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John Halle Replies to David Finkel on Politics

In his useful and perceptive review of Empowering Progressive Third Parties in the United States, David Finkel claims that I endorse the "ultra-left conclusion of historian Eric Chester’s True Mission that the concept of a national labor party has always been a ploy to keep labor ensnared and subordinate to the Democrats."

In fact, the main conclusion I draw from Chester’s book has not so much to do with labor parties, but rather with labor officialdom whose obsessive focus on obtaining establishment respectability has led to routine capitulation and devastating losses. The roots for this go back many years, as Chester’s book reminds us.

They also extend forward to the 2016 campaign which, as Andrew Tillett-Saks notes, yet again immediately brought forth "unions' support of an anti-worker candidate," in this case Hillary Clinton, while "suicidally" passing on Bernie Sanders, the greatest presidential hope for advancing the interests of workers since FDR.

While the chapter was completed well before, the Clinton endorsement was of a piece with the recommendation of the chapter that those attempting to challenge anti-worker neoliberal orthodoxy (either through a third party or within the Democratic Party) direct their attention to local activist networks which can act independently of national leadership, as many did in endorsing Sanders. Rather than be blindsided by their inevitable capitulations, we should expect that national leadership to be at best risk averse and more likely hostile to challenges to even the most right-wing Democrats.

This unpalatable conclusion may be why Finkel and others find that, for them, that "it’s not quite clear where (my) argument leads."

It should by now be clear where it does, even if this means opening our eyes to aspects of organized labor which we would prefer not to see.

John Halle is Director of Studies in Music Theory and Practice at Bard College.

August 30, 2016
Daraya
Four years following its liberation, the predominantly agricultural town of Daraya, strategically located near the capital, has fallen to the regime. A deal was reached to evacuate the 4,000-8,000 civilians remaining from a pre-uprising population of 300,000. The local fighters who defended their town so courageously will go to Idlib and join the resistance there.

Daraya’s residents know that they may never return to their homes. Photos circulated on social media showed residents gathered at the graves of loved ones to say goodbye. Fears abound of a plan to cleanse opposition strongholds permanently, and in previous evacuation deals, even those carried out under UN auspices, many were detained by the regime, never to be seen again.

But the residents are desperate. A few days ago a group of women from Daraya sent a letter to the world. They described horrific conditions. A regime-imposed siege, ongoing for 1,368 days, had blocked the entry of food and medical supplies. People were starving. They described the daily regime assault which has seen over 9,000 barrel bombs dropped on the town as well as internationally prohibited poisonous gas and napalm. The hospital had been targeted and was out of operation. Agricultural land, the sole source of food, had been deliberately burned and destroyed. The women called on the international community to take action to end the violence and lift the siege. This letter followed months of protests held by women and children with the same demands. The first, and only, aid convoy to reach the town entered in June 2016. It contained medicine, mosquito nets and baby formula, but no food. ‘We can’t take medicine on an empty stomach,’ read a banner at a protest soon after.

Those who leave Daraya, leave as heroes. Daraya is an iconic town for Syrian revolutionaries. It’s been a centre for the development of the thought and practice of non-violent resistance and has inspired civil disobedience across the country. And despite the horrific repression inflicted on the town, it’s had remarkable success in practicing local, autonomous self organization. Revolutionary activist Razan Zeitouneh, who herself was kidnapped in 2013, said “Daraya was a star before the revolution and a star during. What the young men and women of the city built took immense efforts and resulted in a small exemplary model for the future of Syria, the one we dream of. The activism in the city never ceased to amaze us for a minute… In Daraya, the signs calling for co-existence continued to be held high even when the entire country was falling into despair following every new massacre.”[1]

In 2011, when the uprising began, a local coordination committee quickly emerged to organize anti-regime protests. The committee emphasized the importance of non-violent struggle and handed out leaflets calling for a democratic Syria and for equality between all religious and ethnic groups. As church bells rang in solidarity, protesters marched holding flowers, and handed bottles of water to the security forces sent to shoot them. ‘The army and people are one,’ they chanted. One of those involved with the local coordination committee was a 26 year old tailor called Ghiyath Matar. He earned the nickname ‘Little Ghandi’ for his commitment to peaceful resistance. Ghiyath was arrested by security forces on 6 September 2011. A few days later his mutilated corpse was returned to his family and pregnant wife. In one of his last Facebook posts, Ghiyath said “We chose non-violence not from cowardice or weakness, but out of moral conviction; we don’t want to reach victory by having destroyed the country.”[2]

The principles of non-violent resistance which influenced Daraya’s youth had a history in the town. Unusually for Syria, a police state that ruthlessly suppresses independent organization, a group of young men and women aged between 15 and 25 established the Daraya Youth Group in 1998. They had been studying Quran under the religious scholar Abdul Akram Al Saqqa. Al Saqqa promoted social and political freedom and encouraged free thinking amongst his students. Because of his liberal views he was controversial amongst the Syrian ulema (religious authorities). He called for women to choose their own husbands and argued that women’s education was more important than whether or not they wore the veil. He introduced students to the work of Jawdat Said, an Islamist scholar who promoted non-violent thought and practice through the Quranic traditions as well as the teachings of Ghandi and Martin Luther King. Al Saqqa’s work attracted the attention of the authorities and he was imprisoned in 2003 and 2011. Under his mentorship, the Daraya Youth Group organized actions such as cleaning the streets of their town, boycotting American products, as well as risky campaigns against bribery and corruption. In 2002 they demonstrated against the Israeli invasion of Jenin refugee camp and in 2003 they organized protests(without government permission) against the US invasion of Iraq. This activity led to the arrest of 24 members of the group. A few were soon released but the majority were sentenced to between three and four years in prison. [3]

The peaceful protests were subjected to violent repression. Flowers were met by bullets, protesters were rounded up en masse and detained. In August 2012, following intense shelling, Syrian army troops stormed the town and committed one of the regime’s worst massacres. Some 400 men, women and children lost their lives in execution style killings. Those attempting to flee were hunted down and shot. The bodies of the dead littered the streets or were thrown into mass graves.

In a scene which would be endlessly repeated, some Western commentators sought to exonerate the regime from wrongdoing. The celebrated journalist Robert Fisk visited Daraya shortly after the massacre, embedded with regime troops. He reported that the situation occurred due to Free Army hostage taking and a prisoner exchange gone wrong, quoting sources saying that victims were relatives of government employees. Daraya’s local coordination committee issued a strong condemnation of Fisk’s report. They had never heard of the prisoner exchange story, questioned whether interviewees would be free to speak the truth in the presence of regime soldiers, and criticized Fisk for not meeting with opposition activists. [4]

Daraya was liberated by local rebels three months later. As the state withdrew, residents set up a Local Council to run the town’s affairs. One of those involved was anarchist Omar Aziz who encouraged revolutionary Syrians to organize their communities independently from the Assadist state and work towards advancing a social revolution. Despite enormous challenges, Daraya’s Local Council has had remarkable success. It’s established numerous offices to provide services to civilians including media services, legal services and public relations (they maintain an excellent website). A relief office runs a soup kitchen which began providing three meals a day, although due to the siege frequency was reduced. The council also tried to build self-sufficiency, growing beans, spinach and wheat. A medical office supervises the field hospital which provides for the sick and wounded. A services office is responsible for opening alternative roads when the main ones are inaccessible due to airstrikes or collapsed buildings. The local council also aimed to unify civil and military efforts. Daraya is one of the few communities where the local Free Army brigade is part of the council’s organizational structure and subject to civil administrative control. Revolutionary women set up the Enab Baladi magazine to discuss events happening in their community and Syria more broadly and promote civil disobedience. Activists built an underground library so residents could continue their education.

The people of Daraya have paid a heavy price for their dream of freedom. For four years they defended their autonomy from the Assadist state and kept going despite the bombing, despite the starvation siege. Their struggle will continue to be remembered and honoured by Syrian revolutionaries everywhere.

Notes:
1. Cited in ‘Daraya: the town that shames the world’, The Syria Campaign, March 2016.
2. Cited in Mohja Kahf, ‘Water bottles & roses: Choosing non-violence in Daraya’, 21 November 2011.
3. For more information see Mohja Kahf, ‘Water bottles & roses: Choosing non-violence in Daraya’, 21 November 2011.
4. The American war reporter Janine Di Giovani also entered Daraya (without the regime) a few days after the massacre. She gives a harrowing account in her excellent book The morning they came for us (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016).
Originally posted here.
August 29, 2016
Anti-imperialism and the Syrian Revolution

The Syrian Revolution has tested the left internationally by posing a blunt question: Which side are you on? Do you support the popular struggle against dictatorship and for democracy? Or are you with Bashar al-Assad's brutal regime, his imperial backer Russia, his regional ally Iran and Iran's proxies like Hezbollah from Lebanon?

Tragically, too many have failed this test.

From the very beginning of Syria's revolution–even before the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and al-Qaeda's Nusra Front some years later–a whole section of the left opposed the popular uprising against the Assad dictatorship that began in early 2011, part of the Arab Spring wave of popular rebellions against dictatorship and repression.

Since then, they have turned a blind eye to Assad's massacre of some 400,000 Syrians, and his regime's use of barrel bombs, chemical weapons and barbaric sieges of cities like Aleppo. Today, 11 million people–half the country's population–have been displaced, with the Assad regime responsible for the lion's share of the death and destruction.

The U.S. has been seeking a resolution that might push Assad aside, but that above all maintains his regime in power, preferably with representation from reliable pro-Washington figures associated with the uprising.

Barack Obama came under pressure to intervene militarily in Syria after the regime carried out a chemical weapons attack in a suburb of Damascus in 2013, but he backed a Russian-brokered resolution that protected Assad.

His administration has hoped to use figures on the rebel side to provide a new face for Syria's dictatorship. But Assad held on–thanks in no small measure to the fact that the U.S., while accepting some supplying of the rebels, denied these forces the heavy weaponry they pleaded for to stop the regime's assault.

The result today is that the Obama administration has struck a de facto alliance with Russia to wage the war on ISIS, with the acknowledged consequence that even the Syrian regime's hated figurehead will likely stay in place, while those who rose up for democracy and justice continue to bear the brunt of the violence.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

EVEN IN the early stages of the Syrian uprising, when it was plainly following the inspiration of the popular revolts in Tunisia and Egypt, Stalinist groups like the Workers World Party, Party for Socialism and Liberation, and Freedom Road Socialist Organization never wavered in their support for the Assad regime. They have always preached uncritical support for opponents (perceived or real) of the U.S. government, no matter how oppressive and reactionary.

But they weren't alone. Prominent figures on the broader left adopted a similar position.

Journalists Patrick Cockburn and Robert Fisk erase the anti-Assad revolution in their coverage of Syria and present the situation as a geopolitical conflict–between the U.S. and its proxies on one side, and Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies on the other.

Even important antiwar formations like Britain's Stop the War coalition have adapted to Assad supporters, giving a platform to allies of the dictatorship, while denying the same to supporters of the revolution. For example, Stop the War toured regime apologist Mother Superior Agnès Mariam de la Croix, despite an open letter protesting this decision signed by dozens of Syria solidarity activists.

In the U.S., the small antiwar formation United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) staged a demonstration that included people carrying the flag of Assad's regime–some even wore T-shirts emblazoned with the dictator's face.

The American Communist Party's U.S. Peace Council went so far as to send a delegation that met with Assad and his henchmen. They justified their sympathy with Assad by claiming that he was resisting U.S. imperialism's backing of Islamic fundamentalist forces to carry out regime change in Syria.

"Most of Syrian society [has] unified behind the state to protect a secular Syria against the divided and sectarian result the U.S. and its nefarious allies have been working and killing to generate," wrote Henry Lowendorf about his visit with Assad in a post that circulated on the United for Peace and Justice e-mail list. "Syria has what is apparently a national unity government, focused during the crisis on fighting off the vicious mercenaries of most powerful country in the world and its allies."

This is a complete distortion of reality that is used to justify standing on the side of dictatorship, counterrevolution and imperialist intervention. The pro-Assadists are discrediting the left in the eyes of Syrians who have fought heroically on the side of the revolution.

A genuine internationalist left must stand with Syria's popular resistance to Assad, which began as a nonviolent uprising against the dictatorship–and against intervention by American and Russian imperialism, as well as by the region's main powers.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

HOW COULD opponents of U.S. imperialism end up supporting a dictator–one who has been known to collaborate with the U.S. in torturing "war-on-terror" prisoners in the CIA's extraordinary rendition program.

The answer starts with the Stalinist left's support of Stalin's Russia and Mao's China during the Cold War era. It supported those state capitalist dictatorships not only as opponents of U.S. imperialism, but as positive models of socialism.

Thus, some of the same currents that today support Assad yesterday defended murderous repression of workers' rebellions and even imperialist invasions in the past.

They stood with Russia's crushing of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Czechoslovakia's Prague Spring in 1968 and Poland's Solidarity in 1981. They supported Mao's China when the regime wrecked workers and peasants' lives through the Great Leap Forward and oppressed Tibetans in a decades-long occupation. They defended regimes like Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe as anti-imperialist, despite his relentless crackdown on all dissent.

Even today, when all the world's states are obviously capitalist, these leftists support oppressive regimes as "anti-imperialist" so long as they oppose the U.S. in some form. Under the faulty logic that "my enemy's enemy is my friend," popular struggles for democracy are denounced as the work of American imperialism if they protest the wrong regime.

This attitude, referred to as "campism," has distorted much of the left's response to popular uprisings in the Middle East. For example, Iran's "green movement" was dismissed as a creation of the U.S. drive to overthrow former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

As a consequence of this flawed underlying approach, the campist left reacted to the Arab Spring in a completely incoherent fashion.

Everyone on the left supported the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions of early 2011 because these countries were considered U.S. allies. But the campists opposed pro-democracy uprisings in Libya and Syria, even though these revolts were driven by the same economic and political grievances–and clearly inspired by the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt.

Why? Because the dictatorships that masses of people were rebelling against could be depicted as "anti-imperialist" opponents of the U.S.

In reality, both the Libyan and Syrian regimes had been "frenemies" of Western imperialism–sometimes collaborating with and at other times dissenting from the designs of the U.S. government and its European allies. And both regimes were happy to work with Russian and Chinese imperialism. In no way can they be accurately categorized as "anti-imperialist."

Libya's Muammar el-Qaddafi curried favor with Europe by acting as a border patrol for the EU, stopping North Africans from crossing the Mediterranean Sea and imprisoning large numbers of them in his country's gulag.

As for Assad in Syria, his dictator father joined the first "coalition of nations" for the U.S.-led Gulf War against Saddam Hussein's Iraq in 1991. Bashar al-Assad got his chance to collaborate with a Bush during the "war on terror" years after 2001, when prisoners of war were smuggled into Syrian jails to be tortured for information and then returned to U.S. custody.

At one point, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went so far as to call Assad a "reformer" worthy of engagement.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

THE CAMPIST left's attitude is based, to at least some degree, on a misreading of the structure of today's world order and America's position in it. They presume that there is only one imperialist power in the world–the U.S.–and that it is an all-powerful manipulator of international events.

The U.S. does remain the world's dominant imperialist power, but as a result of its failed war in Iraq and other factors, it has suffered a relative decline in strength. Washington is now challenged internationally by imperialist rivals like China and Russia, as well as regional powers. In this new imperial order, the U.S. is less capable of controlling world events–it fears popular revolt all the more.

The campist misreadings, however, have led them to the conclusion that the U.S. government is pulling the strings in the rebellion in Syria. Some have gone so far as to argue–absurdly–that the U.S. backs ISIS against Assad. Ironically, this puts the campists in agreement with Donald Trump, who, in his latest ravings, claims that Obama and Clinton were "founders" of ISIS.

Leaving everything else aside, such arguments display an arrogant dismissal–not unlikedefenders of imperialism–of the capacity of exploited and oppressed people to fight for liberation. Instead, we get a classic Orientalist trope: Western imperialism manipulating the ignorant and reactionary local tribes for its own purposes.

In reality, the U.S. retreated in general from outright regime change as its strategy in the Middle East after the failure of its invasion and occupation of Iraq. The main priority behind the alternative direction for U.S. imperialism pursued by Barack Obama is that the U.S. should avoid destabilizing regimes for fear of the chaos that ensues in the aftermath.

Thus, the voices of the campist left are stuck in the past, trying to find the evidence to expose a strategy of regime change that the U.S. has abandoned.

The rebranding of U.S. imperialism under Obama left its mark on Washington's response to the Arab Spring.

The first instinct was to rally to the defense of the old regime–as Hosni Mubarak's police were killing protesters, Secretary of State Clinton praised the government for "demonstrating restraint." But when that became untenable, Washington pressed for a policy of orderly transition, sacrificing dictators in order to save the existing state apparatus.

After the first tide of the revolt receded, the U.S. was all too happy to support the reassertion of the old order–as when Washington's ally Saudi Arabia sent troops to crush an uprising in Bahrain. And now, after the rise of ISIS, chiefly as a consequence of the disastrous occupation of Iraq, the U.S. is solely and obsessively focused on defeating this counterrevolutionary force in Iraq and Syria.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

IN SYRIA, however, Washington's goal is obvious, and has been for some time: It doesn't want regime change. Perhaps the hated figurehead of Assad will be pushed aside, but U.S. policy from the beginning has been to preserve the core of Assad's state.

Why? Above all, the U.S. fears an unpredictable outcome, whether as a result of the advance of the Nusra Front or ISIS–but especially in the form of a popular revolution.

Anyone who doubts the popular nature of the Syrian Revolution should read Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila al-Shami's stirring account of it in their book Burning Country–or for a shorter online description, Mark Boothroyd's article "Self Organization in the Syrian Revolution." This is a struggle from below that imperialism has always feared the most.

In its initial stages, the uprising in Syria had a nonviolent and mass character, but the savage repression and violence carried out by the regime militarized the conflict. The U.S. blocked the shipment of heavy weaponry, such as anti-aircraft systems, that would have strengthened secular and democratic forces that have borne the brunt of the Assad regime's terror.

The net effect of U.S. policy was to assist in the marginalization of anti-Assad forces committed to the democratic goals of the uprising from its beginning–and to provide an opening for the predominance of reactionary jihadist military forces like Nusra or ISIS.

Perversely, Assad himself sought to cultivate these fundamentalist currents by releasing hundreds of jihadists from prison while jailing and torturing the leaders of the popular uprising. Assad rightly understood that the reactionaries could be used to crowd out popular forces, uprising and would be an easier opponent to defeat.

Today, Washington's goals are to wipe out ISIS and to secure a negotiated settlement in Syria that preserves the regime, if not Assad himself. In America's camp, regional powers like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey have tried to push the envelope even further, backing various jihadist forces to strengthen their position in region and weaken their opponents, from Assad to Iran, as well as challengers from below such as the Kurds.

On the other side of the international geopolitical rivalry, Russia–profoundly weakened since its defeat in the Cold War a quarter century ago–is reasserting its imperial power through its all-out support for the Assad regime in Syria.

Russia wants to secure its position as a power broker in the region, push back against the U.S. and maintain a base in Syria. For its part, the Iranian government wants to stop Assad from being toppled for fear of losing a valuable ally in the region. And Assad is eager to manipulate all of the above to preserve his dictatorship.

While each of these players has different interests, they overlap in ways that confound the campist left's flawed analysis.

For example, the U.S., Russia and Assad are in a de facto collaboration in the war against ISIS. Thus, Obama's Secretary of State John Kerry is pursuing a cooperation pact with Russia that would cement a counterrevolutionary peace based on preserving the existing state.

However, Russian and Iranian intervention in Syria has been successful enough that Assad may be able to block demands for a transition that sidelines him. With at least a section of the U.S. foreign policy establishment willing to support a resolution that leaves Assad intact, it's quite plausible that Washington could bless such an outcome, creating yet another awkward point of agreement between campists and the U.S. imperialists they deplore.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

UNFORTUNATELY, CAMPISM has shaped the viewpoint of whole sections of the left–even parts that are far removed from the Stalinism of the Workers World Party. It has, for example, informed the attitudes of Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and especially her vice presidential running mate Ajamu Baraka.

Stein rightly opposes U.S. intervention in Syria, but has made little to no criticism of Assad and his war on the Syrian people. Even worse, Baraka openly supports the Assad regime. Both have appeared on Russia's state-sponsored, English-language RT television network to speak in opposition to U.S. war crimes, while remaining silent about Putin's and Assad's atrocities.

Many Syrian revolutionaries and solidarity activists are rightly furious about this stance from the major left-wing alternative in Election 2016. Stein and Baraka each have proud records of standing against exploitation, oppression, racism and war, and their campaign is, in almost every other respect, a principled challenge to the two parties of capital and militarism–the Democrats and Republicans. But anti-imperialists must not stay silent about this awful exception.

Certainly, the candidates of the two capitalist parties have no alternative on Syria, let alone any other question.

Donald Trump is a racist bigot who wants to bar Muslims from the U.S. and supports Assad's regime as a lesser evil to ISIS.

But Hillary Clinton is no ally of the Syrian people. She calls for the U.S. to enforce a no-fly zone in Syria, and some of her advisers support air strikes against the Assad regime for the stated aiming of stopping attacks on civilians. But Clinton certainly does not support the original aspirations of the Syrian Revolution.

At most, Clinton supports another strategy to achieve the same aim her former boss, Barack Obama, advocates: a negotiated solution that preserves the core of the Syrian state, preferably with Assad out of power, but possibly with him remaining.

No one committed to solidarity with the Syrian struggle can align themselves with either wing of the U.S. imperial establishment. Instead, the left must reject imperialism in any form, including Russia's.

Rather than look to imperialist powers or dictatorial regimes in either camp, the left should stand for workers' struggle across borders and in defense of oppressed nations and their fight for self-determination.

In Syria, the revolution has suffered a defeat for the time being. While civil society activists continue to seize every opportunity to assert their goals, their forces have been ravaged by counterrevolution–in the form of the Syria regime and its international allies on the one hand, and the Nusra Front and ISIS, which was particularly eager from the start to target the rebels than regime forces, on the other.

But as Gilbert Achcar argues in his book Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprising, this setback, however devastating, comes amid a long period of revolutionary crisis in Syria and the whole region.

The task of the international left today is to oppose intervention by any of the imperialist and regional powers, reject the tyranny of the Assad regime itself, demand the opening of the borders to those fleeing the violence and chaos, collaborate with Syrian revolutionaries–and win people away from campism to the politics of international solidarity from below.

Originally posted here.

August 28, 2016
Burkinis and Bombs – What’s New?

This essay was originally written as a letter to the editor of La Gazette de Montpelier. Translated from the French by Nancy Holmstrom.

As a retired American historian, specialized in French civilization, and for the past 20 a resident at the Mediterranean costal town of Palavers-les-Flots, permit me to remind the mayors of our beach towns as well as the Prime Minister of the Republic, of a little historic fact forgotten by those who make an affair of state of modest women who wish to remain covered when they take their children bathing at the beach. This practice is nothing new. It was in almost identical dress that my grandmother and my aunts went bathing around 1900, without anyone being scandalized. (see the attached photo). On the contrary, in that period and up to the 1960s, the girl who wanted to present herself (except on nudist beaches) in a bikini risked being reprimanded by the police and given a ticket – as happened to a woman in a burkini yesterday at Cannes.

And while we’re on the subject of anachronisms, my duty as historian (albeit retired) obliges me to point out another less amusing one. While for seven months the French Air Force, (following behind the Americans) has been launching bombs over Syria, killing who knows know how many Syrian civilians, women, children and destroying their homes, no-one among the French political/media class seems to remember one big fact: As with the burkini, this is nothing new. Let us then recall that the Army of the Republic occupied Syria from 1920 to 1946 and that the French Air Force bombed Damascus not once but twice (ten thousand deaths in 1925, and more in 1945). in order to suppress the Syrian democrats and nationalists.

In 1945, right after the Liberation, de Gaulle tried to overthrow the Syrian Republic that the Free French had tolerated during the war. French bombers pounded the Syrian Parliament and demolished several Damascus neighborhoods, while the French Army machine-gunned thousands of demonstrators and arrested Parliamentarians and other elected officials. Finally, thanks to British intervention and the condemnation of France by the brand-new United Nations, French troops left Syria in 1946.

The so-called “scandal” of modest feminin beachwear, seen as a deliberate Islamist “provocation” and a threat to French security, continues to preoccupy the French politicians and media (and the foreign media remains astonished that such a detail of mores could rouse up a great historic nation) no-one seems to be upset about the real scandal: France (and the U.S.) are destroying Syria under the pretext of fighting “terrorism,” all the while arming these very terrorists by means of lucrative arms sales to the Wahabi Saudi Arabia, the principal supporter of DAESH (ISIS).

Why sell arms to your most dangerous and implacable adversaries when your are war against them? Why then insult the modesty and gratuitously humiliate the women of a great people known for their pride, a people that your government colonized and oppressed for a long time? Is this how you assures the security of a multi-ethnic Republic with a large Arab-Muslim population? Is this not acting the part of a pyromaniac firefighter? Is this not folly?

Back when the United States was mired down in Indochina (after taking over Vietnam from defeated France), the American historian Barbara Tuchman wrote The March of Folly: from the Trojan War to Vietnam in order to explain how the political and military elites of all epochs have persisted in military madness despite repeated defeat. The answer was: they “forget” (mentally suppress) the lessons of the past. So, for example, in order to mentally transform our peaceful but modest female fellow-citizens into a vanguard of terrorists exploited by occult foreign powers hostile to ou secular Republic, we must first forget the image of the bathing suits worn by our own modest grandmothers (Christians and Socialists alike) visible on the sepia-toned “1900” post cards on sale at Palavas and every other beach town. More seriously, in order for a government to persisting with a clean conscience in pursuing a devious and murderous, century-old divide-and-rule foreign policy, stirring up sectarian hatred and nourishing violence in Syria and terrorism in France, it must forget its heavy imperialist past and banish it from acceptable political discourse. Just as during the U.S. occupation of Iraq, it was taboo to mention the mass water boarding of Filipino prisoners during the U.S. invasion and occupation of 1898.

