network chapter on campus in accord with local conditions.  As with the national Network, chapters are charged with building alliances on campus around anti-fascist politics, and working to defend individuals and organizations who may be directly targeted, or feel threatened by, fascist propaganda (fliers) or speakers. To date there are 13 CAN chapters in the U.S., Canada and U.K.

    Finally, in the service of building chapters and a general anti-fascist presence, CAN has promoted study groups, workshops and Teach-Ins on the meaning of fascism drawing from a broad tradition of writing on the topic.  The CAN Syllabus available at its website includes writing on fascism by the likes of Leon Trotsky, Hannah Arendt and Enzo Traverso.  The Syllabus is a living public document available to anyone seeking to educate and build a local chapter of CAN or to prepare for a fascist speaker coming to campus. We welcome new, contemporary reflections, which may be sent to cannetwork.fighttheh8@gmail.com.

    For more information about CAN, or to build your own chapter, visit the CAN website http://campusantifascistnetwork.com or write to cannetwork.fighttheh8@gmail.com

    The time for solidarity is now.

    This article originally appeared at New Socialist. 

  • Academic Freedom Goes to Court

    ImagePeaceful protest carries no guarantee against violence. In mid-May, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, came to the United States to meet with Donald Trump, who had made haste to congratulate him on winning a referendum in April. Its provisions would – according to the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe – undercut “the model of a democratic presidential system based on the separation of powers” and thereby “risk degeneration into an authoritarian presidential system.”

    By most standards, the risk was already a fait accompli, though the referendum (which had passed narrowly and with voting irregularities) further tightened the screws. What it could not do was prevent critics from assembling outside the Turkish ambassador’s residence in Washington. Erdoğan’s bodyguards responded by attacking the demonstrators – punching them, throwing them to the ground, kicking them – and also managed to injure D.C. police and Secret Service agents who got in the way.

    In fact, things were just picking up where they’d left off one year earlier, during Erdoğan’s appearance at the Brookings Institute, a few blocks away. “His security detail abused Brookings’s hospitality,” says the account from April 2016 on the institute’s website. “They picked fistfights with demonstrators and attempted to evict Turkish journalists,” and found themselves threatened with a cancellation of the event “if they did not desist with their thuggish behavior.”

    The whole experience was unsettling to think-tank staff, who are not often called on to serve as bouncers. “The president and his security detail clearly failed to recognize the protests for what they were,” reads Brookings’s assessment of the event: “a natural and accepted activity in a democracy rather than an imagined conspiracy against Turkey.” The same could be said about the skirmish in May – although chiding a swarm of goons for failing “to recognize … natural and accepted activity in a democracy” seems to carry politeness a little too far.

    Inside Higher Ed has reported on the campaign of repression against Academics for Peace, an organization of Turkish scholars and educators with the temerity to criticize the state’s ongoing violence against the country’s Kurdish population. The situation is worsening. On Dec. 5, hearings began in Istanbul for 36 of the 148 signatories scheduled for trial through May 2018. If convicted, they face prison sentences of up to seven and a half years.

    Currently there is an open letter appealing for academics abroad “to show their solidarity by joining delegations to Turkey as international observers at the trials and by sending financial support.” It has already been endorsed by numerous professors and is gathering more signatures here.

    A paper appearing in the journal Critical Studies on Terrorism earlier this year acknowledges that “prison time has often served as punishment for academics challenging the state’s narrative on the Kurdish Question or the Armenian Genocide, which together constitute the ‘third rail’ in Turkish politics.” But prosecution of such thoughtcrimes tended to be “sporadic and unsystematic” before the Academics for Peace petition circulated in January 2016, drawing 1,128 signatories. Among them were the two of the three authors of the paper, which, if not disinterested, is certainly informative. (All three now work outside Turkey.)

    The state’s response was to broaden the definition of terrorism. In Erdoğan's words, “It might be the terrorist who pulls the trigger and detonates the bomb, but it is these supporters and accomplices who allow that attack to achieve its goal. The fact their title is politician, academic, writer, journalist or head of a civil society group doesn’t change the fact that individual is a terrorist.” In fact, the petition called on the Turkish state to honor its own treaties and obey international law. Really bloodcurdling stuff.

    While awaiting trial on terrorism charges, signatories often faced the loss of jobs and passports, as well a wave of attacks in mass media – leading, in turn, to death threats from enraged social-media users. It may bear mentioning that Erdoğan has also prosecuted people for criticizing him via Twitter.

    The paper in Critical Studies on Terrorism posits the attack on Academics for Peace as an instance of “a broader wave of ‘democratic retrenchment’ across the [globe] since the 2000s,” leading to authoritarian regimes that hold elections to legitimate themselves while concentrating power in the hands of “a ‘dominant leader’ through the instrumentalisation of state apparatuses and the ruling [party’s] hegemony over civil society and the media.”

    The recent open letter in support of the persecuted Turkish academics has been endorsed by, at last count, seven Nobel laureates, three Fields medalists and two Pulitzer Prize recipients. Solidarity organizers tell me the signatures will be periodically updated on the English-language part of the Academics for Peace site, along with other statements of support and news about developments in the case.

    Academics for Peace is soliciting video statements by international colleagues who condemn the persecution, such as one by Steven Pinker. A group of academics, trade unionists, artists and politicians from abroad is being assembled to attend the hearing scheduled for Jan. 18. To inquire about submitting a video, observing the hearing or helping to finance the delegation, contact the organizers.

    Financial donations in support of the persecuted academics themselves are also urgently welcome and may be made here.

    This article first appeared at Inside Higher Ed.

  • Why should we care about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau?

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    In the early hours of November 27th, employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) woke up to a world of contested allegiances. Advocated by Senator Elizabeth Warren and set up by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, CFPB was created in 2011 as an independent Federal agency tasked with protecting consumers in the financial sector. Since it was this sector’s predatory exploitation of low-income racialized communities that triggered the subprime mortgage crisis, this agency was intended to regulate finance across consumer services like mortgages, student loans, and credit cards. As such, the founding of the agency received large support from consumer groups and their Democratic allies in the Federal administration. Republicans, for their part, dutifully (and unsurprisingly) rendered the agency as another burden on the “free” market.[i] Such conflicts are hardly news and government employees are in this sense always in the precarious position that their jobs might be discarded with every new administration. Rarely, however, do these conflicts take the absurd character we could witness the following few days.

    A holdout against the de-regulatory agenda of President Donald Trump, the CFPB was until as late as November 24 still directed by Obama-appointed Richard Cordray. Deciding to resign, however, the former director, who is now expected to run for Ohio governor, appointed his chief of staff Leandra English to Deputy Director. This would in accordance with Dodd-Frank regulation make her acting director of the agency until a permanent replacement had been found. While this seemed to be in order, just a little later that same day Trump intervened. Citing the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998, the President claimed the right to override the conventional succession order and appointed White House budget director Mick Mulvaney to the post.[ii] Mulvaney, who had made himself famous as a critic of CFPB when he in a 2014 interview called the agency a “sick, sad” joke, [iii] now found himself competing for an unlikely job. In addition, his contender English had late on Sunday night filed for a restraining order to try to keep him out of office. No wonder Mulvaney brought doughnuts with him when he showed up for his first day of work. [iv]

    Arriving in the office early, however, Leandra English had already introduced herself to the agency’s 1600 employees with an email signed “Acting Director.” The confusion was complete. Throughout most of Monday, the situation on the ground was still unclear; although tweets of empty doughnut boxes indicated that at least some employees had chosen sides.[v] Mulvaney would in a competing email claim the title of “Acting Director” for himself while English sought support from Senators Warren and Chuck Schumer. Finally, on Tuesday 28, Trump-appointed Judge Timothy Kelly gave his verdict on the restraining order, predictably denying the request and installing Mulvaney as Codray’s legitimate successor despite loud protests from demonstrators who had gathered outside the agency’s headquarters. Temporary order was restored and Mulvaney, who the Washington Post now calls “one of the most powerful bureaucrats in the country,”[vi] proceeded by putting a freeze on new regulations and hires.

    The seeming absurdity of D.C. politics was hard to escape. In the pages of the Los Angeles Times, Doyle McManus called the conflict a “bizarre standoff”[vii] while financial market commentator Megan McArdler called the struggle “pointless” as, “in the final analysis, [Mulvaney and English are] battling for brief control over a minor agency with limited impact on the economy.”[viii] The doughnuts, the competing emails and the restraining order only further reinforced the farce-like qualities of the episode. In all its absurdity, however, this debacle within the D.C establishment is simply the surface expression of a much deeper set of contradictions. Beyond legal battles and administrative intrigue, Mulvaney’s coupe-d’état at the CFPB is a particularly striking example of what Greek Marxist Nicos Poulantzas (1936-1979) argued to be the internalization of class contradictions within the capitalist state.

    Poulantzas, the State, and the CFPB

    First becoming known to an English-speaking audience as the “structuralist” antagonist to Ralph Miliband in the late-1960s “State Debate,” Poulantzas would go on to develop a sophisticated analysis of the relationship between state power and class power over the course of the 1970s. Cumulating in State, Power, Socialism,[ix] the last book before his untimely death in 1979, Poulantzas’ work drew inspiration from Marx insistence on treating capital as a social relation. This orientation pitted him against both orthodox Marxist theorists who saw the state simply as an instrument in the hands of capitalists and those mainstream political theorists who thought of it as a subject with absolute autonomy and a rationality of its own. Instead, Poulantzas argued that the state was best understood as a class relation, writing that “[t]he (capitalist) state should not be regarded as an intrinsic entity: like ‘capital’, it is rather a relationship of forces, or more precisely the material condensation of such a relationship between class and class fractions, such as this is expressed within the State in a necessarily specific form” (pp. 128-29).

    Rather than seeing the state as external to society, Poulantzas positioned the state and its myriad contradictions within the class relations of capitalism writ large. While recognizing the gravitational pull of capitalist imperatives, Poulantzas did not see capitalist control over the state as foreordained or automatic. Instead, he saw the state as a terrain of struggle, with class contradictions deeply inscribed in its institutional make up. These contradictions, he argued, were condensed in intra muros bureaucratic quarrels over competing policies and administrative fiefdoms. This view is consequential for social strategy. Rather than regarding the state as a monolithic entity to be encircled and crushed, Poulantzas suggest that by struggling against the state as well as inside the state, socialists can favorably shift the conflictual balance of forces already inscribed in its institutions. This formulation allows for a notion of state power that, instead of simply decrying the state as an almost metaphysical evil, highlights how it is traversed by contradictions that range from its executive heights to the street-level bureaucracy of service provision. When these contradictions surface, they often take the character of the CFPB-affair.

    The role of CFPB is to regulate the financial sector in favor of the “little guy” and, for a liberal regulatory body, it has aggressively pursued this agenda, helping nearly 29 million consumers to reclaim funds of around $12 billion from banks, debt collectors and mortgage lenders.[x] As late as November 17 of this year, it mandated a new rule that would require payday lenders to take steps to ensure their customers could actually repay their loans before extending credit. The appointment of Mulvaney, who in the 2015-2016 federal campaign cycle received $31,700 from payday lenders alone, has, however, made the industry more confident and its representatives are now planning on suing the agency, hoping that with a new director it would be less combative in court.[xi] Indeed, Mulvaney himself has stated that his new job is to makes sure the CFPB does not “interfere with capitalism.”[xii]

    Creditor-Debtor Relations and the Financialized Economy

    If the capitalist state is, per Poulantzas, a contradictory class relation, the CFPB-affair has uncovered a very particular set of contradictions: those emanating from the creditor-debtor relation. Since the subprime mortgage crisis, an increasing number of activists[xiii] and academics[xiv] have argued that this relation constitutes a central– if not the central – contradiction of financialized capitalism. Maybe most explicitly, Italian sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato[xv] has criticized received notions of finance as chiefly being characterized by excessive speculation or greed, instead conceptualizing it as at heart a power relation between creditors and debtors. Lazzarato accordingly prefers to speak about the “debt economy” rather than the “financialized economy,” as a way of putting this power relation at the center of attention. Taking the increased indebtedness of American university students as the paradigmatic example, Lazzarato argues that this social contradiction has become modern capitalism’s most important power relation. Rather than simply replacing old contradictions in a blanket fashion, however, the debt relation now permeates all other social relations, remaking conflicts between workers and capitalists, the welfare state and its service users, businesses and consumers through the medium of debt. In this sense, Lazzarato argues, “[d]ebt creation, that is the creation and development of the power relation between creditors and debtors, has been conceived and programmed as the strategic heart of neoliberal politics” (p. 25).

    Although we should resist some of the strongest claims that financialization constitutes a completely new world of completely new contradictions, centering of the creditor-debtor relation at contemporary capitalism’s “strategic heart” can be instructive when thinking through contradictions of Trumps Federal state.  While the New York Times characterize the conflict over the leadership of the CPFB as “encapsulating dueling visions of how the American financial system should be regulated”[xvi] putting Lazzarato in conversation with Poulantzas shows us that it runs even deeper than that. Together they allow us to see such “dueling visions” as the internalization of the creditor-debtor contradiction within the institutions of the state itself, highlighting the possible cracks in what often appears a monolithic bureaucracy.

    Rather than constituting a neutral terrain for struggle, however, the cards are usually not stacked in our favor. Poulantzas insistence on the state as not simply a social relation, but a “material condensation” of social relations indicated that the state (while riddled with contradictions) still has an inbuilt bias favoring some social forces over others. In this sense, McManus might be correct when characterizing the entire CPFB affair is a “guerilla theater” in which “[a]lmost everyone involved know how the story will turn out in the end.”[xvii] The judicial response, favoring the view that the President has the right to determine Federal appointments, seems to confirm this. But, after all, whoever thought it would be easy? In the face of such challenges, there is no reason for the left to dismiss the affair as merely bureaucratic squabble. Instead we need to recognize it as the expression of the real class contradictions of financialized capitalism, those between the creditors of Wall Street and all those of us who through our interest payments enable their wealth.

    This conflict isn’t just reflective of the contradictions within the Federal state apparatus, however, but also within the parties that have monopolized its administration. In particular, the Democratic Party’s “progressive neoliberalism”[xviii] temporarily allowed it to set up the CPFB as Senator Warren’s pet project during finance’s immediate weakness after the subprime mortgage crisis. In this way, a party outlier could be satisfied while its establishment continued to court the banks and the hedge funds. For democrats who are still coping with the fallout from Bernie Sanders challenge, defending the CFPB now seems to open the possibility of regaining credibility in the “resistance.” Radical challenges to Trump’s plutocratic onslaught will therefore have to be careful not to become foot soldiers in a desperate attempt to cling onto the remains of the Obama administration. Neither should we simply defend an agency that has brought some protection to working class communities, important as that is. Conservatives might downplay the episode as a “Washington comedy,”[xix] but, as Poulantzas argued, “the establishment of the State’s policy much be seen as the result of the class contradictions inscribed in the very structure of the State” (p. 132).  Popular movements need to grab onto those contradictions and try to split open the cracks. 

    *Mikael Omstedt is a geographer at the University of British Columbia. 

    Photo of Nicos Poulantzas thanks to Verso press.

     

  • Jones Victory in Alabama's Senate Race: Pause in that Sigh of Relief

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    Though we wouldn’t know it from mainstream media coverage, the sigh of relief many progressives will breathe at Moore’s defeat should be tempered with the knowledge that Jones will likely not be a reliable ally on issues on which the Democrats should all be expected to fight the GOP and Trump. An exit poll of voter opinions showed over 40% of Alabama voters, Democrats and Republicans alike, gave an unfavorable rating to both parties.

    The upcoming issue of New Politics (subscribe and get the first look at the Winter issue! Note our new, low rates for digital subscriptions!) will carry a lively exchange on the Democratic Party and independent politics. In the meantime, this piece by a young member of Democratic Socialists of America in Alabama will give you food for thought. 

    We are in the midst of our annual fund appeal. Please contribute to help us continue to bring long-time readers and the new generation of activists radicalized by Trump’s election and the Sanders campaign provocative analysis about “socialism from below.” We intend to encourage debate about a “new politics,” a conversation needed online and in print now more than ever. We make it easy for you to part with your money, by donating in many different ways, any sum you wish.

  • Standing Up for Palestine: BDS More than Ever!

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    IF THERE WAS any “Israel-Palestine peace process,” Donald Trump torched it with his December 6 announcement recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the transfer of the U.S. embassy to that bitterly contested city. But there are two more important underlying realities.

    First, there is no “peace process” and hasn’t been for a long time. Endless blather about “the two-state solution” has only covered up the destruction of any viable two-state possibility — through Israeli settlement expansion, demolition of Palestinian homes and neighborhoods in Jerusalem itself, the expansion of “Greater Jerusalem” and “Metropolitan Jerusalem” to slice the West Bank in half, the annexation Wall and apartheid roads for the settlers, and brutal repression of Palestinian protests including the Israeli Army’s deliberate targeting of children.

    Israel’s crimes against human rights and international law, well-documented by Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights and legal organizations and on-the-ground reporting, have been systematically enabled by U.S. administrations of both parties – Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama – with relatively inconsequential differences in rhetoric. The difference now is that the rightwing extreme Israeli settler movement is now directly engaged in setting White House policy, through Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, his bankruptcy lawyer David Friedman whom he appointed ambassador to Israel, billionaire backer Sheldon Adelson – all corrupt figures in their own right – and a cohort of Christian Zionist fanatics spearheaded by vice-president Mike Pence.

    Announcing the embassy move rips away what’s been a convenient fig leaf of U.S. “peace” posturing and isolates Washington from the rest of the world including its major allies, but it changes little on the ground except to encourage even greater Israeli military and settler violence.

    Second, there should be no surprise about Trump’s announcement, coming from the same thief-in-chief who has pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord, threatens to start trade wars with Canada and Mexico, terrorizes immigrant communities and destroys their families, intends to cancel the multilateral nuclear agreement with Iran, threatens North Korea with “total destruction” (meaning nuclear war), and is looting the treasury of the American people with tax cuts for the super-rich, the destruction of priceless national monuments – and so much more besides.

    Here, the difference is that many liberal Democrats who oppose Trump on other issues think it’s just fine to recognize Jerusalem as “Israel’s eternal capital” and treat the lives and the rights of the Palestinian people as minor collateral damage. That’s another whole discussion of its own.

    For social justice and Palestine solidarity activists, the big question of course is: What can we do? Many important emergency appeals have been made, all worth supporting, by CODEPINK, Jewish Voice for Peace, the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian rights, numerous Arab, Palestinian and Muslim organizations and progressive Christian church bodies – to call Congressional representatives and Senators, to write letters to newspapers, to demonstrate in the streets and proclaim in social media, “Not in Our Name!” in response to Trump’s latest atrocity.

    But we believe that one ongoing grassroots campaign stands out: The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement has been growing in strength on U.S. campuses, in communities and internationally. The BDS campaign was launched in 2005 by Palestinian civil society organizations around three fundamental demands: an end of the post-1967 Occupation, full equal rights for Palestinians who are treated as second-class citizens inside Israel, and the right of return for Palestinian refugees. (Read the call at https://bdsmovement.net/call)

    It’s not that BDS has the power to severely impact the Israeli economy (much of which is based on high-tech and military exports). Rather, it brings the issues of the Occupation and of racist policies inside Israel, and particularly the complicity of U.S. corporations, to the attention of ordinary people in a way they can do something about it. The U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights has a summary of BDS activism and victories at https://uscpr.org/campaign/bds/bdswins/.

