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  • From Solidarity to Trump: White Working-Class Culture in the Rust Belt

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    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.

  • UAW backs Kurdish solidarity call

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    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. 

  • Wave of Occupations Marks Step Forward for Black Lives Matter

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    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.

    A message written in chalk outside of City Hall in New York City. (Ashoka Jegroo)

    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. 

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

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    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.

     

     

     

  • The DNC’s Right Realignment

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    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.

     

  • To Beat Trump, Clinton Brings Back Triangulation and the Politics of Fear

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    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. 

  • The Toxic Games

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    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).        

  • A Challenge to the Green Party on Syria

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    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.

  • Thinking About the Election

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    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.

  • The Mexican Teachers' Long Struggle for Education, Workers Rights, and Democracy

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    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

    [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.

     

  • Erdoğan’s Counter-Coup Coup

    Image

    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. 

  • Bernie’s Army of Idealists Finds a New General in Jill Stein

    ImageFor three days the wounded and defeated soldiers of Bernie Sanders’ army, tired and disappointed but still idealistic and hopeful, marched and picketed around the convention center in Philadelphia, while inside many of Sanders’ delegates booed Hillary Clinton’s name every time it was mentioned. Though they had lost a battle in the struggle for the political revolution Sanders’ soldiers thought, hoped, dreamed that they might still somehow continue and ultimately win the war.

    Inside the hall the party pressured them to turn coat, while outside the media largely ignored them. For a year they had marched proudly, fought bravely, and won many to their cause. Now they seemed in danger of being reduced to a scraggly band of survivors, lamed, wounded, and weary, limping away.

    Women like Deb and Dana, whom I met on a trolley, had come from as far as Washington State simply to protest against the Democratic Party’s unfair treatment of their candidate, their hero. Wikileaks’ release of Democratic Party chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s emails, proving that she had worked to sabotage the Sanders’ campaign confirmed their suspicions and infuriated them. “And then Clinton hires her,” said one of them.

    Two young men from Texas told me there was no way they would vote for Hillary Clinton who represented all that they detested in the Democratic Party. Thousands of others—identifying with Occupy Wall Street, the environmental movement, and Black Lives Matter—joined a series of protest marches, sweating, swiping their brows in the 95-degree heat. When the marches ended, the protestors spread out all over downtown Philadelphia, little bands of marauders, sniping at the Clinton forces.

    They had seen Bernie as their champion, and some still did, but they would not follow him in his endorsement of Hillary. Asking them to do was like asking a Union soldier to put on a Confederate uniform: it violated both their sense of loyalty to a cause and their ideals. They would not do it. Though the general had gone home, his army marched on. Where would it go?

    The Search for a Future

    A series of left events in Philadelphia strove to provide an alternative. Veterans of Occupy convened the People’s Convention at the Arch Street Meeting House. But only a couple hundred of the people showed up to attend the short sessions where with little time for adequate discussion they adopted proposed progressive amendments to the U.S. Constitution.  

    Several socialist organizations joined together to create the Socialist Convergence at the American Friends Service Committee hall, which during its first couple of days organized a series of interesting panels on issues such as feminism and racism, attended mostly by the socialist groups that had organized the event.

    At neither of those events on those first couple of days did many of the veterans of Sanders army of the idealistic, the hopeful, and the committed make much of an appearance. As I sat in the halls those first couple of days, I thought I could hear the sands of time falling and see the in the mental distance the movement evaporating before my mind’s eye.

    A Leader Appears

    Then suddenly last night at the Socialist Convergence things changed. The hall began to fill with 700 veterans of the Sanders army, among them more than two dozen Sanders delegates to the Democratic Party Convention. There were some illustrious speakers such as journalist Chris Hedges, editor of Jacobin Bhaskar Sunkara and activist Steve Williams of LeftRoots. (Kshama Sawant, who supported Sanders and then urged him to continue his campaign as an independent or a Green, would have been there had she not had a city council meeting back in Seattle.)

    Much of the crowd was unhappy when Hedges in a typically moralistic and off-target talk focused his fire on Sanders instead of Hillary, and they let him know it. When Lev Hirschhorn, a Philadelphia labor and community organizer and Bernie backer, argued for supporting Hillary as the lesser-evil and making a protracted fight inside the Democratic Party he was booed. The crowd wasn’t looking for critics, it was looking for a leader to continue the political revolution—and they found one.