August 28, 2016
Richard Seymour's "Corbyn": Not Gloomy Enough?

Richard Seymour, Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics. New York: Verso, $19.95. 256pp.

This time last year I believed Jeremy Corbyn was wrong to stand for the Labour leadership; he would, I thought, get a derisory vote and merely reinforce right-wing hegemony and the marginalisation of the Labour left. Since then the unexpected has happened, and perhaps we should all be a bit cautious in pronouncing on what is and is not possible.

A great deal of nonsense, much of it highly pernicious, has been written about Corbyn. So a new book on the subject from Richard Seymour is very welcome. Seymour, who first established his reputation with the excellent website Lenin’s Tomb, is a perceptive and exceptionally well-read commentator on current affairs, and what he has to say about Corbyn – which as he points out “won’t leave anyone entirely comfortable” [p. 11] – can hopefully raise the level of the discussion above the spite and gossip which has characterised so much of what has appeared so far.

In a devastating opening chapter Seymour surveys the response to Corbyn’s campaign and election from professional politicians and journalists. Comments ranging from the paranoid to the inane – from prophecies of strikes and violence to comparisons with National Socialism – show just how much Corbyn has succeeded in upsetting his opponents. The Guardian – from which one might, naïvely, have expected something a little bit better, has been particularly culpable, mobilising its writers against Corbyn. The lamentably obnoxious Suzanne Moore (who, as Seymour notes, learned her trade at Marxism Today) accused Corbyn of being an ascetic; the implication being that unless one enjoys oneself in the particularly lurid manner that Ms Moore would like us to believe she indulges in, then one is incapable of any sort of enjoyment.

As Seymour shrewdly observes, Blairites are so angry because they are frightened, “panicking”, and the same is true of the journalists who back them. These people are often described as “opinion formers”; but it seems that the ungrateful populace do not want to have their opinions formed any longer, and that opinion formers, like wig-makers during the French Revolution, may see their craft become obsolete.

Seymour attributes this to the declining influence of the press and the rise of alternatives, especially social media: “With the rise of alternative sources of information …. there is far less deference to the dominant television and press outlets than there had been before.” [p. 23]. Undoubtedly there is considerable truth in this, but I would add the general prevalence of a diffuse sceptical anti-authoritarianism. This is not unambiguously progressive (for example, the belief that climate change is just a scam invented to increase our taxes), and when one reads the ignorant, reactionary self-obsessed contributions that flourish on the Guardian readers’ “Comments” sections, there are no great grounds for optimism. Nonetheless the trend is unmistakable.

But, as Seymour points out, the onslaught on Corbyn was counterproductive. Those who were voting for Corbyn were not convinced by the virulent attacks; on the contrary, “those who were likely to vote Corbyn were already convinced that the old leadership was undemocratic and didn’t take members seriously.” [ p. 15]

It was not that Corbyn represented a serious threat to those who hold power in our society and their hangers-on. As Seymour notes, “barring foreign policy, there is nothing in principle that Roy Hattersley couldn’t support in Corbyn’s agenda.” [p. 83] Corbyn’s appeal was that he was an example of that unusual phenomenon, an honest person in politics. As an LBC radio host remarked with incredulity “he’s given me a straight answer to a straight question”. [p. 25] Corbyn says what he believes rather than looking over his shoulder and wondering what he ought to be believing this week. Such people are rare, and the far left has no monopoly of them – the name Ann Widdecombe springs to mind.

Seymour mocks the way in which political commentators have repeatedly drawn comparisons with the rise of Bennism in the early eighties, and its impact on the Labour Party – the 1983 election defeat and the Social Democratic Party split. He makes some valid points in support of his insistence that “This is not 1981”. [p. 54]

Yet there are some valid comparisons. Seymour should consider the analysis made by his own former organisation, the SWP, of the Bennite phenomenon. In the early seventies there was a powerful working-class movement, embodied in the Saltley pickets, the freeing of the Pentonville Five and the overthrow of the Heath government. The revolutionary left sometimes rode on its coattails, sometimes made small but significant interventions.

By the end of the decade things were very different. Tony Cliff, perceptively but over‑optimistically described the situation as one of “downturn”. He expected an upturn to follow – we’re still waiting. So the turn to Benn, by many Labour members and trade-union militants, was a sign of weakness; in Cliff’s words “because workers don’t feel confident enough to fight for jobs or over wages in their own workplace, they look to Tony Benn”.

Interestingly, the SWP today has not renewed this analysis for Corbyn. From being the author of the analysis it has become part of the problem; it looks to Corbyn to give a boost to its own reduced membership.

Seymour is, however, right to locate the Corbyn phenomenon in the context of a general crisis of politics, in Britain and around the world. This is expressed most concretely in a continuing decline in electoral turnout. And above all it is the young and the poor who do not vote. The poor because they have repeatedly seen that no party offers any solution to their plight. And unless the young take to voting as the joys of youth begin to fade, the decline will only continue as years go by. But the real causes lie in the political system: “it is not apathy that characterises a growing chunk of the electorate so much as their exclusion from effective political power.” [p. 73]

Seymour then devotes two chapters to the history of the Labour Party, from the origins to New Labour. It is a useful summary of a familiar story, based on such sources as Ralph Miliband. Labour, he argues, has been trapped with a system that required it to support the existing order and permitted only the most limited reforms. The very particular, and probably unrepeatable, circumstances of 1945 provide the only partial exception.

One could quibble about details. Seymour says nothing of the events of 1960, when the parliamentary leadership refused to accept a conference decision for nuclear disarmament, and set a crucial precedent for the undermining of party democracy. The left, sadly, relied on constitutional niceties while the right mobilised at grass-roots level in unions and constituencies to overturn the decision. But overall Seymour’s account of the Labour Party is correct, and shows just how tight the constraints on Corbyn’s freedom of manoeuvre will be.

Which brings us to the crunch, the fifth and concluding chapter which asks “Can Corbyn Win?” Seymour is a leading figure in the new journal Salvage, which makes no secret of its political pessimism: its original motto was “Hope is precious; it must be rationed.” Here he tells us: “This is not to claim that Corbyn can achieve nothing with this experience, or that his supporters will gain nothing from it. But they are best placed to do so if they are sober about the tremendous obstacles facing them.” [p. 137]

He begins with a reference to what he calls the “uses of defeat”, arguing that while victory can reward complacency, defeat encourages rethinking and regroupment. [p. 179] Seymour looks at the various alternatives ahead, and stresses the weakness of Corbyn’s position: “Much of his shadow cabinet includes people quietly waiting for him to be forced to resign, while backbenchers maintain a fairly constant drumbeat of attacks …. The majority of his supporters in the party lack the organisation, experience, visibility and power that his opponents have.” [ p. 184] In particular Seymour is very sceptical of deselection, which is seen by some as a panacea; it could easily provide “ballast to a right-wing sabotage campaign” [p. 197]

If Corbyn survives to 2020 he will probably lose the election, and of course this will be used to condemn him, even though there is little or no evidence that anyone else could have done better. And in the unlikely but not impossible event of his winning he would face the same problems as all previous Labour governments in office: “It is not apparent that even if Corbyn were to win an election, he would be able to implement his core policies, which require a minimum of cooperation from business and even the financial sector.” [p. 184]

The only hope Seymour offers is of real change over an extended period; “there is … a generation of work to be done to reconstitute a viable, habitable Left”. [p. 217] What this might entail is left extremely vague, and is highly tantalising to the likes of myself who are very unlikely to live long enough to see how things take shape.

Where Seymour is clearly right is that opinion is not static. It is Corbyn’s virtue that he “wants to change opinion, to lead it, rather than merely reflect it in various poll-tested triangulations”. [p. 199] People do change their minds, sometimes very rapidly (in 1789 you’d have been pushed to find a single French person who wanted to chop the king’s head off). Those who voted for Corbyn are a small minority of the population – but they have friends and families, they are in workplaces and communities. If they endeavour to win support they can make a real difference, though not necessarily by 2020.

Many of the arguments about what would, or would not, make Corbyn “electable” are based on a static view of consciousness. In fact attitudes change. Thus in my own lifetime I have seen a massive switch from the homophobia which in the early sixties was nearly universal, even in far left circles, to the widespread acceptance of same-sex marriage today. This happened because gay activists stuck their necks out and fought bravely for their rights. So it is particularly sickening when the likes of Ben Bradshaw, who have personally benefited from the courage and determination of their predecessors, insist that Labour should simply reflect existing consciousness.

What Seymour says very little about is what organisational form a new movement might take. He has little hope of transforming the Labour Party and suggests that “for the great majority of the newest recruits, Labour is a temporary home”. [p. 219]

He devotes only a few paragraphs to the far left. Seymour was, like myself, for a good number of years a member of a revolutionary left organisation. As it happens it was the organisation which made the best shot at combining adherence to a revolutionary socialist tradition with a serious and realistic analysis of the world around us. In the event it wasn’t good enough. Inside the bubble of the revolutionary left it is all too easy to overestimate the importance of one’s own group and to view the world in the distorting perspective of the party line. But to puncture the bubble all that is needed is one small prick.

Mocking those who raised the spectre of a Trotskyist takeover of the Labour Party, Seymour estimates the forces of the far left at less than fifteen thousand. [p. 32] If this means those actually in far left organisations it is a generous overestimate. But there is also a larger diaspora of those who were once in revolutionary organisations and have retained most of their beliefs and commitments.

In the aftermath of 1968 most of the far left saw the need to build a genuine socialist alternative outside the Labour Party, and for want of any other available historical model, decided to build Leninist parties. In that heady period, the days of the Chilean coup and the Portuguese revolution, it was a reasonable perspective. That it has survived so long is evidence of how deeply a generation were marked by their experiences.

In recent years a key part of the strategy of the far left has been to build an electoral alternative to Labour. From Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party through the Socialist Alliance and Respect to Left Unity and TUSC, a whole series of attempts were made. Seymour is now dismissive of these, though at the time he, like myself, backed them enthusiastically. He explains the failure of Respect in terms of being “overly dominated by certain well-placed egos” and of the failure of any significant Labour figure other than George Galloway to join. [p. 165] The two are closely linked; if even a handful of Labour MPs had joined Respect, the egos could have been called to order. But it could not happen; Corbyn’s mentor Benn was deeply committed to the principle that the Labour Party was the only channel for social change.

That whole electoral strategy has been destroyed by Corbyn. To stand against Labour while Corbyn is leader would mean denouncing Corbyn’s programme and isolating oneself from Corbyn’s followers. TUSC’s attempt to find a middle way was hardly successful. (For TUSC’s results you will have to go to the TUSC website [ http://www.tusc.org.uk/17246/10-05-2016/super-thursday-elections-the-tusc-results] – they made no impact anywhere else.)

Yet the far left has not managed to find any other response to Corbyn than to be relatively uncritical cheerleaders. Thus the SWP told its supporters: “How should revolutionary socialists respond to the sustained attacks on Corbyn and attempts to undermine him? Should we shout “Sell out!” at every compromise he is forced to make? Should we sloganise against the inevitable capitulations of reformist politics? Or should we build the broadest possible defence of his leadership in order to give him the backing to implement the policies he was elected on and to defend him against attacks from the right? If we adopt the former approach we will be consigned to a sectarian ghetto and not deserve a hearing for our politics. Instead we need to rally round to defend him from attacks from the right. In defending Corbyn we are defending the principles of anti-austerity, solidarity with refugees, anti-racism and opposition to war that are at the core of our own politics.” [Sean Doherty in Socialist Review, October 2015] Party Notes reported gleefully on how many papers had been sold at Corbyn rallies; what they didn’t tell us was how many of those buyers came back for even a second copy.

Even RS21, which has generally had a very realistic attitude to current possibilities, has been swayed by the enthusiasm for Corbyn : “The election of Jeremy Corbyn, the same day tens of thousands surged through London in defence of refugees, has opened a world of possibilities. The radical left is no less fragmented and our anti‑austerity movement is no less short of what we need, but many can now sense the chance to advance radical politics and renew attempts to build resistance from below.” [https://rs21.org.uk/2015/10/02/corbyn-what-next-issue-5-of-rs21-magazine/]

Yet what can the left hope for from the Corbyn experience? If Corbyn is deposed, or loses the 2020 election – the two most likely scenarios – there are unlikely to be any significant gains for the left. By the 2020 election Corbyn will be nearly 71. He will resign, disdainfully reject an offer of a peerage, and return to his allotment. What is absolutely certain is that he will not lead a split from the Labour Party, however badly he is treated. Like Benn, he will live and die in the Labour Party. The right will regain control of the party, and use Corbyn as a bogeyman, just as Foot and Benn were used by a previous generation.

So where will Corbyn’s followers go? Some will stay in the Labour Party, nourishing the hope that one day happy times will come again. Others will go to the Greens, others again to single-issue campaigns. No more than a handful will go to the various groups of the far left.

Long ago, in some Trotskyist circles, there was the idea that revolutionaries should “take the masses through the experience” – i.e. encourage them to put reformists in power so that when the reformists “exposed themselves” the masses would flock to the revolutionary leadership. It is a notion which, along with “transitional demands”, belongs in the dustbin of history.

Seymour is at least partially justified in his scornful dismissal of “Britain’s old, exhausted, fractal Left”. [p. 196] It occurs to me that the one way that SWP could make an effective intervention at the present time would to mobilise its grey-haired comrades into the pensioners’ movement, where they could make a real impact. Unfortunately the veteran comrades still have their eyes on the stars and aren’t prepared to take on the donkey-work.

But if the old far left will not give birth to a new movement, where will it come from? On this point Seymour has little to offer. Of course there is always hope – just enough to encourage us to keep on fighting. But overall the prospect is bleak – even bleaker than the melancholy sages of Salvage would have us believe.

Climate change will produce a migration crisis many, many times worse than the one we are currently experiencing. A far right – whether or not fascist in the classic sense – demanding closed borders will get ever stronger. Increasing tensions between nations will make nuclear war ever more likely. Socialism or barbarism. Rosa Luxemburg was right, but not in the way she hoped.

Ian Birchall is a socialist writer and translator. he has written the following books: France: the Struggle Goes On [with Tony Cliff, 1968]; Workers Against the Monolith [1974]; Bailing Out the System [1986]; The Spectre of Babeuf [1997]; Sartre Against Stalinism [2004]; A Rebel’s Guide to Lenin [2005]; Tony Cliff: A Marxist For His Time [2011]. He has translated Alfred Rosmer and Victor Serge and published numerous articles in political and academic journals.

Originally posted here.

August 25, 2016
Spain: Podemos MP on understanding transversality

When the 15-M movement broke out onto the streets across Spain in 2011, it didn’t coalesce into a series of political parties on either end of the political spectrum. In fact, there was a common declaration that stood out among all of the indignados: “They don’t represent us”.

This referred to the “Regime of ‘78” and the dominant political actors that have been ruling Spain since the death of Franco, and have made the rupturing of the social contract possible over the last 30 years. The 15-M movement saw people come together from diverse places, not just ideologically, but in terms of their perspectives and their understanding of reality. Yet if there was something that truly united them it was their common diagnosis of the current situation, namely an unsustainable disequilibrium between the establishment (an elite armed with political and economic power, ready to do anything to keep their position), and the outsiders (ordinary people that don’t participate in the decision-making process), the widening gap between these two groups, and the forcing of the latter into an increasingly precarious position.

The establishment makes use of its power and its vast resources, they have ossified the institutions that were supposed to protect the rights of the outsiders, they have become increasingly out of touch with reality, and over time have completely broken the fragile balance created by the Constitution of ‘78, which brought democracy and social rights to the Spanish people after 40 years of dictatorship. The 1978 Constitution guaranteed – among other things – the right to decent housing, the right to healthcare, and the right to work. These promises have been greatly compromised by austerity, with major cuts to education and healthcare, labor reforms that increase the precariousness of the workers, and foreclosures that have left families homeless across the country.

Pushed to the limit, and having discovered the establishment’s deception, popular movements took to the streets to get rid of those who put their own interests above the social majority.

They did this in an organized manner, without partisan support, going beyond the outdated left-right axis. The indignados, as opposed to those unaffected elites who refused to resign, stood for social justice, freedom, democracy and the common good, and demanded greater democracy in the economy. They demanded that the political class be empathetic to this view and to stop being the institutional continuation of the IBEX35 (the 35 most powerful businesses in Spain).

Time passed, general elections were held, the Troika and austerity continued, misery grew and spread, but the 15-M movement never disappeared. It matured, incubating within it a solution which it wasn’t going to find outside.

“Start a party and run in the elections”, someone said to those people in the streets with their assemblies and proposals, shared by an immense majority of society. Soon he would wish he had bitten his tongue.

This is how Podemos began, as the inheritor of the 15-M movement. Though it would be unjust not to mention the many years of struggle for common welfare and for more just social models, in the form of organizations or activists from parties that share our goals. In the first stage, many people came together in the same space – both veteran activists as well as those who hadn’t engaged in politics until then – some already organized and some yet to organize.

The double challenge then began: that of channeling popular power into a shared line of action and that of organizing a party as a sum of parts, but harmonized by diverse collectives. Podemos has transitioned from movement to party, with the objective of entering institutions, to transform them, to put them on the side of the people.

After the success in the 2014 EU Parliamentary elections, where Podemos won five seats, the party-movement attracted more people, who began to identify for the first time with a project that aimed at bringing down the barriers of outmoded politics, and recovering the hope of achieving its desired aims. Many people who abstained from voting in past elections became activists in the 15-M movement. The moment arrived when political organization opened the door to a series of electoral opportunities, which will prove to be crucial for the future of Spain.

Through assembly debates in local “circles” they discussed the political and organizational models with which they would face these different elections. In October 2014, the proposals with the most votes were discussed in the founding congress of Podemos in Vistalegre. Podemos was founded upon a transversal political model – meaning that it is committed to building a broad consensus among diverse groups of people for things like the defense of free, public and universal healthcare, the social right to housing, and regaining lost labour rights.

But what exactly do we mean by “a transversal political model”? Transversality can be understood as the act of building majorities. Not electoral majorities per se, but social majorities made up of identities based on common goals; building inclusive identities adapted to today’s society. An example is that of the identity of “working class”, which was a necessary identity when they were organizing to overcome their class conditions 50 years ago, but which is not appropriate to the modern world.

It is in this transversality that there is a clear reflection of citizens that came together in the streets in 15-M. It is this important subject which I would like to focus upon in this article. Because it is thanks to this transversality – this broad appeal – that we have been successful. It has resulted in governments having changed hands in cities such as Cadiz, Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia. Transversality has made it possible to take projects anchored in minority objectives and integrate them into major projects with real possibilities of reaching the government, and transforming institutions from within, the essential element to successfully carry out the projects.

Of course commonly identified goals and lines of action by the social majority is not sufficient. They must be ready to take institutions back from the privileged elite. It is their duty to join forces and provide tools of participation and action so that the social majority feel not only represented but have real resources to be heard. This is reflected in Podemos’ current organizational model which provides various channels for participation.

We must not forget that within the organization there may be many different levels of participation. On the one hand there is the core or “nucleus”, the people who are the most heavily involved, and on the other there are supporters that participate to varying degrees. The lines of action must be oriented towards the social majority to which it aspires, not the nucleus. Towards supporting communities in their struggles – whether or not they support Podemos – in an effort to construct a major identity that is conscious of the importance of change and that (contrary to what boredom and the media blitz has produced in them) it is in their hands to carry out. And so groups like public servants, healthcare professionals, teachers, the unemployed, regardless of ideology based on outdated left-right divides, are gradually adding to the construction of large consensuses such as the defense of free, universal public health, the social right to housing, the recovery of lost labour rights, the fight against corruption, etc.

It is true that many of us come from very progressive environments, some of us will cringe to recall the legend of the POUM, or are avowed Republicans, others feel a sense of pride when the Internationale is sung, others are anarchists, some consider themselves eco-socialists or feminists, others come from being active in big parties. Some are newcomers to politics, but are as concerned as those who have been in activism since they were born.

Therefore with this in mind it is essential that we always remember that activist spaces are a means and not an end in themselves, to reach the broad social majority that needs us. We must be prudent not to assimilate activist spaces one hundred percent with that hegemonic project that is being constructed around us everywhere, and we must escape the perverse dynamics of the old politics that lead nowhere. Our goal is not to proselytize the extreme left; we need to look beyond our activist navel, to regain the hope of people who feel identified with, and involved in, the project, and to recover the momentum that occurred early in the movement.

Originally posted here.

August 25, 2016
NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS AWARDED TO KARL MARX; ACADEMIC ECONOMISTS SHOCKED, ‘DISMAYED.’

[Stockholm – August 21] The Nobel Prize in economics has been awarded posthumously to Karl Marx (1818-1883) for his book Das Kapital, a decision that has shocked and “dismayed” the economic establishment.

Lars Enquist, spokesperson for the committee, said that awarding Marx represented “an attempt to rectify shameful past errors on the part of the bank’s award committee.” He then read a remarkable statement to the media and the public explaining this year’s award:

“We have, ever since the Sveriges Riksbank’s Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was created in 1968, presented this award to a series of economists whose work was neither scientific nor humanitarian. The recipients, whether neoclassical economists, Keynesians, or more recently neoliberals, have not been able either to contribute to our understanding of economic life nor have they improved the lives of the earth’s peoples nor of our planet. In fact, their theories have more often contributed to economic policies that have been detrimental to the economic and social life of the world’s peoples and have contributed to the continuing degradation of the environment.

“We deeply regret the Swedish State Bank’s past awards. A profound crisis of conscience led our committee to make this year’s award to Karl Marx, an economist whose theory provided an actual account of the working of the capitalist system and who saw both the tremendous damage done by that system as well as the need to abolish it. We are also urging the bank to do away with the Nobel economics prize, feeling that economics is not a science, nor one of the humanities, nor one of the arts, but is rather an ideological construct created to obscure the actual exploitative function of our contemporary political economy and to protect those who profit from it.”

The Nobel Prize in Economics is not in fact one of the original Nobel Prizes in the arts and sciences established by Alfred Nobel between 1895 and 1901 and it is not awarded by the Nobel Foundation. The Sveriges Riksbank, the Swedish State Bank, only began to award the economics prize in 1968 on the occasion of its 300th anniversary. Some leftist economists have suggested that the bank, shaken by the first symptoms of a worldwide trend toward a falling rate of profit noted just a year before, began to award the prize in order to shore up the largely discredited field of academic economics.

This is the first time that the award has ever been made posthumously. Following the awarding of the prize this year, in an unprecedented demonstration, Enquist and other tuxedo-clad members of the committee tendered their resignations to the chairman of the bank, saying that they no longer wished to be associated with the prize, and marched out together in protest.

Reactions from Right and Left

A spokesperson from the conservative Cato Institute said that the Swedish State Bank’s prize committee’s decision was “astounding” and “dismaying.” The Heritage Foundation issued a statement saying that, “clearly a rogue committee has made an award that will destroy the reputation of the Nobel Prize.” William Nordhaus, president of the American Economics Association, told the media, “At first I thought it was some kind of joke….It’s really flabbergasting.” He asked, “Who will they give it to next Lenin? Trotsky?”

David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), said, “I am amazed by the committee’s decision. It is truly remarkable. Marx certainly deserves recognition for his contribution both to economic science and to humanity.” But, said Harvey, “I doubt he would accept a prize from Nobel who made his money in arms and whose bequest has been used to reward economists who justify and rationalize the capitalist system.” Harvey alluded to French socialist Jean-Paul Sartre’s refusal of the Nobel Prize in 1964.

Prize Recipients Usually Upholders of the Status Quo

The prize has usually been awarded over the years to mainstream economists, whether their branch of the stream was flowing toward the left, the right, or the center. Several have been on the far right. Samuel Brittan of the Financial Times, wrote that two former Swedish Ministers of Finance, Kjell-Olof Feldt and Gunnar Myrdal, had suggested the prize abolished. “Myrdal…wanted the prize abolished because it had been given to such reactionaries as [Friedrich] Hayek,” wrote Brittan.

Hayek, who was awarded the prize in 1974, was an opponent of both labor unions and social welfare programs. He is not the only far right-winger to receive the prize. The bank awarded the prize to Milton Friedman in 1976.

Friedman’s receipt of the prize in 1976 sparked world-wide protests because of his role and that of his colleagues from the University of Chicago—often referred to as the “Chicago Boys”—in advising the dictator Augusto Pinochet who had overthrown the elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile only three years before.

Four Nobel Prize laureates—George Wald, Linus Pauling, David Baltimore and Salvador Luria—wrote letters to the New York Times in October 1976 to protest the awarding of the prize to Friedman.

Prize Winner Karl Marx

Karl Marx, the winner of this year’s prize, was born in 1818 in the state of Westphalia to Jewish parents who had converted to Protestantism. He studied philosophy, became one of the Young Hegelian rebels against Germany’s leading philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, and took part in the 1848 revolutions that swept Europe. It was at that time that Marx wrote his most famous and widely read work, the Communist Manifesto, a pamphlet that called for the working class to lead a socialist revolution.

In the post-revolutionary period, with the financial support of his friend and colleague Friedrich Engels, Marx settled in London where—working in the British Museum library—he dedicated himself to the study of the capitalist economic system. Criticizing and rejecting the theories of Adam Smith, author of the Wealth of Nations (1776), and other scholars of the era, Marx produced his masterwork Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Capital: A Critique of Political Economy) in 1867.

Following Marx’s death in 1883, Engels undertook the publication of Volumes II in 1885 and Volume III in 1894. Following Engels death, German socialist Karl Kautsky, edited notes for three other volumes by Marx that were later published as Theorien über den Mehrwert (Theories of Surplus Volume). All six volumes are sometimes referred to as Capital, though Marx only oversaw the editing of Volume I.

In Capital, Marx argued that the capitalist system, based capital’s exploitation of labor, would eventually collapse because of its own internal contradictions, just as other earlier systems such as slavery and feudalism had collapsed. In Capital and other writings, Marx argued that the working class, forced to struggle for its rights and to improve its conditions, would overthrow capitalism and establish a democratic socialist society.