    That’s why Zionist forces, state legislatures and the U.S. Congress (yes, both parties) are attempting to suppress and criminalize BDS activism. That’s perhaps the best indicator of its growing importance and success. Those of us outside Palestine and Israel can’t produce “the solution.” What we can do is show that the Palestinian people have allies in their struggle for dignity, survival and self-determination. BDS now more than ever!

    We particularly recommend the following sources of analysis and calls for action:

    Phyllis Bennis on Trump’s announcement, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/12/06/no-peace-process-exists-destroy-trumps-jerusalem-decision-dangerous-hell

    News from the US Palestinian Community Network, www.uspcn.org

    “Tell Trump No” at https://jewishvoiceforpeace.org

    CODEPINK’s petition at www.codepink.org/JERUSALEM

    News from the Israeli peace bloc Gush Shalom: http://zope.gush-shalom.org/index_en.html

    Originally posted at the website of Solidarity.

     

  • A Greek Tragedy Foretold

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    Adults in the Room: My Battle with the European and American Deep Establishment
    By Yanis Varoufakis
    Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017

    And The Weak Suffer What They Must?
    By Yanis Varoufakis
    Nation Books, 2016

    Along with French economist Thomas Piketty, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis is making economics sexy again. Journalists enjoyed snapping photos of Varoufakis, clad in a black leather coat, commuting to the finance ministry’s offices on his Yamaha motorcycle. But his short tenure in the Greek government was marked by clashes with the country’s creditors and ultimately with the leadership of Syriza, the left-wing party that came to power in Greece in early 2015.

    Varoufakis, a self-described “erratic Marxist,” also happens to be a gifted storyteller who can deftly relate personal experiences to larger themes without sacrificing analytical rigor. It’s not something you would expect to find in your average finance minister, but he is no ordinary government bureaucrat.

    He opens Adults in the Room, his memoir about his short time in government, by describing a late-night meeting in a Washington bar in which former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers asks him if he would behave as an insider or outsider. It is a sly narrative construct, as Varoufakis tells all from the outsider-insider perspective and recounts the negotiations over Greece’s debt with the “Troika”: the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank (ECB).

    Varoufakis names the individual actors in the Greek tragedy, but where he really shines is in explaining the central economic and political forces that created Europe’s economic crisis.

    Greece’s population is 10.75 million but its public debt is around 330 billion euros ($390 billion). He argues that Greece is in a modern-day debtor’s prison and cannot pay its sovereign debt without a serious restructuring. Adults in the Roomtakes pains to describe his attempts to end the country’s “fiscal waterboarding” at the hands of the Troika. Varoufakis demanded new debt terms and some debt cancellation — “haircuts” for the banks and other institutions that held Greece’s bonds. One problem was that the ECB’s charter explicitly prohibited debt cancellation and bailouts, thus stacking the deck against the debtor nation.

    An outsider’s tale of crashing the ultimate insiders’ club.

    Once in power, Varoufakis got creative. He offered to convert Greece’s unsustainable debt payments to perpetual bonds that paid lower but perpetual interest, and the country would be able to choose when to pay off the principal, sometime in the distant future. Another novel but workable idea was that Greece would swap its largest debt obligations for new 30-year bonds that had crucial provisions: Annual payments would be suspended until Greece’s national income increased, and would then be linked to its economic growth.

    It would have been a win-win solution for both sides, but the Troika rejected all of Varoufakis’ proposals. It held the upper hand: It could close Greece’s banks and turn off the liquidity spigot. Varoufakis wanted Greece to play hardball and default on its ECB debt if that happened. He was convinced German Chancellor Angela Merkel did not want to force Greece to leave the Eurozone, the 19-nation group that shares a common European currency. He believed a “Grexit” would have spurred a stampede out of the Eurozone by other debtor countries like Italy, Spain and Portugal. However, the Syriza government lost its nerve and did not default. The chapter “Lions Led By Donkeys” details what happened when the Troika shut Greece’s banks down and the Syriza government capitulated.

    Adults in the Room unflatteringly portrays Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and how he cracked in the face of intense diplomatic pressure, bank closures and the threat of being kicked out of the Eurozone. When Tsipras agreed to impose a new round of austerity on his country in order to procure a new loan from the Troika, Varoufakis resigned and sped away on his motorcycle. He was finance minister for just five and a half months.

    Readers should pair Adults in the Room with Varoufakis’ And The Weak Suffer What They Must?

    The title of the latter is derived from an infamous scene in the Greek historian Thucydides’ recounting of the Peloponnesian War, in which the Athenians demand that their weaker rivals unconditionally surrender or else face complete annihilation, because “the strong do as they like while the weak suffer what they must.” More than 2,000 years later, Varoufakis contends, this same merciless logic can be found in today’s neoliberal global economy. He does us the favor of showing us how we came to this moment.

    In his retelling, the United States shifted in the 1970s from an industrial powerhouse that ran large trade surpluses to a debtor nation, within which economic and political power shifted from industrialists to Wall Street.

    “The trick for America to gain the power to recycle other countries’ surpluses… was to persuade foreign capitalists to voluntarily send their capital to Wall Street,” he writes. Wall Street offered high returns on investment in the form of higher interest rates to attract Japanese, German and eventually Chinese capital. Higher interest rates meant American manufacturers’ costs jumped and consumer purchasing power nosedived.

    Then the party stopped with the financial crash of 2008. Varoufakis thinks the United States can no longer effectively manage the global economy. The Great Recession decimated Americans’ already stagnant incomes, so they do not have the purchasing power to absorb surpluses and recycle money that they did in previous generations.

    Varoufakis warns that unstable, debt-ridden countries are a breeding ground for fascism. While Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party is hobbled by murder trials and corruption charges, elsewhere the far right is capitalizing on economic insecurity by blaming immigrants for society’s problems.

    Varoufakis, like Piketty, advocates a federal European Union system that would socialize debts, stabilize debtor countries’ economic growth and democratize the EU bureaucracy. After his stint as finance minister, he came away convinced that no one country by itself could successfully challenge Europe’s powers that be. He cofounded DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement 2025) — “a pan-European, democratic, humanist movement” — that seeks to transform the European project while preventing it from sliding into a 21st-century version of fascism.

    It won’t be an easy task. But from his writing, it is clear Varoufakis knows exactly who and what he is up against.

    Originally printed in The Indypendent.

  • Punitive Neoliberalism in Puerto Rico

    ImageIsolating the situation of Puerto Rico is one of the mechanisms used to seek acceptance of the austerity policies that are now being imposed on the Island.(1) If the crisis is seen as the result of actions by Puerto Ricans or their government — if the responsibility lies, exclusively or fundamentally, in Puerto Rico — then it is logical that it bears the consequences of its own deeds or misdeeds, painful as they may be.

    On the contrary, to recognize that the crisis of indebtedness is a global phenomenon, that the debate over fiscal crises and austerity policies spans the planet, indicates that the crisis in Puerto Rico, with all its colonial particularities, is in fact not unique. This also suggests that the crisis has structural, systemic roots, linked to the contradictions of the dominant economic order in its present stage. It cannot be attributed to some specifically Puerto Rican pathology.

    From this, two conclusions may follow. First, just as austerity policies are resisted elsewhere, we should not acquiesce to them in Puerto Rico. Second, we need to connect with resistances elsewhere, including of course the United States.

    Here I examine current debates in Puerto Rico using two concepts, punitive neoliberalism and financial melancholia, elaborated by several students of similar debates in Great Britain, among them William Davies and Liam Stanley (see references below).

    I begin with some general points regarding unemployment and debt.

    A Global Ideology …

    Unemployment is a normal aspect of capitalism. During its recurrent recessions and depressions, unemployment increases above normal levels.

    In colonial and underdeveloped economies, unemployment is typically much higher, not periodically but chronically. In response to this, and often thanks to labor and social reform movements, many governments have instituted programs that lessen the privations provoked by lack of employment in a market economy.

    Nevertheless, we are all aware of the popularity of the notion that unemployment results from the fact that “people don’t want to work” and that welfare, that is to say, programs that compensate for no or low income, promote and reward “laziness.”

    According to this logic, the problem is laziness, not capitalism or colonial capitalism; the poor, not the system that impoverishes them; welfare, not the system that does not generate employment.

    It would be hard to exaggerate the reach of this ideology that exonerates capitalism while blaming others — indeed blaming some of its victims — for its consequences. This misrepresentation of reality, perfectly fitted to the reproduction of the existing social system, has penetrated all social sectors.

    Something similar happens in the case of debt, over-indebtedness and fiscal crises. To put it briefly: in its present epoch capitalism cannot exist without very high levels of debt.

    For example, capital seeks to lower its tax burden and to freeze or cut real wages, yet it must increase its sales to individuals and the state. The bridge between these contradictory impulses is built on debt.

    Meanwhile, deregulation frees speculation with debt-based financial instruments, one of the key factors leading to the financial meltdown of 2008, at which point governments organized massive bailouts of their banking and financial sectors, for which they incurred new and massive debts.

    This is the real source of the present fiscal crises: not excessive spending or overgenerous social programs, but three decades of corporate tax cuts; not fiscal excesses, but the cost of rescuing capital from its speculative irresponsibility and excesses.

    Yet personal over-indebtedness is not attributed to the dominant economic system, but to individual negligence. The system is not the problem, but rather the individuals who have irresponsibly “lived beyond their means.”

    Similarly, the fiscal crisis is blamed on excessive spending, high public sector wages, and over-generous social programs or subsidies. Capital is again exonerated: the source of the crisis is the irresponsibility of individuals and governments.

    All this has practical consequences. If welfare and a bloated public sector are considered to be the causes of unemployment and of the fiscal and debt crises, the solution must then consist of welfare and public spending cuts. This may be painful — so we are told — but it is inevitable.

    Yet there is a discordant fact: austerity policies do not have the promised effect. In country after country they have had a depressive impact. Thus, justifying them in spite of their manifest failure requires turning the economic debate into a moral drama: perhaps austerity policies do not function as well as expected, but they are morally deserved. Austerity is the deserved if bitter consequence of our irresponsibility.

    William Davies thus speaks of a third stage of neoliberalism: punitive neoliberalism, characterized by the justification of austerity as punishment, a deserved punishment for past excesses that must be administered regardless of other considerations.(2)

    From that punitive perspective, to protest against austerity seems particularly perverse: such protests perpetuate the very same irresponsible behavior that lies at the root of the crisis, affirming the infantile desire to live whichever way without facing any consequences. There’s more: individuals and governments must regain the “trust” of the financial markets. That is to say: capital, which has caused the crisis, becomes the moral authority, the arbiter of probity whose absolution we must seek.

    Furthermore, if the fiscal and debt crisis is the result of the irresponsible actions of citizens or politicians, then it must be concluded that both the electorate and its representatives are part of the problem (either because elected officials obey an irresponsible electorate or because they seek its support by enacting popular but unaffordable programs, or both). As they can hardly be expected to lead in the solution if left without proper guidance, an authority “above electoral pressures” is needed to impose the required discipline.

    For neoliberalism, people have a tendency to demand interventions that interfere with the infallible discipline of the market, and democratic governments tend to yield to those “populist” pressures.

    Thus, from its inception neoliberalism demands reduced democratic accountability, as it shifts key policy decisions to unelected bodies (such as the independent powers conferred on central bank directors). This is often done and justified in the name of “depoliticizing” decisions, of creating “non-party,” “non-partisan” or technocratic institutions or placing decisions in the hands of professionals or so-called “experts.”

    … And its Puerto Rican Version

    All this applies to the crisis in Puerto Rico. I already referred to the widespread notion of chronic unemployment as the result of purported laziness and of the demoralizing impact of welfare.

    Regarding debt it is no different: Public debt, we are told, is the consequence of fiscal excess, government overspending or government overexpansion. (“Gigantismo gubernamental” is the most common term in Puerto Rico.)

    Individually and collectively we have lived “beyond our means.” But the unavoidable day of reckoning is upon us. This is the logic that is to be found in editorials, opinion columns, radio and TV programs, policy papers and interventions in public hearings.(3)

    The “party is over,” the “mirage” we tried to inhabit, the “false glitz” covering our misery has dissolved: readjustment will be painful, but deserved. To protest is unrealistic, irresponsible and infantile.

    Davies and Liam Stanley have also studied what they call “financial melancholia,” which afflicts persons who internalize the guilt for their situation of over-indebtedness, who blame themselves for it in spite of evidence that speaks to the contrary and who feel they deserve punishment for it.(4)

    Needless to say, this is the mindset that best corresponds to an attitude of acceptance toward the policies of austerity typical of punitive neoliberalism. And this is the mentality incessantly promoted by editorialists, columnists, commentators and analysts.

    In Puerto Rico this comes with an additional twist. As mentioned above, Puerto Rico is usually portrayed as isolated from the global crisis, as if this were the only place undergoing a fiscal and debt crisis.

    What allegedly we face is not a particular case in a global crisis, but a strictly Puerto Rican disaster, rooted in the incapacity of Puerto Ricans to adequately manage their own affairs.

    The alleged specifically Puerto Rican pathology at the root of the crisis justifies that an external agent, such as the Federal Fiscal Control Board created by Congress in 2016 through the Puerto Rico Oversight Management and Stability Act (PROMESA), be put in charge of rectifying Puerto Rico’s fiscal practices. (As the cynicism of Congress has no limits, the promesa means “promise” in Spanish.)

    In our case, the neoliberal explanation of the debt crisis as the result of personal or public irresponsibility — and therefore austerity enforced by non-elected, undemocratic bodies as the necessary corrective — both draws upon and reaffirms colonial notions of native inadequacy for self-government that long pre-dated this crisis.(5)

    But we know that austerity policies have an unjust and counterproductive impact. Economist Sergio Marxuach, associated with the mainstream Center for a New Economy, recently calculated that the budget cuts adopted by Governor Rosselló in collaboration with the Federal Control Board will depress Puerto Rico’s GNP by at least 6.5%.(6) Under existing policies, most economists predict continued stagnation of Puerto Rico’s economy through 2024.(7)

    This is not the place to detail the present austerity program; suffice it to say that it includes more than halving the state’s contribution to Puerto Rico’s public university.

    Resistance: To Act and Connect

    The struggle against punitive neoliberalism and its ideology begins with the rejection of its myths. Unemployment is not the result of laziness, but an aspect of capitalism and of colonial and dependent capitalism. Debt and over-indebtedness are not caused by personal irresponsibility or over-generous public spending, but are inherent to capitalism, particularly in its most recent period, with its anti-labor policies, corporate tax cuts and bailouts.

    People and states “owe” capital but only because capital owes all of society. In Puerto Rico this manifests itself in a paradox: a stagnant economy with a bankrupt government still generates massive profits for a handful of primarily U.S. corporations.

    The fiscal and debt crisis is not a Puerto Rican particularity but a global process. Austerity is not inevitable, it is the policy that global capital seeks to impose to make us pay for its crisis. The extent to which it is imposed is not preordained, but rather depends on the outcome of the clash, or series of clashes, between its promoters and the resistance to it.

    In Puerto Rico, the prevailing orthodoxy repeats that since austerity and neoliberal policies have been adopted globally, we cannot do otherwise. This discourse is deployed everywhere: since such policies are dominant elsewhere they must be adopted everywhere.

    To break the chain of global neoliberalism — ultimately an international task, if there ever was one — we need two things. First, nobody anywhere, no people, can afford or should wait for others to resist or struggle.

    If all wait for others to act elsewhere, then nobody will act anywhere. If all wait for a more favorable international situation, then the international situation will remain unfavorable. We must act, wherever we are, even when initially isolated, if such is the case.

    Admittedly, this is a more challenging task in small and economically weak countries, since it is harder for them to alter the international balance of forces. This is a reason to discard any facile optimism and to prepare for a long struggle, not for quietism or passivity. Help will only come to those who help themselves.

    Second, we must understand that nobody, no people can succeed on their own. We cannot wait for anybody to initiate the struggle, yes, but we must count on others and immediately seek to link our struggle with resistance elsewhere, beginning in our case with U.S. struggles.

    Puerto Rico urgently needs (a) a program of economic reconstruction; (b) the political powers necessary for it; (c) a movement capable of formulating and pressuring for the former and of demanding and attaining the latter; (d) international allies without which no alternative to the dictates of capital can succeed; and (e) a true process of decolonization and national self-determination.

    In other texts, I have summarized some of the key aspects of Puerto Rican society under U.S. rule. Allow me to restate six of them.(8)

    First, since 1900 Puerto Rico’s economy has been shaped by the priorities and preferences of U.S. capital. It has been, and remains, a classically dependent and colonial economy.(9)

    Secondly, while specializing in the production for export, largely controlled by U.S. capital, the island has imported most of the consumer goods needed for its reproduction. An example this one-sidedness is the destruction of Puerto Rico’s agriculture. Today Puerto Rico imports around 85% of our food.

    Thirdly, a further consequence of the domination by U.S. capital has been the outflow of a significant portion of the income generated in Puerto Rico. Presently, around $35 billion leave every year, in the form of payments to external investors. This is around 35% of Puerto Rico’s Gross Domestic Product.

    Needless to say, this is capital that is not reinvested in Puerto Rico, leading to a fourth feature of its economy since 1900: Puerto Rico’s dependent economy has never been able to provide sufficient employment for its workforce. At present, Puerto Rico has a 40% labor participation rate. The official unemployment rate is 12%.(10)

    Fifth: Given the lack of employment, considerable migration has been another feature of Puerto Rican life since the early 20th century.(11)

    High unemployment also conspires against higher wages, which deepens economic inequality and ensures high levels of poverty. This helps explain the sixth feature: the persistence of the wide gap in living standards between Puerto Rico and the U.S. mainland. Puerto Rico’s per capita income is a third of the U.S. figure. It is half of the per capita income of the poorest state.

    Around 45% of the people in Puerto Rico live under the U.S. poverty level. The corresponding figure in the mainland is 15%.

    Whatever material progress Puerto Rico has made over the last century, and that progress is undeniable, must be tempered by the acknowledgement of these limitations and contradictions. They are not, it should be underlined, the result of restrictions on movement of capital or goods between Puerto Rico and the United States. They are, if anything, the result of free trade, of unfettered capital, not of restrictions to it.(12)

    In other words, the dogmas of free trade are part of the problem, not the solution. We need a planned reconstruction of our economy, with broadened public and cooperative sectors. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the proposals emanating at present from Puerto Rico’s government, the Federal Fiscal Control Board or Congress, for that matter.

    To orient our resistance to their punitive neoliberal agenda, we have presented a program that, in general terms, includes:

    • Revoke PROMESA.

    • Maintain the stay on the claims by creditors on Puerto Rico’s public debts.

    • Audit, annul the illegitimate portion, and renegotiate the remainder of the debt with three priorities: protecting pensions, essential public services and retaining resources required for economic renewal.

    • Declare a moratorium on all debt payments until the audit has been completed.

    • Adopt an economic reconstruction plan centered on reinvesting profits generated in the Island that must include a reconsideration of the existing tax-exemption policies.

    • Democratically reform the public sector with active labor and citizen participation.

    • Self-initiate a process of decolonization and self-determination through a constitutional status convention.