    Presidential candidate Jill Stein of the Green Party stood to talk, stating that, “I find Hillary Clinton’s record every bit as terrifying as Donald Trump’s [proposals],” the crowd roared. “I agree with many of you, with most of you, that we should not be intimidated out of our power. We can change our voting system. Why are we locked into a voting system that tries to compel us to vote against what we fear, rather than for what we believe?”

    In one of the strongest speeches I have heard her give, she encouraged the audience to build an independent political movement and to do so through her campaign, as she laid out her Green Party platform, not so different from Sanders. The 700 people in the hall stood and shouted throughout her speech, giving her multiple standing ovations.

    While 700 people may not sound like many, think about the 500 Black Lives Matter activists who went to Ferguson, Missouri in solidarity with Michael Brown, and returned to cities and towns throughout the country to build the national movement that mobilized hundreds of thousands. Bernie’s army is on the march again; having stripped the Democratic Donkey insignia from their sleeves, they have found a new general: Jill Stein.  

  • A Call to Action: Walk Out from the Democratic National Convention!

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    A serious and wide-ranging debate has been taking place among Sandernistas in the two weeks since Bernie endorsed Hillary. And now with the Democratic Convention underway, the unresolved questions become more pressing by the day.

    The central issue is whether we should follow Bernie’s lead in supporting Hillary’s corporate politics, or continue the political revolution by building our movement independent of the DNC. While I supported Bernie’s primary campaign, spoke at Bernie rallies, and initiated Movement4Bernie, I believe we simply cannot follow him in his decision to back Hillary. Our political revolution now risks being turned into its opposite, and funnelled into support for the DNC’s neoliberal agenda.

    Backing corrupt establishment politicians is no way to defeat the right-wing – it will only embolden them and allow the political agenda to continue to be pushed further rightward. This failed strategy of lesser evilism is what has brought the 99% to this point. And now genuine outrage at the corporate politics of the establishment has allowed a right-wing populist within striking distance of the presidency.

    We cannot continue down this dead end.

    As Clinton’s choice of Tim Kaine for her running mate shows, she and the DNC have not in any significant way been “pushed to the left” over the course of the primary, in spite of some limited concessions being made with the non-binding platform and in minor reforms to superdelegate rules.

    With Kaine, Clinton has chosen her neoliberal political twin, and earned Wall Street’s emphatic seal of approval. As if to underscore the political meaning of her VP choice, and perhaps as a signal to Corporate America, in the days before the announcement Kaine made clear his full commitment to both the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and to further bank deregulation. And now Donald Trump is set to use both Clinton’s and Kaine’s pro-corporate, “free trade,” anti-worker policies against them in the general election – and in this the Democratic ticket has provided him a near perfect target.

    Meanwhile, Wikileaks’ exposure of the DNC has made crystal clear how rigged the (un)Democratic primary was from start to finish, with thousands of emails showing the absolute non-neutrality of a corrupt party leadership who made the primary into utterly hostile terrain for the democratic socialist challenger.

    The leaks also completely exposed the hypocrisy of the Democratic Party leadership, which claims that its key priority is to defeat Trump. Yet they have fiercely and undemocratically backed Clinton in spite of the fact that the polls have shown Sanders to be the far stronger candidate in every matchup.

    With the attention of the country and world focused on Philadelphia we now have some serious choices to make, as well as some powerful opportunities. The actions of Bernie delegates and activists both inside and outside the convention have the potential to make history this week.

    Thousands are joining protests and rallies on the streets of Philadelphia. There are also many protest actions taking place inside the convention such as the tremendous anti-TPP action that took place yesterday, which temporarily halted the proceedings.

    But the most powerful protest of all will be for delegates and activists to reject the neoliberal Democratic establishment altogether, and walk out of the convention in the largest possible numbers later this week.

    Delegates have been organizing for just such a walkout action, and there is the potential for several hundred delegates to collectively walk out. This will take real courage. The convention is a huge, scripted spectacle with a carefully chosen procession of Democratic nobility, including people like Michelle Obama and Elizabeth Warren. But this year, perhaps in recognition of the political uprising that has taken place, the Democratic leadership has gone so far as to give the event a populist veneer, with some workers and activists also speaking. The scale and intimidating character of the 50,000 person event will no doubt have a psychological impact.