Marx’s Influence

Marx’s influence has been enormous. Both the Western European Social Democratic and the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc nations, as well as China, Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba all claimed to derive their economic theories from Marx. Many socialists have argued for the years, however, that those bureaucratic states had nothing to do with Marx’s notion of socialism. In any case, even with the Communist system collapsed and the Social Democratic establishment now managing capitalism, Marx’s ideas continue to inspire labor movements and leftist parties around the world.

Since the Great Recession of 2008, Marx’s writing and ideas have become enormously popular with young people around the globe, new social movements such as Occupy Wall Street, and with the political activists in Bernie Sanders’ primary campaign in the United States, Jeremy Corbyn’s fight for the leadership of the British Labour Party, and with new leftist parties such as Podemos in Spain. Given Marx’s popularity in these quarters, perhaps it is not so strange that the Swedish State Bank would posthumously award him the Nobel Prize for Economics.

———-

Yes, this is a spoof, written by Dan La Botz. There is no Lars Enquits. None of the remarks here, attributed to Cato, Heritage, Nordhaus or Harvey are true, though the account of the history of the prize and its winners is veridical, as is the brief story of Marx and his writings. Isn’t it a nice thought though?

August 22, 2016
The Left Hook: The Marxism of Sidney Hook
I. Introduction

When the politics of Sidney Hook, a public intellectual and philosopher, are remembered today, they are generally associated with a right-wing variant of social democracy which was compatible with both neoconservatism and McCarthyism.

For example, in 1953, Hook infamously wrote Heresy, Yes – Conspiracy, No, which justified the witch-hunts of the Red Scare and the purging of communists from academia reasoning that Leninist doctrine was the basis of an international communist conspiracy of subversion – with all orders emanating from Moscow.[1] Hook would end his life receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan, whose policies in support of death squads in El Salvador he had “applauded.” However, there was a very different Hook, who during the Great Depression was not only a committed communist revolutionary, but the leading Marxist theorist of his generation. Hook’s Marxism is overlooked and misunderstood today due to his later political trajectory. However, Hook made a worthwhile effort to understand Marxism as a revolutionary method of practice. Hook’s Marxism was unique not only for engaging with the “Western Marxists” Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch (whose works would not be translated into English until the 1970s), but for incorporating the pragmatism of John Dewey.

II. Background

Sidney Hook was born in Brooklyn, New York on December 20, 1902 to Jewish immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In his teens, Hook became a supporter of the Debs-era Socialist Party, the Bolshevik Revolution and an opponent of US involvement in the First World War. Hook did not join the Communist Party after its foundation in 1919, but he did remain a fellow-traveler of the party into the 1930s – including being a prominent member of the League of Professionals for Foster and Ford, which was formed to support the Communist Party’s Presidential campaign of 1932. After breaking with the Communist Party in 1933, over the politics of the third period and philosophical differences, Hook was one of the founders of the American Workers Party (AWP) in 1934. The AWP hoped to create a force to the left of the Communists by organizing workers, farmers and the unemployed on a revolutionary platform, which was independent of the USSR. However, Hook left the AWP after they merged with the Trotskyist Communist League of America in December 1934. Hook remained a sympathizer of Trotskyism and the anti-Stalinist left for a few more years until the impact of the Soviet Purges, World War II, and the Cold War caused him to shift to the right.[2]

  Hook combined political commitments with a career in academia, earning a Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1927, where he came under the influence of John Dewey, a major pragmatist philosopher. Hook would later be employed as a professor of philosopher at New York University (and later heading the Department of Philosophy) until his retirement in 1972. Hook also studied abroad, spending a year in Germany from 1928-9 where he attended the lectures of Karl Korsch and read Georg Lukács.[3] During this period, Hook spent time in the Soviet Union at the invitation of David Riazanov, Director of the Marx-Engels Institute, where he translated several of Engels’ works into English.

III. Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx

On the 50th anniversary of Marx’s death and just as President Franklin D. Roosevelt decreed a bank holiday, Hook’s masterpiece, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation was released. In his memoirs, Hook said that the time of the book’s release occurred when “millions were already convinced that capitalism as an economic system was in ruins, and the thesis of the book, of which they were blissfully aware, apparently confirmed that.”[4] Hook’s work received rave reviews from across the political spectrum who hailed it as a lucid exposition of Marx’s ideas.[5] However, Hook’s harshest criticism came not from anyone on the right, but from the Communist Party who denounced the book for its apparent approval of social democracy and revisionism. This was nothing but a hatchet job by the CP, since the opening section of the book is an extended critique and condemnation of social democracy alongside praise for the revolutionary practice of both Lenin and Luxemburg.[6] The dispute between Hook and the CPUSA came down to their vastly divergent views of Marxism. For the Communist Party, Marxism was seen more and more as an infallible science, which in the hands of the party reveals rigid historical laws. According to his biographer Christopher Phelps, Hook’s Marxism argued for “a methodological emphasis [on] provisional truth rather than absolute certainty, scientific inquiry over doctrinal fidelity, flux and change over fixity and determinism, and the potential of human action over fatalism… His criticisms [of the CP] derived not from a hostility to communism as a principle and social goal but from the perception that official Communism was straying from its stated aim and classical theory.”[7]

A. Thesis

The central thesis in Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx is that the guiding theme in both Marx’s life and work was his revolutionary opposition to capitalism and class society. Hook bluntly declares: “The purpose of Marx’s intellectual activity was the revolutionary overthrow of the existing order.”[8] Hook claims that Marx’s immediate successors, the Second International of Bernstein, Kautsky, Hilferding, completely misunderstood this and falsified Marx by turning him into a proponent of reformism, fatalism and determinism where socialism was “inevitable.”

Hook said that social democracy’s approach was an “abandonment of the revolutionary standpoint which was central to Marx’s life and thought.”[9] This change in the practice of the Second International had come about during decades of “peaceful” development of capitalism encouraged gradualism and parliamentary politics. This was most pronounced in the largest party of the Second International, the German Social Democratic Party who were integrated into the German state. Germany had grown from being a backwater of Europe to a major imperialist power which was able to grant concessions to the working class such as rising wages and a social safety net. The party’s orientation towards reforms resulted in a change in the composition of the SPD with the entrance of non-proletariat elements, the growth of a bureaucracy and officialdom who were cut off from the masses. All of this encouraged tendencies towards conservatism and nationalism within the SPD. Yet this produced in the SPD a need to square their seemingly revolutionary theory with a reformist practice that led to the controversy between revisionism and orthodoxy.

For revisionists such as Eduard Bernstein, the problem was simple enough – they wanted to “update” Marxism by officially turning the party into a social reform group that would bring theory into line with what they were actually doing. Ironically, Hook says, that the revisionists were honest and consistent, by contrast, their orthodox opponents were dishonest for “acting one in one way (always with the revisionists) and speaking in another (always against the revisionists).”[10]

Orthodox Marxists like Karl Kautsky argued that orthodoxy was the correct interpretation of Marxism. Yet this was a very peculiar form of Marxism, which was not viewed as the theory and practice of revolution, but as the science of social development. For orthodox Marxists, socialism comes about inevitably due to the processes at work under capitalism. In other words, this was a passive and fatalistic Marxism that was divorced from revolutionary practice. Hook said that this Marxism could analyze both the past and predict the future, but it was of no use in the present, rather it was a “religion of consolation” that dominated both the SPD and the Second International.[11] Despite their verbal commitment to revolution, orthodox Marxists were similar in practice to the revisionists, despite their claims to the contrary. For both revisionists and orthodox social democrats, there was a divorce between the ends and the means, which emasculated and bastardized Marxism.

  Rather, Hook said, those who preserved Marxism were Rosa Luxemburg and V. I. Lenin. Not only had they criticized the reformist tendencies within the Second International, but they had argued for a connection between the ends and means, in the form of linking everyday struggles of workers with the conquest of power which was the ultimate aim of the socialist movement. Hook argued that Lenin and Luxemburg put active consciousness back into Marxism, which “was not mystic intuition but scientific knowledge. But scientific knowledge was not merely a disinterested report of objective tendencies in the economic world but a critical appreciation of the possibilities of political action liberated by such knowledge.”[12] This Marxism was not just a knowledge of objective tendencies in the economic world, but a critical appreciation of the possibilities open for political action as a result of that knowledge.

To mediate between the two factors of the objective economic conditions and assert a revolutionary class will was the task of a political party which would act as a vanguard and general staff of the class struggle. However, the party’s goal is not to organize the development of the economic preconditions of socialism (capitalism did that automatically), but to undertake the conquest of power. And if the goal of socialists was a revolutionary dictatorship, then this entailed the employment of means, “could not be of a kind that hindered the fulfillment of the end.”[13] If socialism was “inevitable” and the goal was practical reforms, then it didn’t matter if socialists voted to strengthen the bourgeois state (such as by increasing the size of the army) or made opportunistic deals with the class enemy. For revisionists and opportunists, a focus on the seizure of power was a distraction from their struggle for “practical” reforms. On the other hand, if the socialist goal was power, then they had pursue means consistent with that end. This meant socialists could not engage in short term compromises of voting to strengthen the capitalist army. As Hook put it, “if the state had to be captured, it was sheer insanity to begin by strengthening it.”[14] Rather reforms would be the byproduct of the struggle for power, not the goal itself. Every class struggle was viewed as potentially a political struggle.

In 1914, when the Second International voted for war, under the banner of orthodoxy, it was Lenin and Luxemburg who remained true to Marxism by arguing for class struggle and the downfall of imperialism. Hook praised them both on no uncertain terms, “The work of Luxemburg and Lenin marked, so to speak, the beginning of the Marxist reformation. The texts of Marx and Engels were to be read in the light of the original spirit behind them. In refusing to be ‘orthodox’ at any price, Luxemburg and Lenin claimed to be more faithful to the ideas and methods of the men who originally inspired that orthodoxy than the formula – ridden pendants who anathematized them as heretics.”[15] Although Lenin and Luxemburg were viewed as faithful disciples of Marx, neither escaped Hook’s criticism. According to Hook, Luxemburg was wrong on the organization question with her reliance on spontaneity (as opposed to Lenin) and national liberation. In regards to Lenin, Hook argued that his epistemological approach in Materialism and Empiro-Criticism was mechanical, whereas the approach in What is to Be Done was Lenin’s true philosophy with its “frank acceptance of the active role of class consciousness in the social process.”[16]

B. Korsch and Lukács

As mentioned above, Hook was perhaps the only American to have engaged with the works of both Karl Korsch and Georg Lukács. Both were Marxist revolutionaries – in Germany and Hungary respectfully, who sought to purge Marxism of the determinism and fatalism of the Second International and, like Hook, to emphasize the role of active consciousness and revolutionary praxis.

In Korsch’s 1923 work, Marxism and Philosophy, he argued that for Second International Marxism, theory had ceased to be guide for practice, but was viewed as “more and more as a set of purely scientific observations, without any immediate connection to the political or other practices of class struggle.”[17] Korsch said that orthodox Marxism was fragmented with “separate branches of knowledge that are isolated and autonomous, and with purely theoretical investigations that are scientifically objective in dissociation from revolutionary practice” instead of being viewed as “a living totality; or, more precisely, it is a theory of social revolution, comprehended and practised as a living totality.”[18] For Korsch, Marxism was not just a science of social development, that could be utilized by any class, but “is the theoretical expression of a revolutionary process”[19] which can not avoid questions of politics, ideology and the state. To neglect these questions is to fall into opportunism. Korsch praised Lenin’s approach in the State and Revolution in 1917 as “an early indication that the internal connection of theory and practice within revolutionary Marxism had been consciously re-established.”[20] Hook shares with Korsch a criticism of orthodox Marxism, determinism, upholding Marxism as a method of revolution and the active role of consciousness.

Although Hook had similar ideas on the role of the party to Lukacs, they diverged on the question of orthodoxy. Lukács had famously tackled the question of orthodoxy and the dialectic in the opening chapter of History and Class Consciousness, “What is Orthodox Marxism?” by declaring:
- Let us assume for the sake of argument that recent research had disproved once and for all every one of Marx’s individual theses. Even if this were to be proved, every serious ‘orthodox’ Marxist would still be able to accept all such modern findings without reservation and hence dismiss all of Marx’s theses in toto – without having to renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment. Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not the ‘belief’ in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a ‘sacred’ book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders.[21]
Despite Lukács’ rhetorical point in the above passage, there is little utility in following a method that only produces the wrong results and conclusions. Hook handled questions of method and orthodoxy far differently than Lukács. In regards to orthodoxy, Hook said it was “an anomaly in any revolutionary movement. Its derivation is notoriously religious… Wherever there are people who insist on calling themselves orthodox, there will be found dogma; and wherever dogma, substitution of a blind faith or a general formula for concrete analysis and specific action.”[22] Whereas Lukács is orthodox in his dialectical method, in contrast to the determinist and revisionism of the Second International, Hook is unorthodox for precisely that reason.[23]

C. The Dialectical Method

Although Hook differed with Lukács on the question of orthodoxy, both did agree that Marxism is defined principally by its method. For Hook, this meant that Marxist intellectual activity was “a program of action; his analyses a method of clearing the way for action.”[24] This methodology was experimental since ideas are true only so long as they are verified by experience and practice. The Marxist method was not, as the Communists and the USSR imagined, a rigid dogma and foolproof science, but a flexible method where conclusions were provisional and revised according to the dictates of experience. These themes bore the imprint the John Dewey’s pragmatism.

It may seem strange and untenable that Sidney Hook is defending pragmatism as a revolutionary method. After all, pragmatism is associated in the popular mind with opportunism, “doing what works” and anti-intellectualism.[25] And for Marxists, such as George Novack, it is the philosophy of the petty bourgeois tainted by its twin links to liberalism and imperialism. However, this is a vulgarization of pragmatism and not the views of John Dewey, Hook’s pragmatist mentor. Dewey saw pragmatism or more preferably “experimentalism” or “instrumentalism” as when the “validity of beliefs and judgments about values is dependent upon the consequences of action undertaken in their behalf.”[26] These hypotheses and ideas must then be verified by experience – which extends the scientific method out of the laboratory and into social life. People can thus plan and work towards certain future outcomes. Yet these outcomes are not known in advance, since all conclusions are provisional and need to be proved. While Dewey is not mentioned in Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx and only once in passing in From Hegel to Marx(1936), his influence on Hook’s perception of the dialectical method is undeniable.

According to Hook, the dialectic is not a dogma or a religious mystery, but a logic of movement, growth, and action. The dialectic was applicable to all levels of existence and it seeks objective knowledge of the natural and social world from the standpoint of the doer, not the spectator. Human action is the necessary element of the dialectic. Hook stresses that there is a difference between the laws of the natural world and those of the social. In the latter, human thinking is an active historical force. After all, human productive activities give rise to new needs and desires because as people act on the external world, they change their nature in the process. It is only through practice that problems can be solved. Hook went so far as to claim that: “Any problem which cannot be solved by some actual or possible practice may be dismissed as no genuine problem at all.”[27] The dialectic was thus the philosophical rhythm of conscious life.

Hook summarizes his defense of the dialectic along pragmatist lines as follows:
- The truth of any theory depends upon whether or not the actual consequences which flow from the praxis initiated to test the theory are such that they realize the predicted consequences. In other words, for Marx all genuine questions are scientifically determinable even though for a variety of reasons we may never know the answer to some of them. Since all judgments are hypotheses, the expectations which enter into the process of discovering the truth about them are not the personal and private expectations of the individual thinker but the public and verifiable expectations which logically flow from the hypotheses entertained. What a man wants to believe is relevant only to what he believes, but it is not to its truth. There is no will to believe in Marx but a will to action, in order to test belief and get additional grounds for further action if necessary. What takes place as a result of practice is not a relevant consequence of the theory unless the conditions involved in the meaning of the theory are met.[28]
In other words, the dialectical method is not a dogma or inflexible method, but is flexible, provisional and the hypotheses proposed are subject to change based on practice.

Hook’s incorporation of pragmatism also allows him to defend Marxism as a science. Hook said that, despite its professed goal of revolutionary overthrow of the existing order, this “did not make [Marx’s] conclusions any less objective, but it made them partial in their bearings and implications.”[29] Marxism was the revolutionary class theory of the proletariat and that class had different goals and interests from those of the bourgeoisie. Thus the social theory of the proletariat would naturally be denounced as wrong and dangerous by its class enemy.

This understanding of Marxism as a science, yet tied to the class interests of the proletariat, can be seen in Hook’s defense of the labor theory of value. The labor theory of value is not a myth, but
- is rather the self-conscious theoretical expression of the working class engaged in a continuous struggle for a higher standard of living – a struggle which reaches its culmination in social revolution. It states what the working class is struggling for and the consequences of its success and failure… In its full implications it can be grasped only by one who has accepted the class struggle from the standpoint of the working class and thrown himself into its struggles. To the extent that economic phenomena are removed from the influences of the class struggle, the analytical explanation in terms of the labor theory of value grow more and more difficult. The labor theory of value is worth saving if the struggle against capitalism is worth the fight.[30]
Lastly, Hook sought to reconcile pragmatism and communism by stating that only by establishing communism could the pragmatist ideal of free inquiry truly be realized since capitalist society blocked any proposal or genuine inquiry that questioned or challenged private property. “That is why no true social experiment is possible in class society.”[31] The result of Hook’s elaborate exposition, synthesis and reconstruction of Marxism during the 1930s was what Phelps called, “one of the most substantial contributions to Marxist philosophy in American history.” [32]

IV. The Right Hook

So what explains Sidney Hook’s later right-wing trajectory and odious positions? Some of his critics cast blame upon his blending of Marxism and pragmatism. However, Dewey’s influence on Hook was at its lowest point during the 1930s. In this period, Hook criticized Dewey for failing to see the struggle of the working class as the appropriate means of change. And as we have already discussed, Hook barely discusses Dewey by name in his major writings on Marx.[33]

What was more decisive in Hook’s later evolution were wider social and political factors. In the 1920s and 30s, Hook had managed to balance a commitment to both philosophy and political action, but the demands of career and family no doubt encouraged him to retreat from politics.[34]

Yet this still doesn’t explain his adoption of right-wing politics. Alan Wald, in his study of the Anti-Stalinist New York Intellectuals of the 1930s – the broader milieu that Hook was a part of – identifies a number of factors that brought them close to Marxism, but in their absence caused them to shift to the right. First, their anti-Stalinism had a dual nature which “allowed the possibility of either a return to classical Marxism or a sharp turn to the right, depending on individual circumstance and the complexity of the context in which an individual became an anti-Stalinist.”[35] During the 1930s, there were radical working class movements in the US and abroad that inspired these intellectuals to see socialism as a viable alternative to capitalism, whether the CIO or anarchists and the POUM in Spain. Thirdly, Leon Trotsky offered a Marxist, democratic and revolutionary alternative to the conservatism of the existing Communist Parties and the USSR. Lastly, many of the New York intellectuals lived in poor financial straits and expected few rewards for social advancement or success under the current system.[36] However, as Wald notes, at the end of World War II, all of this changed:
- The very factors that had occasioned the development of the intellectuals into revolutionaries in the 1930s had dissipated. Moreover, they had abandoned their ties to those socialist groups that might have reinforced their original convictions. So by the time a resurgence of social and political struggle occurred in the 1960s, many of the intellectuals had become hardened apologists for American imperialism.[37]
V. Conclusion

Sidney Hook, despite his sharp mind, was not immune from these social and political pressures. He too, ultimately succumbed to puerile anticommunism. It is also a sad fact that Hook’s abandonment of the revolutionary left meant he refused to allow Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx to republished during his lifetime for fear that it would “corrupt the youth.” Yet Hook’s work not only remains worth reading for its clarity and commitment, but many of the problems he identified – avoiding dogma and using Marxism as a method for revolutionary change – still remain with us.

Endnotes

[1] Sidney Hook, “Heresy, Yes – Conspiracy, No,” Dissent Magazine. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/wp-content/files_mf/1390433798d15Hook.pdf; Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Intellectuals From the 1930s to the 1980s(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 290-1; Christopher Phelps, Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 227-8.

[2] For more, see Phelps 2005, 74-139; Wald 1987, 3-16; Sidney Hook, Out of Step: A Unique Life in the 20th Century (New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, Inc., 1987), 7-207.

[3] “The author wishes to state his indebtedness to two contemporary writers: Georg Lukács whose Gerschichte und Klassenbewusstein stresses the significance of the dialectic element in Marx’s thought and links Marx up – unfortunately much too closely – with the stream of German classical philosophy; and to Karl Korsch whose Marxismus und Philosophie confirms the author’s own hypothesis of the practical-historical axis of Marx’s thought, but which underestimates the difficulties involved in treating the formal aspects from Marx’s thought from this point of view.” Sidney Hook, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2002), xii [73]. Brackets indicate the page numbers in the updated edition.

[4] Hook 1987, 165.

[5] Hook 2002, [39]-[43].

[6] Ibid. 43-53.

[7] Phelps 2005, 89. See also Hook’s own account of his fight with the CP over his book in Hook 1987, 158-65.

[8] Hook 2002, 68 [142].

[9] Ibid. ix [71].

[10] Ibid. 41 [115].

[11] Ibid. 28 [102].

[12] Ibid. 55 [129].

[13] Ibid. 58 [132].

[14] Ibid. 59 [133].

[15] Ibid. 60 [134].

[16] Ibid. 63 [137].

[17] Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), 60.

[18] Ibid. 60 and 57.

[19] Ibid. 69.

[20] Ibid. 68.

[21] Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (MIT Press, Cambridge, 1971), 1.

[22] Hook 2002, ix [71].

[23] Wald 1987, 121.

Hook also followed in Lukács in touching on Marx’s ideas on reification: “The historical expressions of a set of relations of production were turned into fixed things; and human behavior in all its economic ramifications was explained as controlled by things.

The upshot of this unhistorical approach corresponds to the actual consciousness of those who live in a commodity-producing society ans have not yet penetrated the secret of commodity production. The rise and fall of the market, periodic glut and scarcity, small-scale and large-scale panics, are taken as natural events bestowing blessings and calamities, like the fortunes of the weather, upon the just and unjust, the wise and the unwise. The social relations between human beings are ‘thingified’ into impersonal automatic laws while the material instruments of life are ‘personified’ into the directing forces of human destiny. Man finds himself ruled by the products (commodities) of his own hands.” Hook 2002, 188 [262].

[24] Hook 2002, 65 [139].

[25] Phelps 2005, 7. George Novack, Pragmatism vs. Marxism (New York: Pathfinder, 1975).

[26] John Dewey, “The Quest for Certainty,” Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/dewey.htm

[27] Hook 2002, 76 [150].

[28] Sidney Hook, From Hegel to Marx: Studies in the Intellectual Development of Karl Marx (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), 284-5.

[29] Hook 2002, 106 [180].

[30] Ibid. 222-223 [296]-[297].

[31] Ibid. 105 [179].

[32] Phelps 2002, 9.

[33] Ibid. 54.

[34] Ibid. 119 and 130.

[35] Wald 1987, 157.

[36] Ibid. 366-74. See also Alan Wald. 1984. “The New York Intellectuals in Retreat.” In Socialist Perspectives, ed. Phyllis and Julius Jacobson, 178-9. New York: Karz-Chol Publishing, Inc.

[37] Wald 1987, 368.

Originally posted here.
August 22, 2016
Young People Are Ready For A Third Party

According to a recent GenForward survey by political scientist Cathy Cohen’s Black Youth Project, based at the University of Chicago, young people across the board, dissatisfied with both the Democrats and the Republicans, are eager for a fundamental political change. That is the good news.

On one level this is not surprising because so many young people, including young Black people, broke with their parents by supporting Bernie Sanders in the recent Democratic Primary election. In Cohen’s survey, even though Sanders did not win the Black vote overall, 46% African Americans between the ages of 18 and 30 supported him (as compared to 36% for Clinton). However, these young people are not just looking for the best option within the confines of the Democratic Party. They are looking for big changes.

When asked whether or not “a third party is needed,” 66% of African American young adults and 71% of their age cohort regardless of race, answered in the affirmative. They are not confident that either the Democratic or Republican Parties are able to fully address their concerns. And Trump’s rabidly racist populism has created an even greater mood of political urgency. Sanders’ appeal was largely that he was a left-leaning outsider and outlier. Even though he ran in the Democratic Primary, he spent most of his political career as a Socialist independent. This seems to have had an added appeal to young voters.

The problem is that the most progressive organized electoral Third Party, the Green Party, is unknown to most young people, and most Americans in general. 78% of the 2,000 young people surveyed by the GenForward poll (including 77% of African Americans) did not know enough about the Green presidential nominee, Dr. Jill Stein to have an opinion one way or another. This is both sad and telling because much of the Green Party’s platform reflects a commitment to those issues that concern African American young people the most: racism, police violence, education and guns. And Stein’s newly selected running mate is Ajamu Baraka, an African Americana and longtime human rights leader. Moreover, the Greens were the first national political party to run two Black women in a presidential election in 2008 when its ticket included former Georgia Congresswoman, Cynthia McKinney, and Black Puerto Rican activist, Rosa Clemente.

In terms of the Green Party platform, it includes many issues that resonate for young Black voters. In terms of education, the Greens promise to “abolish student debt to free a generation of Americans from debt servitude. Guarantee tuition-free, world-class public education from pre-school through university. End high stakes testing and public school privatization.” Under their racial justice plank the party addresses reparations, mass incarceration and police violence. The section reads as follows: “End police brutality and mass incarceration. Create a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to understand and eliminate the legacy of slavery that lives on as pervasive racism in the economy, education, housing and health. Ensure that communities control their police rather than police controlling our communities, by establishing police review boards and full time investigators to look in to all cases of death in police custody. Demilitarize the police.”

All of these positions seemingly coincide with the political leanings and passions of young Black people, and many progressive white and Latino(a) youth. But most of those young people will never have the option to make an informed decision about a third party option because Stein/ Baraka and the Green Party are invisible in the current media circus that covers every babbling utterance from Donald Trump’s mouth and is virtually silent on what real alternatives might look like.