    • Seek and obtain sizable funding from Congress for Puerto Rico’s economic reconstruction as well as action for Puerto Rico’s decolonization.(13)

    Mobilization and Alliances

    Are these goals attainable? Yes, but only through consistent and growing mobilization on the Island and of our allies in the U.S. mainland. Is it possible to find such allies? Yes, although that alliance can and should be based not only on sympathy for Puerto Rico, not only on links with the Puerto Rican Diaspora, important as these are, but on a shared agenda of resistance against policies that affect all working, poor and oppressed peoples in the United States.

    There is a solid objective basis for such a shared agenda: Working and poor people in the United States today face the impact of several decades of neoliberal corporate tax, fiscal, social and economic policies, to which we must now add the frankly racist and universally reactionary agenda of the Trump administration.

    As much as we in Puerto Rico, they need a vast program of economic reconstruction, geared toward the creation of jobs and the satisfaction of basic social needs. Such a project that would require an expansion (and transformation) of the public sector and which must be financed through a radical redistribution of wealth.(14)

    We must connect with all movements pointing in that direction. We should ensure that our program and demands for economic reconstruction and political self-determination become part of their program, which begins by mobilizing for them in Puerto Rico.

    The fact that these movements are still minority forces in both the United States and Puerto Rico makes it all the more urgent that those seeking to build them join forces and collaborate as effectively as possible.

    Notes

    1. I thank Maritza Stanchich for her help in editing this text. I am solely responsible for all mistakes.
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    2. William Davies, “The New Neoliberalism” (New Left Review 101, Sept.-Oct. 2016, 121-134).
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    3. It is to be found, for example, in the editorials and news items of El Nuevo Día, in the articles of economists such as Elías Gutiérrez, Gustavo Vélez and Juan Lara, of columnists such as Mayra Montero, of political commentators such as Carlos Díaz Olivo, to mention some, among many others.
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    4. Will Davies, Johna Montgomerte, Sara Wallin, Financial Melancholia: Mental Health and Indebtedness (PDF Edition, 2015); Liam Stanley, “’We’re reaping what we sowed’: Everyday crisis narratives and acquiescence to the age of austerity” (New Political Economy, Vol. 19, issue 6, 2014, 895-917).
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    5. Economist Gustavo Vélez was one of the earliest proponents of a federal control board. His logic was as follows: for years, Puerto Rico has been mismanaged by its two ruling parties; it needs administrative and policy changes; ergo, Congress must create a board to oversee the situation. Could the people of Puerto Rico organize to bring about the required changes? The possibility is not even considered: native impotence is taken for granted.
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    6. This, he warns, “would be a devastating blow to an economy as weak as Puerto Rico’s economy.” Sergio Marxuach, “Ante el ajuste fiscal y la realidad económica” (Nuevo Día, 12 marzo 2017).
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    7. See Lara Merling, Kevin Cashman, Jake Johnston, Mark Weisbrot, Life After Debt in Puerto Rico: How Many More Lost Decades? (Washington D.C.: Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2017).
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    8. For more background on Puerto Rico’s present crisis see my book with César Ayala, Puerto Rico in the American Century. A History Since 1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2006).
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    9. Such was the case before WWII, when sugar production was the main industry, during the expansion of light-manufacturing from the 1940s to the 1970s, and during the following period, characterized by capital intensive manufacturing (pharmaceuticals, for example).
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    10. Even between 1950 and 1964, the period of rapid postwar growth, the number of jobs fell. Manufacturing was never able to compensate for the jobs lost in agriculture and the needlework industry.
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    11. This was the case in the 1910s and 1920s, when the first Puerto Rican colonia took shape in New York, as well as in the mass migration of the 1950s and during the last decade.
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    12. Contrary to the doctrines of market fundamentalism, these are the results we should expect. Economist Anwar Shaikh: “Simply opening up the markets of a developing country exposes its businesses to powerful international competition, whether or not they are internationally competitive. And if they are not, they will lose out on a large scale. This can be offset to some extent by foreign investment… But… the unemployment created by the displaced domestic industries need not be absorbed by any new production by foreign firms, for the latter will generally be far less labor intensive… Without the intervention by appropriate institutions that counter these tendencies of free trade, the problems will tend to be chronic.” Globalization and the Myth of Free Trade (London/New York: Routledge, 2007), 63-64.
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    13. The recent study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, quoted above, concludes that “there is a substantial case for federal aid to Puerto Rico, as well as sufficient debt cancellation, to allow for speedy economic recovery.”
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    14. In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration sought to redistribute land, diversify production, operate mills as public corporations, promote cooperatives, electrify and build other infrastructure. We need a suitably modified equivalent of those initiatives. Allow me to underline the word modified in the previous sentence. I bring up the P.R.R.A. merely as an example of federal funding for a plan of economic reconstruction, not as a project to be mechanically copied with its many limitations (beginning with its control by federally appointed officials). Needless to say, those projects emerged in the context of the New Deal and of an upsurge of labor organization and struggles in the United States. We need the 21st century equivalent of those too, if the interests of working people in the United States and Puerto Rico are to advance.
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    Related/background publications

    Puerto Rico: crisis y alternativas, (Río Piedras: Huracán, 2014)
    ”¿Desahogo contra el espejismos o los espejismos del desahogo?” (17 July 2014) http://www.80grados.net/desahogo-contra-el-espejismo-o-espejismos-del-desahogo/

    ”Ni Kruegger, ni Krugman” (7 August 2015) http://www.80grados.net/ni-krueger-ni-krugman/

    ”La amnesia del capital” (26 September 2014) http://www.80grados.net/la-amnesia-del-capital/

    ”La noche oscura del neoliberalismo” (21 July 2015) http://www.80grados.net/la-noche-oscura-del-neoliberalismo/

    ”Detrás de la crisis de la deuda de Puerto Rico” (30 July 2015) http://www.cadtm.org/Detras-de-las-crisis-de-la-deuda

    ”El régimen de los acreedores y la crisis de la deuda” (21 August 2015) http://www.80grados.net/el-regimen-de-los-acreedores-y-la-crisis-de-la-deuda/

    ”The End of an Era: From Dependence to Self-Propelled Development” (Caribbean Business, 2 September 2016) http://caribbeanbusiness.com/the-end-of-an-era-from-dependence-to-self-propelled-development/

    Originally posted at Against the Current.

  • John E. Chiaradia, 1926 – 2017: Political Activist

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    John E. Chiaradia was a longtime reader and sometime contributor to New Politics.

    How does one come to political activism? Are we influenced by the times, by our personal experiences, by some innate quality within us, or are each of these just the necessary ingredients of activism? John (Giovanni) Emilio Chiaradia left Italy as a child, a political refugee from mid-20th-century Italian fascism. His family escaped the turmoil engulfing their country for the welcoming haven of the United States, landing in New York City and eventually settling in central California. There they were once again confronted by nationalist politics and uprooted from their home. They were compelled to leave California following the bombing of Pearl Harbor as John’s mother, Antoinette, was not yet a naturalized citizen. In the wake of the war, the US government deemed all non-naturalized people from Axis countries, and even citizens in the case of Japanese Americans, to be potential threats to national security. They were commanded to vacate a 100-mile exclusion zone from the west coast. The family was forced to leave what few possessions they had and return to the Bronx.

    The son of a stonemason and a seamstress, John struggled through the poverty of the Great Depression, finding relief by enlisting in the army. Coming into the war near its end, he first saw action at the battle for Okinawa. Following the Japanese surrender, he was mobilized as part of the military occupation of South Korea. To understand how he found himself in Korea: Korea was part of Imperial Japan’s colonial empire, and at the end of World War II, U.S. forces occupied the southern portion of the country while the Soviet Union occupied the north. In a preamble to the coming cold war, the Korean peninsula was bifurcated in the same fashion as Germany.

    Still in his teens, John watched firsthand as a newly installed Korean government and its American overseers turned a blind eye to corruption and the violent clashes for control and the suppression of ideas contrary to the ruling authority. He watched as the political aspirations of many Koreans for rule by an independent government composed of Koreans was crushed. The occupying U.S. force justified its complicit attitude to this oppression with a policy that was later known euphemistically as, “they may be bastards, but they are our bastards.”

    Returning home at the completion of his service, John made good use of the GI Bill and attended City College. There he found a hotbed of radical and progressive thinking that gelled his political activism and colored his views for the rest of his life. At that time, City College was filled with young men and women who had experienced war, traveled the world, and survived the Great Depression. In this post-war environment, these energized individuals learned a common language that articulated their ideas, expressed their insights, and voiced their burgeoning progressive ideology. It was here that John’s political activism was fully born.  

    Educational aspirations led John to a master’s degree from Columbia University and then a doctorate from New York University. His chosen profession was that of an educator. He spent most of his career in New York City high schools such as Bronx Vocational (now Alfred E. Smith High School) and George Washington High School in Manhattan. He lived between New Paltz, NY and New York City. He was a strident supporter of the professionalization of teachers and initially an advocate for the teacher’s union (United Federation of Teachers). He changed this stance when the United Federation of Teachers moved away from putting educators in the forefront of teaching and mandating content over educational outcomes. He was known for raising his voice in dissent within the UFT when he felt it swayed from its commitment to the classroom teacher.

    John was responsible for the importation into the United States of film footage showing the devastating after effects of the destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. At the time, the U.S. government was suppressing the documentary footage of the bomb’s aftermath. This action earned John both an FBI and a CIA file. When he obtained these files, via a FOIA request, they were heavily redacted. Based upon the information he was able to read, he surmised that there was a personal acquaintance that informed the agencies about his whereabouts and activities. He never knew who that was.

    In the early 1960s he brought Oliver Tambo to the Bronx to speak with the students at Bronx Vocational High School. From my understanding this was way before the African National Congress became a cause celebre. I recall he told me that the school wouldn’t pay the $25 honorarium that Mr. Tambo asked for, so John paid for it out of his own pocket.

    In true iconoclast tradition, John spoke at the Antonio Gramsci Project of the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn. This participatory sculpture/complex was built within a courtyard of a South Bronx housing development in 2013. There, he gave a talk about Amadeo Bordiga, an early Italian Marxist and contemporary of Gramsci. Bordiga’s contribution has gone mostly underappreciated, as he was extremely critical of the move by Italian Communists, like Gramsci, to embrace Soviet ideology. It was Bordiga’s assessment that such a shift was a step away from fundamental Marxist thought.

    John was a member of the Green Party towards the end of his life. He also ran for political office as a Democrat. Ulster County, NY, is a very conservative county (apart from the Village of New Paltz), where even a Democrat is considered far to the left.

    While it would be nice to believe that our struggles result in heroic achievements and revolutionary actions, in reality we must accept that social change – between historic moments – is realized by incremental steps. Each of us must do our part, invest our energies, and exploit opportunities, to advance socially worthy causes and ideas. My parents insisted that their children accompany them (sometimes dragging them) to anti-war demonstrations in the 1960s and 1970s, to participate in civil actions to protest nuclear armaments in the 1980s, or to support candidates with progressive legislative agendas. They did this, if for no other reason than to offer an alternative narrative to those that are popularly held. As the son of an activist, I was regularly reminded that I have a responsibility to do my part and raise my voice whenever and wherever it is called for. This is what I try to do as a parent for my children as well.

    I consider myself extremely fortunate to have had my father for as long as I did. He lived independently up until the very last few months of his life. Having him present in my life for so long meant that there were constant ongoing discussions and debates about political analyses and worldly events. It is here that I found the value of New Politics. It is those debates and discussions that I will miss most. 

    John married a likeminded woman, Marcia Stein, a special education teacher from Brooklyn, and started a family in the Bronx. His political activism never diminished with time. He was an adjunct professor of European history, ran two unsuccessful campaigns to be an Ulster County legislator, and was always generous with money and time to the social causes in which he believed. His progressivism is shared by his two sons, André and Pier, their wives, his eight grandchildren, and three great grandchildren. John died peacefully at his home a few days past his 91st birthday.

    – Ribelli André Chiaradia

     

  • Is Change Possible in Mexico?

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    Mexicans, worse off than at any time in the last 100 years, are asking themselves as the July 2018 elections approach: Can Mexico change? Can an election change Mexico?

    Mexico is a disaster. It has become increasingly violent, the economy grows too slowly to absorb the ever-expanding workforce, and wages are below those of China, though costs are more like those in the United States.

    The Candidates

    Today, Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) sits in the Eagle Throne of the presidency, but the Mexican Constitution permits only one term. In the time honored method of the country’s authoritarian ruling party he has “tapped” or “unveiled” his successor, chosen by the party’s inner circle. While many had thought the candidate might be Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, the Secretary of the Interior, in fact the Peña Nieto and the PRI leadership chose José Antonio Meade Kuribreña, the Secretary of the Treasury. Under Mexican law, Meade has to resign his current office into order to run for president.

    The choice of Meade, a Mexican of Irish and Lebanese descent, represents an affirmation of Mexico’s commitment to the neoliberal economic agenda that the country adopted in the 1980s. With the PRI’s powerful patronage machine behind him and support from the media, Meade will be a strong contender for the presidency, though because of the country’s disgust with Peña Nieto and the PRI he begins 14 poits behind in the polls.

    Leading in various polls by anywhere between 5 and 15 percent is Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the Movement for National Regeneration or MORENA Party, a populist candidate on the left. López Obrador was the head of the government of Mexico City (the Federal District) from 2000 to 2005, best known for the building of the second level of the city’s freeway system and for establishing pensions for the elderly. He ran for president in 2006, when he is widely believed to have lost because of governmental fraud. He ran and lost again in 2012.

    López Obrador, who argues that the country has been taken over a political Mafia, puts the emphasis of his campaign on ending corruption and, while promising austerity, also advocates an expansion of infrastructure programs to improve the economy. His recently released a 415-page platform called “Project for the Nation” calls for combatting poverty, restoring peace, financial viability and austerity, gender equality, national reconstruction, sustainable development and wholesome lives for all.

    The National Action Party (PAN) is expected to nominate its president and unrivaled leader Ricardo Anaya Cortés. He will not only be the candidate of the PAN, but will head up the Citizens Front for Mexico, a coalition that includes the left-of-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and the centrist Citizens Movement (MC). Though he is the candidate of the historically religiously conservative and pro-business party, Anaya, who is only 38 years old, has called for a universal basic income for all Mexicans that would allow them to live with dignity. Over the last few decades it has been common for the conservative PAN to align with the PRD, which is part of the Socialist International, in order to defeat the dominant PRI. Yet the creation of his coalition in a presidential race is unprecedented.

    There is also a radical candidate in the race, currently gathering signatures to qualify. The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), which led an armed uprising in Mexico’s southern-most state of Chiapas in 1994, and which has since then spent its time organizing autonomous communities in that state, is now putting forward an indigenous woman, María de Jesús Partricio, as candidate for president in the 2018 elections. Chosen as candidate by the EZLN and by 1,500 delegates to the National Indigenous Congress (CNI), María de Jesús Partricio of the Nahua people, known as Marichuy, is not a prominent national figure, but rather a traditional healer who workers at La Casa de Salud Calli Tecolhuacateca Tochán, a community health center in Tuxpan, Jalisco.

    While they are putting forward health worker Partricio for president, they are not actually trying to elect her. The Zapatistas hold the Mexican government and the country’s political parties in utter disdain, both for their corruption and for their disregard for the people they supposedly represent. They also reject elections and voting on principle. Patrico’s campaign will be symbolic and have virtually no impact on electoral politics.

    Interestingly, the Political Organization of Working People (OPT), an alliance between the small Mexican Electrical Workers (SME), the Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT) and other working peoples and left organizations has backed the candidacy of Marichuy. In the 2012 election the OPT had supported López Obrador the candidate of MORENA. Today the OPT argues that Marichuy's campaign represents the candidate of Mexico's many movements of the indigenous, the farmers, and the workers, an alternative for Mexico's many exploited and oppressed peoples.

    The Crisis

    Who ever becomes president will find his or her self confronting the most challenging circumstance the country has faced since the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920. Violence is rife and poverty plentiful.

    In the last several years, Mexico has seen about 30,000 people killed each year in the drug wars, or about 300,000 since the wars began in 2006. There have also been about 30,000 forced disappearances, that is, people who have been kidnapped and possibly murdered. So many women are disappeared or killed that they have a word for it: femicidio—femicide. Reporters are frequently killed in Mexico, some 39 since 1992 and five of them in 2017. Why don’t the police do something, people frequently ask, but the police are frequently complicit in the killings and kidnappings, and routinely torture those they arrest to wring out of them false confessions for crimes the drug cartels or police themselves commit.

    Mexico’s economy remains stagnant. The Mexican GDP is growing at a rate of less than 2 percent, and in the last quarter available (July) it shrunk by 0.3 percent. While Mexico’s official unemployment rate, which is highly unreliable, is only about 3.3 percent, some 60 percent of all Mexicans work in the informal economy. And wages are low. Some seven million Mexicans live on the minimum wage of $3.86 per day, but even those who earn two or three terms remain very low-wage workers. Food alone for a family of four costs about $10.50 per day. It is this economic situation that has led almost 12 million Mexicans—that is 10 percent of the country’s total population–to migrate to the United States to seek employment at higher wages.

    The clase política, that is, the Mexican establishment made up of the upper echelons of PRI and PAN, serves the oligarchy of a dozen of Mexico’s wealthiest families, all multi-billionaires, as well as protecting the interests of foreign banks and corporations, most of them American. This is the group that López Obrador calls the Mafia. It has no interest in solving the problem of poverty and no ability to solve the problem of violence except through the greater power of the military.

    We can get a sense of the Mexican government’s political program by looking at what’s taking place in the country’s Congress at this moment. Mexico’s lower house just passed yesterday the Law of Internal Security, a piece of legislation that deals with the question of violence by the complete militarization of the country on a permanent basis. The vote found the PRI and the PAN united against MORENA, the PRD, and the MC, 248 in favor, 115 against, and 48 abstaining. Mexican human rights groups have warned that the law will lead to continuing military abuse of Mexican citizens, such as the extra-judicial killings, torture, and rape that have occurred over the decade of the drug wars.

    As for poverty, the PRI and PAN would continue with the neoliberal free trade agenda, while MORENA seeks what has been called social liberalism, that is neoliberal with social reforms. And the Zapatistas hope the country will awaken, reject electoral politics, push capitalism away, and establish the self-governing community of the producers.

    Can Mexico change? And can an election change Mexico? We will be watching on July 1, 2018.

  • Business warms to Corbyn: getting our bearings in a new political world

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    It is now seven months since Theresa May called a general election with the aim of increasing her majority and the Daily Mail published a front page headlined “Crush the Saboteurs”. The spring of this year, as regards parliamentary politics, seems like another world.

    Following May’s disastrous election results the Tories, far from recovering, are caught up in a perfect storm without parallel for decades, a disaster for which they have no solution. The Tory administration is so extraordinarily divided and incompetent that sections of the ruling class are doing something no one could have predicted in April – they are not only starting to come to terms with a future Corbyn government, but to regard Corbyn as preferable to May. The left needs to begin thinking through how we respond to this remarkable shift in political fortunes.

    The Tories’ perfect storm

    Every day now opens up some fresh hell for the Conservative government. The Observer of 19 November revealed that half of the electorate think Boris Johnson is a bad Foreign Secretary, and before lunchtime on the same day Phil Hammond had told the BBC’s Andrew Marr that there were no unemployed people in the UK.

    The first week of November saw May lose two cabinet ministers. The enquiry continues into the “extreme pornography” on the computer of Damian Green, effectively May’s deputy. Ahead of Wednesday’s Autumn Statement Tories were urging Hammond to take bold action to restore Conservative popularity – but his minor manoeuvres on Stamp Duty, Brexit preparations and the NHS will do little to address his embattled position in relation to one faction or another of a deeply divided party. It is only a week, after all, since the leak of a letter from Johnson and Gove to May calling for a firmer pro-Brexit position – a barely-veiled attack on Hammond.