    But for those who do take the bold step of walking out on the DNC and its neoliberal politics, there will be a rally with media, livestreamers, and fellow activists ready to greet them on the other side of the walls of the so-called “free speech zone.” Mass media have already been contacting Movement4Bernie in anticipation of the event. I hope I will see you there.

    Delegates have had to organize underground, with a campaign of fear by party leaders being directed at any delegates advocating for strong protest actions or third party candidates, with the specific threat of having their delegate status revoked (called “de-credentialing”). But last week the organizing came above ground to some degree, with Occupy Wall Street coming out in favor of the walkout on their Facebook page and in Twitter, along with Bernie or Bust and Movement4Bernie. For updates on the walkout action you should follow all three twitter feeds. To help out, see the Q&A created by the organizers.

    One of the most common arguments being made against the walkout is that delegates will somehow abandon their chance to fight for Bernie’s politics and lose their voice by leaving. But the walkout will happen well after the platform and nomination votes are over. After the nomination roll call, the convention becomes ever more purely ceremonial, undemocratic, and scripted: The Hillary Show™

    As genuine reactions to the horror show of last week’s Republican National Convention already suggest, fear of Donald Trump will drive many votes in November. The danger of right-wing populism is all too real, but also for that reason it would be completely counterproductive to support Clinton and the DNC.

    Over the past decades, effectively unchallenged by the left, the Democratic establishment has joined the Republicans in carrying out the neoliberal project, differing more in degree than direction.

    If the 99% continues to support neoliberal politicians on a lesser-evil basis, it will only create more space for right-wing populism, as we have seen in other countries. This year, failure to stand up to the DNC would mean the anti-establishment space would be thrown wide open to right-wing candidates like Donald Trump and Libertarian Gary Johnson. Already, Johnson has received 9% in some polls. This would be a disaster, and millions of anti-establishment votes for Trump and Johnson could help create an ongoing base for right-populism and potential for a new right-wing party, like the National Front in France. The danger was already shown after 2009 by the rise of the Tea Party, when the right exploited the genuine fury at the Wall Street bailouts to build a new political force, while the left was busy making excuses for Obama.

    We absolutely need to defeat the right but this requires a serious strategy. To succeed we will need to build the strongest possible movements completely independent of both parties of Wall Street. We will need to build our own mass political party of the 99%, that will work alongside those movements, rather than against them. Concretely, right now, we need to build the broadest possible support for Green Party Candidate Jill Stein, whose campaign is the clear continuation of our political revolution.

    A new mass party of the 99% will need to reject all corporate money and influence, and fight unambiguously for our interests. This is what Bernie began to do in the primary, and it is why he had broad and genuine appeal not only for Democratic voters, but also for independents and even some Republicans. There is no “secret” as to why he fares much better in the polls against Trump than Hillary does. Hillary’s support for “free trade,” pro-corporate, anti-worker policies is clear for all to see. Bernie was able to bring a historic challenge to the DNC, despite all the undemocratic attacks on his campaign, precisely because he called for a political revolution against the billionaire class, advocated for bold policies in the interests of the 99%, and welcomed Wall Street’s contempt.

    Unfortunately, Bernie has now walked out on that strategy, and called for a vote for the very establishment we have been fighting against.

    Now it is left to us. To win the things we have been fighting for, our movement will need to stand on its own feet, go beyond Bernie, and begin laying the basis to build our own party, a mass party of the 99%.

    And to do this we cannot afford to let moments like this one pass us by. A walkout of hundreds of delegates from the convention, combined with the mass protests already happening on the streets of Philadelphia, will be a bold stand pointing towards political independence for working people and youth.

    Enough is enough. Join me in supporting the brave delegates walking out on this rigged process and the (un)Democratic National Convention.

    Kshama Sawant is a Seattle City Councilwoman and member of Socialist Alternative.

    Originally posted here. 

  • For Jill Stein and Independent Politics

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    Bernie Sanders’ campaign for a “political revolution” lit up the 2016 primary election season like a meteor across the sky. Contrary to conventional wisdom that he’d peak and fade early, Sanders’ challenge to the Democratic party machine lasted throughout the primaries. Surpassing all expectations, he won 23 primary and caucus contests, raised an astonishing $222 million almost exclusively in small donations, and gathered over 1800 pledged delegates.