So, in all the ways in which our political system is biased in favor of the reigning elites and the status quo, it is also sensationalist and selective media coverage by mainstream outlets that does us all a disservice. The GenForward survey exposes one important layer of this problem. At a time when a significant demographic among the U.S. electorate seem frustrated, if not completely disgusted with the two major political parties, many of them having expressed willingness to at least discuss what a third party could offer, the mainstream media are virtually silent on the issue, save for a brief town hall with the right wing Libertarians, and a few interviews with Jill Stein.

In addition to campaign finance reform, an elimination of the electoral college and an end to voter suppression, we also need media accountability in political coverage. This is one major reform that could pave the way for a viable Third Party challenge in future elections.

Originally posted here.

August 22, 2016
Syria is the World: On the Failures of Leftist Internationalism
“But then came Syria, and my hypocrisy and the fragility of those ideals became exposed,” wrote Palestinian activist Budour Hassan in her latest brilliant piece entitled “how the Syrian Revolution has transformed me”.

For those familiar with the situation in Syria, and in particular with the Left’s reaction to the uprising, Hassan’s open apology is a truly powerful one. The Syrian revolution exposed a lot of inconvenient facts about much of the Western and Arab Left.

There is a lot to unpack here and a single article would not do it justice. Here, I wish to address a certain aspect of the Syrian crisis, namely what ‘we’ can do to address it in our own ways. For the truth of the matter is that many of us can identify with Hassan and her initial hesitation to support the Syrian revolution.

Solidarity and support were replaced by attempts to justify the unjustifiable through the means of upholding whatever geopolitical ‘positions’ happen to suit us and prioritizing our immediate concerns rather than the concerns of those on the ground.

Two years ago, Pulse Media identified the 3 common types of ‘Leftist’ responses to the Syrian uprising and its subsequent militarisation. They are:
- Explicit support for the Assad regime
- Monochrome opposition to Western intervention, end of discussion (with either implicit or explicit neutrality on the conflict itself)
- General silence caused by deep confusion
That trend is still present today, but the recent publications of a number of books by Syrians and supporters could, one hopes, reverse the Left’s reactionary positions thus far. This includes, but is not limited to: “Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War” by Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami, “La Question Syrienne” by Yassin Haj Saleh, “The Crossing” by Samar Yazbek, “The morning they came for us” by Janine Di Giovanni and “Khiana: Daesh, the Left and the Unmaking of the Syrian Revolution” edited by Jules Alford and Andy Wilson.

The reason I’m listing books here is simple: the Left has, for all intents and purposes, lost the moral right to talk about Syria. It has, at best, taken the cowardly stance of ‘essentialist anti-imperialism’, defined solely in relation to their own governments rather than on the basis of a universal opposition to all forms of imperialism. It is in need of a deep re-thinking of not only Syria but of itself as well.

As Palestinian academic Lama Abu Odeh wrote: The Syrian revolution left us “digging deep inside familiar lines of thought, scrambling for things to say; rummaging inside old political bags, grappling for positions long held to hold again; milking political affiliations and precious theoretical hometowns for whatever they’re worth, but only to find us lacking in things to say; only to find us tongue-tied, stone-faced, and dumbstruck. But most importantly quiet, as quiet as the tomb made of rubble that came from a building that fell from the weight of a barrel bomb that smashed the head of a Syrian man, too poor to make his escape when he should have, that came from the city of Homs!” That silence, however justified or not, is deafening.

We have failed as a movement which pretends to follow an internationalist framework. Instead, we have adopted the isolationism of our own governments, exceeding it at times, and even armed ourselves with racist generalizations that stink of colonial disgust.

Syria exposed the fragility and superficiality of a Left that is failing to unshackle itself from the inherent contradictions of the nation state. As Yassin Haj Saleh wrote, “the movement of Syrian refugees – by sea or by foot, with many falling along the way – across the borders of hostile countries that define themselves by their past, into other countries that define themselves by a more recent past, also evokes something old. Its prototype is probably the movement of humans across continents in prehistoric times.

” Interestingly, this movement is something which can easily be understood by the average person, “despite being ‘corrupted’ by the nation-state, which has become a binding framework for all thought and politics” for the simple reason that it has always happened throughout history, everywhere on Earth. But the nation-state’s fragility is revealed when it “stands watching, either powerless, or attempting to contain this movement that is destabilising its meaning even before it destabilises its borders.” Doesn’t that partially explain the hysterical reaction that Syrian refugees have often had to face once reaching Europe’s ‘safe’ shores? This narrative of seemingly primordial hatred which, with notable exceptions, desires to demonize those seeking refuge is exposing the very lack of conviction of those professing to uphold universal values.

This should come as no surprise then that the cynicism expressed at the top level of governance is recycled down to the last activist and intellectual – again, with notable exceptions. The inherent contradictions which have plagued Syria and the world should give rise to deeper realizations, eloquently expressed by Kurdish activist Dilar Dirik in a Facebook post: “It is the capitalist-statist-nationalist-patriarchal system that forces people around the world and at the moment especially in the Middle East to chose between lesser evils in the name of freedom. Forcing millions of people to pick between ISIS or Assad; religious fundamentalism or secular militarism; monarchy, caliphate or racist nation-states; women’s pornification or complete veiling; Sisi or Morsi; Atatürkism or Erdoğanism; etc are not choices but perfect weapons of breaking the people’s will. To force people to settle between death by drowning or by burning is the perfect way to make them lose the most fundamental human power: hope.

The only alternatives can be outside of the two-sides-of-the-same-coin system. An internationalist, women’s liberationist, grassroots democratic revolution of the people is going to make sure that in between dust and ashes and dead bodies, the communities will still be able to look each other in the eye.”

Following Dirik’s words, our first step should be the realization that Syria is not just a land of helpless people enduring horrible things. It is also the land of ordinary activists, teachers and rescue workers, doctors and nurses, bakers and gardners, whether Arab, Kurdish or other, engaging in extraordinary acts of solidarity and heroism in attempts to establish alternatives to all forms of authoritarianism.

Today, there are numerous Local Councils across Syria. As Leila Al Shami explains, “the model which emerged was based on the vision of Syrian anarchist Omar Aziz, who produced a paper in November 2011, in the eighth month of the revolution, advocating the establishment of local councils”.

With the central government largely absent for the past 4 years in so much of Syria, Syrians took the opportunity to self-organize in a direct challenge to the hegemony of the Assad dynasty. Aziz called for “autonomous, non-hierarchical self-governance and organization based on the principles of cooperation, mutual aid and solidarity” as Al Shami pointed out at a talk recently. Local councils would be “horizontal, grassroots forums where people could come together to collaborate effectively and to discuss the issues that they faced in their community, to manage their lives independently of the state and also the forum through which they could initiate social revolution, not only at the local level but also at the national and regional levels through linking up the councils”.

Such an explosion of solidarity lead to unprecented cultural and media achievements. They are not perfect, but they are extraordinary giving the circumstances in which they have to function. If there’s anything that can ‘save’ Syria from cycles of perpetual violence, it is a model which abandons a top-down imposition in favor of an inclusive bottom-up approach.

The bottom-up approach is already manifested in discussions surrounding the remarkable Rojava experiment which, while exposing the hypocrisy of selective sympathies, is worth defending for its achievements. The heroic Kobane resistance against Daesh fascists has inspired the world over and moved anarchists to join the struggle, a phenomenon which many likened to the international revolutionaries of 1930s Spain. The creation of the Autonomous Region in Afrin, Jazira and Kobane in Northern Syria/Western Kurdistan was launched in the hope of building “a society free from authoritarianism, militarism, centralism and the intervention of religious authority in public affairs” as the Constitution of the Rojava Cantons states. In a vision echoing that of Omar Aziz, the Rojava Charter is notable for “enshrining unity and coexistence amongst the region’s diverse ethnic and religious groups, a respect for human rights and an end to gender discrimination, and affirms people’s right to self determination”.

And then there are the international solidarity groups, often organized by Syrians themselves, both within and outside of Syria, that are trying their best to keep the world’s attention on the every day heroes of Syria. Whether it is those saving lives in underground hospitals in Homs and East Ghouta, or those teaching future generations in underground schools in opposition-held Aleppo such as Kesh Malek, the group of 110 teachers serving around 3,000 children, or those risking their own lives to save civilians from Assad’s – and Russia’s – scorched Earth policy. These are the people who have asked for the world’s assistance, and these are the people who have been met with a deafening silence from the Left.

Syria is the world because the world is in Syria. “The world is sick, and its sickness is aggravating our sicknesses, both inherited and acquired”, wrote Haj Saleh, and I’ll end with this quote of his: “There is a crisis of the Left in the world, and the Syrian revolution has given it the opportunity to become manifest in the ugliest of ways. I believe this crisis can be traced back in part to the reality that the Left no longer occupies the position of critically examining the world system, and the question of revolution and changing the world no longer occupies its mind. The Left today is largely made up of domesticated middle-class forces, pastist in their thought and policies. It has not managed to get out of the Cold War mindset, and it finds itself completely incapable of understanding the social explosions in our internationalised region and other parts of the world.

When progress is not universal, reactionarism progresses.”

Originally posted here.
August 22, 2016
From Solidarity to Trump: White Working-Class Culture in the Rust Belt

Before embarking on my current career, I worked as a labor organizer, mostly in West Virginia and Ohio. In the course of doing that work, I probably did two thousand “housevisits” with people I was attempting to organize. The purpose of these meetings was to understand people’s motivations and interests in order to assess how they would vote in a union recognition election (as the union president once said to the organizers: “I don’t care if you lose, I care if you can’t count”) and assess their leadership potential for either the union’s organizing committee or for management’s anti-union efforts.

The work entailed a never-ending confrontation with the slow social death of a region. Proud people—who once possessed the social honor that came with hard work, supporting a family, and meeting one’s civic responsibilities—were confronting the fact that their skills, their values, and their mores were not only no longer valued, but had become an object of ridicule. This is on my mind these days as I look at my RSS feed, awash as it is in horror that populist revolt, which has already claimed Brexit, Poland, and Austria, will soon claim the American presidency.

I sympathized, and I understood the people I visited. Not all of it, of course; not the racism, misogyny, or jingoism—all often coded in the language of merit and worthiness. What was refreshing about it was that it amounted to a rejection of the material calculus that dominates in so much of our political culture and in academic theories of action. In school I learned that politics was about delivering material incentives to people in order to win their support. Democrats win because they deliver the welfare state. When they vote for Republicans, people are being fundamentally stupid in a way that warrants intrepid journalistic explorations of how it is that people can have motivations they do (what’s the matter with Kansas?). But of course, Republicans have much to offer too: assertive nationalism, moral righteousness, and validations of white privilege and heteronormativity, to name a few.

The working class of the Rust Belt has been in its death throes for decades. Deindustrialization first began to take hold with the “Southern Strategy” of American manufacturers who moved to the southern United States where “right to work” laws ensure an environment that is hostile to unions. But Japanese competition accelerated the problem. Then there was Bill Clinton, a Democrat, who abandoned the working-class base of the party in his pursuit of free trade agreements. Companies received tax breaks for moving jobs overseas. Then there were the tax preferences for financial investment over manufacturing investment, practically guaranteeing that money would flow out of the industrial economy. In a valiant defense of their social order, workers in Youngstown and Wheeling tried to stem the tide by purchasing their plants and hoping that they would remain viable if only profit could be subordinated as a motive. The plants closed anyway.

Wages stagnated and even shrank for many. It was open season on unions not just because of deindustrialization, but aggressive union-busting. Today, the United Mine Workers, which once had 800,000 members and the fortitude to strike in the middle of World War Two, now has 60,000 members. My partner, also a former union organizer, recalls the elderly retired miner she met on a housevisit who bragged about happily paying union assessments to cover John L. Lewis’s legal fees when Roosevelt had him thrown in jail. Lewis, unlike many labor leaders today, was happy to fight a losing battle in the name of a principled defense of working-class autonomy and dignity. His combativeness earned loyalty. But West Virginia workers don’t have unions anymore to help them fight the decline of their communities.

With income stagnation the norm in the 1990s and 2000s, Democratic policy often focused on helping people maintain their standard of living through the possession of assets. Policy encouraged homeownership and investment in securities. Predictably, people lost their pensions or retirement savings in the tech bubble, and then lost their homes in the foreclosure crisis. The Democratic President, Barack Obama, chose to bail out bondholders while leaving homeowners to rot. He then pursued more free trade policies, expanding the number of countries that American workers would have to compete with. Cities like Cleveland had a windfall in their stock of postindustrial porn. In addition to rusting plants they now had naked and rotting houses. Suburban houses lost as much as 75% of their value in postindustrial Ohio. They were never worth anything to start with in West Virginia. Since that time, the problems of disinvesment and unemployment have been compounded by drug addiction. These are problems that, thanks to scholars like William Julius Wilson, we once associated with the urban black working class. They are now the problems of white, small-town America too. It turns out race isn’t the relevant variable for explaining the crisis of the family.

Young people are rare in many of these communities. Nursing homes have replaced mines and mills. Working as a nurse’s aide is a young person’s work, but not in this part of the country, especially in rural areas. The nursing homes I encountered were staffed by women who went back to work when their partner lost his job as a miner or a steelworker. Back then it wasn’t surprising to encounter a forty year-old nurses’ aide working two jobs, “one for the bills and one for health insurance.” Not only is the structural decay of towns a constant reminder of the demise of a way of life, but the decay of the people themselves is as well. It is hard to sustain optimism when the young people most imbued with the characteristic are gone.

Men lose their breadwinning jobs, making the justification for their authority in the household precarious. Women return to work. I was organizing at a moment when women carried with them an attitude towards bosses and unions that their husbands had learned in decades of struggle in their workplaces. This wasn’t all good, workers had plenty of fights with their union representatives too. But it did sustain a culture of combativeness and solidarity that was possible to transfer into healthcare, with modifications, of course. Patients had a different significance for healthcare workers than rivets did for autoworkers. Healthcare workers wanted to use unions to defend their patients against the depredations of the profit motive, though they probably didn’t mind the health insurance and wages they won in the name of patient care. As for the men, pride and combativeness can easily become authoritarianism and misogyny when they’re dependent on a female breadwinner. A shibboleth in the local I worked for recounts ex-UMW members opposing the unionization of their wives and girlfriends: “We know that if you teach them to fight the boss at work, they’ll know how to fight the boss at home,” they said.

In order to stave off the indignity of dependence on their wives and girlfriends, some men would go to extreme lengths that illustrate the value of white working-class identity for people who haven’t known anything else. I’ll never forget the autoworker I encountered on a housevisit to his wife, a nurse at a local hospital. He liked unions and what they stood for. He told me about the notorious Lordstown Strike against GM in 1971. He participated in the torching of a motel that was housing strikebreakers. He didn’t seem to regret it. When I met him he was still working as an autoworker. His UAW contract meant he could bid on jobs in other plants with seniority rights. Laid off at Lordstown, three times per week he would carpool with friends for the five-hour drive to another plant in order to maintain his income and, one had the sense, his working-class identity. Other men figured out that staying at home and maintaining their income meant a switch to healthcare and nursing, but that work didn’t confer status in the same way as manufacturing work did, it was “women’s work.” A Youngstown-area hospital I was organizing had a huge number of male nurses (nationally, about 12% of nurses are men, in Youngstown back then it was more like 25%). Obviously for them, the money was worth more than working-class pride.

The serial destruction that has faced the Rust Belt has not occurred without a struggle. “Fighting the good fight” was extremely important to many Rust Belt workers, as if it were a matter of social honor and recognition. And fight they did, often enough anyway. Why did they fight? Was it for material gains as so many assume? Sometimes. There is always the nurse that will throw some Randian entrepreneurial freedom stuff at you (workers read too), but that particular ideology wasn’t that common, despite the assumptions of economists, pundits, and union busters.

Union busters use a kit, a sort of paint-by-numbers sequence of things to talk about and do in the run-up to a recognition election. One standard item is the checks. This is a mock-up of a check with the worker’s name and current weekly pay. Next to it will be a comparison check with the costs of a strike deducted. How do workers react? Certainly some were influenced. People have different economic circumstances and different reactions to them. But often enough the response was something like: “that’s a small price to pay to tell the boss to fuck off.” And there it is. The value that many workers place on being able to express their opinion or fight just for a chance to speak is an awful lot higher than many expect. Workers stage sit-down strikes, even though they are completely illegal and could result in the bankruptcy of the union. Transit workers did this in New York in 2006, but nursing home workers were doing it in Ohio too.

Perhaps such a fight is worth a few dollars, but surely there is an underlying material instrumentality, isn’t there? Union staff often told the story of a contract fight for county mental health workers in Mentor, Ohio. The county had told the workers that if they refused to accept the contract the county would simply stop funding mental health altogether, costing all of the workers their jobs. As the votes were counted, it became clear that the workers had placed more value on their right to protest the behavior of their employer than they did on their own job. They ratified the contract, told the boss what they thought of his threats, and, presumably, headed for the unemployment line.

In 1998, I found myself on a picket line in front of a prison in Lima, Ohio. We represented the social service professionals who worked for the state: doctors, psychiatrists, nurses, social workers. That year the union representing the non-professionals negotiated a concessionary contract with the state. We could either also accept the concessionary contract or fight it despite having very little workplace power. But our members and our president wanted to fight, not least to show everyone what cowards the other union was. Our picket had signs like: “Grandmas shouldn’t have to strike.” Prisoners were jokingly shouting “we want a contract too!” out their cell windows. We won. The threat wasn’t because our workers were off the job, and it certainly wasn’t because the guards respected the picket (though a few did). But the prisoners rioted. State troopers had to be called in to quell riots, including one at the notorious Lucasville Prison. It turns out representing nurses isn’t such a weak hand after all, at least when you’re striking a prison. The culture of solidarity reaches far in the Rust Belt, especially when people choose to fight the boss.

I have long thought that the workers of the Rust Belt and their communities were an underutilized political resource. Unions once did important work holding white workers in the Democratic coalition, despite the fact that Democrats have been ignoring them for three decades. But unions have mostly been destroyed in the Rust Belt. Michigan, the birthplace of the UAW and Industrial Unionism, became a Right to Work state two years ago, joining Wisconsin and soon to be followed by West Virginia. States which once had 40% of their workforces represented by unions now have 10-11%. As a result, the populist outrage of the white working class is available to both the Right and the Left. Over the years various Democratic candidates, Tom Harkin, John Edwards, and Bernie Sanders among them, have attempted to recapture white workers for the Democratic Party and, in the process, reorient the Party away from its deference to finance capital. These efforts have failed. The Democratic coalition is a party of free trade, finance, and tech with a diverse base recruited on the basis of social liberalism and fluency with identity politics. This is not a party of the working class and is especially not a party of the white working class.

Trump has stepped into this political vacuum and it has served him well, enabling him to trounce establishment and Tea Party Republicans in the primaries. Trump seems to be furious at the establishment politicians that long ago wrote off the Rust Belt. He is combative, he doesn’t defer to the political correctness that is sensitive to the feelings of everyone other than the white poor and working class. Trump’s performance emphasizes action as much as words and ideas, which exasperates the educated, but appeals to Rust Belt workers. Ideas and rational consistency are not, academic dispositions aside, particularly important to people without Ph.Ds. Trump performs the combativeness of Rust Belt culture, the lack of deference to odds or the focus-grouped lowest common denominator. He seems as lost playing the politically-coded game of pandering and recognition that people in Portsmouth, Ohio, are. He is a manifestation of the “fuck you” id of the Rust Belt that leads workers to fight their bosses even when they will probably lose. And sure, it isn’t exactly about the working class, but if Trump has been consistent on any issue, it has been trade. He promises to rip up the trade agreements that forced workers to make a choice between their dignity and their jobs, and that forced them onto an unfair playing field against workers with government health insurance or lower housing and food costs. He promises to protect them from immigrants that are somehow simultaneously competing for their jobs and sucking state coffers dry.

Hillary Clinton had a word for the Rust Belt in her convention speech, just like she did for every other constituency in the Democratic coalition. She pointed out that Donald Trump’s merchandise is made overseas. My first thought was that it was a good opener, but that was it. No policy, no recognition, just “That guy is a liar”. Now, granted, Rust Belt workers do get pissed off about stuff like that. For years the draw for the Central Labor Council annual picnic in Dayton, Ohio, was the destruction of a Japanese car with a wrecking ball. Watching a crane destroy a perfectly good automobile is exciting, but it’s downright cathartic when that car represents an existential threat to your existence and an offense to your patriotism. But I fully expect that Rust Belt voters, many of whom are pretty familiar with the dynamics of these issues (thanks unions!) would hear that and think: “ok, she’s taking us for suckers… again”. Just because that stuff worked with patrician Romney (and it did) in no way means that it will work with combative, disrespectful, trade-deal trashing, and immigrant-deporting Trump. Clinton’s move was calculated and condescending. She volunteered for an authenticity fight with Donald Trump, a fight she will lose.

Trump has nailed down populism for the Right. Sanders made a bid to win it back for the Left, but no one named Obama or Clinton is going to win it back for Democrats. Now pundits and Trump’s campaign are plotting a path to the presidency through the Rust Belt. Trump’s (former) campaign manager has said that victory depends upon winning Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania. Trump has talked about extending the map to Michigan and Wisconsin which, after all, are enthusiastic enough about Republicans to vote them into power in every branch of government and watch them pass Right to Work laws and create punitive social welfare regimes. The electoral map might be realigning to situate Democrats as the representatives of the New Economy and Republicans as the champions of Smokestack industries and their workers. Trump has made it clear that this potential political opposition is real.

But the anxiety and the worry is misplaced. There is no Brexit majority here. The path through the Rust Belt is actually a cul-de-sac, not because Trump lacks appeal with white workers, but because there are so few of them left. Cities aren’t filled with factories and working-class neighborhoods anymore; they’re filled with artist studios, tech startups, coffee bars, and criminalized hyper-ghettos. Latinos have been moving to Chicago, Cleveland, and Milwaukee, but they sure aren’t voting for Trump. White people have been leaving many of these states which has increased the minority share of potential voters. Trump polled at 0% among African-Americans in Ohio during the Republican Convention. The Rust Belt economy has been diversifying. Unemployment in Ohio and Pennsylvania has mostly been below the national average since the financial crisis. Ann Arbor, Madison, Grand Rapids, Toledo, Columbus, Cincinnati, Lansing and others have been increasing in importance. These towns are hubs for tech and pharmaceutical startups, advanced manufacturing, and software engineering. They have concentrations of educated people who are less likely to vote for Trump.

The work of economic transformation has already been done in the Rust Belt and the demographic results are real. Trump missed the window for exploiting the alienation of the Rust Belt as a path to national office. White workers were angrier, more numerous, more combative, and more motivated twenty years ago when they were smashing Japanese cars at picnics. But back then unions had more capacity to hold white workers in the Democratic coalition. Unmoored from unions, racism and terrorism can be exploited to harvest white votes. Trump’s combativeness is the ideal vehicle for effective exploitation, but the harvest is getting smaller every year. Trump can tap into the dispositions of the white working class, and speak to the issues of Rust Belt workers, but it is doubtful that he can overcome the demographically- and economically-determined fact of their declining relevance.

August 19, 2016
UAW backs Kurdish solidarity call

Unite has welcomed the backing from the 400,000 strong U.S. union, the UAW, for the freedom of Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdish Workers’ Party who remains imprisoned in Turkey.

In a letter sent to Britain’s biggest union, Unite, the president of the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (the UAW), Dennis Williams states, “Since the days of former UAW president Walter Reuther, our union has always taken action for peace and justice around the world.

“As trade unionists, we know that dialogue is a powerful process for dispute resolution. Abdullah Ocalan is a necessary voice in these trying times for Turkey, the Kurdish people, and the world. His presence in peace negotiations would clear a path for real solutions.”

Unite is calling on the Turkish government to stop the war against the Kurdish population and to return to the table so that a serious and structured peace process can begin again. The union is also calling for the release of jailed Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan which it believes is essential for such a process to have any real chance of success.

Follow the Freedom for Abdullah Ocalan campaign on Twitter.

Originally posted here.

August 19, 2016
Wave of Occupations Marks Step Forward for Black Lives Matter

Activists in New York City seeking to defund the police have successfully occupied City Hall Park for a week and seen one of their demands met with the resignation of Commissioner Bill Bratton. While blocking roads and highways has been the tactic of choice for Black Lives Matter since it gained national attention two years ago, the recent deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile have sparked the resurgence of a tactic many thought had been left behind in Zuccotti Park.

Occupations against systemic racism and state violence started in Los Angeles, made their way to Chicago eight days later, and then ended up in New York City after another 12 days. But will these occupations end the same way the Occupy Wall Street protests ended? Does the adoption of this well-worn tactic represent an advancement for the movement, or does it illustrate the need for newer, more disruptive tactics?

The first of the recent occupations began on July 12 in Los Angeles when the city’s police commission ruled that the LAPD officers who killed 30-year-old Redel Jones last year on August 12 had acted in accordance with the LAPD’s deadly force policy. The LAPD claimed that Jones was a suspect in a robbery and that she had moved toward an officer with a knife in her hand when they shot her. But at least one witness said that Jones had not charged at officers and was, in fact, running from cops when the shots rang out.

Protesters in Los Angeles tried to enter City Hall on July 12, but were stopped by police. “Initially, when we came down to meet with the mayor, we were met with severe brutalization,” said Melina Abdullah, a professor at California State University in Los Angeles and co-founder of Black Lives Matter LA. “We attempted to go up to the mayor’s office. We were stopped by police officers who pulled their billy clubs on us. I was personally wrestled to the ground, slammed on the stairs and handcuffed. We were detained for quite some time.” Protesters then promised to occupy City Hall until their five demands were met, including the firing of LAPD Chief Charlie Beck and reparations for the victims of police brutality.

On July 15, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti offered to meet privately with a “delegation” of the protesters, but was turned down. Instead, the protesters demanded that the mayor come out in public and meet with all of them, which he declined to do. This prohibition against private meetings with politicians would also later be adopted by the Chicago and New York occupations as well. The next day, the protesters decided to change the name of the occupation from #OccupyLACityHall to #DecolonizeLACityHall since the “police and government structures that employ them are the occupiers.”