    Overall, May is clearly unsuited to the role of Prime Minister, but if she steps down a leadership election will only expose her party’s divisions and enlarge them further. Her government has been defeated in the Commons seven times in the last two months alone – Thatcher was defeated four times in eleven years, Blair four times in ten.

    The last Tory government in anything like a comparable situation was that of John Major, who took over from Thatcher in 1990. Soon after his victory in the General Election of 1992, Major suffered a double setback. On Black Wednesday the government spent billions in a futile attempt to keep the pound in the Exchange Rate Mechanism, the precursor of the euro. Huge protests also responded to the government’s decision to close most British coal mines. The Tories’ reputation for financial competence was destroyed and their popularity gone, but the Major government continued – though divided over Europe and beset by sexual scandals – until the spring of 1997, when Blair won a landslide victory for Labour.

    Could May continue on a similar basis, in the hope that, somehow, things will improve? So many unexpected things have actually happened in the last six months that anyone trying to predict future events must do so with a good deal of caution. But there are two ways in which her position is even worse than Major’s, so that it’s hard to see her leading a zombie government until 2022.

    The first factor is Brexit. Almost eighteen months since the referendum vote, and over six months since May invoked Article 50, there have been no significant steps forward in negotiations between Britain and the EU. In the absence of certainty about their future in London, banks are getting ready to move elsewhere: Goldman Sachs has leased eight floors in a new office block in Frankfurt, where increased demand has pushed office rents to record levels. The Bank of England says that, as far as finance companies are concerned, a transitional deal with the EU can’t be delayed much later than Christmas. With financial services accounting for 7 percent of the British economy and employing a million people, May needs the issue resolved.

    But the Tories have to please the incompatible demands of two groups of stakeholders. Most of British business was against Brexit in the first place, and would prefer a version which involves as few changes as possible, and a lengthy transitional period which delays those changes far into the future. Many Tory voters, however, are UKIP-style nostalgic nationalists, eager for a Brexit which they believe will transform Britain and hostile to any attempt to delay it or water it down. Negotiating Brexit with a hostile EU would be hard enough were the Tories united – but the different interests of these two stakeholder groups, reflected in the divisions among Tory MPs, make it all but impossible for May to develop a coherent strategy. With a cabinet divided between Hammond on the one hand and Johnson on the other, it’s hard to see how the Tories can deliver Brexit successfully.

    The second element which makes it hard to see May leading a government for a full term is austerity. George Osborne, announcing his first budget in 2010, predicted that the books would be balanced and austerity over by 2015. But, two years past that deadline, austerity is set to continue indefinitely. Indeed, most people’s lives have taken a turn for the worse in a way unprecedented for decades or even longer. For all Thatcher’s attacks on working people, wages under her premiership continued to rise, as they did almost every year between 1975 and 2009. Real hourly earnings – earnings after inflation – almost doubled in this period.

    Since 2009, however, hourly pay has first fallen and then remained stable, but not returned to the growth which characterised the previous 35 years. Indeed, one survey calculated that the last decade has seen the lowest growth in wages for 200 years. This decline is one of the key factors underlying the different political fortunes of Thatcher and May. When Thatcher claimed that unregulated capitalism would lead to prosperity for working people, modest but regular increases in pay suggested to many of those people that, on this point at least, she was right. Whether it was a pay increase, a small windfall from buying and reselling shares in public utilities, or proud home ownership from buying your council home, Thatcher could point to justifications for the claim that capitalism would improve people’s lives. May can make no such claims, and these economic fundamentals were one of the root causes of her electoral disaster, as millions of people – especially young people, beset by student debt and unable to buy homes – have turned to Corbyn.

    The ruling class warms to Corbyn

    Corbyn successfully exploited the Tories’ deep-rooted problems to extend greatly Labour’s share of the vote in June. His election as Labour leader and his electoral performance are hugely positive developments. They bring to an end a period stretching back to Cameron’s election as Tory leader in 2005, and in some ways before that to Blair’s as Labour leader in 1994, in which a large measure of consensus prevailed between all the parliamentary parties. It was accepted that markets bring prosperity, that state involvement in the economy should be limited by privatisation and that Britain’s role as a junior partner to the US should be made clear through participation in American wars, however senseless. For all that the proposals in Labour’s election manifesto were, by historical standards, modestly reformist, Corbyn’s success means an end to those decades of consensus. Politics begins again, and indeed socialism is one of the alternatives on the agenda.

    Corbyn’s electoral success, however, is also having more contradictory effects, both inside the Labour Party and as regards Labour’s relationship with the ruling class. Inside the Labour Party, many MPs and councillors spent the first two years of Corbyn’s leadership in more or less open revolt against him. They disagreed with his politics – but that disagreement was inseparable from their view that he was certain to prove an electoral disaster. As such, he stood in the way of them both changing society for the better through parliament and advancing their own careers.

    Now that Corbyn is revealed as a possible election winner, it becomes possible for more common ground to exist between himself and those to his right. Inhabiting that common ground we find, for example, Shadow Brexit Secretary Keir Starmer, an enthusiast for the soft Brexit business would prefer, or Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry – a personally congenial politician, but only last week the guest of Labour Friends of Israel in the Middle East, who pronounced the week before that Corbyn supported a two-state solution in Palestine and was, as such, a Zionist. If part of the reason Corbyn works with such figures is a lack of more consistently left-wing Labour MPs to form a Shadow Cabinet, he has also throughout his leadership attempted to develop a centre ground, increase the unity of the Labour Party and reduce his own isolation – a strategy which goes back to his initial decision when first elected leader that Hilary Benn could continue as Shadow Foreign Secretary.

    However, even more striking than the development of common ground between Corbyn and some Labour MPs are the positive noises now being made about a Corbyn-McDonnell government by members of the British ruling class. A remarkable Observer article last weekend described the positive reception given to Corbyn’s speech at CBI conference, and makes the assessment that, with the Tories in chaos, the Shadow Cabinet looks increasingly to business like “a stable outfit and the basis for a government in waiting.” Labour’s ability to deliver a coherent strategy in favour of a soft Brexit is mentioned as a key part of its appeal.

    While businesses increasingly like the look of Labour, Corbyn for his part wound up his speech by saying that “I value the day-to-day relationship we have with the CBI, as does John McDonnell, and others in my team. And I look forward to working with all of you in the future, whenever the general election comes, and we, I hope, are in government, to continue working with you.” You have to assume that some of this is public rhetoric which doesn’t match Corbyn’s own views. But there is also beginning to cohere some notion of an identity of interests – no doubt partial and conflicted, but still real – between Corbyn, Labour MPs some way to his right (if not hardened Blairites) and the British ruling class.

    If this is the case, is this development of some common ground not a good thing? After all, a future Corbyn government will have to deal from day to day with the Parliamentary Labour Party and the CBI. If Corbyn and McDonnell face something less than total hostility as they seek to tax the rich and renationalise the railways, for example, isn’t that better than the kind of unceasing attacks that marked the period from Corbyn’s election as Labour leader to the 2017 election?

    What strategy for the left?

    The problem with Corbyn adopting such a strategy, of simply reciprocating the more constructive approach of the PLP or the CBI, is the question of where the power lies in such a de facto alliance. Ten days after the election, Corbyn stated that Labour would remain in “permanent campaign mode”. If that meant continuing the political excitement and involvement of the election campaign after the vote, it was never likely to happen – in a parliamentary democracy like ours, the main way that masses of people become involved in politics is through the polling booth. But still, the Tories are in crisis and Tory policies are causing appalling suffering – as with the case of Elaine Morrall, found dead in her freezing home, wearing a coat and scarf because she could not afford to put the heating on. There is both a need and an opportunity to bring the government down as soon as possible. If Corbyn went outside the normal limits of electoral politics – organising rallies and demos saying that the Tories are incapable of governing and have lost their mandate to do so – he could put himself at the head of a movement involving millions of people, which really could make the country ungovernable and bring down the Tories.

    The more Corbyn can become a Prime Minister like this, at the head of a popular movement, the stronger his position. The more he is supported by a widespread popular mobilisation that involves as many different groups of people as possible, the more strongly rooted his government will be and the more likely it is that the reforms it stands for will become reality.

    Yet such an approach – creating networks which can organise and support popular protest – seems to form an increasingly small part of the agenda of Corbyn and those around him. Instead, Labour’s strategy is a much more conventional electoral one – of waiting for the Tories to exhaust themselves and collapse, so that power fall into the laps of Labour as the only possible alternative. For example, Simon Hannah, author of a history of the Labour left to be published next spring, has highlighted the way that Momentum’s description of its own purpose has changed in the last eighteen months. In July 2016 the statement, entitled “What does Momentum want to do?”, began:

    “Organise in every town, city and village to secure the election of a progressive left Labour Party at every level, and to create a mass movement for real transformative change…”

    Specific references to a mass movement and social transformation are replaced in the current version by a commitment to:

    “Organise with communities across the country to put forward Labour’s ambitious plan for Britain and secure a Labour Government…”

    This focus on electoralism has been matched by Momentum’s practice – the most influential work the organisation has done has been its election campaigning, especially its innovative use of social media.

    If the focus of the Labour left is not on building a mass movement outside the Labour Party, it does also seem that there is a lack of organisation to coordinate the left inside Labour structures and to discuss the issues Corbyn will face as Prime Minister. While Momentum is portrayed in the mainstream media as the key organisation of the Corbynite left, its lack of internal democracy has led many activists to be sceptical about it. The impression to be gained from outside the party is that a patchwork of networks and discussion groups exists. But there are few forums – in terms of online discussions, magazines/websites or national organisations – where Corbyn-supporting Labour members can discuss their priorities and key strategic issues, such as those raised by John McDonnell at Labour conference – “what happens when or if they come for us? … What if there is a run on the pound?”

    This lack of discussion about strategy could create serious problems for a Corbyn government – and such a government, after all, could be in office within months. Millions of people are investing in Corbyn their hopes for better lives, and there’s no doubting his commitment to significant reforms. But, while sections of the ruling class may regard a deal with Corbyn as a price worth paying, they will still fight tooth and nail over the terms of that deal – and there will be others from the same class, and the right-wing media, utterly opposed to any such approach. So we can expect Corbyn to face opposition from day one.

    What we can do now is to begin to develop strategies for that time. The organised forces of the radical left are small, inside and outside the Labour Party. Can we do more to develop networks that can both support a Corbyn government and hold it to account if it begins to wobble under the huge pressures it will face? Can we do more to develop our understanding of the current political situation and debate the best ways to respond? Overall, can we increase the active engagement of the forces that support Corbyn in activity or debate, so that they are more actively engaged and less inclined to wait passively for reforms to be delivered from above? Those are the new and vital tasks in front of us after seven months which have transformed politics in Britain.

    Originally posted at rs21. 

  • The House Resolution on Yemen is a Stinker

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    Congress was given a chance to stand up for basic humanity and the Constitution, but instead chose to lay an egg, a rotten one at that. It rejected a chance to use the War Powers Act to halt U.S. collaboration with Saudi Arabia’s ruthless war and siege tactics in Yemen. Instead it passed a resolution that could have been written by the Saudi kingdom’s lawyers and publicists.

    The effort started well. Reps. Ro Khanna, Thomas Massie, Mark Pocan, and Walter Jones introduced a privileged bipartisan bill invoking the War Powers Resolution to force a floor vote on ending U.S. participation in Saudi Arabia’s two year old war. Eventually H.Con.Res. 81 had 45 cosponsors and support from a large number of organizations. They had been building on a number of efforts in Congress to stop US involvement, including one this June that narrowly failed to stop the sale of $500 million in precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia.

    Their key legal point was that Congress had never authorized participation in what plainly is a war. They tried to invoke the Constitution, through enforcement of the War Powers Act, legislation passed in the 1970’s to hold back the tendency towards an imperial presidency and disasters like the Vietnam War.

    The action in Congress came on the heels of a U.N. warning. The Saudis had just shut down all land, sea, and air entry to Yemen, supposedly to keep out Iranian weapons. For a country devastated by civil war and Saudi bombing and totally dependent on donations of food, medicine and chemicals to treat water, it was a death knell. The U.N.’s highest official on humanitarian aid, Mark Lawcock, told reporters outside the Security Council, “There will be a famine in Yemen. It will not be like the one in 2011 in Somalia that cost 250,000 people their lives. It will be the largest famine the world has seen in many decades, with millions of victims.” Millions!

    Yet the Khanna bill ran into opposition, not just from a Republican leadership eager to support a president who firmly thinks (or tweets) that the Saudi princes “know exactly what they’re doing,” but also from the Democratic Whip, Steny Hoyer, who urged fellow Democrats to refuse to sign onto the bill. In the end the “privileged” status was stripped from the bill and it was sent to oblivion in committee and another bill put in its place and guaranteed one hour of debate.

    It was House Resolution 599, which did nothing to stop our warfare on Yemen. It had nothing in it about U.S. weapons being sold to the Saudis or U.S. mid-air refueling of Saudi bombers. Instead it provided a tendentious history of the bloodshed and our involvement, wrapped in a fig leaf of pious clauses urging the warring parties to obey humanitarian law.

    When you inspect the resolution’s “whereas” sections you see the entire situation framed with the Saudi kingdom’s legal and factual assertions. It claims that “In 2014 after years of violence and insurgency, Iranian-supported Houthi rebels seized the Yemeni capital.” The Iranian bugaboo is in there right at the start and all through the resolution. In fact this analysis is topsy-turvy. Whatever Iranian military aid the Houthis received came after the Saudis started bombing in 2015. Elizabeth Kendall writing in October of this year says the Houthis were “only marginally connected to Iran” and in fact that Iran had advised the Houthis not to conquer Yemen’s capital city. Her paper is under the auspices of The Atlantic Council project “Pushback: Countering and Exposing Iran” whose purposes can hardly be seen as friendly to the Tehran regime.

    U.S. House Resolution 599 further claims that the Hadi government is the “legitimate” and “internationally recognized” government (even though Hadi was the Vice President of Yemen’s last dictator for 17 years and was picked by the Gulf kingdoms to pacify and thwart Yemen’s democratic revolution). The resolution justifies Saudi intervention with this clause, “Whereas the Saudi-led Arab Coalition launched a military intervention in 2015 against the Houthi-Saleh alliance in response to the deposition of the legitimate Government of Yemen.” Nowhere does it mention that by law the United Nations Security Council must authorize military action by foreign or international forces, something that has never happened.

    Then there’s this section: “Whereas the Saudi-led Arab Coalition has worked to improve their targeting processes and capabilities aimed at reducing unintended civilian casualties….” This is grotesque. The Saudis have bombed schools, markets, civilian airports, hospitals, and wedding parties. In October 2016 their air force bombed a funeral home during a funeral. Hundreds of mourners were decimated.

    HR 599 mentions that Yemen is suffering 500,000 cases of cholera (the number is more like 900,000), but it emptily blames it on “the war.” There is no mention in the resolution that Saudi bombing has destroyed the clean water infrastructure. 

    The final sections of the resolution are the “Resolved” clauses. These clauses make not one demand on Saudi Arabia, call for no suspension in international arms sales to the kingdom, and put no pressure on the Trump Administration. Instead the resolution salutes the Saudi kingdom as it declares that the U.S. House of Representatives “supports the Saudi-led Arab Coalition’s 14 commitments to abide by their no-strike list and restricted target list and improve their targeting capabilities.” The only country criticized by name in the resolution is Iran. The resolution “condemns Iranian activities in Yemen in violation of UNSCR 2216” and blesses “the interdiction of Iranian weapons to the Houthis.”

    To be sure the resolution has a few pious sentences about humanitarian concerns. It denounces activities “inconsistent with the laws of armed conflict, including the deliberate targeting of civilian populations.” Yet it does NOT call for an end to the closing of all access to Yemen by land, sea, and air, just for access to Yemen by humanitarian groups and reporters.

    The resolution passed 366-30. Members of Congress can now go on to their Thanksgiving feasts with good consciences. They have used an hour of their valuable time for a #YemenDebate. No need to do more about the coming Yemen famine.

    Yet a day later Connecticut’s Senator Chris Murphy persisted in talking about Yemen, persisted in denouncing the Saudi-U.S. war there. He started his remarks by doing the unthinkable. He described what cholera actually is, what it’s like to suffer through it. His language was medical as he talked about uncontrolled diarrhea and vomiting. He did it in less than a minute. If he had graphically related the symptoms of what hundreds of thousands of Yemenis were feeling and what measures brave medical personnel have to take, he would have left the Senate gagging in disgust. Come to think of it, that is what we all should be feeling after observing years of U.S. government support for the Saudi kingdom’s wretched attack on Yemen.

    Efforts to fight the Saudi-U.S. aggression against Yemen must continue. Check out the Coalition to End the U.S.-Saudi Alliance: www.SaudiUS.org

     

    Stanley Heller is Administrator of Promoting Enduring Peace, founded 65 years ago in New Haven, best known for its Gandhi Peace Award, www.pepeace.org. He can be reached at stanley.heller@pepeace.org PEP is active in the Coalition to End the U.S.-Saudi Alliance

     

  • Lone-Wolf Terrorism: A Symptom of the Deepening Social Crisis

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    On November 5, 2017, 26-year-old Devin Kelley killed 26 people and injured 20 others attending Sunday church services at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, TX.  This small, unincorporated community is 30 miles southeast of San Antonio and, in 2000, its population was but 362 people. Sadly, Kelley is the latest, but not the last lone-wolf terrorist to engage in the mass killing of Americans.

    Kelley seems to have been a very troubled man.  He grew up in New Braunfels, TX, located about 35 miles from where the killings took place.  After graduating high school, he joined the Air Force.  While serving, he violently assaulted his wife and step-child, and was court-martialed for domestic violence, served a one-year detention sentence, was demoted and received a bad conduct discharge.  He subsequently remarried and was the father of another child, but was living a hard-scrabble existence.  Due to an Air Force screw-up, Kelley was able to purchase a Ruger AR assault-type rifle and an anti-ballistic vest which he used in his murderous rampage.

    Five days earlier, on October 31st, Sayfullo Saipov, a 29-year-old legal immigrant form Uzbekistan, undertook another terrorist act.  At around 3:00 pm on Halloween afternoon, Saipov drove a rented pickup truck on a bicycle path abutting the West Side Highway along the Hudson River in New York’s downtown Tribeca district, attacking pedestrians and bicyclists, killing 8 people and injuring 12 others. After crashing his truck into a school bus and attempting to flee, Saipoy was shot by a police officer and shouted in Arabic “Allahu akbar,” “God is great.”

    Earlier that month, on October 3rd, in Las Vegas, NV, Stephen Paddock, a 64-year-old retired real-estate speculator and gambler, shot re-tooled assault rifles from a room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay at attendees of the Route 91 Harvest music festival, killing 59 people and leading to over 500 people being injured.  After the shooting, police found 23 guns in his room at on Mandalay Bay hotel as well as 20-plus more in his two Nevada homes, along with an enormous amount of ammunition.  He seems to have been as normal as the proverbial “guy next door,” although some reports claim his father was reportedly mentally ill with “psychopathic with suicidal tendencies.”