    Sanders and his army of supporters promised to carry on to the Philadelphia convention, fighting for “progressive planks” in the party platform. But with his long-awaited (and ultimately inevitable) endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president, Bernie Sanders has folded up his challenge in the name of “doing everything possible to defeat Donald Trump.”

    The Sanders campaign always embodied a contradiction. Within the parameters of a rigged two-party system, running for the Democratic nomination gave this avowed “democratic socialist” ballot access and a place in the debates. Yet it also meant, as Sanders openly stated from the outset, that he would support the party nominee—and there was never any doubt about who that would be. Although we understand why many of his supporters are disappointed, this is not a surprising outcome, and it poses the question, what next?

    Like many on the left, Solidarity welcomed the energy and hope for change that the Sanders campaign inspired. If you‘re not familiar with Solidarity, we’re a socialist, feminist, anti-racist organization. Our members in a number of unions and cities have participated in the Labor for Bernie project, which we see as an important vehicle for making political discussion the property of union members, not just the top leadership.

    Now, however, the hard fact is that the inspiration of the presidential primary campaign is giving way to a sordid race between the cynical corporate centrism of Hillary Clinton and the ugly, racist economic nationalism of Donald Trump. In today’s particularly vicious climate, it’s essential for all of us to unite in defending Black Lives Matter against the racist slanders and assaults that the right wing is promoting. The attack on BLM is effectively a license for the continuing brutalization and murder of African American people and communities.

    Certainly, part of the strategy for keeping the “political revolution” moving is keeping the movements active—the struggles for racial and reproductive justice, the Fight for $15, solidarity with immigrant communities, and resisting homophobia, transphobia, and Islamophobia. The important gains that the LGBTQ struggle has made need to be defended and extended.

    Despite the best efforts of Sanders’ supporters, the Democratic platform includes almost none of this. The drafting committee has rejected the calls to block the Trans Pacific Partnership (which a majority of the population hates), to end fracking (even on federal land!), and to support the Palestinian people’s struggle under Israeli occupation. There was no reason to expect anything different from a party of corporate capital and imperialism. To put a brave face on these defeats, much is being made of “the most progressive Democratic platform in history.” To put it bluntly, most of this language—except perhaps for raising the minimum wage, in stages—consists of vague generalities that will be rapidly forgotten.

    Cornel West and Jill Stein; Dr. West endorsed the Stein campaign after Bernie Sanders conceded and endorsed Hilary Clinton.

    If you believe that a better choice is possible, a movement for political revolution also needs an electoral expression. In this election, the best expression at the national level of what all of us have been fighting for is the Green Party campaign of Jill Stein. Solidarity supports that campaign as a way to support the political revolution in 2016.

    Looking not only toward November but also beyond, especially to Bernie Sanders’ supporters who reject the dead-end option of Hillary Clinton, we urge you to consider that you need more than a different candidate: you need a different party. Hillary Clinton, after all, did not “hijack” the Democratic Party. She represents exactly what the Democratic Party really is: Wall Street connections, militarism, and all. There was no way that Bernie Sanders was going to be the Democratic nominee.

    This reality explains why Jill Stein’s support has been growing. So are local independent political organizations, campaigns and ballot initiatives. We urge a vote for Jill Stein, but more than a one-time “protest vote,” solid independent political organization is a necessity. It’s going to be a long road, and there isn’t a magic success formula for creating a working class-oriented party in the United States that can be the voice of social movements. But at this point one thing should be clear: the trap of voting for one after another “lesser evil” corporate candidate will only leave us with worse and more barren choices.

    The Democratic Party wants Sanders’ supporters’ votes—not their demands to break up the banks, get rid of superdelegates, dump the TPP, and end the obscene one-sided U.S. support for Israel’s war against the Palestinian people. “Vote and shut up,” is the Clinton campaign’s message to Sanders’ base. There has to be a better way, or else we’ll never see anything better than the miserable non-choices the corporate party “duopoly” has to offer.