So far, the occupation has been going on for nearly a month, and the protesters don’t look like they’ll be compromising with the mayor on their demands. “Until he fires Beck, he’s going to be occupied,” Abdullah said.

Chicago’s occupation came next. On July 20, activists staged a march and chained themselves to the entrance of the Chicago Police Department’s infamous black site at Homan Square — where, according to reports, Chicago police have taken people to be interrogated without any legal representation for almost 20 years. Activists then set up an occupation at a vacant lot across the street from Homan Square and dubbed it “Freedom Square.” The activists stated that the occupation would continue until a proposed “Blue Lives Matter” law is rejected by the local legislature. The law, modeled after a similar law passed in Louisiana earlier this year, would protect cops under hate crimes legislation and would make it easier for police to charge protesters with a hate crime for getting into altercations with the police.

“They can charge people responding or people protecting themselves [with] hate crimes,” Damon Williams of the Black Youth Project said. “They have that extra power to criminalize and charge someone with a felony … We know that the police engage with protesting in a militaristic fashion and things could escalate.”

Along with being a spot where activists can engage the community and spread their message, it soon turned into a mini-village and community resource hub modeled on the new world the activists wish to create. Activists organized an outdoor kitchen, an arts and crafts section, a library, sleeping areas, a medical center, and an assortment of other resources. “We are showing love in action,” said Let Us Breathe Collective co-director Kristiana Colon. “We mean for Freedom Square to be a visual representation of our belief in love and freedom. We want to show the North Lawndale community that we love them.”

Then, starting on August 1, activists in New York City, inspired by their comrades in Los Angeles, took over the park right next to City Hall. The occupation was named #ShutDownCityHallNYC, and the organizers explicitly advocated for the police to be abolished. They would also later, on August 4, go on to express solidarity with the #DecolonizeLACityHall and #FreedomSquare actions.

“Before we called this action, LA had already begun their action decolonizing LA City Hall. That was definitely an inspiration for us,” said Nabil Hassein of Millions March NYC. “We put out our call before Chicago’s Freedom Square, but we’ve definitely been watching what they’re doing and that’s also been a great inspiration for us. They’re doing great work pointing towards abolition.”

Much like their comrades in Los Angeles, Millions March NYC, and all the other activist groups involved, issued demands with the first being the firing of NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton and an end to the “broken windows” policing that he championed. Broken windows, a form of quality-of-life policing that encourages cops to harshly crack down on petty offenses in order to prevent larger crimes, has long been criticized as merely a way to criminalize marginalized groups, particularly communities of color. Also like #DecolonizeLACityHall, #ShutDownCityHallNYC demanded reparations for victims of police brutality.

Activists at #ShutDownCityHallNYC want less money invested in police and more money invested in resources for black and brown communities. (WNV/Ashoka Jegroo)

The other demand of #ShutDownCityHallNYC is shared by all three occupations: defunding the police and the reinvestment of those resources into black and brown communities. Rather than spending millions of dollars on police, all three occupations want those resources spent on providing physical and mental health care, education, housing and other necessities to marginalized communities.

“The differences between what parts of the country are more safe is not a matter of who has the most policing,” activist Elsa Waithe said, as she helped occupy City Hall Park in New York. “It’s a matter of who has the most resources.”

And despite the threat of the NYPD or their supporters possibly attempting to forcefully end the occupation, the activists say they’re willing to keep #ShutDownCityHallNYC going for as long as it takes.

“We’re prepared to hold the space,” Vienna Rye, an organizer with Millions March NYC, said. “Obviously, the NYPD is a violent institution, and they will very likely bring violence to this camp. And that’s something we’re prepared for. That’s also why we’re out here fighting. Because their violence is not just because of this action. The NYPD is violent everywhere every single day regardless of how we’re organizing.”

Thanks to a nearby 24-hour, privately-owned public space, the NYPD wasn’t able to arrest #ShutDownCityHallNYC protesters once City Hall Park closed at midnight, and the occupation made it past its first night. Then, to their surprise, they awoke to part of their first demand being met. After one day of #ShutDownCityHallNYC, Bratton announced that he would be resigning by September after previously hinting at remaining until 2018. Despite Mayor Bill de Blasio denying that the protests had anything to do with the move, it further invigorated the protesters who renamed City Hall Park “Abolition Square” and set-up a variety of workshops and activities for people to do. Much like Freedom Square in Chicago, it has become a center for abolitionists around the city to meet, talk, learn, eat, sleep, organize and hopefully realize the new world they are working to build.

And this is part of why all three cities have embraced occupations as a tactic. While it may not be as novel and disruptive as blocking highways seemed in 2014, this tactic represents both a strategic advancement in the movement and serves as a stationary space for activists to network, brainstorm, discover and organize how to take the movement even further.

“I think people are fed up,” Rye said. “We’re at a point where if we want our communities to survive, we have to find new tactics, a new way to organize, and to really build power and not just do actions that are more symbolic. We’re at a point where we have to organize and build our own power to dismantle this system.”

Originally posted here.

August 12, 2016
On Indigenous Day, David Brooks Admires Native Americans’ Sense of Community—But Fails to Ask What Made It So

For a minute this morning, I asked myself if conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks might be about to follow Chris Hedges into the far left. Or perhaps wander off into the woods to find a commune.

Brooks has written an interesting column in which he suggests that maybe Americans, especially millennials, want more than material comforts in our highly individualistic society, that they want community.

His entrance into this topic is through a comparison of British colonial Native American and European communities living side-by-side in the eighteenth century. At that time, the Indians seldom if ever wanted to live in the European communities, but Europeans frequently and in significant numbers ran off to live with the indigenous people. “Why?” Brooks asks. Because they preferred the Indians’ community to colonial society.

Following this very promising beginning, however, Brooks fails to ask the key question—What was the basis of the Indians’ community? Instead he wanders off into the tepid, liberal utopianism of community self-help. as explained by John McKnight and Peter Block. We will not follow him there.

So, let’s ask the question Brooks failed to ask. What was the basis of the indigenous community? Native American communities in the Northeast in the colonial period at the time of arrival of the Europeans were sedentary agriculturalists who also engaged in hunting and gathering, all on a modest scale in comparison with earlier Mississippian culture and with the Maya, Aztec, and Incan peoples in the South.

The Northeastern indigenous people had not developed social classes. They had not developed a notion of private property in land and goods. They had not developed a state that rose above the society, as was the case in Central America, Mexico and Peru. Gender differences existed and men usually held the leadership positions, though, as in the case of the Iroquois, women could “knock their horns off” and remove them from office.

The Native Americans’ communities were attractive to Europeans because they had no rich and poor. No bosses. No standing army and no police. Men and women were more equal, and women were those who most wanted to say with the Indians, even if they had been their captors.

The indigenous peoples’ community was based on their sharing of the bounty of nature, their shared labor, and their shared social wealth. In many American indigenous societies, when some Indian became rich, he or she had to give away their belongings to the others, in what the Pacific Northest peoples’ called the potlatch.

The Native Americans’ societies were not exactly socialist or genuinely communist, but they were not far from it either. The colonial Europeans who went to live in the Indian villages wanted the community that came from socialism. And that, by the way, polls suggest, is what many of the millennials today want as well.

[The drawing is by Iroquois Native Canadian Indian Tattoo Artist: Grasset de Saint Sauveur Jacques, 1757-1810. Engraver: Mixelle, Jean-Marie active late 18th century. Credit: Library and Archives Canada.]

*Dan La Botz is a Co-Editor of New Politics.

August 9, 2016
The DNC’s Right Realignment

On July 26, concurrent to the Democratic National Convention’s star-studded attempt to make everybody forget everything that transpired during the primary, New York Mag published a great piece on the Florida senatorial race. What they call “the second-strangest campaign of the season” is worth reading about for a few reasons; because the general election might be able to defeat Marco Rubio’s mercurial reentry into national politics and hand a rare Florida win to the Democrats; because Alan Grayson — the $16-million-tax-haven owner, who, policywise, lands on the left wing of the Democratic Party — is great entertainment; and because Grayson’s primary rival, Patrick Murphy, is a quiet, but powerful, signal of where the Dems are headed.

According to NY Mag:

The son of a construction magnate, Murphy initially followed his father into the GOP. In 2007, he made a $2,300 campaign donation to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.

Strange. What’s he doing in a Democratic primary?

Murphy explained that the subsequent rise of the tea party persuaded him to become a Democrat. In 2012, he decided to run for Congress. Fortified by $550,000 in donations from his father, Tom, to two super-pacs supporting his candidacy, Murphy beat the tea-party darling Allen West by fewer than 2,000 votes in what was that year’s most expensive House race. He was assigned to a seat on the Financial Services Committee, which he used to hoover up campaign donations. With a campaign war chest of $5.2 million in 2014 — the second-largest of any Democratic House candidate that year — Murphy won reelection by almost 20 points.

Wow! So what’s he done in office?

Ranked among the most conservative House Democrats by National Journal, Murphy voted in favor of the Keystone XL Pipeline and tougher security checks on Syrian refugees.

…

Democratic kingmakers […] also respected the elbow grease he showed in seeking their endorsements. “We busted our tail trying to get that support from everybody,” Murphy told me. It didn’t hurt Murphy’s cause that his father began giving generously to other Democrats. In the past few years, Tom Murphy has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democratic candidates and their affiliated super-pacs.

Patrick Murphy represents the perfect confluence of establishment Democrat strategy and establishment Republican meltdown. He didn’t switch parties because he saw the light of liberalism — he switched because he, like many old-guard conservatives, was outflanked by the Tea Party. And the formidable institutional support he’s won from the DNC seems to come from two things: their insistence that the only way to win in red states is to appear as indistinguishable as possible from the conservatives they oppose; and his father’s money.

Bernie Sanders’s primary run had a lot of people predicting, and hoping for, a left-wing Democratic realignment. At times, Hillary Clinton has tried to take advantage of that hope, selling the idea that really, she wants what Bernie supporters want — she’ll just be better at implementing it.

But with an avalanche of national conservative figureheads flocking to Hillary Clinton — former Reagan aide Donald Elmets, billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Charles Koch, to name a few — the great Democratic realignment might run in the other direction.

While none of these figureheads have actually changed their party affiliation, they’re sending a powerful message to young conservatives with political ambitions. They’re validating, and creating a national voice, for the Patrick Murphy route, a route that on a district-by-district basis has a lot of power to shift Democratic policy rightward and bring the party ever closer to corporate control. And with Clintonites still firmly at the helm, there will be no institutional resistance to this drift — in fact, they’ll salivate over the chance to recruit more red-state-friendly Murphys.

Meanwhile, the labor movement, through their inability to unify around Sanders during the primary, has already signaled that whatever happens, they’re along for the ride.

This poses a dilemma to a socialist left that’s only just come to prominence in the wake of Sanders and is trying to figure out how to relate to the Democratic Party now that it has a tiny bit of power.

Contra Harold Meyerson, left realignment is not the “reality based” option. Sanders’s campaign demonstrated the power of using a Democratic platform to disseminate left-wing ideas and cohere a scattered left. It reflected the reality that overwhelmingly, the average person’s political experience is filtered through electoralism, and that the Left’s ability to reach those people depends in part on maintaining an electoral presence. But it did not demonstrate the feasibility of reforming the Democratic Party.

Not all of the Bernie or Busters who had the gall to boo (boo!) the DNC’s glitterati were convinced of the first two points. But they were convinced of the third, and they weren’t wrong. And they showcased an independent and uncompromising approach that socialists should cultivate and focus, not dismiss.

Because of the intractable two-party system, socialists will have to keep using Democratic platforms and running in Democratic races in order to influence the electorate and win power, but they shouldn’t do so with the intention of reforming the party. For this reason they’ll need both Bernie or Busters and people organizing in labor, in Black Lives Matter, and in the community in order to build up organizations of popular power independent from the election cycle, and to keep third-party power in their long-term vision.

Our job is to win both realignment cheerleaders and Bernie or Busters to this vision.

*Elizabeth (Ella) Mahony is a member of Brooklyn Democratic Socialists of America and DSA's Left Caucus.

August 9, 2016
To Beat Trump, Clinton Brings Back Triangulation and the Politics of Fear

The enduring cliche of the 2016 election is a comment by Trump that provokes outrage, rebukes, and the declaration: “He’s gone too far.”

This happened the moment Trump declared his presidential bid by denigrating Mexicans, then when he attacked veterans, women, the disabled, Muslims, and the judiciary among others, and most recently with his vendetta against Khizr and Ghazala Khan.

Trump’s attack on the Khans seems curious as he had nothing to gain. The couple grabbed the moral high ground at the Democratic National Convention by pointedly telling Trump, “You have sacrificed nothing and no one,” in reference to the death of their son as a U.S. Army officer in Iraq in 2004.

The self-inflicted wounds are unlikely to cause Trump permanent harm, however.The New York Times found his attacks on military members and families mainly affected the opinion of undecided veterans, representing just a sliver of voters. Trump also recovered after a similar racist tirade against a U.S.-born judge overseeing lawsuits against the defunct Trump University. Republicans inside the Beltway freaked out in private over Trump’s antics, but in public they are loathe to break with him when polls show 81 percent of the party supports him along with41 percent of the public overall.

Moreover, Trump’s ranting about the Khans is consistent with his trickle-down revenge and nativism that’s congealed a white nationalist rebellion around him. It shows little sign of faltering. In battleground states like Ohio, North Carolina, and Iowa, Trump trails Clinton by less than 1 percent. And while Democrats have opened up new fronts in Arizona and Georgia, Trump lags by 6 percent or less in delegate-rich states such as Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, Virginia, and Nevada.

Digging into local data in Ohio and Pennsylvania exposes the seismic shifts in public attitudes that Trump capitalized on. In Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County, a white working-class enclave Obama won by five points in 2012, Trump has a 23-point lead over Clinton. Ohio’s Mahoning and Trumbull counties are the heart of now-vanished “Little Steel” that Obama handily won in 2012 with more than 60 percent of the vote. But with voters flocking to him, Trump is poised to flip these former union strongholds. Even if many working-class whites are intoxicated by Trump’s racism, they are equally embittered by their declining economic fortunes under Obama.

These whites are America’s Brexit voters, battered workers distrustful of politicians, media, and business leaders who have hoodwinked them for decades about the benefits of globalization and empire, even if their anger is nursed on a diet of bigotry and bizarre conspiracies. So they shrug off Trump’s tantrums or spread slander such as Khan is an “al Qaeda double agent.” As some have told Telesur, they support Trump because they want him “to blow up the system.”

Trump’s allegiance to the Republican Party is limited to hijacking it for his outsized ego and ambitions. But he has a death grip on the wheel of the GOP and is blase about driving it off a cliff. Even in defeat Trump will emerge victorious with an army of aggrieved whites, a fundraising machine, and a megaphone to foment trouble. He is already spinning racially tinged yarns that if he loses it’s because the election is rigged. If Clinton triumphs as seems likely, the Trumpian hordes will treat her as delegitimized even before she assumes office.

Given elite antipathy toward Trump there is a danger of underestimating his chances. In July his campaign and the Republican National Committee hauled in $82 million, mostly in small contributions that indicate the depth and breadth of his support. Fine-tuned demographic analysis reveals up to 10 million more white voters over 45 who lack a college degree—Trump’s bedrock—than previously estimated nationwide. If Trump sticks within a point of Clinton in the polls, this subterranean force could tip the election his way, just like Brexit passed despite consistently trailing in surveys.

Hillary Clinton’s strategy is to revert to Clintonian form. In 1994, congressional Democrats were shellacked by Newt Gingrich’s mob of bigots, bomb-throwers, and conspiracists who established right-wing rule of the House that has lasted for all but four of the last 22 years. Bill Clinton responded with “triangulation,” treating unions and progressives as the left counterpart to the rabid right. He staked out the center with insipid initiatives like a “national conversation on race” and a push for school uniforms meant to distract from his anti-poor agenda that rivaled Reagan’s. Meanwhile, Clinton spent his second-term political capital on free trade, loosening banking and commodities regulations, and supercharging media monopolies.

Fast forward a couple of decades to the 2016 DNC. To their credit, Sanders and his rebellious supporters wrested concessions from the Democrats. But Hillary Clinton’s vague calls for raising Social Security benefits, a living wage, tuition-free college, and a jobs program for infrastructure served a purpose other than placating the left. Her proposals sugar-coated the triangulation at the DNC. Nods to social justice and Black Lives Matter were drowned out by bigwigs extollingpatriotism, God, militarism, and American exceptionalism. Gen. John Allen said with Clinton as commander-in-chief, the United States would continue to be the “indispensable, transformational power in the world” with a military that would “defeat ISIS … defeat evil,” while equipped with “the finest weapons, the greatest equipment.”

Likewise, the Democrats calculated they could insult their base by featuring Michael Bloomberg as a prime-time speaker with little backlash. As New York City mayor, Bloomberg bitterly fought attempts to end racist stop-and-frisk, had police spy on every mosque in a 100-mile radius, imposed big rent increases on millions, and attacked public schools, social programs, and unions with gusto. Bloomberg was only the first billionaire for Clinton, with Mark Cuban, Meg Whitman, and Warren Buffet trotted out after the convention. Whitman is doubly notable as Clinton had courted the right-wing tech executive and she was joined by other prominent Republicans in backing Clinton.

Then in an utterly cynical maneuver, Obama announced days after the DNC he would push the lame-duck Congress to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership this year. It showed the dishonesty of Clinton and her vice president pick Tim Kaine in suddenly claiming they were opposed to the trade deal after consistently championing it.

New Deal liberals like Thomas Frank fret that Clinton’s right-wing swerves risk snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. But this is a misreading of history. The elites are aware that the Democrats are more capable managers of capitalist globalization, diplomacy, and war than the Republicans. It’s why Clinton is attracting a bipartisan cast of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the mainstream media, and the military and foreign policy establishment.

Clinton also has unions, feminists, and civil rights groups behind her. They serve as progressive window dressing and troops for swing state trench warfare in return for a “seat at the table,” but no real say. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told me at the DNC that organized labor is with Clinton because the Democratic agenda “is our agenda.” When I pressed Trumka about Clinton’s record of supporting nearly every free-trade deal that came before her, he responded, “I’m not worried at all, she’s against TPP” (before smacking me in the face with a cardboard sign).

Trumka is covering for Clinton, and misleading workers because organized labor has no strategy other than clinging to the globalization express and begging for crumbs off the banquet table. The Democratic election strategy is to win the Rust Belt through micro-targeting of uncommitted whites, a massive canvassing and get-out-the-vote operation, deploying the good ol’ boy band of Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kaine, and pounding Trump in the media from every imaginable angle—including harkening back a half-century to the infamous daisy ad to ring the alarm about Trump with the nuclear codes. Clinton is also counting on Trump to keep shooting himself in the foot, and he looks likely to oblige. Big business, celebrities, and Obama will throw their full weight behind Clinton. Democrats need to peel off only a small percentage of whites in the Midwest to decisively defeat Trump.

Overall, Democrats are happy to paint white workers as irredeemably racist so they can reject working-class politics. If determined, Democrats could enact legal and regulatory changes that provide unions with the tools to rebuild the labor movement. But that would alienate the corporate constituency the Democratic Party belongs to and relies on for its core support. The logical path, then, for the Clintons, Obama, and the rest is to look to the right for votes.

The Democrats are seeking a historic triangulation by trying to occupy the center for a generation. They will then berate the left, telling them there is nowhere else to go, and watch the radical right flail around with guns and sinister ideas, damaging society but not elite power. The Democrats think they can deliver a fatal blow both to Trump and Trumpism with a blowout victory this election, while demographics takes care of any lingering threat. But this is a fantasy as Clinton’s right-wing policies will produce new white nationalist threats, as they did during the 1990s. And elements on the right are taking advantage of the Democrats’ disdain for workers by scheming on how to turn the GOP into “a (white) workers’ party.”

From this viewpoint, the left response is simple: it should do nothing to help Clinton, not even push people to vote for her in swing states. If Clinton can’t beat Trump with the combined might of capital and labor, then a tiny, disorganized, threadbare left is not going to make any difference. Instead, the left should affirm people’s right to decide if they want to vote and then whom to vote for, such as Jill Stein, Sanders, Vermin Supreme (my favorite), or Clinton. And it should denounce Clinton apologists working feverishly to bully or scare people into voting for her. Fear-based politics makes a mockery of any democratic claims.

Jill Stein will far outstrip her 2012 vote total of 469,000 as she harvests the anti-Clinton vote on the left. But her current polling average of 4 percent will shrink by election day, which is typical of third-party candidates. Stein serves a vital role by blasting Clinton for a “terrifying track record” on the economy, foreign policy, and climate change. She reminds voters Clinton is distinctly dangerous. But pouring energy into Stein’s bid replicates the mistake of prioritizing electoral politics above all else. Third-party presidential runs measure discontent that exists. They do little to build radical movements and often divert energy and resources from organizing. (Though local elections can create space and provide aid for movements.)

But there should also be no illusions about a Trump presidency. It would be open season for the police, state, and vigilantes on Black Lives Matter, Muslims, immigrants, Mexicans, and the left. Left forces would be on their heels, fighting limited defensive battles and grateful to survive, even in a weakened state. Whatever remains of Sanders political revolution would dry up and blow away.

But climbing on the Clinton train means muting criticism of her right-wing policies. It would hobble the left going into four years of more war, more free trade, more oil and gas drilling under Clinton. And that’s exactly what the Wall Street Democrats want.

The left should concentrate on what it does best: laying the groundwork for new movements such as the anti-war and global justice movements, Occupy Wall Street, union, immigrant, and low-wage worker organizing, and Black Lives Matter. Clinton has bankers and liberals, pundits and billionaires, hawks and Republicans all advocating for her. Someone needs to advocate for people.

Originally posted here.

August 7, 2016
The Toxic Games

Brazil’s Dance with the Devil: The World Cup, the Olympics, and the Fight for Democracy. By Dave Zirin. Updated Olympics edition. Haymarket Books, 2016. 238pp. + notes and index. $17.95 paperback.

I celebrated with great relief back on October 2, 2009, when my hometown Chicago was the first city eliminated by the International Olympic Committee from consideration for hosting the 2016 games. The scale of the pillage, cronyism and social cleansing that “Mayor One Percent” Rahm Emanuel would have inflicted in the name of preparing for the party was horrible to contemplate. And I wasn’t wrong, as reporter David Haugh has shown in his piece of bidder‘s remorse, “In retrospect, losing 2016 Olympics to Rio a big victory for Chicago” (http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/columnists/ct-haugh-olympics-spt-0803-20160802-column.html).

Haugh rightly calls it “the day the IOC saved Chicago from itself.” Alas, the bullet that Chicago dodged slammed into Brazil, with double force – in the form of the 2014 FIFA (soccer) World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games, which are just opening as these lines are written.

As usual, most of the corporate media are fixated on the challenges to the Great Show. There have been some reports on how Rio’s favelas are walled off from the Olympic glitter, but the main well-established pattern of coverage goes way back. Panic over Athens 2004: Would the stadiums be ready? Beijing 2008: Would the smog choke the Games? London 2012: Would Olympic athletes and tourists be paralyzed in traffic gridlock? Brazil 2016: What about the raw sewage in the bay, the Zika virus, Brazil’s political crisis and the Russian doping scandal?

The multiple challenges in 2016 are admittedly larger than normal, but the pattern persists: The Opening Ceremony washes away the doubts, the torch is lit, the games begin and the show unfolds to great praise and the monopoly sale of official products and merchandise, cleansed of unauthorized popular vendors and their wares.

Forgotten then are the grim back stories of the death toll of construction workers in the rush to completion (Athens), the mothballed giant stadium and human rights disaster (China), and all the massive cost overruns and truly Olympian financial deficits that have caused more and more cities around the world to decide, rightly, that the games are a poisoned chalice rather than a prize to win.

Dave Zirin’s timely gem of a book navigates the cesspool that the Olympics as well as the FIFA World Cup have become. A veteran sportswriter and political critic, Zirin weaves together the themes converging on Brazil in 2014 and the present: the evolution of the Workers Party (PT) from militant social movement to popular government to agent of neoliberalism; Brazil’s blood-soaked history of colonial genocide, slavery, distorted development and social struggle; the emergence of soccer (futebol) as the “beautiful game” of the masses, and its current travails as “(n)eoliberalism is making Brazilian soccer as static as the European game from which it once joyfully emancipated itself.” (133)

The brief account of what soccer did for Brazil’s masses and their national identity is reminiscent of C.L.R. James’ classic writing on how the people of the West Indies made cricket their own. All the more agonizing, then, is the symbolism of what Brazil has done to itself – more accurately, what its ruling class, the wannabee elites of the PT, and the governing bodies of global sport have inflicted on the society – in the fate of the iconic Maracana stadium, built for the 1950 World Cup.

“At the 1950 finals, Brazil lost to Uruguay 2 to 1 in front of an estimated 220,000 spectators, one-tenth of Rio’s entire population at the time.” It was a national trauma undimmed by the passage of decades.

In preparation for the World Cup and Olympics, the place has been gutted so that now “it seats only 75,000 and includes a shopping center. In an eerily symbolic construction move that mirrors the erasure of the favelas, the upper deck, once the famed low-cost open seating for ordinary fans, is now ringed by luxury boxes [which] will, in true US fashion, be sold off to private business interests after the 2016 Games.” (36-37)

That’s not all. For the 2014 World Cup, at the insistence of FIFA – one of the few institutions whose corruption matches that of the IOC – stadiums were constructed around the country in places where no local professional clubs exist, most notoriously including Manaus in the rain forest, an environmentally ruinous $300 million white elephant whose proposed post-Olympic use is to become an open-air prison. (45-46)

As Zirin points out, the 2014 World Cup was organized under the auspices of the PT federal government, while the 2016 Olympics are the bailiwick of the Rio de Janeiro government of the centrist PMDB, which has important political implications.