    In August, at the bloody anti-racist showdown in Charlottesville, VA, a 20-year-old white nationalist, James Alex Fields, Jr., from Maumee, OH, drove his car into a crowd of demonstrators, killing Heather Heyer, a 32-year old local resident, and injured 19 others.

    Killings by lone-wolf perpetrators are reaching an epidemic proportion.  Over the last few years, there have been dozens of such incidents.  Six that gained significant media attention over just the last five years are: (i) Omar Mateen killed 49 (50 including himself) people and injured 58 at an Orlando, FL gay nightclub in 2016; (ii) Micah Johnson shot and killed four Dallas police officers and one Dallas Area Rapid Transit officer in what authorities called a “sniper ambush” in 2016; (iii) Ahmad Khan Raimi, a 28-year-old, Afghan-born U.S. citizen, detonated a pressure cooker bomb in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood and exploded a pipe bomb along a Marine Corps charity race in in Seaside Park, NJ, in 2016; (iv) Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik shot and killed 14 people and wounding 22 others at an office 2015 Christmas party in San Bernardino, CA; (v) the white racist Dylann Roof killed nine African-American parishioners at the Emanuel AME Church in downtown Charleston in 2015; and (vi) the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing by Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev left three spectators dead and wounded 264 others.

    Government and media reporting on these and similar incidents attempt to distinguish between “mass shootings” and “terrorist” acts.  Mass shootings, like those committed by Kelley and Paddock, involve lone-wolfs driven by psycho-personal factors; terrorist acts, like those committed by Saipov and Fields, involve lone-wolfs driven by ideological-political factors.  The distinction, while analytically useful, fails to grasp the underlying commonality binding the growing phenomenon of lone-wolf terrorism. Most troubling, lone-wolf terrorism is a symptom of the deepening social crisis.

    * * *

    “The United States (US) is the primary target among western states for lone wolf terrorist (LWT) attacks, and the frequency of attacks continues to increase.”  These words open a June 2015 Georgetown National Security Critical Issue Task Force (NSCITF) report, “Lone Wolf Terrorism.”  It points out that while such terrorist acts constitute a very small portion of all terrorist attacks (1.8 percent), it notes that such attacks more than doubled from 30 attacks in the 1970s to 73 attacks in the 2000s.

    Since 1900, according to Wikipedia, more than 100 acts of political terrorism have taken place in the U.S., many committed by lone-wolfs.  They include the assassinations of two presidents – William McKinley (1901) and John Kennedy (1963) – as well as the attempted assassinations in the continental U.S. of seven presidents – Theodore Roosevelt (1912), Franklin Roosevelt (1933), Harry Truman (1950), Kennedy (1960), Richard Nixon (1972, George Wallace paralyzed), Gerald Ford (1975) and Ronald Reagan (1981, James Brady wounded).  These are attacks on presidents; no one knows the true scale of terrorist violence in the America.

    A 1999 FBI report, “Terrorism in the United States,” found that in the two decades between 1980 and 1999 there were 327 domestic terrorist acts that left 205 people dead and 2,037 injured.  A 2010 report from the University of Maryland’s START (National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism) project found that between 1970 and 2007 the U.S. faced 1,347 “terrorist attacks.”  It reports that New York was the most targeted city (21% or 284 attacks), followed by Miami (70), San Francisco (66), Washington, DC (59) and Los Angeles (54).  (For a list of terrorist acts dating from 1865, see Wm. Robert Johnston, “Terrorist attacks and related incidents in the United States.”)

    Earlier this year, the nonprofit advocacy group, Everytown for Gun Safety, released a revealing study, “Mass Shooting in the United States, 2009-2016,” reporting that from 2009-2016, there were 156 “mass shootings” in the U.S.  Such incidents are defined in terms of whether four or more people were shot and killed.  Digging deeper, it found: “These incidents resulted in 1,187 victims shot: 848 people were shot and killed, and 339 people were shot and injured. In addition, 66 perpetrators killed themselves after a mass shooting, and another 17 perpetrators were shot and killed by responding law enforcement.”  Most disturbing, “the majority of mass shootings – 54 percent of cases – were related to domestic or family violence.”

    The Georgetown study warns, “While the majority of LWTs are single, white men with criminal records, these patterns are too broad to develop a clear profile for LEOs.”  Among the most notorious lone-wolfs are: Andrew Philip Kehoe, who committed the 1927 bombing of the Bath, MI, School; George Metsky, known as the New York “mad bomber” during the 1940-1956 period; Sam Melville and Jane Alpert, 1960s New Left radicals; and Ted Kaczynski, the “Unibomber” who operated between 1978-1995.

    Today’s lone-wolf domestic terrorists are draw from the same ideological cloth as those of yesteryear.  They are driven by political-ideological, cultural-religious or psycho-pathologically forces.  Sometimes, combinations of all three categories are realized in violent acts. The following examples illustrate each category.

    Among lone-wolf political attackers are:

    §  April 19, 1995: Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, OK; the explosion left 169 people dead, including 19 children, and more than 675 people injured; it also damaged or destroyed more than 300 buildings in the immediate area.

    §  April 15, 2013: Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a 26-year-old Chechen immigrant, and his 19-year-old brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, explode a self-made bomb near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three spectators and wounding 264 others.

    §  December 2, 2015: a married couple, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, kills 14 people and wounding 22 others, many of them Farook’s co-workers, a holiday party in the conference room at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, CA.

    Among lone-wolf cultural attackers are:

    §  June 17, 2015: the white racist Dylann Roof kills nine African-American parishioners at the Emanuel AME Church in downtown Charleston, SC; his website was named the “Last Rhodesian” and his jacket sported flags of white-ruled Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and South Africa; his car license plate featuring the Confederate flag; and his racist manifesto.

    §  June 11, 2016: Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old American-born Muslim son of Afghan immigrant, kills 50 people (including himself) and the wounding of 53 others in Orlando, FL, at the Pulse nightclub, a popular gay entertainment and community center, on Latin night.

    Among lone-wolf psychopathic attackers are:

    §  July 20, 2012: James Holmes kills 12 people and injured 70 others in a shootout at an Aurora, CO, movie theatre.

    §  December 14, 2012: Adam Lanza, a 20-year-old resident of Newtown, CT, fatally shot and killed 20 children and seven staff members at the Sandy Hook Elementary School as well as his mother.

    The recent long-wolf attacks – Kelley’s at a Texas church, Saipov’s targeting New York pedestrians and cyclists, Paddock’s Las Vegas shootings and Fields’ crashing into a demonstrator – reflect the complexity of the terrorist act.

    * * *

    The Georgetown study identifies “four main trends” among domestic, lone-wolf terrorists:

    §  Increasingly target law enforcement and military personnel;

    §  Overwhelmingly use firearms to conduct attacks;

    §  Increasingly become radicalized via the Internet, extremist media and the civilian workplace; and,

    §  Proclaim an individual ideology instead of claiming affinity to specific, organized extremist groups.

    In the next few years, domestic lone-wolf terrorist incidents are likely to increase.

    Sadly, the Everytown for Gun Safety study warns that the “majority of mass shootings in the United States are related to domestic or family violence.”  It notes that many share a set of common symptoms including the violation of a protective order, evidence of ongoing substance abuse, serious mental illnesses and the easy availability of high-powered assault firearms.

    One factor that seems common to many (if not all) recent mass shooters or terrorists — but given little attention – is the deepening sense of disillusionment spreading through the country.  It is like an undiagnosed cancer, a phenomenon that is often expressed in secondary symptoms until a major outbreak – like a terrorist act – occurs that is too late to treat. Disillusionment is expressed in the rising morbidity and mortality rates, including suicides and drug (e.g., heroine and oxy-condign) overdoses among white men 35 to 64 years.  It is also expressed in the deepening dissatisfaction with the way income and wealth are distributed, notably ongoing wage stagnation and the rising poverty rate. And some are waging a war against U.S. war-making internationally.

    Most troubling, depression and social or political cynicism is mounting, evident is a growing sense that the long-cherished belief in the “American Dream” is over.  This is the shared ideology that shape American society for a half-century following WWII.  It is the defining belief that hard work, debt and white skin privilege would guarantee the ordinary American – and, more importantly, their children – a better tomorrow. Those days are over.

    American disillusionment was most bitterly expressed in the desperate effort to reverse history that elected Trump president.  In such a festering social setting, one can only expect the worst – more lone-wolf terrorism.

  • A New Green Uniform for Latin America’s Armies?

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    When the decorated “Hero of the Republic of Cuba,” General Ramón Espinosa Martín, rallied his forces in the province of Camagüey in September, it was against an enemy far more dangerous than those he had faced in the Escambray mountains in 1958 during the Cuban Revolution or even in Angola in 1975 resisting US and South African intervention. This enemy was nature itself.

    Cuba’s military, like others throughout the Caribbean, was in the front line preparing for the devastating Hurricane Irma that battered the island from September 7–10, destroyed 14,657 Cuban homes, and damaged many others.

    Through a complex network of well-established civil defence and compensation strategies, Cuba’s National Defense Council led the official response to the disaster – and undoubtedly saved hundreds, if not thousands, of lives.

    In Mexico, where two devastating earthquakes struck in September, causing significant damage and claiming at least 467 lives, the armed forces took over many rescue operations. In Guatemala, the military has been at the forefront of the government’s response to recurrent flooding this year that has affected at least 144,000 people.

    Latin American militaries have also been in the frontline combating another natural threat: disease. In April this year Peru’s army was drafted in to help fight dengue fever in Piura. In Brazil in 2016, in the largest military mobilization in the country’s history, the armed forces were tasked with eradicating the mosquito responsible for spreading the Zika virus.

    From hurricanes to earthquakes to diseases, when natural disasters strike Latin American militaries are invariably called up. Even if there is little prospect of inter-state warfare in this region, its armed forces are often kept busy mopping up the mess caused by nature.

    Yet if you were to bury yourself in scholarship on security on Latin America, you could be forgiven for thinking that war is imminent. Academic security perspectives remain overwhelmingly concerned with armed defence of the state and have singularly failed to engage with alternative theories that have proliferated since the end of the Cold War.

    This is largely because  a traditional understanding of security as defence – built on the aging firmament of Clausewitzian ideas about warfare and US Cold War priorities – continues to exert disproportionate influence over scholarship about this region of the world.

    In the US itself, where most of the research on security in Latin America originates, policymakers are also constantly finding new potential threats in the region. Accordingly, English-language perspectives have focused disproportionately on issues of public security and violence, the war on drugs, cross-border terrorism and migration, and low-intensity conflicts within strategic US allies.

    Alternative security theories

    The end of the Cold War posed searching questions about the purpose of security, spawning alternative theories that went beyond traditional concerns about war to explore “emergent” threats deriving from globalization.

    Scholars began to ask what or who should be the most appropriate object of security, and many argued that “national security doctrine” had not rid people of the everyday insecurities caused by poverty, hunger and poor health. A “human security” perspective was enthusiastically taken up by multilateral bodies. Debates about “securitization” widened the range of policy areas approached through a lens of security.

    Similarly, growing interest in “environmental security” began to address diverse themes – from the environmental impact of warfare to the potential for “greening” defense activities. Debates touched on a range of themes, from the potential for environmental changes to fuel inter-state conflict (the “environment-conflict” thesis) to the securitization of climate change.

    Yet when it comes to scholarship about Latin America, these alternative conceptions of security have had a limited impact and, even when they have been the main focus of research on the region, have tended to reflect US anxieties.

    This is strange, because even a cursory examination of history reveals that there has been little inter-state warfare in this region.

    Arie Kacowicz, for example, has argued that an absence of warfare means there has been a long South American peace since the late 19th century and that, with the end of the Cold War and the resolution of conflicts in Central America, the region has become one of the most peaceful in the world.

    The role of the military in Latin America has, in fact, rarely been one of fighting wars, and the region is one of the least militarized in the world. It is on the periphery of the international system, states rarely face the security dilemmas found elsewhere, and there are no existential threats to national security. WMD are absent amid an emphasis on nuclear non-proliferation, growing security cooperation, and an increasing commitment to peacekeeping.

    The character of scholarly debates on Latin American security reflects a lack of empirical research on policymaking, and the obvious point of departure for correcting this is to undertake a close reading of the libros blancos – the defence “white papers” compiled throughout the region between 1989 and 2015 as part of a confidence-building agenda agreed by defence ministers at the US-sponsored Williamsburg summit in 1995. These in fact paint a picture of security thinking that challenges US scholastic obsessions.

    The most striking recurring theme in these white papers is how security policy must be reconciled with democracy, an emphasis that reflects both a determined effort to ensure civilian control over defence ministries following a lomng period of military rule and, in Ecuador and Colombia, the product of public consultation exercises that ended the military monopoly over policymaking. These documents are notable for recognising that defence is not solely a military responsibility but a social one, reinforcing the underlying trend in civil-military relations.

    A second aspect of these white papers is their lack of theoretical sophistication – and in the absence of theory, civilian governments resorted to institutional and historical arguments to explain why they needed to reassess their security policies. In most cases they took their cues from the momentum generated at Williamsburg and resulting changes in the inter-American defence system that established a network of regional security forums.

    A third feature of these papers that has been addressed only in a limited way is an explicit commitment to human security objectives. Ecuador, for example, developed a sophisticated analysis of human security in 2002 and wrote this into its constitution (Article 393). An oft-stated reason for pursuing human security objectives was an underlying commitment to economic development that interpreted inequality as a threat to stability.

    Finally, these white papers demonstrate that the creation of institutional structures for military cooperation across the region had important implications, by reducing the emphasis in security policy upon armed force and increasing the emphasis upon collective defence. Such ideas were only possible in a situation where military clashes were considered unlikely, and the white papers developed historical perspectives that alluded recurrently to the disappearance of conflicts and foresaw few prospects of future ones.

    In summary, these white papers offer compelling evidence of a shift in emphasis away from the coercive aspects of security policy towards notions of collective defence, an embrace of human security perspectives, and a developmental aspiration. There is little doubt that this reinterpretation was driven by the politics of the Left, reflecting the broader process of democratization.

    Nonetheless, these white papers also show that the environment has hitherto not been a prominent security concern, and has been incorporated as a threat within policymaking mainly in terms of broader concern about natural disasters.

    Environmental security puzzle

    The absence of scholarship on environmental security in Latin America and the limited attention this is given in the policy documents is puzzling, given the factors that make this region fertile territory for theoretical development.

    Those factors begin with the history of the region, which yields many examples of security responses to the threats posed by the natural environment and has been the scene of incessant struggles over land and resources. More recently, the transition to democracy pushed the environment up the political agenda to the extent that Latin America has since had a disproportionate influence over global climate change debates.

    A key question, therefore, is why traditional security perspectives have persisted. First and foremost has been the overwhelming influence of the US over the security agenda in Latin America. While the end of superpower tensions after 1989 clearly strengthened policymaking autonomy vis-à-vis Washington, there have been signs of a revived emphasis on military power reminiscent of the Cold War.

    A second reason for the persistence of traditional security perspectives has been the unique, often dominant status of the military in Latin American political development. The high command’s interpretation of threats and fetishistic sovereign vocation have had an overbearing influence on security policy, helping to explain why until recently this remained exclusively a military domain characterized by a focus on armed defence against enemies of the state. Notwithstanding this, and seen in the round, the military has also had a profoundly malign influence on politics as frequent foes of democracy and serial abusers of human rights.

    Together, these factors have frozen scholarly perceptions in time, preventing debates about Latin American security from moving forward.

    This would be little more than an academic problem were it not for the fact that it is stifling Latin America’s ability to respond the principal security threat that it confronts today.

    Ample evidence suggests that extreme weather events and natural disasters are already the main threats faced by this region, and that these are set to worsen due to climate change. It has been argued that the effects of Hurricane Harvey in the Gulf of Mexico earlier this month, for example, were made significantly worse by climate change.

    The UN’s World Risk Index for 2016 lists eight Latin American countries within the 30 that face most risk from extreme events. The Germanwatch Global Climate Risk Index  places four countries in Latin America – Honduras, Haiti, Nicaragua and Guatemala – among the 10 most badly affected globally by extreme weather events between 1996 and 2015. The 2017 tropical cyclone season was spectacular in terms of the number of events hitting the Caribbean, but at any given time the organization ReliefWeb monitors a series of ongoing disasters in Latin America.

    Concern about increasing natural disasters has prompted leaders of multilateral bodies to warn about a lack of preparedness for growing risk. In Chile in early 2017, for example, the severe impact of forest fires was blamed on poor preparation for climate change.

    Moreover, alongside climate change, Latin America already faces serious environmental challenges: from soil degradation and deforestation to the polluting impact of mining and threats to biodiversity.

    There are further reasons why Latin America should be an ideal laboratory for environmental security approaches.

    The region has been an important focus of research on the “environment-conflict” thesis, especially in Amazonia and Central America, has a long history of violent conflict over land, and in recent decades has witnessed a proliferation of socio-environmental conflicts. Moreover, it continues to suffer high levels of inequality, which can increase the risk of violent conflict. In 2007, International Alert identified 46 countries globally where, as a knock-on effect of climate change, there was a high risk of armed conflict, which included Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and Haiti. A number of studies conclude that climate change is a threat multiplier, increasing the risk of instability in fragile states.

    Latin America also offers opportunities to address a question that has been at the heart of the human security approach: security for whom? Ecuador and Bolivia both provide many examples of the security dilemmas states can face when development policies contradict environmental commitments and the interests of indigenous groups.

    The securitization of extractive and agricultural resources is becoming a prominent political issue in Peru, Mexico, Paraguay and Honduras. This has made indigenous groups and environmental activists targets of violence, and in 2016, Global Witness placed five Latin American countries the top 10 experiencing the highest number of killings of environmental activists.

    Swords into ploughshares

    Under the circumstances, it is opportune moment for Latin American security debates to shift their attention away from traditional strategic affairs to environmental themes.

    First, a transition has been underway in the role of militaries for some time and new ideas are displacing the state as the sole focus of security. Second, traditional notions of sovereignty are being tested by regional cooperation in ways that make them more open to the dicussion of environmental threats, which are inherently non-national. Third, multilateral initiatives have proliferated to address sustainable development, offering an institutional basis for collaboration on environmental security. Finally, the traditional focus of “national security doctrine” on economic development cherished by Latin America’s top brass offers a way to reconcile military and environmental priorities.

    In 2012, the scholar David Pion-Berlin argued that persistent interest in military defence in Latin America was ironic because the security threats it faces today do not lend themselves well to military responses. He asked, provocatively, whether the military had outlived its usefulness.

    This is not a frivolous question in a region with little warfare, not least because of military expenditure – totalling $67bn in 2016. This level of spending on armies that do not fight makes little sense when the cost of environmental threats is considered: for example, the combined price tag of the 2010 earthquakes in Chile and Haiti alone was about $38bn – 50% of the entire Latin American and Caribbean military budget in that year ($77bn).

    Moreover, Latin America is lucky to have two unique role models where governments have chosen to dismantle their armies, Costa Rica and Panama. It is no coincidence that Costa Rica is recognized as a global leader in environmental protection, and in 2017 topped the Happy Planet Index ranking socio-environmental wellbeing for the third year in a row.

    The response of Latin America’s militaries to disasters demonstrates where the real value of these institutions lies in this region today, and their future potential in the battle against climate change. Given this, soldiers are more likely to need shovels than guns.

    A region without warfare that boasts our shared planet’s most awe-inspiring biodiversity – where the military has been little but a malign influence – might be better served anyway by turning its swords into ploughshares.