    If you want a “political revolution” that goes beyond empty promises, the time to break with the capitalist parties is now. As the Jill Stein campaign states:

    “A movement for democracy and justice is sweeping the planet — from Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring to the Black Lives Matter movement. People are rising up to halt the neoliberal assault, calling for an America and a world that works for all of us. While our movement is winning important victories – notably for living wages and against fossil fuel infrastructure – the economic elite have only tightened their grip. People are realizing that if we want to fix the rigged economy, the rigged racial injustice system, the rigged energy system etc., we must also fix the rigged political system…

    “Jill Stein’s Power to the People agenda reflects many of the domestic policies of the Sanders campaign – income equality, climate justice, free public higher education, Medicare for All, immigrant rights, racial justice and an end to mass incarceration. In other areas, Stein goes much further than Sanders, calling for the cancellation of student debt, full public financing of elections, and the creation of public banks.

    “The groundswell for Donald Trump was created by the economic misery of NAFTA and Wall Street deregulation – policies promoted by both Clintons. Neoliberal Clintonism caused the rise of Trump.

    “The clock is ticking – on the next Wall Street collapse, the climate meltdown, the expanding wars, the slide towards fascism, nuclear confrontation and more. This is the time to stand up with the courage of our convictions, while we still can. Forget the lesser evil. Fight for the greater good – like our lives depend on it, because they do. The corporate parties will not fix this for us. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

    We agree, and it’s all the more reason why today is the time for building independent politics.

    Originally posted here. 

    (NP Editors’ note: This is one of several articles we will be posting reflecting the responses of different left groups and leftists to the election. New Politics does not endorse candidates for office.)

  • 1936: Revolution in Spain

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    On 18 July 1936, part of the Spanish army, backed by the upper classes and the Catholic church, rose up with the intention of ending the country’s experiment in democracy and social reform (the Second Republic 1931-6). The resulting civil war would be one of the pivotal events of the 20th century. For some it was the rehearsal for the Second World War, for others the “last great cause”.

     

    For millions, defeat meant almost 40 years of fascism in Spain. But 1936 also saw the beginnings of a profound revolution – the possible key not just to victory over fascism but also to a different future.

    The revolution of 1936 continues to be one of the greatest examples of how ordinary people can take control of their lives and begin to transform the world around them. It did not appear out of thin air.

    Workers take control

    In previous decades anarchist and socialist ideas had rooted themselves in the Spanish working class. At the centre of this tradition was the idea of workers taking control of their workplaces. However, the revolution was not just the work of the more radical minorities but based on massive and largely spontaneous participation.

    Without any order being given, most industry and much of the land was collectivised, especially in Catalonia, Eastern Aragon and Valencia. In the countryside, the great estates were seized and many small holdings were merged.

    Workers’ organisations set up militias to fight the fascist rebels. Anti-fascist committees organised security and supplies, and applied revolutionary justice.

    Occupied buildings were converted into people’s restaurants, hospitals or schools.

    The lives of women were transformed as many entered the factories and political activity for the first time or went to the front to fight.

    Popular resistance had converted what was supposed to be a simple coup into a full-blown civil war. A great divide now emerged in the Republican areas controlled by the anti-fascist resistance.

    The question of power

    This was not between war or revolution as is often claimed, but over what type of war—an orthodox war or a revolutionary war.

    What happened in Spain in 1936 was the clearest example of how you cannot change the world without taking power. For the powerful anarchist trade union, the CNT, the revolution was a reality.

    In the streets, the factories and on the land it seemed the masses dominated the situation. However, they did not control communications, trade, finance and, above all, the armed forces—the revolution was incomplete.

    The anarchists were opposed to all states and so rejected the idea of building a new one, even though in practice they saw the need to centralise the anti-fascist struggle.

    So they rejected the setting up of a revolutionary state, which they believed would mean an “anarchist dictatorship”, yet ended up collaborating in the reconstruction of the Republican state. In November 1936, four anarchist leaders joined the very Popular Front government that would undermine the revolution.

    Stalinism

    The struggle against fascism in 1936 starkly posed the need for left unity. The Popular Front, established before the war with the aim of uniting the workers’ and liberal middle class parties in defence of democracy, seemed the logical response to the terrible threat posed by fascism.

    In reality, far from achieving unity, the Popular Front oversaw a counter-revolution that seriously undermined the anti-fascist struggle. It was to be expected that the liberal Republican parties and the moderate socialists, given their opposition to social revolution whatever the situation, would opt to support capitalist democracy before all else.

    The reasons why the Communists, the most enthusiastic supporters of the Popular Front, opposed the revolution are more complex. The Communist Party grew rapidly in the first months of the war, especially among the lower middle classes.