“And here is how the Olympics could lead to a judicial coup in Brazil: if [PT president) Dilma (Rousseff)’s government falls and the Games go smoothly, it could contribute to the utterly undeserved image that Rio mayor Eduardo Paes is trying to cultivate as a competent, pro-business manager who makes the trains run on time. This narrative ignores how the Olympics have been organized on the backs of the poor. It ignores the brutal debt, displacement, and militarization that have surrounded the Games.” (xvii)

This is not what you’ll learn from the television coverage, even from the critical reporting at the margins. Barring a security disaster, god forbid, or athletes becoming violently ill from swimming and sailing in shit, the celebratory vibe will become overwhelming. Brazil’s Dance with the Devil helps explain how the euphoria of the spectacle is fleeting while the social damage is so long-lasting, and how this fits perfectly with the operations of capital today.

By the way, if you don’t already know that the iconic rituals of the Olympics – the torch relay, the march of the athletes, the extreme nationalist display – originated with Adolf Hitler’s 1936 Olympics, now is a good time to learn. (154-157)

To return to a subjective note, 2016 could be the year when the Chicago Cubs might actually go to the World Series which they last contested in 1945, and maybe even win it for the first time since the ancient Biblical period (1908 – seven years before my father was born). If Chicago had been cursed with the 2016 Olympics, it’s quite likely that the Cubs’ schedule would have been hugely distorted by lengthy disruptive road trips, messing up their chances for this possible dream season.

It’s one more small reason to celebrate the city’s escape, and to praise the coalition of Chicago’s community and social activists, No Games Chicago, who organized against the bid. May others learn from and follow their brave example. It’s just so sad that Chicago’s good fortune contributed to such a disaster for the people of Rio and Brazil. Get your hands on Zirin’s book, and you’ll have a deeper understanding of why.

David Finkel is a native Chicagoan transplanted to Detroit, and an editor of Against the Current (www.solidarity-us.org/atc).

August 5, 2016
A Challenge to the Green Party on Syria
The uprising and fighting in Syria have gone on for over five years and your platform doesn’t say a word about it. Delegates to this weekend’s convention, how about adding these five sentences?
1. We stand with the Arab revolutions and uprisings for democracy that started in Tunisia and Egypt
2. Syrians have a right to reject the Assad dynasty
3. We support the democratic forces in Syria against all reactionary killers from Assad to ISIS to al-Qaeda and others
4. We demand that the great powers abide by the promises to airdrop food and supplies to Syrian areas under siege as of June 1, 2016 #DropFoodNotBombs
5. We denounce any deal by the U.S. government with Russia that makes cooperation against ISIS dependent on giving Assad, Russia and Iran a free hand to crush the Syrian uprising
This should fit in perfectly with your principles, but I admit it may be a hard sell. It conflicts with the reigning Conspiracist worldview on the Left that everything is the fault of the U.S. including Syria. On the face of it Russia and Iran (and plenty of other countries outside the NATO orbit) are grasping capitalist powers on the make, but in the Conspracist worldview they’re all just poor victims of imperialism and if they appear to stomp on their own citizens or some other nation it’s really a U.S. plot.

Jill Stein’s pick for vice president, Ajamu Baraka, certainly sees Syria that way. He thinks Syrians voted for Assad to continue running the country after shooting down peaceful demonstrations and torturing to death thousands of prisoners. Continued opposition supposedly is the fault of the U.S., Saudis and Turkey. Look at this July 6 piece on his website http://www.ajamubaraka.com/

He even says ISIS is a creation of the West that went a little sour. Here are some of his claims in that July 6 article.

“This was evident when the Bush administration and then the Obama administration decided to re-empower these radical jihadists as part of their strategy to put pressure on the al-Maliki government in Iraq and effect governmental change in Syria. In short, they encouraged a jihadist invasion and then framed it as a 'civil war.'

“…the Administration didn’t appear to be too concerned when ISIS broke off from al-Qaeda and began to establish its own independent economic base once it captured the oil fields in Syria. It all seemed like part of the plan, especially when it became clear that NATO member Turkey was being used to get the Syrian oil to world markets.

“…But this Frankensteinian strategy turned farce into disaster when ISIS double-crossed their benefactors by breaking the rules and attacking the 'good Kurds' in Iraq. The strategy appeared to be more concerned with holding territory in Iraq and Syria than carrying out their assignment to overthrow the Assad government and completing the dismemberment of the Syrian state – the strategic objective of U.S. and Israeli policy to counter the regional power of the Iranians.”

So according to him the U.S. fostered ISIS to pressure Iraqi government leaders. They then lost billions in money and weapons and half the Iraqi army in the process, but that was OK because ISIS’ job was then supposedly to get rid of Assad. This is nonsense.

Jill Stein’s position is only somewhat better. In Moscow (of all places) she said “US pursuit of regime change in Libya, Iraq, and Syria created the chaos that promotes power grabs by extremist militias.” So there was no popular uprising. It was all a U.S. plot against Assad.

I heard her speak in CT in February and she said more or less the same thing, lumping Syria in with Iraq and Afghanistan as being just another U.S.-inspired disaster, no mention of Assad’s torture-to-death prisons, no anger over the 1,400 killed by sarin gas, no outrage about what the Russian and Iranians were doing, no demands that the sieges end. Instead she issued a call for diplomacy to settle things. I’ve heard that song many times from the U.S. leaders talking about Palestine. It goes, “Continue with the peace process and ignore the horrendous human rights abuses. All will be well.”

Her analysis is not only wrong, but naïve. The enemy of our enemy is not automatically our friend. Instead we have to realize we’re walking in a minefield with mines and pits and enemies all over the place and we have to figure out how to navigate it and how not to lose our souls in the process.

Green Party convention delegates, you all determine party policy. How about standing up for an Arab people undergoing horrific violence? How about voting in a section on Syria on the Green platform like the five points I propose above?

Stanley Heller works with the Revive the Peace Movement Network. This article originally appeared on Economic Uprising.
August 5, 2016
Thinking About the Election

As the U.S. election season proceeds, there is controversy, confusion, consternation, and sometimes recrimination. Below, in a question and answer format, we present our views on these matters, hoping to contribute to the discussion.

1. Who are Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton?

Trump is a narcissistic, violent, lying, racist, misogynistic, ultra-nationalist bully. He says whatever he calculates will best promote himself. Is he a racist thug? Yes. Does he advocate total state control on behalf of private owners? Not yet. Is he a Mussolini in the making? Maybe.

Hillary Clinton is a leading representative of the neoliberal wing of the capitalist class and has helped move the Democratic Party from New Deal liberalism to pro-corporate liberalism. She is beholden to wealth and power and Sanders was correct to call her the candidate of Wall Street.

Yet as horrible as adherence to wealth and power is, it is unclear why many people see Clinton as massively worse than Obama or her husband, say. Clinton was one of the more liberal Democrats in the Senate, yet some progressives claim they prefer Reagan or even Trump over her. Perhaps these people are first discovering the horrors hiding behind fuzzy Democratic Party rhetoric. Or perhaps they are first directly experiencing the massive obstacle to fundamental change that is our corporate system, and their fury at that system is directed at Clinton alone rather than at her but also more widely.

2. How does the Democratic platform compare with the Republican platform and should we care?

That party platforms and campaign promises are routinely violated is undeniable. Yet, even so, specific campaign pledges are often kept and members of Congress often vote in accord with their party platforms. The key determinant, though, is whether political pressure is brought to bear to compel compliance.

This year, the Sanders forces had substantial input into the Democratic platform. They didn't get the language they sought on a bunch of issues, and on some (especially Palestine), they got nothing. But the document is still one of the most progressive in Party history:

•       a $15 an hour minimum wage, pegged to inflation (remember when that was a major left demand?)

•       working families should not pay any tuition to go to public colleges and universities,

•       50 percent of the country's electricity should come from clean energy sources within a decade,

•       federal legislation to protect the LGBT community from discrimination and transgender folks from violence,

•       repeal the Hyde amendment, which bans federal funds for abortion,

•       comprehensive immigration reform providing a path to citizenship for those without legal documents and in the meantime defending executive actions to prevent the deportation of DREAMers, parents of citizens, and lawful permanent residents, and an end to raids and roundups of children and families,

•       end mass incarceration, reform mandatory minimum sentences, close private prisons and detention centers, expand re-entry programs, require body cameras, stop the use of weapons of war in urban communities, end racial profiling, require the Department of Justice to investigate all questionable or suspicious police-involved shootings, end capital punishment, end the hypercriminalization of marijuana.

Contrast that with the GOP platform, one of the most reactionary in history, which calls for a wall across the Mexican border, no amnesties, treating illegal immigrants as a major source of violent crimes; no abortions, even in cases of rape or women’s health; abolishing tenure; abstinence-only sex education; repealing the Affordable Care Act; characterizing coal as a “clean” energy source; a gay rights section that the Log Cabin Republicans called “the most anti-LGBT platform in the party’s 162-year history”; ending the Attorney General's “campaign of harassment against police forces”; condemning the Supreme Court's erosion of the death penalty; and eliminating the federal minimum wage.

Both platforms reflect a fundamental commitment to capitalist values. Nonetheless the differences they reveal in the two parties and the two likely emerging administrations would have significant human consequences.

3. But given Clinton's connections to the energy industry, aren't the differences between Clinton and Trump on climate only cosmetic?

Clinton and the Democratic Party platform recognize climate change as an “urgent threat” and commit to addressing it. Clinton says she will “install half a billion solar panels by the end of her first term, cut tax subsidies to oil and gas companies,” and “deliver on the pledge President Obama made at the Paris climate conference—without relying on climate deniers in Congress to pass new legislation.” She will “reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 30 percent in 2025 relative to 2005 levels….”

The words “up to” are disturbing, but compare them with Trump, who considers climate change a hoax, or with the Republican platform which proposes “to shift responsibility for environmental regulation from the federal bureaucracy to the states” and “to transform the EPA into an independent bipartisan commission.” They reject “both the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement,” and refer to the “illusion of an environmental crisis.” They want to revive the Keystone pipeline.

Some ask why it matters whether we are killed immediately or more slowly. What matters is that the longer timeline offered by the Clinton policies gives us time to build a movement able to win the environmental policies we really need.

If Trump wins and seeks to abolish the EPA, abrogate the Clean Power Plan, and scuttle the Paris Climate Agreement, climate activists will certainly oppose him. But that is the point. To have Trump in office means next year’s organizing will be fighting to prevent or undo horrendous backsliding instead of seeking positive new gains.

4. Given Clinton and the Democrats' support for “free trade agreements,” would Trump be better for American workers than Clinton?

Technological change and the industrialization of the Third World will inevitably affect employment in the United States. The left insists that the costs of those shifts be shared as fairly and as democratically as possible. What's objectionable about TPP and the other “free trade agreements” is not that they promote trade, but that they give too much power and benefit to corporations and that they are not accompanied by domestic policies that equitably redistribute the costs and benefits.

Trump has not put forward any policies that would address the redistribution problem. Blocking TPP, but then pursuing other policies that shift income upward will not help the non-college-educated working class victims of globalization.

On the minimum wage, Trump recently took “three different positions … in less than 30 seconds,” but the most generous of them was two-thirds of what the Democratic Party platform calls for (an increase to $15 an hour over time, pegged to inflation). The Republican platform sees the minimum wage as “an issue that should be handled at the state and local level,” calls for the repeal of the Davis-Bacon law, which mandates the payment of prevailing wages on federally-funded construction projects, and supports anti-union Right to Work laws.

On tax policy, Citizens for Tax Justice commented: “Trump’s tax plan would represent an unprecedented shift of income to the wealthy, while taking away substantial income and public services from the overwhelming majority of Americans.”

The tax provisions in the GOP platform, said Citizens for Tax Justice, “would exacerbate the dual problems of rising inequality and continuous annual federal budget deficits with tax cuts that essentially put more money into the pockets of wealthy people and corporations and reduce federal revenues.”

The Republican Platform also opposes the Dodd-Frank regulations, and especially the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Trump himself told the New York Times that he prefers using non-union labor.

In contrast, Democrats offer modest steps to address inequality: make the rich pay their fair share of taxes (“In terms of tax justice,” observed Citizens for Tax Justice, “this year’s Democratic platform is one of the party’s most progressive in modern history”), make it easier to form unions, raise the minimum wage, and oppose Right to Work laws.

The rich have a decisive role in Clinton's Democratic Party, but even limited differences between the parties will translate into significant differences in people's lives.

5. How would Trump and Clinton differ on court appointments? Does it even matter?

The next President will likely make four Supreme Court appointments who will adjudicate for decades. When Trump says he will choose justices in the image of Antonin Scalia, we can assume he will. Some of Bill Clinton and Obama's nominees have been centrist but have voted with the liberal bloc on many crucial close decisions.

Decisions on immigration, reproductive rights, affirmative action, LGBTQ rights, voting rights, campaign financing, and corporate power all matter, and so different appointments to the Court matter too. Social movements, of course, are needed to generate real change, but the more reactionary the Court, the tougher their job.

6. Is Clinton more likely to pursue war than Trump?

Bernie Sanders rightly criticized Clinton's 2002 vote for the Iraq war. But despite Trump's claims, there's no evidence he opposed that war before it began. His one documented pre-war opinion was his answer to a September 2002 question from Howard Stern on whether he supported going to war. He replied “Yeah, I guess so.” In 2011 Trump told an interviewer that smart people said the Iraq war was about taking over the oil, but “unfortunately, Bush didn't have that in mind.”

Trump also supported the 2011 campaign to depose Qaddafi in Libya — though he criticized U.S. policy on the grounds that support for the rebels should have been conditioned on their agreeing to give us 50 percent of their oil.

Clinton has hawkish inclinations and a hawkish record, and has surrounded herself with hawkish advisers (including neocons like Robert Kagan). She worked to undermine democracy in Honduras and pursued provocative policies toward Russia. The jingoism at the Democratic Convention was repulsive, but familiar. However, Trump's America Firstism is not pacifism. He's called for sending 30,000 troops to fight ISIS (and won't rule out the use of nuclear weapons against them). He wants bombing that kills the family members of ISIS members (noting that Obama has been fighting a very “politically-correct” war), waterboarding and worse, and he favors barring Muslims.

Trump proposes a 45 percent punitive tariff on China that will surely exacerbate tensions with that major power, and says he wants to bolster U.S. military forces in the tense South China Sea to give the United States a stronger bargaining position.

Clinton may or may not ignore the terms of the Iran nuclear deal and use sanctions to try to extract further concessions from Iran. Trump has said his “number-one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.” The Republican platform says they don't recognize the agreement as binding.

Trump has called for building up the U.S. military and accused Obama of allowing the U.S. nuclear arsenal to “atrophy.” ”The Trump doctrine is simple,” declared The Donald. “It’s strength. It’s strength. Nobody is going to mess with us. Our military will be made stronger.”

In April 2016, Trump warned that, “Our military is depleted, and we’re asking our generals and military leaders to worry about global warming. We will spend what we need to rebuild our military. It is the cheapest investment we can make. We will develop, build, and purchase the best equipment known to mankind. Our military dominance must be unquestioned.”

Obama proposed a trillion dollar nuclear modernization program. Clinton submissively said she had to look into the matter, but now the Democratic platform urges “work to reduce excessive spending on nuclear weapons-related programs that are projected to cost $1 trillion.”

The GOP platform, on the other hand, echoes Trump's claim that Obama and Clinton have weakened the U.S. military. It denounces them for neglecting U.S. strategic weapons, for signing an inappropriate arms control agreement with Russia, and for moving to normalize relations with Cuba.

Some on the left have been delighted at the fact that Trump has seemed to question several of the mainstays of U.S. foreign policy, especially its non-proliferation policy and the NATO alliance. But telling Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia that the United States is no longer going to bear the expense of their defense and that it would be fine if they wanted to acquire nuclear weapons is precisely the sort of policy that could lead to out-of-control nuclear arms races in East Asia and the Middle East. And saying he might not defend one of the new Baltic NATO members until he had checked whether they had “fulfilled their obligations to us” is not a peace policy but the replacement of a provocative military alliance with a gun-for-hire arrangement.

And doesn't having a racist megalomaniac's hand on the nuclear trigger present a real danger?

7. Is Clinton terrible on Palestine? What about Trump?

Although the Democratic Party platform did adopt some of Bernie's positions on important issues, on Israel-Palestine the document refused to condemn the occupation, condemn the settlements, or call for any pressure on Israel to move toward peace. In conformity to Hillary's promise to Israel-apologist billionaire Haim Saban, the platform even says the Party will “oppose any effort to delegitimize Israel, including at the United Nations or through the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement.”

The platform pays lip service to the two-state solution, but by saying it must be “negotiated directly by the parties,” it is essentially saying that Washington will apply zero pressure to bring that solution about (and will guarantee Israel's “qualitative military edge”).

As awful as this Democratic platform section is, the Republican's is even worse. It does not even pretend to support a two-state solution, explicitly rejecting the view that Israel is an occupier. The word Palestinian does not appear in the entire document — except for one clause demanding that the United States immediately halt funding to the UN's climate body because it grants Palestinians membership as a state. It calls for “no daylight between America and Israel” and guarantees Israel a qualitative military edge. It recognizes “Jerusalem as the eternal and indivisible capital of the Jewish state” and calls for the American embassy to be moved there. It denounces the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement as anti-Semitic and calls for legislation to prevent the boycotting of Israel or “the Israeli-controlled territories.”

In February 2016, Trump said that the United States should remain “neutral” between Israel and the Palestinians so as to be in a position to broker a deal between the two sides. But he quickly withdrew that, saying that “Palestinians must come to the table knowing that the bond between the United States and Israel is absolutely, totally unbreakable,” that he would move the U.S. embassy to “the eternal capital of the Jewish people,” Jerusalem, and that Hillary Clinton and Obama had “treated Israel very, very badly.”

In May 2016, Trump went even further, declaring that Israel should just “keep moving forward” in building settlements in the occupied territories. U.S. pressure on Israel to stop settlement expansion — which Washington used to call illegal — has generally been non-existent, but this is the first time a presidential candidate has urged them to build more. Trump has been endorsed by billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a leading supporter of Israel’s right-wing government, who says he believes that Trump “will be good for Israel.”

Both parties' positions on Israel-Palestine are terrible, with Trump's being more so. But this is an example of how one can press on issues before and after the election, totally independent of how one votes in November. Many groups supporting Palestinian rights were out in the streets during the Democratic Convention trying to appeal to the strong sentiment among rank-and-file Democrats who are far more progressive on this issue than are the Party leaders. They were working and will continue to work on changing the conversation on Palestine, quite apart from those ten minutes in November.

8. Does the fact that Clinton is a woman matter?

Yes, a woman becoming president is an undeniable step forward, and, other things equal, it should be enough to decide one’s vote. But of course other things are never equal.

If Trump was a woman, and Clinton a man, and everything else was unchanged, that one positive for Ms. Trump would not override her incredible negatives. Or consider Sanders versus Clinton. Clinton being a woman was certainly a factor in her favor, but not remotely enough to sway most progressives toward supporting her over Sanders — and rightly so.

That said, the effects of having a woman president will be profound for young girls and women — and for young boys, too.

And of course, on the other side of the issue, it isn’t just that Trump isn’t a woman. It is that he is incredibly misogynist and in office would cause feminists to have to battle violent reaction rather than pursue liberation.

9. Does it matter for future activism whether Clinton or Trump becomes President?

Yes, in two main ways. First, in reacting to protests Trump would be far more aggressive than Clinton and encourage local police to be far more repressive. Indeed, Trump would implicitly, and maybe even explicitly, welcome citizen vigilantes to violently repress resistance in a throwback to the days of the “hard hat riots” against anti-war protestors in 1970, or even to KKK tactics against anti-racist organizers.

Second, imagine it is Election Day plus one. You wake up. Clinton won. Sanders is building a new organization called “Our Revolution.” Movements are eager to pursue positive aims they have been elaborating. There is no honeymoon for Hillary, there is activism for society. The focus of protest is government, the two parties, and corporations. The overriding concern is attaining positive gains and moving toward implementing Sanders’ policies and then more.

Or, you wake up, Trump won. Racism surges. Sexism explodes. People of good will are shell-shocked. Movements scramble to find voice and form to oppose a drastic shift rightward. Activists prepare to battle to preserve what with Clinton in office they would have been trying to transcend. The focus of protest is Trump, his policies, and repression. Positive aspirations are back-burnered by the urgency to prevent gruesome reaction and even fascistic violence. The overriding concern is survival, repelling reaction, and getting back to what is remembered as the relative sanity of Obama/Clinton.

10. But couldn’t a victory of the greater evil hasten progressive change?

Going backward to go forward makes sense when retreat leads to a short cut to leap ahead. But a path forward from a Trump-led society would lead right back through some Democrat, maybe even Clinton herself. It would entail four, eight, or more years delay, and also the massive pain that a Trump administration would impose on people, not to mention the delay in addressing global warming and all that that might mean.

Has any labor organizer ever wished owners would cut salaries or worsen conditions so that labor can leap forward? Has any anti-war organizer, feminist organizer, anti-racist organizer, or other organizer called upon the establishment to make things much worse in order to arrive at much better? Of course not, and for good reason.

11. But didn’t the neoliberal Democratic Party pave the way for Trump, and wouldn’t having more liberals in office now mean more “Trumps” later?

Yes, Democratic Party policies, particularly paying little attention to the declining income, feelings of alienation, horrendous health care, and even the plummeting lifespan of white working people, have been central to Trump’s rise, as has the Democrat’s unwillingness to actually comprehend and relate to working class issues in a remotely sincere fashion.

And yes, having Clinton in office with no effective opposition to force better policies and develop lasting movements, could lead to a still worse and still more effective “Trump” running in the future, particularly if Clinton wins via a campaign that effectively ignores white workers and really all workers as workers, leaving them feeling even more estranged and angry than now.

But who proposes that scenario? And why should we expect it? If Clinton wins she will immediately confront not only an electorate and especially an activist community that will fight for change, but even inside her own Party a seriously divided base with much and perhaps even most of it leaning at least somewhat left, including toward developing working class ties and program.

On the other hand, if Trump wins, he will operate in a Party that backs his most aggressive choices, is utterly disdainful of all opposition, and is also hell bent on delivering a worse “Trump” later.

Regarding its operational lesson, and perhaps even the stakes we face, it is relevant to note that Hitler surely arose from the terrible failures of the German capitalist and social democratic parties to deal with the Depression, but that doesn't mean it was sensible for progressives to refuse an alliance with the social democrats to stop Hitler.

12. What is Trump’s appeal to white working class people? How might it best be addressed?

Trump appeals to illegitimate racist and sexist fears, but also appeals to legitimate though misdirected concerns about severely worsening life conditions.

Republicans cater to owners and try to win over workers with lies, posturing, fear of terror, and racism/sexism. Democrats serve owners but cater to what might be called the professional class, and try to modestly accommodate workers to gain their votes.

Not believing campaign speeches, people often vote for who they feel understands their situation better. But if many of Trump’s working class supporters are not supporting him because they want him and others like him to get even more rich at working people’s expense, if they are not supporting him because he is a real estate tycoon, if they are not supporting him literally because he is abominably racist and sexist, then perhaps they are supporting him because he appears to them unafraid to say what he thinks. He is not polished and academic. He talks straight. He does not appear to be the kind of person who looks down on workers and who day to day constantly exerts direct power over them.

If so, progressives need to speak directly to Trump’s supporters, respecting their pain and anger and providing real but also believable policy answers to their concerns.

13. Who are the Greens, and Jill Stein? And does a higher vote tally for them aid social change?

Greens are progressives and leftists who believe in the desirability of creating a powerful third party in the U.S. as part of the process of winning a new society. They are polling at 3-5 percentage points nationally. They have won some local elections, though their main emphasis has been on presidential elections. Jill Stein is their likely candidate for President.

A higher vote tally for Greens would reveal support and support typically garners more support because momentum matters.

Further, of those who vote Green, some will join the Greens, and then work for them, and that will help their development.

Finally, reaching 15 percent in the polls gets Stein a seat in the coming debates, 5 percent gets federal matching funds, and attaining various state-wide tallies helps ballot access in the future.

14. What does strategic lesser evil voting mean?

Strategic lesser evil voting means you vote in light of the implications of your choice for the future. It means you look not only at the short and long-term consequences for human well-being of each candidate winning, but also at the likelihood of each candidate winning.

Strategic lesser evil voting means looking at the likely overall benefit and harms of casting your vote in a particular state for Clinton versus the overall benefit and harm of casting your vote in that state for a third party candidate with no chance of winning. If polling shows a close race between Clinton and Trump, then a small number of additional votes for Clinton could mean the difference between which of the two candidates gets all the state's electoral votes. On the other hand, if polls show that the race is not close, then a strategic lesser evil voter can vote for the Greens or other third party with no negative cost at all.

But what is the positive impact on the Green Party, say, of Green supporters voting for Clinton in contested states? If the Greens were to put all their energies into safe-state campaigning, they could win nearly as many overall votes as otherwise, especially since they wouldn't lose the support of safe-state voters who considered an all-states campaign irresponsible. But even if the Greens lost some votes by declining to campaign for presidential votes in contested states, the impact of these lost presidential votes would be quite modest. Greens who vote for Clinton would emerge from the voting booth with the same views they would have had had their state been safe and had they voted for Stein, and they could work just as hard for Green positions in either case. And Trump would have lost — or, in the horrible event he won, Greens would not be called the cause of it, with disastrous results for the Party.

So even ignoring implications of a Trump victory for the country and the world, Greens would at most be marginally hurt by promoting a safe state strategy, and might even benefit from doing so. And, of course, we should not ignore implications for others, in any event.

15. But if we're always committed to lesser evil voting, won't that mean we're always going to be voting for a reactionary capitalist party and that therefore the development of an alternative will be impossible?

If all we do is vote every four years, then no matter how we vote, we will never get much change. What is crucial is whether we build sufficiently effective movements to generate sufficient support for change to carry a really worthy candidate into contention, and then to victory, whether in a mainstream party, like Sanders nearly achieved, or in a third party. And what determines that is overwhelmingly what we are doing other than voting, like the work of Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and other projects that over the past years have paved the way for Sanders, but also on whether our periodic voting creates conditions more or less conducive to progress, and on whether our third party work locally creates a steadily enlarging base.