  • Post-Modern Trumpism and Loneliness: The Rise of Vulgar Authoritarianism

    ImageLoneliness

    In Hannah Arendt’s pioneering book The Origins of Totalitarianism, she criticized the failure of many to understand the appeals of fascism to modern citizens. She wrote that many observers gave fairly rote justifications for its rise and appeal in an apparently advanced and enlightened country like Germany, the birthplaces of Goethe, Kant, and Beethoven. Some claimed that it was the depressed economy that was responsible. Others in the German context pointed to defeat and humiliation in the First World War. Some reactionary conservatives claimed it was declining moral standards and the collapse of religiosity. And Arendt accepted that many of these might have something to do with it. But her ultimate explanation was far simpler and yet strangely more acute. Modern Germans were lonely.

     The technologically oriented modern world, focused on the production of wealth and new economic values had driven many Germans from their homes in rural areas. There they had expected to grow into secure jobs in traditional forms of work whose ancestry went back centuries. Instead, they found themselves in big cities where they knew no one and were exposed to forms of life with which they had no familiarity, and which seemed to evolve and metastasize from day to day. Coupled with the realization that myth of endless capitalist expansion was simply that, a mythology brutally desacralized with the advent of Depression and unemployment, countless Germans found themselves alone and poor in a world that seemed strange and unreal to them. In this context, their capacity for resentment and radicalization deepened and could gnaw at itself in bitter isolation. It was only a matter of time before many of these same Germans gravitated to the simplifying but rhetorically powerful movements who promised them belonging, prosperity, and of course revenge against the manipulative alien parties who had manipulated them and infected their country.

    Today, Arendt’s analysis still has a great deal to teach us about the appeal of hard right movements to lonely individuals. Much has been written about the rise of Trumpism–its relativism, its appeal to traditional values to efface all standard political conventions, its vulgarity, its populism–but relatively little attention has been paid to its psycho-social foundations beyond traditional appeals to working class ennui and economic malaise. Here Arendt can still be our teacher. But we must update her insights considerably by looking at how our now post-modern technological world engenders new but still seductive hard right movements.

    Technology and Capitalism

    It seems strange today to think of how anyone could be lonely. Technology, especially telecommunications and the internet, have brought about a global village where billions of people can interconnect with one another in an instant. Often all that is required is a cell phone with a decent enough data plan. People are connecting with one another at a rate that would bewilder even such prophets of the post-modern world as Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard. Moreover, the economy is booming. After a recessionary dip in the last 2000s, the 2010s have seen recovery and job expansion in the United States and many other OECD countries.

    Any yet hard right movements like Trumpism thrive because people say they are deeply anxious and losing their country. They feel alienated and like they no longer connect with their communities. Many claim that Western Civilization itself-whatever that means-is under assault by hordes of turbaned and hooded immigrants bringing foreign religions and customs. How is this possible? With immense capacities to communicate, and interconnected economy, and Western Civilization still mostly retaining its position as a globally hegemonic, how is it that these hard right movements exist. I believe the answer lies more deeply, in the political economic processes of post-modern capitalism and its alliance with the powers of technology. Much as in Arendt’s day, these same forces continue to propel a culture of loneliness and anxiety. But they do so in a unique way.

    In the United States and other Western countries, reactionary conservatives have long made idols of both Christendom and the dollar. They wanted a white, Christian society organized according to traditional mores that were widely approved by democratic majorities. At the same time they wanted robust capitalist societies in which barriers to capital expansion and wealth creation were liquidated as rapidly as possible. What was never accepted was the fundamental tension between these two positions. The stability of a traditional way of life is in no small part dependent on maintaining forms of wealth creation and their affiliated technologies to the extent possible. But one of the features of capitalization, especially in the post-modern era where technology enables the movement of wealth and the creation of new industries with unparalleled rapidity, has been precisely to upend these traditional forms of wealth creation and their affiliated technologies. At points capitalist firms will move themselves around the globe. At others they will simply outdate industries; coal being an ideal example. These will demolish traditional forms of wealth creation and the communities which depend on them. And this is only the surface tendencies.

    Echoing observations by Edmund Burke decades before, in the middle of the nineteenth century Karl Marx wrote that in capitalism “everything that is solid melts into the air.”  He was referring to capitalisms’ tendency to upend traditional forms of life and their affiliated mores. Strangely, it has largely been the deepest conservative critics who acknowledged this tendency and sought to explain it. Writers such as Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter, and George Grant recognized that capitalism-for all its variations-has an uncanny ability to transform societies by liquidating barriers, including moral barriers, to the pursuit of profit. In some circumstances this could mean liberalizing the public sphere. In other circumstances, it meant colonizing the globe to establish new markets and tear down competition.

    We can see the impacts of this everyday. We live in a society where capitalist firms continuously create new values through the production of new products and technologies which are affiliated with diverse ways of life. In effect, capitalism produces social difference by encouraging people to express their individuality through consumption. Bohemian hipsters assume their identity through purchasing the right clothes, drinking the right beer, and pushing for the legalized sale of narcotics. Emancipated women are expected to earn a big salary, wear the right clothes, and buy cars that would make a yuppie blush. And of course, we have a President who has transformed the very idea of truth into a kind of marketable value, determined by popularity and campaign donations. And this is simply the case in the Western world. It boggles the imagination to conceive of the social transformations wrought by capital in economic giants such as China and India, where growing disparities in wealth and development have led to immensely different ways of living in various parts of the country.

    Trumpism and Capitalism

    We can now bring this analysis full circle to update Arendt’s analysis of loneliness and the appeal of fascism. Modern capitalism continuously revolutionizes both the forms of wealth creation and the affiliated technologies present in a society, and the values that society professes. Far from being an ally of traditional, “Christian,” society, it has demolished even the possibility of tradition. And it will continue to do so at an accelerating rate.

    Recognizing this and dealing with it extensively would require a deep rooted commitment to critique and analysis of contemporary trends in political economy and our growing dependence on technology. But this is rarely undertaken, in no small part because the powers that be benefit from these very tendencies and have no interest in seeing them abetted. The consequence is that the many individuals who are increasingly outdated by these trends, and left alone in a society they no longer recognize, turn to the modern technologies which helped render them obsolete. There, they do not turn to the global polis and the wealth of information provided by modern technologies. Instead these individuals look inward, towards groups and individuals who feel the same sense of alienation and loneliness. Rather than look to the complexity of these social trends, and recognizing the breadth of the problem, these individuals find powerful figures like Trump and Steve Bannon who are willing to profit from, and direct, the powers caged in their resentment. The finger is pointed not at the roots of social trends, but at its symptoms and critics. Migrants, leftists, intellectuals and employees in the knowledge sector, cosmopolitans and so on. These provide an easy and vulnerable outlet for lashing out. So a few hundred Muslims wearing a burka, or a Professor teaching a class on post-colonial theory for two hours a week, become the subject of paranoiac projects. They are tormentors who emerge to tear down society. All the while, what is ignored is that figures like Trump and Bannon, who deploy the might of capital and technology to advance their own power and egos, are the most individualized catalysts for the real forces undermining tradition and society. The vulgar authoritarianism of Trumpism is the result of these radical trends in our society. It gives expression to the resentment of the lonely and alienated whom these trends have left behind, and deliberately channels their energy against the weak and vulnerable to prevent recognition of the real roots of the problem. 

  • Herman Axelbank, Max Eastman, and the Documentary “Tsar to Lenin”

    ImageThe Russian Revolution, the only—if only briefly—successful workers’ revolution took place in the era of photography and film, consequently thousands of hours of film footage from the revolutionary period existed. In the late 1920s, as the revolution’s red star was fading, a Russian-born man decided to collect as much as possible of the existing film—some of it shot by individuals, some by governments, some by new agencies, some by who-knows-who. Eventually, over 50 years this man collected some 271 motion picture film reels. He was a fanatic. Glad he was.

    Herman Axelbank, who had been born in 1900 in Nowo Konstantinow, Ukraine (at the time part of the Russian empire) later moved to the Bronx in New York City. In 1920 he began collecting film footage of the Russian Revolution; gradually this became his personal calling, his obsession. Eventually he compiled and edited the film into a roughly chronological account. Then in 1928 he contacted the writer Max Eastman to ask his help in producing an actual film. Eastman described his first impression of Axelbank:

    In the late autumn of 1928, a young man named Herman Axelbank came to see me—a persuasive young man. He was broad and short, hairy enough so that his chin was always blue, and his skull, which he kept close-cropped, was so shaped as to give him—but for his eyes—a rather formidable appearance. His eyes were deep blue and warm, and could be very convincing of his nobility of spirit. And he had in his possession a thing of great value to mankind: a collection of all the important films, or most of them, that had been taken of momentous events and personalities in the Russian revolution. He had come down from the Bronx merely to ask me whether I thought a consecutive narrative could be made of them, but before we parted he had offered to give me complete editorial control, and split the profits fifty-fifty, if I could convert hem into a “visible history” of the revolution.[1]

    Eastman agreed to take on the job.

    Axelbank had come to the right man. Max Eastman had been a socialist virtually all of his adult life, editor of The Masses and later of The Liberator. It was Eastman who raised the money to send John Reed to Russia where Reed wrote Ten Days that Shook the World, first published serially in Eastman’s magazine. In 1922 Eastman went to Russia to see the revolution for himself, spending a year and nine months there. In 1928 a Russian Communist named Eleazar Solnetsev passed on to Eastman a bundle of political papers written by Leon Trotsky, leader of the opposition to Joseph Stalin in Russia. At about the same time, Eastman was contacted by James Cannon, a longtime Communist who has just become a supporter Trotsky and his opposition group in Russia. Eastman edited the papers Solnetsev had given him into a book eventually titled The Real Situation in Russia by Leon Trotsky and gave the proceeds to Cannon’s Trotskyist organization, though Eastman himself never joined the group.[2] At about the same time that Eastman agreed to undertake the editing of Axelbank’s film, he was also working on the translation of Trotsky’s monumental three-volume History of the Russian Revolution. Perhaps no man in America knew more or had thought more deeply about the Russian Revolution. A Trotskyist, Eastman was not uncritical of Trotsky; a supporter of the Russian Revolution, he was willing to discuss its failings and the disastrous turn it appeared to be taking.

    Eastman threw himself into the film project. He traveled to Paris to get film from Pathé and Gaumont, and while there he got Alexander Kerensky, whose government Vladimir Lenin and Trotsky had overthrown, to give him permission to use photos of Kerensky made by the surrealist photographer Man Ray. In Berlin Eastman got photos of the Tsar swimming naked (Russian men then didn’t wear bathing suits) and of the Russian royal family: his wife the Tsarina and his son the Tsarevitch feeding his pony. He had trouble finding film of Stalin, who was not prominent before or even during the Revolution, but eventually found one short piece of Stalin shifting his weight back and forth from foot to foot. Eastman finished "Tsar to Lenin" in January of 1931. Charlie Chaplin, the star of Modern Times, took a look at it; he thought it was good.

    Post-production work with Axelbank proved to be difficult. He was understandably extremely possessive of the film that he had birthed and which Eastman had midwifed. Axelbank kept it in a vault, in strongboxes to which only he had a key; he made access difficult by mysteriously disappearing for long periods of time. Axelbank felt persecuted and misused and his cranky behavior destroyed relations with potential financial backers and promoters. Axelbank proved to be not only difficult but also litigious. Eastman found himself embroiled in a series of court cases over the finished film, which ended up in the possession of court-appointed receivers. The receivers leased the movie to the Lenauer Film Company in 1936, but the printed capitions still had to be replaced by a vocal narrative before it was finally ready. The film was finally released in theaters on March 6, 1937, first playing in the Filmarte Theater on West Fifty-eighth street in New York City.

    The New York newspaper reviewers praised the film and the public flocked to the theater to see it. By then, however, Stalin had come to power in Russia, took over the Communist International, and determined the policy of the Communist Parties worldwide. Stalin wanted no mention of his adversary Trotsky, who he had exiled, whom he was hunting–killing family, friends, and comrades–and whose assassination he would arrange a few years later. The Communist Party in the United States, consequently, called for a boycott "Tsar to Russia" and the Soviet Union’s film industry made clear to film distributors and theaters in America that if they showed Axelbank’s and Eastman’s film they would never receive any Soviet films ever, this at a time when the films of the Russian Sergei Eisenstein were tremendously popular among the avant garde. So “Tsar to Lenin,” blacklisted by the Stalinists, never had a run in American theaters, though Axelbank put out another version that reached a small audience. Eastman placed a copy of his film in the Library of Congress where it was preserved, but languished.[3] A few years later, Eastman, deeply disappointed by the Russian Revolution, gave up his leftist politics and became an editor of the conservative Readers Digest, a disappointing and profoundly sad end to a brilliant literary and political career. For decades those interested in viewing “Tsar to Lenin” had to satisfied with a much cut version made available through the Library of Congress and the film in its entirely was not made available to the public generally until released by the Socialist Equality Party, a small Trotskyist group, in 2012.

    “Tsar to Lenin” is now available on YouTube and well worth watching though it deals only with the revolution in the most narrow sense of the word, that is the upheaval that brought the soviets (workers, peasants, and soldiers councils) to power under the leadership of the Bolsheviks and the bloody civil war that followed. We have no great film of the Russian social revolution, the functioning of the soviets, the workers seizing of the factories, the peasant land seizures, no film of the struggle between democracy from below and what eventually became bureaucratic rule from above–though we have right-wing films of the rise of Stalin. Tremendous film archives exist in Russia and some are available online, though whether or not they contain the filming of everyday working class life and workers’ struggles to preserve and exert their power as the Communist bureaucracy and the state together hardened into a new ruling class and a new state is doubtful. We can only hope that some other fanatic like Axelbank has preserved such film somewhere and somehow, and that some new Eastman (would that be China Miéville, author of October?) would come along to write the narrative.

    [1] Max Eastman, Love and Revolution: My Journey through an Epoch (New York: Random House, 1964), Chapter 77, “My Career in the Movies,” p. 57.

    [2] Eastman, Love and Revolution, Chapter 75, “A Taste of Rehabilitation,” pp. 510-16.

    [3] Eastman, Love and Revolution, Chapter 89, “A Triumph and a Defeat,” pp. 615-17.

     

  • How will labor look after the Janus case is decided?

    Image

    The Janus case before the Supreme Court will deny public employee unions the right to require non-union members to pay their share of the union’s costs to negotiate on behalf of everyone in the bargaining unit.

    Most unions and pundits have identified unions’ loss of revenue as an unfavorable ruling’s most dire consequence. Forces behind Janus aim to weaken public employee unions and the public sector.  The Right’s other, less widely understood purpose, is destroying the public sector and public ownership of resources.  However, the Right’s deeper, darker strategic purpose has been mostly ignored, even by unions: Janus is a "once-in-a-lifetime chance" to “defang the Left” and “deliver the mortal blow to permanently break” the Left’s “stranglehold on our society.”  Everyone who cares about democracy and the economic and social well-being of people who work for a salary set by an employer has a stake in how unions respond to the Court’s decision, which seems pre-determined by the vote Judge Gorsuch will cast in favor of eliminating this union right.

              Most of the fear about Janus focuses on the loss of dues.  The tacit assumption of Janus supporters and foes is when faced with a choice of being a union member and paying dues or not, significant numbers of members will bolt.  Workers who have been paying agency fee will not join. Because unions understand the danger of Janus as being a financial blow to the apparatus, solutions have focused on saving money, cutting staff and pursuing mergers.  In some cases, unions have realized they should be pro-active to stave off mass desertions and are reaching out to members to solidify their support as dues payers.  Belt-tightening and talking to members may temporarily fortify the unions as organizations, but they ignore the question Janus demands we ask: Why are we predicting members will desert the union and agency-fee payers will refuse to join?

              Labor’s assumptions about the threat Janus poses exemplify the real crisis unions confront, one often not discussed even behind closed doors.  In defining their purpose as protecting members’ narrowly-conceived economic interests and operating like a business, unions construct a very limited role for members.  Members are passive, with limited authority and voice.  Their sole “power” is to pay dues and cast votes in what are generally uncontested elections for officers. 

              The Janus brief articulates arguments familiar to any union activist who has tried to recruit co-workers, especially those who prefer to remain “agency fee” payers.  The plaintiffs’ claims are about their unions’ purposes, its presence as a political force, and its being a collective voice for working people on the job. The brief reads “Janus objects to many of the public-policy positions that AFSCME advocates, including the positions that AFSCME advocates for in collective bargaining. For example, he does not agree with what he views as the union’s one-sided politicking for only its point of view. Janus also believes that AFSCME’s behavior in bargaining does not appreciate the current fiscal crises in Illinois and does not reflect his best interests or the interests of Illinois citizens.”In building support for Janus, the Right has concentrated on the meaning of union membership and of public employee unions’ engagement in politics.  In contrast, unions have argued on the narrowest ground, pleading about “fair share” and railing against “free riders,” fuming they will be “required to represent non-members, who would be paying nothing at all, passing that burden off to dues-paying members.”

              This argument about paying for representation has little resonance to workers who feel they are not well-represented. It avoids the political contestation the Right has undertaken and is winning about why joining the union is in workers’ self-interest. The Right has succeeded in confusing many workers about its individualistic, competitive ideology and the unions have been very slow to address why these values are harmful, antithetical to union principles of collective action and solidarity. The Right’s frighteningly vast financial resources stacked the deck against labor in this battle over competing ideas, but unions have been confused in responding to the charge they are just another special interest group, buying politicians for their members’ benefit (and benefits).  Unions have disarmed themselves in this assault by having adopted the mentality and tactics of special interests. As others have observed, organized labor has by and large forgotten the grammar and vocabulary of class struggle. Labor has accepted the Right’s and employers’ definition of the contest (winning over “friendly” politicians in either party), the weapons (campaign donations), and the enemy (foreign countries and their workers). In doing so, unions have turned their back on their unique resource—an informed, mobilized membership that understands solidarity.

              Though we shouldn’t adopt their methods or mentality, labor can learn a great deal from the Right’s victories. To move from the defensive, labor needs to develop a new “mindset,” as investment bankers did when they reimagined public education as a profit center.  The strategies being discussed to avoid disaster post-Janus reflect the unions’ unwillingness to reimagine themselves. One strategy is to eschew the legal responsibility to be “exclusive representative” of the bargaining unit, creating competition between unions.  Multiple unions representing workers for a single employer is the norm in other countries, where unions are allied with political parties, and some might consider it an idea worth pursuing. But as Chris Brooks demonstrates in an empirical study of what occurred in Tennessee, seeing one’s constituency as members-only and encouraging competition among unions is a cure worse than the disease. Workers turn workers against one another, viewing one another as rivals. Company unions, masquerading as professional groups that offer low insurance rates, compete, successfully, against traditional unions.

              Is a “Workers’ Bill of Rights” an answer to Janus and the anticipated loss of collective bargaining in more states? It’s an interesting legal strategy but its limitation is that it’s a legalistic, not political. It doesn’t speak to the reasons workers choose not to join unions when they have that right or vote down unions in elections. Further, as Nelson Lichtenstein points out, the “rights discourse” is limited by being individual. What makes unions unique is they represent members’ individual interests through expression and struggle for their collective interests. Moreover, this Bill of Rights ignores social oppression that workers experience on the job and separates their lives and rights outside the workplace from their working existence. While it defends workers’ rights to free expression on the job, it is silent about labor's vision for free speech on the streets, for a different kind of society.  This strategy’s major flaw is not in what it tries to do but in what it substitutes for—labor’s failure to critically analyze its losses. 