    It was seen as the defender of both military efficiency and public order. In fact Communist strategy was subordinated to Stalin’s Russia which sought an alliance with the Western democracies against Nazi Germany.

    Stalin was not interested in a revolution in Spain, especially one not controlled by him, which could endanger such an alliance. Thus the revolution and its supporters were attacked in the name of unity.

    This counter-revolutionary offensive culminated in street fighting in May 1937, the bloody persecution of the revolutionary left and the ending of the revolution.

    Popular Front

    One reason given by supporters of the Popular Front for presenting the war as a simple struggle between fascism and democracy was the need to win the support of democratic governments around the world. The fascist axis of Italy and Germany were providing massive aid to the fascists.

    The problem was that the democratic governments’ imperial and class interests meant that they were never going to support a Republic perceived as left wing. Instead Britain and France pursued the cynical policy of “non-intervention”.

    Of the great powers, only Russia sent aid to Republican Spain, something which greatly strengthened the Communist influence.

    But Soviet aid came with strings attached. Prices charged for arms were manipulated and Russian leaders applied pressure to curtail the revolution. This was also the epoch of the great Stalinist purges in Russia and its methods and propaganda were now exported to Spain.

    The only real international support that the Republic received was from workers. There emerged a massive solidarity movement with the Republic. About 35,000 foreign volunteers from around the world, most of them workers, went to Spain to fight in the International Brigades. Many of them died.

    The politics of war

    The Popular Front government’s insistence on presenting the war to the world as one in defence of parliamentary democracy meant its military strategy was posed in orthodox terms with great First World War style offensives. Given the technological superiority of the fascist army this strategy meant an enormous drain on the Republic’s limited resources, as well as a terrible loss of life, and ended in total defeat.

    While the militias created in the early days of the revolution were democratically organised, the new People’s Army, which the Popular Front government created to replace them had a traditional military structure. Everybody, including the anarchists, accepted that there was a need for a centralised command, but a revolutionary army would have maintained the democratic, voluntary and militant spirit of the militias.

    With the resources available to the Republic, an alternative strategy would have been based on mobility and more limited attacks on what was a vast front and in-depth defence. Above all, such a strategy would have taken advantage of a potentially large social base in the fascist rearguard to organise guerrilla warfare.

    However, a revolutionary war needed a revolutionary political power. Fear of the reaction of the imperial powers meant, for example, that the Republic refused to support a Moroccan nationalist uprising in fascist controlled areas of Spain’s colonial possessions in North Africa.

    Similarly, the Republic never took advantage of its control of most of Spain’s navy as the activity of a red fleet in the Mediterranean would have upset Britain and France.

    Alternative

    Only the small revolutionary socialist party, the POUM, posed an alternative strategy. It argued for the setting up of a revolutionary government based on committees of workers, peasants and fighters.

    Such a government would have deepened the revolutionary process, organised a red army and pursued a military strategy that was not subordinated to the winning over of the imperialist powers.

    It would also have won over the lower middle classes by measures that both protected their interests and maintained the independence of the workers’ organisations. For example, it would have opposed the forced collectivisation of small scale private property that sometimes occurred, while showing in practice the advantages of voluntary collectivisation.

    The POUM also defended the need to create a revolutionary workers’ front to both unite the anti-fascist forces and to defend the revolution. The brief formation of the Revolutionary Youth Front in early 1937 by the POUM and anarchist youth could have been an important step in this direction but it was soon opposed by the CNT leadership as “too political”.

    To impose a revolutionary alternative there was a need for not only a correct programme but also an organisation with sufficient influence and support to lead an assault on power and, most importantly, the building of “another power”.

    The POUM did not have sufficient strength on its own and thus, fearing being isolated, baulked at breaking with the leadership of the CNT, and in Catalonia, for example, followed the anarchists into government.

    The experience of the Spanish Revolution shows not only people’s potential to change the world but also that the building of a revolutionary political organisation cannot be ignored.

    Andy Durgan is author of The Spanish Civil War (Palgrave 2007) and Comunismo, revolución y movimiento obrero en Cataluña 1920-1936. Los orígenes del POUM (Laertes, 2016). 

    Originally posted here. 