In this election, progressives and leftists who follow strategic lesser evil voting will be free in nearly all states, we hope, to vote for third parties because those states will be uncontested. In contested states, their lesser evil vote for Clinton will further the prospects for Greens by contributing to stopping Trump.

In contrast, if progressives in contested states reject voting for Clinton and Trump wins, they would have unintentionally impeded prospects for Green gains and consigned people to four years of Trump.

16. Why blame those who vote for third party candidates in swing states for a Trump victory? Isn't that the argument used to tar Nader voters for Bush's win in 2000? Was it correct then?

Suppose it comes down to Florida. Suppose we know, as Election Day dawns, that whoever wins Florida becomes President because every other state is clearly in one column or the other. The polls show Florida could go either way. If in this situation a person, or especially a social group, movement, or organization abstains, votes for a third party, or votes for a write-in candidate, those are votes lopped off Clinton's potential total. If some group does that, and it swings the final tally to Trump, then it is impossible to deny that the group’s choice had the predictable consequence of giving the election to Trump. Had they chosen differently, Trump would have lost.

In Florida in 2000, Bush beat Gore by 537 votes. Nader got 97,000 votes. Therefore, with all else equal, if only 538 Nader voters had voted instead for Gore, Gore would have won all 25 of Florida's electoral votes and would have won the electoral vote 291 to 246. It is true, of course, that without Republican shenanigans during the Florida vote count, Gore would have won the state. It is also true that had Gore run a better campaign, he would have won the very close election. Also, if they hadn't voted for Nader, some Green voters might not have voted at all and some might even have voted for Bush. But still, despite all this, any 538 Nader voters in Florida could have prevented Bush from becoming president. And had Nader urged them to do just that, while he campaigned elsewhere, and in Florida they worked to prepare to carry on after the election against Gore, then Gore would have won, and the Greens would also have been vastly better off.

17. Don’t we need to build an alternative to the two-party duopoly?

Yes, of course we do, but activism that aims to transform society, rather than simply eliminate a horrible turn toward reaction, will be far more likely to happen with Clinton in office than with Trump.

Ensuring that Trump loses by voting for Clinton in contested states while voting for Stein, or whoever, in safe states, builds for an alternative to the two-party duopoly both by supporting a possible alternative right now in uncontested states, and also by warding off a massive impediment to that alternative for the coming four years, in contested states.

18. But doesn’t advocating lesser evil voting mean one doesn’t care about the long term and that one is, as some commentators have suggested, a running dog lackey of imperialism?

We don't feel like we are running dog lackeys of imperialism. We propose and favor full revolutionary alternatives to existing political and economic systems. Yet we also think voting for Clinton in contested states will help block Trump's horrible agenda and also improve the prospects for greater activism to come.

We have the lesser evil inclination in this election not because we are suddenly inexplicably beholden to the powers and institutions we have fought for decades, or because we have lost our nerve, or our way, but because we have for all our adult lives sought and will keep on seeking long term transformation of our society. We simply see that in our country’s current circumstance, lesser evil voting in contested states aids seeking change against wealth and power.

19. Does refusing to vote Clinton even in contested states mean one doesn’t care about the well-being of constituencies that will suffer more under Trump than under Clinton?

In rare cases, perhaps some callousness plays a role, but far more often refusing to vote for Clinton even in contested states means that one is furious at the Democrats for playing dirty with Bernie, that one hates what Clinton stands for, that one hates what Clinton and her administration will be inclined to do in office, that one feels a tremendous urgency to transcend not just neoliberal policies, but the whole political, economic, and social system we currently endure, and that one just doesn’t want to and would indeed feel sick to the core to pull a lever that seemingly ratifies all that one despises.

The problem is, even with all these fully warranted and admirable feelings causing one’s refusal, the refusal itself could elect Trump and unleash even worse outcomes than those we oppose on many, many people, and arguably on the whole species.

Does anyone believe a progressive, leftist, or revolutionary who pulls the lever for Clinton in a contested state must in any way suffer diminished ability to fight on? Why can’t we hold our nose, cast our vote, and then go right back to struggling for a new society? Why can't we stop Trump and also build new political, organizational, and movement alternatives?

20. But isn't voting for Clinton a slippery slope. First you resolve to vote for her, then you don't want to criticize her before the election (for fear you'll help the greater evil), then you tone down your criticism of her after the election (because you'll be helping some greater evil defeat her four years later)…

We all like to feel good about ourselves and we all at times rationalize our choices. But even so, this trajectory is not inevitable. We can vote for Clinton while indicating we do not support her and that we will oppose her, and we can then do just that.

Indeed, if the overwhelming message of leftists in talks and writing in the coming weeks is that we should vote strategically and also fight on, it is hard to see why pulling the lever for Clinton in a contested state, of which there will hopefully be few or even none, should interfere with that voter becoming one of Clinton’s most steadfast and effective opponents, or with that voter becoming one of the Green Party’s most steadfast and effective supporters and participants.

21. Aren't you asking Greens to be inactive until November 8, thereby cutting their momentum?

No, not at all. Campaign in most states for president, for local offices, and for issues, and in swing states campaign for local offices and for issues. The idea that foregoing voting for Stein in contested states means doing nothing there downplays the importance of local activities and campaigns.

22. But I want to vote my conscience.

So do we. Why isn’t accounting for the impact of our choice on the well-being of others and on future organizing prospects part of voting our consciences?

23. But isn't it harmful to vote based on fear rather than positive program?

It would be great if we had nothing to fear and the only question before us was which of various progressive programs we wanted to adopt. But how can we not be fearful of climate catastrophe or nuclear war or mass deportations or racist violence?

Regrettably, we need to focus on both offense and defense: advancing positive programs while, by our 10-minute vote in swing states, we block our most feared outcomes.

24. But Trump's not going to win…

Pundits on the left and elsewhere have consistently underestimated Trump in this campaign. Today Clinton is ahead in the polls, but it is reckless to assume that her victory is a foregone conclusion.

In any event, the odds of Trump winning has no bearing on the call to vote for Clinton only where it might matter. If, in early November, it is clear that Trump has no chance of winning, then one can vote for a third party everywhere. If it is clear that some state that was previously considered up for grabs was now decisively in one column or another, voters there could likewise vote for a third party.

25. What is most important, post election? Is it left unity? Is it who is president? Is it what new organizations and activism we have put in place to go forward?

All three are important.

Efforts at change in the United States cannot succeed, long or short term, unless all who favor these ends work together in a spirit of mutual aid. So we need left unity and we have to be trying for it, not assaulting one another, even as we seek other gains as well.

Aside from affecting many people's lives today, who is president empowers various views, establishes context, and also affects government responses to dissent. Do activists have to fight against policies that seek to move us back in time, or can activists focus on positive aspirations linked to long term aims? Does dissent try to reduce magnified repression or eliminate familiar repression?

Change depends on the levels of activism and organization we have in place to fight for it, and that in turn depends on the extent to which we develop organization and activism as opposed to only immersing ourselves in seeking vote tallies. So, while trying to generate unity, and while expanding popular support, and while trying to avoid a Trump presidency, we need to also build new organizations that can sustain activism in the years ahead.

26. But didn't Bernie Sanders behave like a “sheep-dog,” trying to herd all left voters into the Democratic Party corral?

If Sanders was a sheepdog, then all his supporters are sheep. What a strange way to characterize those one hopes will be engines of social change. But luckily we don’t feel herded, do you?

Sanders wants Clinton to beat Trump. So do we. Sanders wants various changes in the Democratic Party’s rules and methods. We would like to have those changes too. Sanders says he wants much more, and we do too.

But Sanders has gone another step. He is creating an organization. It is not called Young Democrats or Super Democrats or Democratic Allies. It is called “Our Revolution.” What will the structure, policies, and program of the organization be? We don’t know, but hopefully it will mature into a participatory force fighting for Bernie’s program, and for much beyond that as well.

Sanders has said from the day he began his campaign that what matters to winning change is on-going dissent, demonstrations, and organizing in the street through and beyond Election Day. And now he is adding that organization matters, too.

The purported blemish many now point to regarding Sanders, is that he has said we have to stop Trump which means we have to elect Clinton. But that is consistent with the rest of his message and enhances it as soon as we realize that for us it can mean voting for Clinton where necessary to beat Trump, but opposing her objectionable policies everywhere until we have replaced her administration with much better, and then opposing that administration too, until we have a new system.

In fact, Sanders brought many new people into politics and was able to reach millions of people that third parties have for decades been unable to reach. There is no reason to suppose that those of his supporters who are now going to vote for Clinton have been duped into doing so. They may have been attracted to Sanders in the first place because he offered a plausible path to substantial social change without risking a reactionary outcome. They may well agree with strategic lesser evil voting.

Would it have been better, not least in combatting Trump, if Sanders had come to the convention and said something like, “Hillary Clinton’s agenda is not all that I wanted and I don’t believe a Clinton Administration will bring us liberty and justice, but I am absolutely convinced, without an inkling of doubt, that having Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office will do far less harm to working people, minorities, women, the environment, and international relations, and will provide a far better context for winning further gains than having Donald Trump there. For that reason, I want Hillary Clinton to become the next President and I intend to campaign as hard as I can in every contested state to urge my supporters to vote Clinton in those states, and then to join me and our new organization, Our Revolution, to agitate, militate, and organize against the new Clinton administration and on behalf of working people, women, black people, brown people, LGBT people, and really all but the oligarchs and potentates who run our society and profit from our labors.”?

Perhaps that would have been better (we think so), but it did not happen.

27. What then can we sensibly say about Sanders’ role in all that has unfolded? Why didn’t he run for President as a Green, with Stein as his Vice President?

Sanders’ role has been consistent and, relative to anything that anyone might plausibly have anticipated, far more successful than other efforts we might name. Sanders ran as a Democrat for the outreach and visibility it would facilitate, which it certainly did.

We can only guess at Sanders’ decision not to accept the Green invitation to run on their ticket once he could no longer get the Democratic Party nomination. But we hope that if Sanders had thought that he and the Greens might have won, then he would have run. But if he thought, as we guess was the case, that it might have only meant his getting 10 percent or perhaps 15 percent and Trump winning, then we assume he concluded that the risk of running wasn’t worth it. The downside was too great, the upside too limited. The better path, we assume he decided, was to get Trump removed from the field by a Clinton victory, and then proceed with the struggle.

28. What might a person seeking a real revolution in U.S. institutions do at a time like this? What ought such a person not do?

There are countless possible answers as to what one might usefully do in these times. Try to preserve and enlarge the momentum that has developed largely from the Sanders campaign, while also trying to ensure that Trump loses. Work toward creating new organization. Work toward developing and creating revolutionary vision and consistent program feeding into that vision. Support diverse movements and seek to mutually align them into larger endeavors.

As to what not to do, of course that too has many answers, but the most germane might be — don’t escalate time-bound differences into hostile disputes and then into dismissals of allies and potential allies.

August 4, 2016
The Mexican Teachers' Long Struggle for Education, Workers Rights, and Democracy

The last few years of repeated strikes and demonstrations by the teachers of Chiapas, Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Michoacán, and the government’s violent repression of these protests–including forced diseappearance of students, massacres of supporters, and assassinations of individual teachers–has led to interest in the background of the teachers’ movement. The following article is meant to provide a long historical overview of the Mexican teachers’ movement, together with a bibliography for further reading.

The Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE) has 1.4 million members, while 200,000 or more of them are active in the dissident National Coordinating Committee (la CNTE) which has for four months been engaged in strikes and direct actions that have at times paralyzed the states of Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Michoacán. La CNTE has been leading such massive movement now for 37 years in a struggle to win teachers higher wages, to protect public education, and more recently in its battle against the government’s Education Reform Law, it has proposed a new educational model.

How did teachers in Mexico acquire their very central place in the country’s social and political history? How did they become such an organized force both in the government’s corporative labor and political system, as well as in the working class and social movement that challenge the government? What is the dissident teachers movement and what does it want?

The Era of the Mexican Revolution – 1910 – 1920

The root of the teachers’ role in modern Mexico is to be found in the revolutionary period in which primary secondary educators played the role of political advisors to the peasant movement for agrarian reform.

From the Spanish conquest in the 1520s to the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the Catholic Church had provided what little formal education there was for the Mexican people. While the best Catholic Schools were reserved for the wealthy and the tiny middle class, schools for he workers and the peasantry were few and the quality of education was poor. During the dictatorship of Mexican President Porfirio Díaz (1876-1911) the government had established the first public education system, though it too was very limited and reached very few of the country’s young people.[1] It was the Mexican Revolution that brought mass public education to the country.

The Mexican Revolution had several implicit goals and eventual achievements: distribution of land to the peasants, recognition of labor unions, nationalization of the oil industry, and the establishment of a free, secular, public education system for all. When the violent period of 1910-1920 ended, President Álvaro Obregón created the Secretariat of Public Education (SEP) in 1921 and appointed José Vasconcelos, the philosopher and writer, the author of La raza cósmica (The Cosmic Race), to head it.

Vasconcelos, who had been allied with the revolution’s left wing—the Convention of Emiliano Zapata and Francisco “Pancho” Villa—had earlier been appointed to head the National University of Mexico appointed by president Adolfo de la Huerta. Vasconcelos had created the university’s famous motto: “Por mi raza hablará el espíritu” (“The spirit will speak through my race.”) and to make that idea a reality he promoted popular education that was nationalistic, but also Latin American in character.

As head of the university, Vasconcelos had launched a national literacy campaign with volunteer teachers and as head of the SEP he continued to promote the idea of education as a vehicle for the emancipation of the Mexican people. Vasconcelos compared his teachers to missionaries, evangelists of the revolution. The teacher had a sacred mission: the uplift of the poor, the oppressed, and the uneducated.[2]

The Period of Agrarian reform 1920-1930

The teachers accepted the assignment, sometimes at the risk of their lives. During the revolutionary upheaval of 1910 to 1920 and again during the agrarian reform movement of the 1920s to the 1940s, when peasants rose up to demand the return of ancestral fields from the hacienda landlords, it was the local schoolteacher who often helped the illiterate farmers to formulate their demands. Teachers, we might say, became the union stewards of the peasant movement of the 1910s and 1920s.

The teacher, almost surely the only one in the village who read the newspaper from time to time and very likely the only one had ever read a book, took on the task of phrasing the villagers’ demands in the language of the radical agrarian reform movement, which in regions like Michoacán and Veracruz often had a socialist character. In fact, in the early 1920s some of the leaders of the radical peasant movement in those states joined the newly founded Communist Party.

The local village elementary school—few went beyond the sixth grade in those years—became the bastion not only of the agrarian reform movement but also of the Mexican revolution more generally. Before the revolution, the Catholic Church had provided most of the schooling available and almost none to the rural poor. The Constitution of 1917 ended the Church’s role in education and required the state to provide free, lay education for all.

The public school teachers tended to be free-thinkers and often militant atheists who accused the Catholic Church and its clerics of keeping the people in ignorance, filling their heads with superstition, and charging them exorbitant fees for the required sacraments of baptism, marriage, and absolution. The rural teachers, though hampered by their own limited education, strove, on the contrary, to offer a modern, rational, and scientific view of the world.

During the 1920s, the teachers’ role as advocates for the peasants, opponents of the Church, and campaigners for continuing and deepening the revolution made them targets for the landlords who sent their pistoleros (gunmen) of their guardias blancas (white guards) to assassinate the local school teacher, an all too common occurrence in that era. Still rural teachers stepped forward, continuing to put pen to paper to give expression to the peasants’ demand for their land.[3]

Lázaro Cárdenas and Socialist Education – 1934 – 1940

The Great Depression of the 1930s had led to the collapse of some agricultural sectors and to the failure of many haciendas, weakening the landlord class. When Lázaro Cárdenas became president in 1934, he provided support both to the agrarian reform movement fighting for the haciendas’ land and to the rural schools and their teachers. With his support a stronger movement of both peasant leagues and industrial labor unions developed, and became strong supporters of the president. Cárdenas not only distributed millions of acres of land to indigenous and peasant communities in the form of the collectively-owned ejidos, but also in some cases provided arms to peasant organizations to defend that land from the guardias blancas.

At the same time, Cárdenas worked both to strengthen public education but also to radicalize it. Cárdenas, who considered himself a socialist, saw his project as using the government to control economic developments and modern industry to create socialism in an agrarian society. As part of that project, the ruling party that he headed, amended the constitution in 1934 to read “State education will be socialist in character.” The Mexican Communist Party (PCM), which provided some staff for the SEP in this period, shared the president’s goal of socialist education.

The government’s implementation of the new socialist education project—which many quiet correctly interpreted as atheistic education—led immediately to conflict with the Church and with other conservative forces, as well as with the country’s pious peasantry. In some areas the locals burned the schools and cut off the teachers’ ears, or in some cases they assassinated teachers. Many areas of the country were deeply divided over the issue and some were in virtual rebellion. Many from both the left and the right look back on Cárdenas’ decision to improve socialist education as a great error in political judgment, though some historians argue that the struggle around socialist education contributed to the formation of a sense of multi-cultural nationalism.[4]

The Founding of el SNTE – 1940 – 1958

During Cárdenas’ tenure (1934-1940), the labor unions had supported him and he had encouraged the unions’ organization drives and strikes. At the same time he pressured the unions to centralize, forming national federations, but also divided them into three different federations, one for workers (CTM), one for public employees (OATSE), and one for peasants (CNC). (While teachers in some large cities and in some states had organized, forming various teacher federations, the teachers did not succeed in forming a single national teachers union during those years.)

Cárdenas brought the new labor federations into the state party, changing its name from the Revolutionary National Praise (PNR) to Party of the Mexican Revolution (PRM) with the slogan “For Socialism.” Cárdenas envisioned an agrarian socialism guided and created from above through the state-party. So, ironically, Mexico’s most left wing president was also the creator of a corporative system, that is, one where the state-party dominated the unions and workers.

Then Cárdenas chose as successor to the presidency, Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940-46), a leader who was far more conservative. It was Ávila Camacho who in 1943 created the National Union of Education Workers (el SNTE) the merger of the Union of Education Workers (SUNTE), the Mexican Union of Teachers and Education Workers (SMMTE), the Autonomous National Union of Education Workers (SNATE), and the Union of Workers of Mexican Education (STEMRM) and other smaller organizations.

Between1943 and 1949 el SNTE became the locus of struggle between religious right, the state-party, and leftists. The ruling party succeeded in breaking the power of the clerical conservatives in el SNTE. Then in 1949, under the pressure of the U.S. State Department, the Cold War had come to Mexico, a development welcomed by the leaders of the state-party, opening a second front of struggle in el SNTE. The Cold War led the ruling party—now known as the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)—to drive the Communists out of the Secretary of Education and while the SNTE excluded them from the union.

So, during the 1950s Mexico’s educational system came to be controlled by two powerful state bureaucracies: the SEP and the SNTE, the leaders of which collaborated to control the teachers, many of whom were veterans of the social movements and struggles of the 1920s and 1930s. In Mexico’s system, labor bureaucrats were often imposed on the unions by the state-party, sometimes violently. The SEP collaborated with the SNTE to provide funds for an army of union staff and for no-show teaching jobs. State SEP and SNTE officials collaborated with the PRI governors and local officials with the village bosses, the caciques

Union officials were expected to insure that the workers did not strike for higher wages and that they did vote for the ruling PRI, for which the officials were rewarded by also becoming congressmen, senators, and governors, as well as leaders of the PRI itself. The teachers played an important role at the grassroots to insure that the PRI, through fear and favors, won all national elections, held all political offices from city hall, to governor, to the congress, and the presidency. The president controlled the justices of the Supreme Court. It was a very nearly totalitarian system.

The First Dissident Teacher Movement – 1958

This was the era of the “Mexican Miracle,” the rapid growth of the Mexican economy at a rate of 3 to 4 percent with 3 percent inflation rate from 1940-1970. The miracle was based on the nationalist economic model, the substitution of imports, the deployment of the state’s nationalized industries that controlled much of the economy, and on keeping workers’ wages low. The state-controlled union’s job during this period was to keep workers—including teachers—from demanding higher wages. It was this that led to the first dissident teacher movement in Mexico.[5]

The movement was led by Othón Salazar (1924-2008), a teacher who had been born in Guerrero, studied first at the Oaxtepec Normal School, then at the Ayotinzapa Normal School, and finally at the National Teachers College, becoming a teacher in 1951 and a member of a Young Communist Club in 1952. He was soon the recognized leader of the teachers at the Superior Normal School in Mexico City.[6]

Under Salazar’s leadership, Local 9 of the SNTE struck for higher wages in 1956; then in 1957 he and his fellow teachers organized the Movimiento Revolucionario del Magisterio (MRM or Revolutionary Teachers Movement) initiating a broader movement among teachers in Mexico City and other parts of the country. In 1958 the MRM began to lead a series of protest demonstrations and marches for higher wages in Mexico City.

The government responded to the protests by breaking up teacher demonstrations and arresting and briefly jailing Salazar, accusing him of being a Communist, and agent of the Soviet Union, and guilty of sedition. The government suppressed the movement, and when Salazar led a second strike at the Normal Superior in 1960, he was fired. He continued to head the MRM from 1956-1977.[7]

The MRM protests took place at the same time that another Communist, Demetrio Vallejo, became leader of the Mexican Railroad Workers Union and led a general strike of the country’s railroads.[8] That strike, which paralyzed the country, interpreted by both the Mexican and U.S. governments as a Communist attempt at revolution, was suppressed by the army; a few were killed, hundreds arrested, and the movement absolutely broken.[9] The defeat of the Communist Party led railroad worker and teacher movements put an end to large-scale social movements in Mexico for a decade.

The Democracy Movement and Its Suppression: Tlatelolco 1968 and its Impact

Mexico changed dramatically in the 1950s and 60s. The Revolution of 1910-1940 had given the peasants land, brought schools and health clinics, and the population expanded dramatically. The post-revolutionary governments also built roads and highways that led to the cities. The children and grandchildren of the Revolution moved from the countryside to urban areas by the millions, leading to an astronomical expansion of urban areas and populations. The PRI’s old structure of workers and peasants no longer adequately represented the country’s expanded social structure with its various middle class and millions of high school and college students. Young Mexicans had higher aspirations for themselves and their country. Then came the Cuban Revolution of 1959, inspiring movements for radical social change in Mexico.

A new movement for democracy developed at the base of Mexican society, leading in 1968 to massive demonstrations for democracy on the eve of the Mexican Olympics. While students and their teachers had been at the center of the movement, hundreds of thousands throughout the country rallied to it. President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964-1970) responded by calling out the police and army, which attacked the movement, killing as many as 300 at Tlatelolco, the Plaza of the Three Cultures. The events of 1968 became a great turning point in Mexican history, leading to a series of democracy movement through the following decades.

The New Left Goes to the People

The PRI’s violent repression of the democracy movement led tens of thousands of young Mexicans to turn to the left. The pro-Soviet Mexican Communist Party (PCM) grew some in this period, but it was the far left—followers of Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, of Mao Tse-Tung, and of Leon Trotsky—which had the greatest impact. The Fidelistas, Maoistas, Trotskyistas, and some neo-Cardenistas went to the people: to poor urban neighborhoods, to rural villages, to factories in industrial areas. Soon they had recruited followers among peasants, autoworkers, steel workers, and teachers.

Simultaneous with the new democracy movement, an insurgencia obrera, a worker insurgency that lasted from 1968 into the mid-1970s had developed among industrial workers and some public employees. The insurgencia became a laboratory where leftist activists could test out their ideas about organizing a revolution. The left debated strategies for changing Mexico’s bureaucratic, corrupt, and violent state-party controlled labor unions. Some left groups opted for creating new independent unions, while others decided that they should struggle within the existing structure, fighting to build movements for democracy that could take control of local unions and eventually of the national union. A group of leftist teachers decided on the latter strategy.

The Founding of the Teachers Coordinating Committee (la CNTE)

Today’s dissident teacher movement began in the mid-1960s among mostly women indigenous teachers in the state of Chiapas. These bilingual or multilingual teachers, teaching in Spanish and one or more of the Mayan languages of the region, began to organize to win higher wages. Though women formed a majority of the rank and file, virtually all of the movement’s leaders were men.

Several things created the context for the emergence out of their early efforts of an organization among these teachers.

First, President Luis Echeverría (1970-76) ended the old system of “Hispanicization of the Indians” and made the SEP responsible for indigenous education in their own languages and Spanish. The result was the training in the rural normal schools of thousands of indigenous bi-lingual educators who found a new, significant, and dignified role in their communities. These teachers became over time a counter-weight to the PRI’s cacique and to party’s clientelistic system of patronage in the village as well as a challenge to the SEP’s bureaucratically controlled union delegates.

Second, while most teachers received their basic teacher education in the rural normal schools, many later went on to study at the National Teachers College and the Superior Normal School in Mexico City. Their professors in the 1970s, many of them leftists in the new left made up of Maoists and Trotskyists, taught the new teachers the elements of Marxism. Thus a grassroots indigenous movement became connected to national leftist oganizations, Maoist Línea Proletaria (LP or Proletarian Line) and the Trotskyist Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores (PRT or Revolutionary Workers Party).

While the Maoists, the dominant tendency, focused on building local bases in schools and communities, the Trotskyists emphasized the importance of a struggle against the state, a struggle for socialism. Both of these currents would have an important influence on la CNTE, their politics tempered over time by their involvement in the indigenous communities.

The new teachers movement of the 1970s began with a struggle to raise workers’ wages but soon became a struggle focused against the SNTE’s bureaucracy. But the struggle was a multi-faceted one against the PRI, against the SEP, against the officials of the SNTE, but perhaps most important against the local cacique, the political boss at the intersection of those three organizations. The bilingual teachers, a majority of them women, used their biweekly meetings with their students’ parents to explain their movement and its goals. The gradually built an alliance with many of the parents and the communities.[10]

Carlos Jonguitud Barrios and the Revolutionary Vanguard

From 1949 to 1972 el SNTE had been dominated by Jesús Robles Martínez, the eminence grise of the union, but when it became clear that he was unable to maintain control of the restive teachers, he was ousted and replaced by Carlos Jonguitud Barrios.[11] Jonguitud was an official of Local 9 in Mexico City, the head of the National Vigilance Committee (responsible for union discipline), and the leader of a powerful caucus called Revolutionary Vanguard. He also served as a PRI congressman, senator, and state governor, as well as head of the Congress of Labor (CT).