              One way to understand what occurred when the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE), the reform caucus of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), won the union’s leadership,  was that it adopted a new “mindset.”  They conceived of the CTU as a “member-driven union” that served members’ economic interests best when it supported social justice.  The newly elected leadership altered the way the union talked and acted about its purpose and tried to make all the union’s operations support this “mindset.” CORE put the people it represented, employees of the Chicago Public Schools, at the center of its organizing as Jane McAlevey puts the challenge.  A “member-driven union” gives people a reason to be union members and not agency fee payers. The goal? Shift the “union” from being “it” to being “we.” 

              Putting workers at the center of organizing requires union democracy and understanding the working class as being global.  What Kim Moody calls “labor nationalism” has weakened the unions and made workers prey to Trump’s xenophobia. The slogan “’Buy American’ is very close to “Make America Great Again.”  U.S. public employee unions are weaker for not having vigorously supported campaigns of public employee unions in the global South against the privatizations, attacks on civil service, and privatization. The World Bank has hammered away that public employees, teachers and teachers unions hurt the poor, impeding their educational success, by opposing policies that shifted public money and control of education to the private sector. Now teachers and students in the U.S., especially in low-income communities of color that are most politically vulnerable, suffer from versions of these policies  the World Bank imposed on Latin America, Africa, and Asia.  

              Overcoming the fallout from Janus requires reimagining union membership by democratizing the unions, inverting hierarchical relations that replicate disempowerment on the job. Why have professional negotiators or staff sent by the national or state at the bargaining table instead of members who have been elected based on their leadership and ideas? Should union organizers be elected rather than being hired and appointed? Should votes in the union’s executive council meetings identify how individuals have voted on major issues? Should endorsements for political office be made by the membership in a referendum? What process should be followed when officers to speak on behalf of the members by endorsing political issues and campaigns? Should we try “participatory budgeting” to have members decide priorities for members’ dues? What’s a member’s responsibility for recruiting and educating co-workers about the union? Activists who have tried to recruit co-workers to the union know that changing people’s minds is slow and hard. It requires listening and a deep commitment to union ideals because people have many beliefs that are inimical to collective action. It also requires having a union you trust will make a difference in their lives and yours.

              This is a time of truth for unions and their supporters. We need to look in the mirror and see that Janus has two faces.  It can reduce organized labor to a shell, or it can be the start of a remarkable revitalization that draws strength from the widespread social protests that have emerged from the Sanders campaign and Trump’s election.  Labor needs friends to urge it to adopt the mindset that allows the latter to happen.

     

    Lois Weiner directs the Urban Education and Teacher Unionism Policy Project at New Jersey City University and is a member of the New Politics editorial board. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

    (A version of this article appears in In These Times.)

    Janus photo by Loudon dodd – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7404342

     

  • Whither Catalonia? An interview with Josep María Antentas

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    Dan La Botz, a co-editor of New Politics, interviewed Josep María Antentas, teacher of Sociology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and anticapitalist activist.

    DL: The Catalan independence movement and its suppression by the Spanish state have garnered the attention of the world. What has been your attitude toward the question of Catalonia?

    JMA: My traditional position is the defense of the right to self-determination, with the idea that when a group wises to exercise this right its position must be made specific. In the current situation and since the independence movement began in 2012, the defense of a “Yes” vote has a more democratic content than the “No” vote, which is associated exclusively with the reactionary defense of the Constitution and the political regime.

    DL: So you called for voting yes on the referendum recently organized by the Catalonia government?

    JMA: My position is that a “Yes” in the referendum now is the position that makes it possible to break with the post-Franco political framework. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that independence has to be the endpoint; an eventual Catalan Republic could confederate or federate with Spain afterwards, or could at least ask to do so. And there might be other options.

    DL: What has been the impact of this process on the Spanish state?

    JMA: The impact of the independence process on the Spain as a whole is complex because, in the short term, the Spanish right uses it to cohere its social base and in the last weeks we are experiencing a shift towards the right in the Spanish political and social life. But at the same time, it is the principal threat to the political regime created in 1978.* If Catalonia became independent, it is unlikely that the political regime of 1978 could survive. Such a crisis could open the opportunity for change in the Spanish state as well. The strategic, decisive question is how to link the independence movement—without dissolving its demand, with a perspective of breaking with the 1978 regime within the state as a whole. This requires combining unilateral action from Catalonia with the struggle within the Spanish state as a whole in favor of a new majority politics of the left. But this center-periphery dialectic is complex and neither Catalan independence movement, nor the forces of the Spanish left such as Podemos know how to do it.

    DL: What is the social base of the independence movement?

    JMA: The independence movement is principally based in the middle class, public employees, and youth. The Catalan government is an alliance between the neoliberal right party PDeCAT (Partit Demòcrata Europeu Català or Catalan European Democratic Party) and the center-left ERC (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya,Republican Left of Catalonia). But since the movement began the relation of forces between these two groups has been displaced towards the ERC, while the PDeCAT has lost support. If there are elections on December 21, and the the two parties renew their alliance, the ERC will take control. Or, to put it another way, on the one hand, the Catalan right is playing a central role, but, on the other hand, it has been overwhelmed in a process that benefits the center-left independence forces.

    DL: What has been the role in all of this of the CUP (Candidatura d'Unitat Popular or Popular Unity Candidacy), the farther left political party? And can you explain what has happened to Together We Can (En Comú Podem)?

    JMA: CUP is an independence party and the principal force of the Catalan anti-capitalist movement. It went from 3 percent to nine percent of the vote in the last five years. It’s independence project goes beyond official “independence pure and simple” and links the national question with the social issues and defends an explicit anti-capitalist and anti-1978 regime position. It is a militant, combative force with a participatory and anti-bureaucratic culture. But it remains excessively trapped in the role of honest guarantor that the independence process be carried out to the end, of pressure on the government so that there is no step backwards, and it had no strategy whatsoever for attracking the social base of the left that remains outside of the movement.

    DL: And what are the obstacles that the left faces?

    JMA: The principal problem is that Catalonia’s radical left is divided: a part, CUP, is totally inside the movement; the other part (led by Ada Colau, the mayor of Barcelona and leader of En Comú Podem) is outside and maintains a passive wait-and-see attitude. I think that one has to be both within and outside of the movement, to support it insofar as it has democratic demands that would break with the old regime, but without necessarily sharing its strategy and its objective. The fact is that a part of the left has been totally outside, and that has given the right greater maneuvering room.

    En Comú Podem supports the right to self-determination but it is not pro-independence. It has an anti-austerity program though not anti-capitalist. It defended the necessity of having a referendum on independence in agreement with the Spanish government, but it did not support the holding of the uni-lateral referendum on October 1, even though it considered the “mobilization” to be legitimate. But, as I said, it’s passive and wait-and-see attitude has prevented it from intervening.

    DL: And where are the working class in all of this? My understanding is that the Catalan working class diverse, multinational. How does that affect things?

    Yes, a central part of the Catalan working class, in particular the traditional industrial working class, has its origins in immigration from the South of the Spanish state in the 1970s. We should also point out that in Catalan society there is a generalized used of both Catalan and Spanish and that the population in general is bilingual, even though part of the population prefers to use either Catalan or Spanish in their daily activities.

    At the same time, Catalonia as well as the Spanish state has in the last two decades experienced a strong immigration coming from Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, and also Asia, so the society has become multiethnic and multilingual. But both Catalan and Spanish politics, including the social movements, nevertheless remain quite “white” and “indigenous” [meaning the native-born people of the region].

    The part of the working class that participate in the movement are the public employees (education and health) and young college graduates who can’t find decent, full-time jobs. The traditional industrial working class and the working class youth with less education have kept their distance from the movement. There are two reasons for that: First, they have less identification with the Catalan national question, since the bulk of Catalonia’s industrial working class is made up of immigrant workers who came form the South of Spain in the 1970s. Second, the disintegration of working class society and politics has led to a general crisis of the labor movement.

    During the Franco dictatorship, the national question and the social question tended to become coordinated because they had a common enemy: the dictatorship. It was a period of working class hegemony within the Catalan nationalist movement. This situation began to change in the 1980s when the conservative nationalism of Jordi Pujol, the leader of the CDC (Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya or Catalonian Democratic Convergence) from 1974 to 2003, became hegemonic, while the working class lost its central social and political position in Catalan political life. The fact the independence movement, which erupted as a mass movement in 2012, only defended independence and disassociated itself from “other” demands, particular from the concrete criticism of the politics of austerity, has been an important strategic error and has made it more difficult to involve the working class and the left’s social base.

    DL: So, given all that you have told us, how does this movement move forward?

    Since the Spanish Republic’s proclamation on October 27, the Catalonian government was totally paralyzed. It never thought that things would go so far and didn’t foresee going beyond a symbolic declaration. Since October 27 there has been an absolute vacuum of leadership and an absence of guidance. All of the strategic limits of the catalan government and the social organizations that drive the movement were suddenly exposed. The dissolution of the Catalan government by the Spanish state through the application of Article 155 of the Constitution, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s government’s announcement of Catalonian election on December 21, and the jailing of part of the Catalan government (the other part is in exile in Brussels), which put the independence movement in defensive position.

    DL: What then are the priorities of the left in this context?

    JMA: It is necessary to defend unity of action in the street (demonstrations, etc.) but to remain politically independent of PDeCAT and ERC, with our own slogans within the movement (in particular emphasizing the idea of the need to open the process toward a constituent assembly in Catalonia, as a way of putting the social and democratic aspects at the center of the discussion, and not only debating “independence.”

    DL: So what is the strategy and what are the prospects as the Spanish state now plans to hold elections in Catalonia on December 21?

    JMA: the December 21 the Spanish government called elections immediately after the dissolution of the Catalan government. They have been imposed by force. But all of these Catalan parties are going to participate in them, since there is no other realistic alternative. All of the forces against the bloc representing the regime of 1978 are going to state in their programs opposition to the dissolution of the Catalan government and the demand for freedom and amnesty for those who have been arrested. But beyond this shared defensive element, the fundamental strategic question is to establish a democratic roadmap of rupture with the regime of 1978 that unites the independence forces and those that are not pro-independence but defend the right to self-determination.

    *The “regime of 1978” refers to the political and institutional framework of the established by the approval of the Constitution of 1978 which resulted from the agreement reached between the anti-Franco forces and a section of reformers within the Franco regime and which marginalized those who rejected the agreement and favored a “break.” This gave rise to a kind of democratic state that conserved important aspects of the Franco regime and which didn’t change substantially the dominant power block.

     

     

  • Leftist Candidate Jabari Brisport of DSA Makes Strong Showing in Brooklyn

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    Jabari Brisport, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), made an extraordinarily strong showing in his first bid for the New York City Council. Running on both the Green Party and Socialist lines in Crown Heights, District 35 of Brooklyn where he grew up, Jabari won almost 30 percent of the vote, receiving 8,619 votes. He was defeated by Democrat Laurie Cumbo, who took 68 percent of the vote while the Republican Christine Parker got just 4 percent.

    Jabari ran as a socialist in a diverse district with a mixed population of African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, orthodox and Hassidic Jews, upper middle class white newcomers, and young hipsters. The district has a population of 124,170, larger than many cities. The 2017 election saw one of the lowest turnouts in years. Only about 22 percent of the 5,053,842 registered voters in New York City as a whole cast ballots in the election.

    Jabari wore his politics on his sleeve. As he told a reporter from New York magazine, “I want to win because I’m not seeing the results. I’m hearing people talk the talk of being progressive, but it’s not enough to be progressive. You’ve got to be revolutionary, you’ve got to be socialist, you have to want to change society, and that means going on the offense.”

    Brisport ran principally on opposition to a plan to turn a publicly owned armory building that covers an entire city block into luxury housing, arguing that it should be used for low-income housing and facilities for the community. He called for converting the property to a community land trust. He took up the position of the Crown Heights Tenants Union, which had opposed the deal. His opponent Cumbo had supported the armory deal until public turned against it, as manifest in the spread of “Kill the Deal” signs in local home and store windows. While Cumbo, under pressure, later came out against the armory deal, many doubted her sincerity and had no confidence in her actual commitment to resist it.

    Shortly before the election, Jabari was arrested after he and other housing acivists disrupted a City Planning Commission meeting that voted 11-1 in favor of the plan to turn the publicly owned property into a private development of luxury apartments.

    While housing was the big issue, Jabari also defended public education against charter schools, supported Black Lives Matter and called for criminal justice reform, as well as speaking out for climate justice.

    Following the election Jabari wrote to his supporters, “We just did something the political establishment never would have thought possible. Our campaign got over 8000 votes, nearly 30 percent. One thousand of those voted specifically on the Socialist ballot line! We should all feel proud. We have just sent City Hall a clear message – socialism is rising in New York City.”

    The Role of DSA

    DSA, which has over 1,000 members in Brooklyn, mobilized its members to support Brisport’s campaign. Jabari won the Green Party primary election, while DSA circulated petitions and won enough signatures to put a Socialist line on the ballot.

    DSA had its own operation, independent of the Green Party, in which its members helped to produce campaign literature, canvassed the neighborhoods, and mobilized to get out the vote. DSA members approached local residents saying, “I’m a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and I’m supporting Jabari Brisport…”

    Jabari’s was one of two campaigns supported by Brooklyn DSA in the last few months. In the Democratic Party primaries, DSA had supported Rev. Khader El-Yateem an Arab-American Lutheran minister and community organizer. Born in Bethlehem, Palestine in 1962, El-Yateem migrated to the United States in 1992 and settled in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn in 1995. While he ran primarily on local community issues, El-Yateem also took controversial stands on broader political questions, such as his vocal support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement against Israel, known as BDS.

    In the District 43 Democratic primaries, El-Yateem, also a DSA member, received 31 percent of the vote, while Justin Brannan won with about 39 percent, other candidates dividing the rest.

    For many years DSA principally worked within the Democratic Party and supported its candidates and didn’t expect or ask candidates to run as socialists. These two races give expression to DSA’s new approach to politics, willing to support both progressive Democratic Party candidates, especially if they run as open socialists, but also independent, Green Party or socialist candidates. The race also demonstrates DSA’s desire to link politics to the building of social movements, such as the fight for decent housing and against Islamophobia.

    DSA’s political approach has put them at odds both not only with some progressive Democrats and also with the Working Families Party. The WFP did not support either El-Yateem in the primary or Brisport in the general election. We will seeing more such candidacies backed by DSA in New York City and other areas of the country.

    *Dan La Botz is a Co-Editor of New Politics. He was the Socialist Party USA candidate for the U.S. Senate in Ohio in 2010. He worked as a volunteer in the Jabari Brisport campaign for NYC City Council.

     

     

     

     

  • Is Socialist Revolution Possible – Or Even Necessary?

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    Bennett Muraskin:

    I look at the world for many decades now and do not see evidence that the class struggle is alive and well, except to the extent that workers are on the losing end. But even more than that, it does not appear that the class struggle is playing a key role anywhere in the world. All of the major conflicts are being fought on national, ethnic and/or religious grounds.  In these conflicts, whether they are in Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Niger or even Catalonia, workers line up with their tribe.

    It used to be that the anti-colonial forces at least wrapped themselves in the mantle of socialism, as in the days of the Algerian, Vietnamese or Angolan struggles for independence. Now it is ISIS and kindred groups of fanatics who are pretending to lead the charge against Western imperialism or neo-colonialism.

    It looks to me that every attempt to achieve socialism has gone bad. Compare the former East Germany with former West Germany or the current North Korea with the current South Korea. Do the people of China yearn for the “good old days” of Mao Zedong or are they infinitely more prosperous under state capitalism? I was in Poland a few years ago. No one had a good thing to say about the “People’s Republic.” The most recent socialist experiment in Venezuela is going down the tubes.

    It was been nearly 170 years since the Communist Manifesto and 100 years since the Bolshevik Revolution, where the workers held power for at most two or three years. The left in Russian has been insignificant since the fall of the collapse of the Soviet Union over twenty five years ago. What happened to the once mighty Communist parties of Italy and France?  Obviously their demise did not lead to the rise of the rise of the anti-Stalinist left.

    I recently met a Socialist Party USA activist at a Labor Day Parade in New Jersey.  When I mentioned that Bernie Sanders working within the Democratic Party was the best alternative, he opined that Sanders is not a socialist. Well, I said, you are right. Generically he is a social democrat. But if he went around calling for workers’ ownership of the means of production, he would have never even been elected the mayor of Burlington, VT. Even Eugene Debs could never garner more than 6% of the popular vote, nor could the original Socialist Party in its heyday elect more than two Congressmen.

    Here is my question. If revolutionary socialists have nothing to show for all their efforts for the past 180 years, maybe it is time to give up the ghost and accept that social democracy on the Western European or Scandinavian model is the best we can achieve.

    Michael Hirsch:

    Bennett,

    Yours is a fair question to ask of editors of an eclectic left journal, though one largely committed to the radical vision of socialism from below: why the unblemished optimism over the prospects for radical social change in the face of hideously disappointing, centuries’ long results? Here’s my attempt at clearing the air.

    Understand that you’re asking two questions that aren’t necessarily conjoined. First, why have the expectations of revolutionary socialists going back to Marx and Engels that a growing proletariat would act of necessity to overthrow capitalism in its own interest been so dismally unfulfilled. And second, given that, why do we not simply embrace a social democratic coda stressing reforms, or, as Trotsky put it in September 1939 in a moment of despair, resign ourselves to fight to improve the conditions of the slaves.

    As to the first, you have to take seriously the economics that came out of World War II. Socialists from Michael Harrington to Daniel Singer cite the ascendance of Keynesian economics, which created a welfare regime in which consumerism didn’t empower working people so much as substantially increase their purchasing power – as a spur to increasing production – during what the French called Les Trente Glorieuses (the thirty glorious years, i.e., 1945 to 1975). What followed, what I call the thirty inglorious years, is still working its way into people’s consciousness as a new and growing subclass of contingent workers – the precariat –typifies the life chances of millions of young people worldwide, while the traditional industrial proletariat – still numerous in absolute numbers though shrinking in proportion to other sectors – is joined by public sector workers battling to defend what is left of the social safety net. In short, the class struggle is still being waged, and with a newly reconfigured working class, though capital holds the high ground. Unions are at least organizing the unorganized in sectors that barely existed a generation ago. That’s one example of class struggle as fought by our side. I think you will agree it is promising.

    On social democracy. You have to take seriously its sad history, along with the early degeneration of its main left critics, the Communists. In the United States, what was left of any New Deal politics died with the oil embargo of the mid-1970s and the rise of the New Democrats, who were neither new nor barely Democrats. Increasingly, US liberals and European social democrats in office were administrators of the state and enablers of the capitalist system, not its gravediggers. In France, François Mitterand prior to his 1981 presidential breakthrough made a series of bold promises to nationalize industries, some even under autogestion, a broadly understood French version of workers’ self-management. Within days of his inauguration, all mention of autogestion was gone. Within two years, industries nationalized were reprivatized and Mitterand served out his term as a caretaker for capital. Do I exaggerate?

    In Sweden, the Meidner Plan, a real reform that, if implemented, would have nationalized industry under a form of workers’ control, saw the Social Democratic Party abandoning it after Swedish capital moved against them. The Soviet-backed CPs for the most part went from slavish support for all things Stalinist to a warmed-over reformist Eurocommunism without blinking, seeing their vote in Italy reduced from 30 percent to utterly marginal. Those that stayed Stalinist, as in Greece and Spain, shriveled on the vine.

    What does all this mean? Capital had a plan and the means to follow it through, whether in good times then or in periodic crises now. The left, as embodied by the social democrats and the then extant Stalinists, did not, have a plan beyond posing as governing arbiters if not mediators. Class struggle was relatively muted – or at least less obvious – in the boom years; it is raging today in what the 1970s United Auto Workers president Douglas Fraser presciently called “a one-sided class war.” The left, not to mention the unions as a whole, bears some responsibility too. If Antonio Gramsci is to be taken seriously, we’ve collectively done a languid job of getting our ideas out. As society becomes more socialized, and where social reproduction is now better understood by the left as a corollary to economic exploitation at the point of production, socialism as the logical outcome of a post-industrial socialization ironically takes the form of automation instead of workers control. The alternatives desperate people grasp, such as the noxious nationalism and racial or religio-posturing of a Trump and a Netanyahu, just to name two with whom you are doubtlessly well-familiar, seem to attract supporters by default.

    What I’ve written here is hardly exhaustive, but I expect it addresses your concerns. The class struggle is ongoing, economic crisis is endemic, the long-range choices are still as Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg argued, a choice between socialism and barbarism, with barbarism understood as genocidal total warfare and/or environmental liquidation. Trotsky’s conclusion, even in his darkest days, that there was no “incontrovertible or even impressive objective data as would compel us today to renounce the prospect of the socialist revolution” (The USSR in War), rings true. Like Pascal’s Wager, what choice do we really have?

    Resistance to the system is ongoing, even when it takes bizarre and unaccustomed forms as with the Antifa opposition to the rise of white nationalism or the efforts to tear down the statues of undeserving Civil War generals. Defining whose history is true, which for Gramsci was a necessary adjunct of activist, revolutionary cultural work, is part of the class struggle, too. So are the efforts to rediscover commonalities despite seeming differences. The growing acceptance of intersectionality, not as rhetoric but as an activist, working principle, is proving that class and identity are not at variance, but indissolubly entwined.

    So, comrade Muraskin, a Luta Continua.

    Barry Finger:

    “Here is my question? If revolutionary socialists have nothing to show for all their efforts for the past 180 years, maybe it is time to give up the ghost and accept that social democracy on the Western European or Scandinavian model is the best we can achieve.” – Bennett Muraskin

    Fifty years ago, it was the US, with its underdeveloped welfare state, that was out of step with advanced capitalist societies. Neoliberalism, with the complicity of Democrats as well as Republicans, has, in the intervening decades, decimated the labor movement and begun the piecemeal dismantling of New Deal and Great Society gains. This well-recognized dynamic has been replicated on an international scale.

    Today it is an open question whether the Scandinavian model can be replicated, expanded, or even defended without a worldwide revival of labor militancy.

    Every civilizational upgrade under capitalism with respect to wages, hours and workplace conditions in the “past 180 years” has been inextricably linked to organized working classes asserting their power over the public domain. The exploited classes defend their interests by seeking to inject the principal of social responsibility against the prevailing, seemingly inviolable, rights of private property. It is a perpetual war for position. Where the working classes have been defeated so too has the cause of democracy and progress been set back. The Scandinavian model is now an isolated outpost in the class war. It is the forward operating base of labor, now besieged from all quarters and in full retreat.

    If capitalism were a static system, the permanency of class compromise along Scandinavian lines might be an arguable proposition. Labor crusades, above all, for a share of the prosperity its work creates sufficient to permit it economic security, workplace dignity, limitations on social inequality, and a comfortable retirement. Even the most conservative labor leaders contest almost every right of the employer: over hiring and firing; over wages and hours; over the speed and intensity of work; over promotions and transfers. They challenge every right, that is, save one – the “right” to own and manage.

    This trade union limitation has been replicated on a broader social scale in the scope and limitations of the modern welfare state, a grand compromise between the aspirations of labor for social control and the entrenched requirements of capital for the “freedom” to pursue profit-making.

    On paper at least, the capitalist state is fully capable of exercising the type of social control over the market place – of managing the truncated “economic democracy” needed to minimize the gulf that separates the public from the private domain that labor demands while ensuring, in modified form, the rights of property. It is long well known, after all, how targeted state spending and taxation can regulate output, employment and income to dampen the effects of the business cycle, while ensuring long-run price stability.

    It would seem – again on paper – that the welfare state should be a win-win for both classes in society. As long as labor’s circumscribed demands could be satisfied, it had no reason to challenge this compromise. And it didn’t.

    But what about capital? It, too, would seem to have benefited greatly from this compromise.  State spending socializes the costs of training, research, and development and subsidizes the investments that allow individual businesses to commercialize the process of innovation.  Infrastructure spending reduces turnover times and assists capital to economize on its costs. State contracts increase the level of capacity utilization and thereby enhance the mass of profits available for investment and capitalist compensation.

    The welfare state, it would seem, broadly encourages, by dint both of its secular and counter-cyclical activities, a socially favorable investment climate.

    But if we delve a bit further, we can see that the welfare state has a fatal design flaw that has proven all-but disastrous to this rosy scenario. Full employment and working class economic security eliminates the key threat that management holds over the heads of workers. Without it labor discipline breaks down. And not just labor disciple. Tight labor markets endanger profit margins and intensify the always-latent problems that beset capital accumulation. Moreover, state spending on vast social programs of remediation, as envisioned by consistent welfare state advocates, also transfers capacity from the private domain that would otherwise be available for capital accumulation and profit expansion.

    Under “normal” circumstances this contagion may be accommodated. We might, with little fear of contradiction, periodize the life expectancy of the welfare state with the relatively exceptional and exceptionally brief period of unimpeded capitalist expansion pursuant to the end of World War II. But what is obscured is this. Productivity under capitalism has to be measured against the effects that the forces of production have on the relations of production; that is, against the production of value and profit. Because capitalist accumulation cannot be separated from labor-displacing innovation, a growing mass of capital investment perpetually seeks profit indemnification against a relatively diminished base of workers directly and indirectly engaged in the production of commodities, the very source of the system’s profits. As long as this fall in the rate of profit can be counterbalanced by a growing mass of profits, the crisis tendencies of capitalism can be averted.

    But this is also where welfare state expansion comes into conflict with capital accumulation. Rising real wages and the diversion of production from capital formation to individual and state (public) consumption suppress the accumulation process just when its pace needs to be accelerated. Profits are destroyed rather than contributing to capital formation, because they are diverted from the feedback loop of private production.

    Of course, once the crisis fully sets in, the expansion of state spending certainly has the positive effect of mopping up excess capacity that plagues the contraction of sales and markets. State spending can in theory put the growing legion of unemployed to work and assure that social consumption does not decline. But this increase in economic activity, while socially desirable, is capitalistically useless. This non-capitalist stimulus to demand does not increase investment and profitability. Rather it raises the level of economic activity by bringing excess capacity back into play for the purpose of creating public goods instead of capitalist commodities.

    What good, then, is the unchallenged “right to own and manage,” if it is exercised under circumstances that imperil the incentive to invest and, which, if left unchecked, all but invites the state to assume responsibility over an increasingly dysfunctional and unresponsive private sector?

    Where, of course, the system is being actively challenged from below concessions in the form of countercyclical activities is the lesser evil for capitalists. But the restoration of profitability rests not on state spending, but in speed-ups, rationalization and concentration; the elimination of excess capital and an increase in the degree to which profits can be wrung out of the hides of workers. And having spent decades dismantling and neutering all the organs of working class resistance – unions and parties, there is no reason why an emboldened capital should feel the need to concede power and authority for purposes that do not serve its ends.

    Most socialists share with social democrats the view that a thriving and expanding welfare state is more socially desirable than unfettered capitalism. The difference, however, lies in this. Socialists deny, for the reasons stated, that a healthy and vibrant welfare state is a long-term viable option for capitalists. Welcome as it may be to workers and to the broad public, it rests on exceptional historical and economic circumstances that are unlikely to be replicated. Capitalism cannot be housebroken, and will not share authority. It will violate the class consensus – the implied social contract – that underlies the welfare state and actively prepares to do so as as soon as such opportunities permit.

    Socialists warn that the welfare state is a privilege extracted from the dominant economic ruling class to be infringed upon and abrogated whenever capitalism finds itself in difficulty or endangered by its continuance.

    The scandal of the Great Recession is not the failure of the markets to rationally direct investment. Only true believers continue to think otherwise. No, the scandal is the fact that the capitalist state has within its means, by dint of its ability to freely finance any expenditure consistent with existing productive capacity, to offer jobs on demand at a living wage, to assure health care for all, adequate housing, fully-funded child care and a national pension and yet universally chooses not to do so and to step away from well-established arrangements. There are no financial constraints, the “debt burden” fraud notwithstanding, only a political restraint, the restraint that the power of money casts over democracy.

    That is why socialists raise the demand of expropriation. Not because the tools are not technically available for the state to plan and control the economy, including one nominally under private ownership. One need only look to capitalism under war-time conditions to understand this. No, we call for expropriation because social authority cannot be shared between classes. We call for the nationalization of the banks, for instance, not because public expenditure requires access to private bank capital. The Treasury and Federal Reserve can generate and handle any expense public authority calls upon them to manage. We recognize, in our call, that the socialization of the banks is the only means adequate to put an end to the financial engineering that directs wealth unproductively and exacerbates social inequality. We raise the demand for socialization to end the anti-social behavior of tiny minority in society that subverts and circumvents every honest attempt at regulation. And we call, above all, for the nationalization of the financial sector – and all sectors of production and distribution – to eliminate source of capitalist power over the popular will.

    More generally, socialists warn that capitalism “permits” and or “allows” democracy only to the extent that it does not endanger the class privileges of the bourgeoisie.

    That, and not because we are hidebound dogmatists, is why we will not and should not give up the ghost and accept welfare-state capitalism.

  • Weinsteins in the Workplace: Will Unions Be Part of the Solution Or the Problem?

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    The exploding national debate about workplace harassment of women by powerful bosses or male co-workers is a great opening for unions to demonstrate their importance as one form of protection against such abuse.

    Unfortunately, when unions are not pro-active on this front in their dealings with management or, worse yet, allow bullying or sexual harassment among staff or members, their credibility and appeal as a sword and shield for women (or anybody else) is greatly reduced.

    Unions don’t exist in a vacuum. They reflect the workplace or occupational cultures of their members, and the latter are a product of social conditioning often unsupportive of solidarity on the job, collective activity, or sensitivity toward women and minorities.

    So the task of forging a united front, for purposes of mutual aid and protection in the workplace, is easily hindered by union dysfunction and internal divisions based on race, gender, ethnicity, age, and other membership differences.

    It takes continuous organizational effort—in the form of training and recruitment, new leadership development, and structural change–to insure that the bullying, harassing, divide-and-conquer behavior of bosses, big and small, doesn't infect and weaken the “house of labor" too.

    Locker Room Talkers

    One of my local union assignments, in a 27-year career representing the Communications Worker of America, illustrates some of the complexities, and ironies, of this challenge at the micro level. 

    The CWA unit in question had several hundred members, all factory workers in a depressed mill town in central Massachusetts. The union "brothers" greatly outnumbered the "sisters" in this blue-collar workplace. What President Trump calls "locker room talk" was fairly widespread; the culture was rough, definitely not PC, and, in fact, included some vocal Republicans more in love with their guns than the liberal causes or candidates championed by their national union.

    When I inherited this local in the early 1990s, I was struck by how many people in the shop seemed to have been bickering with or picking on each other since grade school. The rank-and-file was dispirited, divided, and prone to self-blame, for lagging wages and pension coverage. The union leadership was seen as a do-nothing little club, with no women in it, either as elected officers or appointed stewards.

    Members resented their local president for spending dues money on trips to CWA meetings and conferences that benefitted no one else. If workers had a problem or complaint, grievances might be filed on their behalf. But there wouldn’t be any follow-up pressure on management to secure favorable settlements. Everything took place behind closed doors.

    The local union president, whose nickname since high school was "Pinky," sang in the choir of a local church. He was a closeted gay male, a Navy veteran who acted superior to his blue-collar workmates, and often displayed a hostile attitude toward female co-workers. He believed in issuing orders, tightly controlling information, and liked to end poorly attended membership meetings as quickly as possible, due to "lack of a quorum." 

    “Jewing Us Down”?

    Since we had begun wage negotiations with the company, I pressured President Pinky to call a meeting, with or without a quorum, to highlight our lack of progress. I entertained the hope that this rare bargaining update might spark some rank-and-file activity he would be unable to quell. 

    The company's HR director at the time was a non-gentile from out-of town named Sheldon. And Pinky, despite his own aspirations for a salaried position (which he later got) did not like this particular management negotiator. So Pinky began his bargaining report with the news that Sheldon was "trying to Jew us down" at the bargaining table. The head nodding and muttering throughout the gloomy VFW hall suggested that Pinky, for all his leadership flaws, did know his local audience.

    I was a newly assigned union rep not yet known or trusted by anyone in the room, but felt compelled to call Pinky out on this.  My interruption began with a reminder that everyone present worked for a big corporation. Local management’s lack of enthusiasm for paying them better had nothing to do with Sheldon’s ethnicity or religion, I explained. Furthermore, as someone married to a Jew, I was not a fan of the phrase Pinky had used because it was part of evil stereotyping that helped murder millions of people during World War II, a slaughter of innocents not ended until VFW members and others helped defeat the Nazis responsible.

    Since there were no Jews (or African-Americans) present, I asked how many other people had ever been offended at some point in their life by the slurring of Italians as “Wops,” Puerto Ricans as “Spics,” Irish-Americans as “Micks,” French-Canadian New Englanders as “Frogs,” women as “sluts,” or gay people as “fags”—all in the context of attributing some unflattering characteristic or behavior to everyone in the group so labeled.

    A few hands went up. I then noted that talking about other people like this—even if they were in management—did not help us address the problem of how to build the internal unity necessary to win a good contract. Nobody would be getting a decent raise unless everyone in the shop pulled together, stood up, and fought back.

    Pinky did not welcome this personal reproach, my related call for collective action, or reality check on where negotiations were headed without it. True to form, the meeting was gaveled to a close quickly. Members left with the assurance that their local officers would handle everything.

    Unwanted Personal Contact

    Not long afterwards, I got my first opening to help plant the seeds of a better approach, which took another decade to flower. An hourly worker I’ll call Sally—an attractive single-mother, mistreated by men in her past—was threatened with disciplinary action by the company because of her alleged “sexual harassment” of a supervisor! In her version of their interaction, confirmed by co-workers, the married manager who complained about her was actually the initiator of unwanted personal contact.

    With the local leadership’s grudging assent, we not only filed a grievance, but also circulated a petition throughout the shop to support Sally. A special meeting was called to discuss her case, an unprecedented approach to “grievance handling” in the local.

    Women never active in the union but sympathetic to Sally got the petition signed in every department and shift. Nearly half the membership showed up on a Sunday morning to show solidarity with the grievant. At her first union meeting ever, Sally got a big round of supportive applause, from men and women alike.

    Management grumbled, of course, about the creation of such an unexpected and unwelcome ruckus. Despite the murky details of Sally’s actual relationship with the supervisor, disciplinary action against her was dropped. One of the female leaders of the petition drive volunteered to become a union steward and, a few years later, in the post-Pinky era, Peggy was elected vice-president of the local.

    She and others became part of a new, younger, more militant leadership of the local, which restored rank-and-file confidence in CWA. This union revival occurred just in time because, by 2001, the company was owned by the Pritzker family, billionaires from Chicago, who were seeking health care give-backs. (Fortunately, Pinky wasn’t still around to link that all-too-common management objective to the ethnicity of the new owners.)

    By now, a once sullen, isolated, and dispirited union body was filing group grievances, calling in OSHA inspectors, conducting informational picketing, making allies in the community, and defending good medical benefits in the local media. During contract talks, any member could attend, as an observer, and written reports were distributed, plant-wide, after every bargaining session.

    To resist concessions, the local responded with its first strike in 37 years. During that month-long work stoppage, no one crossed the picket-line and women played prominent roles on the strike and bargaining committees.

    SAG & SEIU: "Zero Tolerance?"

    The lessons of this story are several, and hopefully relevant to unions facing virtual extinction today, due to mounting legal and political attacks. A big part of labor’s comeback strategy must involve bottom-up rebuilding of local unions. Greater militancy, internal democracy, and transparency are key elements of that strategy, plus new, more diverse leadership. Challenging retrograde attitudes about women, blacks, Jews, Muslims, Latinos, or any foreign-born workers is an essential part of that task. Replacing officials who are obstacles to inclusion is a necessary, if not always sufficient, step toward real union reform.

    Among the many job-related concerns that can help build unity—among union members and workers seeking collective bargaining rights—is bosses who bully and harass people. However, unions can best stop such behavior and hold repeat offenders accountable if they have their own act together and avoid complicity with similar misconduct.

    In the Toronto Globe And Mail last month, one outspoken Harvey Weinstein victim—Canadian actress Mia Kirshner—accused both of her unions, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television, and Radio Artists (ACTRA) of offering “inadequate protection” against “sexual harassment and abuse in the film industry.” 

    Kirshner’s blistering critique was seconded in Jacobin by Morgan Spector, a New York-based television, film, and theater actor. He also faulted SAG, which has a female president, for not being aggressive enough on behalf of aggrieved members—despite an official union policy of “zero tolerance” for sexual harassment.

    Worse yet, in Bloomberg News, a former hotel union staffer-turned-journalist, Josh Eidelson, just blew the whistle on misconduct by a top Service Employees International Union (SEIU) leader, in charge of its “Fight for 15” campaign among fast food workers. The career of Scott Courtney, Executive Vice President of SEIU, had previously been promoted by Mary Kay Henry, the gay woman who is the union’s national president. But, in mid-October Henry suspended him from his $250,000 a year position because, as Eidelson reported, “people working for Courtney had been rewarded or reassigned based on romantic relationships with him.”

    Courtney has since resigned, before he could be fired, as demanded by UltraViolet, a women’s group which called his conduct “wholly unacceptable.” And, as Buzzfeed News has reported, two male SEIU staffers who reported to Courtney have also been fired or put on administrative leave in Chicago, based on allegations that he protected them, despite co-worker complaints about their bullying behavior involving women.

    Press coverage of this union scandal is tainting SEIU’s reputation and credibility as a defender of fast food workers, who are often subjected to similar harassment by low-level managers in their industry. It’s a propaganda gift to anti-union employers everywhere, from McDonalds to your local manufacturer. Already, neo-liberal media outlets like the New York Times are writing unions off as a contributor to any “real and lasting transformation” of American workplaces, “in the wake of Harvey Weinstein’s expulsion from Hollywood” and the outing or toppling of other high-profile predators.

    In a lengthy October 29 editorial about next steps toward “lasting change,” the Times called for safer work environments, more enlightened and transparent management, and stronger anti-discrimination protection.

    While marveling at “what a difference it can make when women join together—and men join with them—to confront harassers openly,” the editors failed to note that collective action, of this sort, is best organized and sustained by a well-functioning union.

    When labor organizations like SAG or SEIU don’t quickly confront Weinsteins in the workplace, particularly in the situations referenced above, they’re just confirming management claims that unions are weak, irrelevant, and hypocritical as well.

    *Steve Early has been active in the labor movement since 1972. For 27 years he was an organizer and international representative for the Communications Workers of America. He is the author, most recently, 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.