With the blessing of President Echeverría, in 1972 Jonguitud and his Revolutionary Vanguard took charge of the union while at the same time the government increased education spending, a development which made available more funds for the SEP and so for el SNTE’s patronage machine. Where financial favors failed to win over local leaders, Jonguitud Barrios collaborated with the SEP to fired union leaders, and if necessary he had his opponents threatened, beaten and in a few cases killed.

La CNTE Drives Out Carlos Jonguitud Barrios

Still, the dissidents in Chiapas continued their fight for higher wages and for the democratic control of their local union, and succeeded. In 1979 the teachers from Chiapas and other states created the National Coordinating Committee (la CNTE), a caucus within el SNTE. While neither the Trotskyists nor the Maoists in la CNTE’s leadership—nor for that matter the indigenous communities that formed its base—were models of democracy, coming together they engendered a movement that focused on building democratic schools and local unions as well as engaging in campaigns of direct action to pressure the caciques, el SNTE, the SEP, and the PRI. The Chiapas activists fought to hold a democratic state union convention and to elect their own union leaders, a task they accomplished in 1981.

Within a few years teachers in Oaxaca had also succeeded in winning control of their local union while at the same time the reform movement was growing in Mexico City, though in all of these areas maintaining the union’s autonomy was a constant struggle. La CNTE carried out a number of strikes, some successful and some failures, but continued the fight year after year. In 1989 la CNTE led a national strike, strongest in the South and Southeast, but with tremendous support as well in Mexico City. La CNTE mobilized over 300,000 teachers in huge demonstrations, demanding the removal of Carlos Jonguitud Barrios and the calling of a democratic national convention of the union.

With Mexico City paralyzed by striking and protesting teachers, in April of 1989 President Carlos Salinas de Gortari of the PRI called Jonguitud to his office and fired him, ending his 18-year dictatorship over the teachers. The teachers, however, did not win the right to hold a democratic national convention, rather Salinas then put Elba Esther Gordillo, also an official from Local 9, into power as the first woman head of el SNTE. She in turn ratified the election victory of the democratic opposition in Local 9 in Mexico City, which succeeded in calming the dissidents.[12]

Gordillo was no reformer. She had been a loyal, hardline member of Jongitud’s Revolutionary Vanguard and that remained her base in the union, though she also worked to win over leaders of la CNTE, and collaborated with the SEP’s education reformers. Out of a series of political struggles and negotiations within the union she soon constructed a new bureaucratic machine run from above, though the state of Chiapas and Oaxaca continued to stand in opposition.[13]

Elba Esther Gordillo Turns to the PAN

Gordillo maintained political control over the union in the same fashion as her predecessors, through a combination of rewards for loyalty and punishment for opposition. The education system had grown tremendously with more students going on from grammar to high school and the budget had grown along with it. In the prebendalist corporative system, the SEP continued to provide el SNTE with funds that in addition to the union’s dues money, sustaining a vast bureaucracy with many sinecures and no-show jobs. Her administration was also repressive, and she has been accused of responsibility for the murder of teacher Misael Nuñez Acosta[14] in January of 1981. He was, according to la CNTE, only one of 151 teachers murdered in the preceding decades.[15] Several other teachers have been murdered since then. With the exception of Chiapas and Oaxaca, Gordillo’s hold on the union remained secure.

With a firm grip on el SNTE, Gordillo also became a major political figure, attempting to use the union to gain political power. Like other union officials she served as a congressperson and also as a senator, but she also rose through the party ranks to the top echelons, eventually become general secretary of the executive committee of the PRI, the party’s top office, in 2002. All of this was traditional and typical, but in 2000 everything suddenly changed with the election to the presidency of Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN). Fox and the PAN did not dismantle the corporative system, as some had hoped, but rather the conservatives used it for their own purposes, forming political relationships with top union leaders. Fox and Gordillo became friends, providing her with influence in the SEP, a continuing source of money and jobs for the union staff.

In part because of her alliance with Fox, in 2005 Gordillo found herself losing a fight with Roberto Madrazo, another PRI leader. She resigned her office as heard of the PRI and in 2005 formed her own New Alliance Party based on el SNTE. At the same time she supported the PAN’s candidate Felipe Calderón. Her New Alliance Party won a remarkable 14 percent of vote in 2006, making her a significant force in the congress. That same year she tried to regain her position as head of the PRI, but the PRI leadership expelled her from the organization because she had supported the candidate of another party.

Since the presidency of Carlos Salinas (1988-1994), Mexico had adopted a neoliberal economic model—open markets, foreign investment, cuts in social services, attacks on labor unions—and now the government began to impose that model on education. In 2008, president Calderón and Gordillo reached an agreement called “The Alliance for Quality Education” or ACE.

ACE required that teachers take an exam before being hired by the SEP and that the union end the sale of teaching positions. While both of those principal provisions might seem reasonable, it was widely understood that the long-term goal was greater government control over the union and the teachers and an end to the nationalist and popular educational model handed down since the Revolution. La CNTE rejected the ACE agreement, arguing that it was an attack on the union and on public education.

The Education Reform Law

The presidencies of Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón had both proven to be failures from the point of view of the Mexican capitalist class as well as of the nation’s working people. Calderón’s war on drugs led to the death of 60,000 people and the forced disappearance of another 20,000 as well as the displacement of tens of thousands more. And the economy was stagnant. With the PAN utterly discredited, and the left-of-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) denied election victories through fraud, Mexico’s citizens returned to the PRI, electing Enrique Peña Nieto president.

In December 2012, Peña Nieto brought the leaders of the PRI, the PAN, and the PRD to Chapultepec Castle where they signed the “Pact for Mexico,” an agreement calling for reforms of the tax structure, of the banking system, of energy, of telecommunications, and of education. The Education Reform Law won support from all three major parties, though it was opposed by the Gordillo and el SNTE, and was adopted by congress in December 2012.

At the center of the education reform was the establishment of a national teacher evaluation. Peña Nieto’s first Secretary of Public Education, Emilio Chuayffet, explained that the test would be obligatory and that failure to administer or take the exam would result in “legal consequences.” The new law affected hiring, job security, wages, and opportunities for promotion. It also broke the link between the Normal Schools, by allowing all teaching jobs open to competition from any college graduate. And, teachers would not be able to pass on their jobs to family members or sell the on the market.[16]

Gordillo and el SNTE opposed the reform, saying that the union and teachers had not been consulted in the drafting of it. She would not, however, be allowed to continue to oppose it or to lead a movement against it. On February 26, 2013, the Peña Nieto administration had Gordillo arrested on the charge of embezzling millions of dollars in union funds that she reportedly deposited in banks in Europe and spent on real estate.

Mexican Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam charged Gordillo with money laundering, saying she had used the union funds to pay for airplanes, pilot training, her plastic surgeries, and purchases of luxury items in the United States.[17] Juan Díaz de la Torre who was a loyal member of her union caucus, became head of the union. While Gordillo was very likely guilty of the embezzlement of which she was accused, such practices are common in the Mexican labor bureaucracy. The motive for jailing her was political: first she had betrayed the PRI, and then she had opposed Peña Nieto. She had to go. Arrested, she was imprisoned awaiting trial, her reputation destroyed and removed from office she had no political power anymore.

La CNTE took the new Education Reform Law as a declaration of war against el SNTE and especially their dissident movement, beginning a mobilization of the union’s rank and file.[18] Just like ACE, la CNTE saw the Education Reform Law as an attack on public education, the union, and themselves as teachers. The teachers began to protest but soon found themselves involved in a broader struggle. When on September 26, 2014 police and gang members in Iguala, Guerrero killed six people, wounded 25, and kidnapped 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School, la CNTE joined with their protests, which became national in scope.[19]

Challenges Facing la CNTE

Mexico’s teachers continue to face the system that has confronted them since the late 1940s: the Institutional Revolutionary Party in power, the powerful Secretary of Education, the bureaucratic SNTE, and the local caciques. While the teachers of Chiapas, Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Michoacán—have built powerful movements and won power in their states, the teachers remain in a constant state of mobilization to defend themselves. Despite almost 40 years of struggle, the democratic movement has failed, despite occasional outbursts of activity in some other region, to win power any of the other 28 states.

Constantly criticized in the corporate media, la CNTE struggles to explain its issues to the media and to the public, arguing that it is defending public education, teachers’ working conditions, and students’ best interests. La CNTE also continues to work to maintain its relationship with parents and students at the local level, a difficult challenge when the union frequently goes on strike for weeks and even months at a time. The dissident teachers work to win the support of the public, a part of which is critical of practices such as passing jobs on to family members or selling jobs. La CNTE has also worked recently to develop its own program for education reform, putting forward its own proposals for pedagogy and curriculum.[20]

La CNTE has from the beginning struggled with the question of electoral politics. Since its founding in 1989, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) has been most sympathetic to the dissident teachers and been willing to serve as its political vehicle. The PRD’s factionalism, corruption, and opportunism made it a less than satisfactory political ally. The fact that the PRD headed both the Guerrero state government and the Iguala city government at the time of the time of the killing of six people and the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School students severely damaged the party’s reputation among the teachers.

In the June 2015 la CNTE called for a boycott of the elections, but in Oaxaca and Guerrero teachers enforced the boycott by destroying polling places and ballot boxes and burning ballots, leading to some conflicts with local communities. More recently some leaders of la CNTE have collaborated with Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the Movement for National Regeneration Party or MORENA, though many fear that AMLO only uses the union for his own political interests. One can say that so far the dissident teachers have failed to find a political vehicle for their movement.

The epic battle of la CNTE against a series of Mexican governments has taken place during a period in which much of the labor movement has been defeated or demoralized by the Mexican government. Gordillo’s ally Felipe Calderón destroyed the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) and drove Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, leader of the Mexican Miners and Metal Workers Union (SNTMMRM) into exile in Vancouver. Political parties, government agencies, private employers, crooked lawyers, and gangsters controlled most labor unions in Mexico.[21] The economy remains stagnant and emigration to the United States has become more difficult and less rewarding since the Great Recession of 2008.

All of this makes la CNTE’s struggle even more remarkable. Despite the murder of several of its activists, the arrest of some of its leaders, and the violent attacks by the police on its demonstrations, the struggle continues.

Notes

[1] Alberto Arnaut, Historia de un profesión: Los maestros de educación primaria en México 1887-1994 (Mexico: Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económica, 1996), pp. 19-34.

[2] Claude Fell, José Vasconcelos: Los años del águila (Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de México, 1989) is the most complete account of Vaconcelos’ work as an educator.

[3] Salvador Sotelo Arévalo, Historia de mi vida. Autobiografía y memorias de un maestro rural en Mexico, 1904-1965. (Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de la Revolución Mexicana, 1996). This memoir gives us a view of the early era through the life of rank-and-file teacher at the grassroots.

[4] Mary Kay Vaughn, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930-1940 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997), pp. 1-24.

[5] Tamalís Padilla, “Othón Salazar: la dignidad revolucionaria,” at: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2008/05/15/index.php?section=opinion&article=a04a1cul

[6] “Othón Salazar Ramírez,” at: http://www.enciclopediagro.org/index.php/indices/indice-de-biografias/1406-salazar-ramirez-othon

[7] Gerardo Peláez, Las luchas magisteriales de 1956-1960. Mexico: Ediciones de Cultura Popular, 1984) and Aurora Loyo Brambila (El movimiento magisterial de 1958 en México. Segunda Edición. Mexico: Ediciones Era, 1980), passim. Also: Gerardo Peláez Ramos, “El inicio del movimiento magisterial de 1956-1960,” at: http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=109285

[8] Demetrio Vallejo had been a Communist from 1934-1946 when he was expelled. He then joined another Stalinist party, the Partido Obrero-Campesino Mexicano (POCM or Mexican Worker-Peasant Party) in 1950.

[9] “Mexican railroad workers strike for wages and union rights, 1958-1959,” http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edumexican-railroad-workers-strike-wages-and-union-rights-1958-1959

[10] María Lorena Cook, Organizing Dissent: Union, the State, and the Democratic Teachers’ Movement in Mexico (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996) and Susan Street. Maestros en movimiento: Transformaciones en la burocracia estatal (1978-1982). Mexico City: CIESAS, 1992.

[11] Joe Foweraker, Popular Mobilization in Mexico: The Teachers’ Movement, 1977-87. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 49-53.

[12] Juan Luis Campos et al, De las alas a las calles. Prólogo de Carlos Monsiváis. (Mexico: Información Obrera, 1990), this collection of essays gives a good picture of the changing of the guard from Jonguitud to Gordillo.

[13] Foweraker, Popular Moblization, pp. 182-85. Homero Campo, “Abril de 1989 cuando Salinas empoderó a Elba Esther,” Procesco, at: http://www.proceso.com.mx/334746/abril-de-1989-cuando-salinas-empodero-a-elba-esther

[14] Luis Hernández Acosta, “Misael Núñez Acosta: una biografía,” La Jornada, at: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2002/09/01/016n1pol.php?printver=1

[15] Laura Poy Solano, “Gordillo no debe seguir impune por la muerte de Misael Núñez: CNTE,” at: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2007/01/28/index.php?section=sociedad&article=036n1soc

[16] Dan La Botz, “Mexican Congress Approves Education Reform,” at: http://newpol.orgmexican-congress-approves-education-reform

[17] Dan La Botz, “Mexican Teachers Union Leader Jailed for Stealing Union Funds,” at: http://newpol.orgmexican-teachers-union-leader-jailed-stealing-union-funds

[18] Dan La Botz, “Mexican Teachers Rebel Against Government’s Educational Reform,” at: http://newpol.orgmexican-teachers-rebel-against-governments-educational-reform

[19] Dan La Botz, “The Mexican Crisis Deepens,” at: http://newpol.orgmexican-crisis-deepens

[20] For a discussion of the teachers movement today see: Carlos Ornelas y Verónica Luna Hernández, “La Reforma Educativa en México: Los Primeros Libros Ensayo Bibliográfico,” Education Review, at: file:///Users/DanLaBotz/Downloads/2110-1943-1-PB%20(1).pdf

[21] Dan La Botz, “The Agony of Mexican Labor Today,” at: http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2015/0915labotz.html

Bibliography

Arnaut, Alberto. Historia de un profesión: Los maestros de educación primaria en México 1887-1994. Mexico: Centro de Investiación y Docencia Económica, 1996.

Campos, Juan Luis et al. De las alas a las calles. Prólogo de Carlos Monsiváis. Mexico: Información Obrera, 1990.

Cook, María Lorena. Organizing Dissent: Union, the State, and the Democratic Teachers’ Movement in Mexico. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996.

Foweraker, Joe. Popular Mobilization in Mexico: The Teachers’ Movement, 1977-87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Gordillo, Elba Esther. La construcción de un proyecto syndical. Mexico: Taurus. 1995.

Guevara Niebla, Gilberto. La educación socialista en México (1934-1945). Mexico: El Caballito, SEP, and CNFE, 1985.

Loyo Brambila, Aurora. El movimiento magisterial de 1958 en México. Segunda Edición. Mexico: Ediciones Era, 1980.

Monroy Huitrón, Gaudalupe. Política educative de la Revolución (1910-1940). Segunda Edición. Mexico: SEP, 1985.

Ornelas, Carlos and Verónica Luna Hernández, “La Reforma Educativa en México: Los Primeros Libros Ensayo Bibliográfico,”Education Review, July 2016, at: file:///Users/DanLaBotz/Downloads/2110-1943-1-PB%20(1).pdf

Peláez, Gerardo. Historia del Sindicato Nación de Trabajadores de la Educación. Mexico: Ediciones de Cultura Popular, 1980.

Peláez, Gerardo. La nueva insurgencia de los trabajadores de la Education. Mexico: Ediciones Movimiento, 1980.

Peláez, Gerardo. Las luchas magisteriales de 1956-1960. Mexico: Ediciones de Cultura Popular, 1984.

Sotelo Arévalo, Salvador. Historia de mi vida. Autobiografía y memorias de un maestro rural en Mexico, 1904-1965. Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de la Revolución Mexicana, 1996.

Susan Street. Maestros en movimiento: Transformaciones en la burocracia estatal (1978-1982). Mexico City: CIESAS, 1992.

Vaughn, Mary Kay. Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930-1940. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997.

Yescas Martínez, Isidoro and Gloria Zafra. La insurgencia magisterial en Oaxaca, 1980. Oaxaca: Instituto de Investigaciones Sociológicoas de la Universidad Autónoma “Benito Juárez,” 1985.

August 3, 2016
Erdoğan’s Counter-Coup Coup
When I was writing the following lines two years ago, I was almost able to see the smirk on the face of some of my comrades who would subsequently read them:

Traditionally in such impasses in Turkish politics the army has intervened. However, for the moment the military seems content with the more passive role assigned to it after the well-publicised trials involving its leading figures. That, of course, does not mean that a new military intervention is ruled out. So it seems to me that we are in for a bumpy ride.(1)

‘These Turks,’ I could imagine them sighing, ‘they always exaggerate!’ Alas, last year almost to the day I was forced to write about the massacre in Suruç, which was just one of the cascading violent atrocities committed against the popular resistance in Turkey since then.(2) And now we have to analyse how the botched military intervention of last week came about, and what the consequences will be.

The two principal factions of political Islam in Turkey after the 1960 military intervention were the National Vision (Millî Görüs) movement and the Fethullah Gülen Jamaat, the principal offspring of the Nur Jamaat (Community of Holy Light). They cooperated in the formation of the AKP (Justice and Development Party) as the new bastion of political Islam in the face of military tutelage.

Erdogan and his close allies, who cut their teeth in the National Vision movement, do not have the necessary finesse to gain credibility in the eyes of the west and, although Gülen Jamaat had no political cadre with a similar calibre and reputation, it had managed to train a highly skilled cadre that infiltrated some of the principal institutions of state.

So the first phase of the AKP – the cooperation between two sides – was mutually beneficial. And during that phase the AKP gained recognition from the top brass of the armed forces. However, since 2004 the new phase of the relationship between the two components was marked by a rift that appeared between them – and the gap gradually widened under the pressures of political reality. In 2013 the relationship became unsustainable, and there was a very public divorce.

The trials initiated against the nationalist military junta on the basis of evidence that had been concocted, allegedly by the operatives of Gülen movement within the armed forces, suddenly lost the support of Erdogan, and collapsed. The Gülen movement decided to counter this by publicising details of corruption and bribery involving Erdogan’s ministers and family members, and attempted to use its influence in the judiciary to ensure the prosecution of some very prominent figures.

Erdogan distanced himself from the Gülen movement and started to demonise them. He sought support from the military top brass by letting them loose on the Kurds, and reversing the previous policy of seeking a solution to the ‘Kurdish problem’ through negotiations.

Kurdish war

The unexpected reversal of Erdogan’s Kurdish policy was so sudden that even some of his closest associates were wrong-footed. The long period of tacit ceasefire ended abruptly and the period of extended and elaborate negotiations – that had reached the stage where Kurdish MPs and members of the government held a joint press conference and issued a joint declaration – was abandoned. A massive attack on Kurdish towns and cities was launched, comparable to the most ruthless of Sri Lankan actions against the Tamil Tigers: that is, to exterminate the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), to the last guerrilla.

The atrocities committed were unspeakable. One by one, the poorest districts of Kurdish towns and cities were surrounded by a ring of steel, and large swathes of the urban areas were obliterated by artillery and aerial bombardment aimed at defeating the well-entrenched guerrillas, who responded with improvised explosive devices.

The mounting police and military casualties led the government to adopt even more vicious tactics, such as blowing up or burning down any structure suspected of harbouring guerrillas, instead of attempting to enter and clear out such buildings. As a result civilian casualties increased substantially. One after another, almost all the principal districts showing support for the freedom movement within the cities of Kurdistan were attacked – and demolished.

However, these atrocities failed to produce the ‘victory’ hoped for – the ‘pacification’ of Kurdistan was not achieved. The utter failure of the military campaign, despite all whitewashing attempts, became apparent to all, and the strain on the military and police began to tell.

When these strains began to become obvious, western commentators were full of foreboding.(3) It was clear that the ongoing war in Kurdistan, as well as Erdogan’s Syria policy, which got bogged down in the sticky mud surrounding Islamic State, would inevitably force his government to adopt more authoritarian measures at home.

The government hoped that a series of such measures put in place after the 1980 coup would prevent any repeat. These included:
- The paramilitary Special Operations Police force under the control of the ministry of interior was strengthened to such a degree that the government believed it would be able to fend off an insurrection and if necessary challenge the military. They had been battle-hardened by their role in the Kurdish campaign side by side with the commando forces of the gendarmerie.
- The Special Forces Command was created within the army as a brigade of highly skilled, well equipped and mobile solders detached from the chief of staff. In that way they were able to operate independently of other main branches of the armed forces.
- The SOP and SFC were based near Ankara, the capital, within self-sufficient compounds, and in numbers believed to be sufficient to meet any contingencies.
- The intelligence services were also separated into military and police units, and each was run under the close supervision of the government itself. The traditional control of the national intelligence agency by the military was broken, and a civilian management team occupied the top positions.
- Great emphasis was placed on developing signal and image intelligence capabilities independent of the US, and in 2011 military-dominated signal intelligence was placed under the control of the national intelligence agency.
Effective

Despite the feeble nature of previous measures taken to prevent a military coup, this time they proved to be effective. While the junta managed to maintain control of army, airforce and navy headquarters, they failed to take over the Special Forces Command.

On July 16 a lower rank officer shot and killed the general assigned by the top brass to take over the SFC after the general had declared his intentions. While he was killed there and then, that act created a chain reaction and the skeleton staff on night duty managed to fight back and hold on to their positions. That was one of the first failures of the night leading to the defeat of the coup.

The Special Operations Police had been recognised by the junta as a possible centre of resistance, so a stronger force attacked its main compound. One of the fiercest battles was fought there and – despite massive casualties when helicopter gunships opened fire – the operational control of the police remained in the hands of the government. Then those police units were reorganised and employed to recover lost positions at military headquarters.

Of course, the first casualty of such infighting is the truth, so it was not easy to distinguish the facts from the many lies, but gradually it was possible to piece together what had happened. Initially surprise was expressed at the apparent lack of intelligence regarding such a massive junta preparation. But 48 hours later it was clear that the national intelligence agency had forewarned the chief of general staff and army – there was a discreet meeting from which a series of orders were issued to stop any military move. Why these were not promptly implemented to stop the coup attempt in its tracks will no doubt become clearer over the coming days, but a few guesses can be made.

The junta is formed around a core of Gülenist diehards, who believed – or had actually been informed – that they would be kicked out of their top posts, or expelled from the army altogether at the annual High Military Council meeting due to be held at the end of August. There were also rumours that the government could have acted even earlier to remove important Gülenist personnel following their involvement in an ongoing court case.

Around that core, other layers of the junta were gathered from among those who opposed to the regime being created by the Erdogan government. And then there was a larger section consisting of those sitting on the fence, and waiting to jump according the fortunes of the junta without fully committing themselves in advance.

When the government-controlled top brass ordered countermeasures, the junta acted prematurely, abandoning the prearranged timing, consequently losing the expected support of the fence-sitters. Most probably there were betrayals and self-preservation acts of ‘repentance’, which will become known later. In any case, when a small cabal of officers acted against the military hierarchy, and was unable to carry the topmost echelons with them whether by persuasion or coercion, it was almost inevitable they would try to cover up their lack of control by the harshness of their actions. As the diehards became desperate, the fight became brutal and the casualties mounted.

When the government felt confident enough to appeal to the general population to block the units despatched by the junta to take over TV channels, municipal offices, police stations, and critical road junctions and bridges, the civilian casualties suddenly reached unheard-of levels.

Aftermath

Erdogan could well have been aware of the junta’s intentions, and there is a strong possibility that the government actually managed to flush it out prematurely to further its own agenda.

And, looking at the speed and effectiveness with which it mobilised its supporters, the utilisation of mosques under the control of the state religious affairs department with its strong Islamist bias, and the paralysis of the opposition parties in defending parliamentary democracy against military intervention, it seems likely that these government moves had been pre-planned.

Furthermore, Erdogan was clearly better prepared for the aftermath than the junta. Thousands of military officers, including a third of all generals and admirals, have been detained; thousands and thousands of civil servants, including teachers, academics, prosecutors, judges and police officers have been sacked, while many have been arrested and charged.

Fifteen thousand teachers employed by the Ministry of National Education were sacked forthwith. The licences of 21,000 teachers working in the private education sector – a mainstay of the Gülen movement – have been revoked forthwith.

Almost 9,000 police officers were sacked, and 1,500 of them were detained and charged. Hundreds of health-sector employees were also dismissed, and some of them were also charged. It was the same with employees of the stock exchange and currency department. Even hundreds of imams, together with muftis employed by State Religious Affairs, were sacked. Top members of the judiciary were summarily removed without due legal process, and have also been charged.

Legal niceties were dispensed with, as the mobilised mass of Erdogan supporters occupied the main squares – they created the appropriate background noise by calling for the restoration of capital punishment. Any oppositionist is to be dubbed a ‘Gülenist terrorist’, as the legal system of ‘checks and balances’ over executive power is set aside.

There is a strong possibility that a state of emergency rule or martial law will be declared so as to dispense with any parliamentary scrutiny. A referendum on a constitutional amendment to bring in presidential rule has been mooted.

The powers of the State Religious Affairs department look set to be extended to occupy a more prominent role within the state – SRA support was crucial, since throughout the night of the coup the imams continued to call people onto the streets, mixing their exhortations with ceaseless prayer conveyed over the sound systems of the mosques.

So where will it end? Things will become clearer over the coming days, but one thing is apparent: stopping the counter-coup of the Erdogan government will require a prolonged fight. Are the forces of democracy and the working class up to the job?

Notes

1. ‘On its last legs’ Weekly Worker March 20 2014.

2. ‘Solidarity targeted by IS bomber’ Weekly Worker July 23 2015.

3. See, for example, Newsweek March 24 2016.

Originally posted here.
August 2, 2016