  • The 1898 Invasion of Puerto Rico and the Emergence of U.S. Imperialism

    For the many people who have engaged in the struggle for Puerto Rico’s independence, July 25 has a special significance. On that date in 1898, U.S. troops invaded Puerto Rico, beginning a period of U.S. colonial domination on the island that continues to this day. The United States invaded Puerto Rico, along with the Philippines, Guam and Cuba, in the setting of the Spanish-American War. That war was the opening of what would be the menacing role and predatory nature of the U.S. capitalist class in the Caribbean, Latin America and the entire world.

    The seizure of Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam and the Philippines by the United States signaled the quest of the U.S. capitalist class to become a world power. European powers had pursued a policy of colonial acquisitions since the end of the 15th century. But only in the late 19th century had the mature and developed capitalist powers virtually colonized the entire planet. The projection of U.S. power outside of the North American mainland signified a rush not to be left behind in this global division of markets. Imperialism was transforming from a policy into a global system. No capitalist power could stand on the sidelines.
    Eventually this scramble and competition for colonies led to the first “world war” in human history, from 1914 to 1918, involving all the major capitalist powers. V.I. Lenin (leader of the Russian socialist revolution) noted this trend in the very first sentence of his classic 1916 work “Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism.” “During the last 15 to 20 years, especially since the Spanish-American War (1898) and the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), the economic and also the political literature of the two hemispheres has more and more adopted the term ‘imperialism’ to describe the present era.” Until the Spanish-American War, capitalism in the United States was focused on expansion within North America. The expansion came from the push west and the seizure of the land of the Native American population and the theft of nearly half of Mexico’s territory in the 1846-1848 U.S.-Mexican War.
    Following the end of chattel slavery and the conclusion of the U.S. Civil War in 1865, industrial capitalism was able to grow rapidly. Facilitating trade and the transfer of raw materials, railroad track was laid throughout the entire stretch of the U.S. territory. Mining of raw materials increased. Factories, ports, bridges and dams were constructed at a greater pace. Beneath this supposed progress in U.S. society, there was a tremendous cost in human suffering. The consolidation and expansion of capitalism in the country could be measured by the genocide of the indigenous people—Native Americans. By the late 1890s, Native people were virtually annihilated within the territories of the continental United States with the close of the so-called “Indian Wars.”
    Eventually the dynamism of capitalism meant that the home market was insufficient. New markets, raw materials and cheaper labor were increasingly required for continuation of a vast increase in productive forces. Capitalist development began to be propelled in the direction of a new kind of expansionism, aimed at subordinating the economies of other lands.
    THE COMPETITION BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND SPAIN
    The more benefits that U.S.-based companies derived from economic investments made in the Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico before the war—amounting to $50 million in 1897—the more that U.S. manufacturers and bankers desired direct control of these markets. Throughout the 1890s, there was a growing war fever among the U.S. ruling class. Prominent bourgeois figures, politicians, journalists and the clergy encouraged hostilities and openly called for the military seizure of Spain’s remaining colonies. “Democracy” and “freedom” became the banner for all sorts of demagogic warmongers.
    Militarism and arrogance, nurtured by capitalist expansion in the centuries of campaigns to expel Indigenous people from their lands and enforce a genocidal system of slavery, were now utilized to justify imperialist expansion. The use of brutal force against people in the invaded lands was justified as “divine will” or “manifest destiny.” With mounting tensions between Washington and Madrid, the U.S. Navy targeted and harassed any vessel flying the Spanish flag in the open sea. U.S. Navy warships were instructed to stop Spanish freighters, carry out searches, and in many cases seize the cargo.
    This was despite the fact that a state of war did not yet exist. Spain was a crumbling feudal power facing severe internal political strife. It no longer had the empire status that it enjoyed centuries ago. The Spanish government was not in a position to engage in hostilities with any country—especially the United States, which was demonstrating its industrial might and was obviously eager to test its military ability.
    A PRETEXT FOR WAR
    On the evening of Feb. 15, 1898, the battleship USS Maine exploded while docked in the harbor of Havana, Cuba. While 266 sailors were killed as they slept in their quarters, the ship’s captain and his close officers were not harmed. Washington officials were quick to blame the Spanish government, claiming that the explosion was caused by a floating mine. The fact that many eyewitnesses saw the force of the explosion coming from within the bow of the ship did not matter to U.S. investigators. Later investigations discounted the possibility of a mine explosion altogether. Whatever the cause, the Spanish government was in no way responsible. Despite Spain’s repeated diplomatic efforts and willingness to compensate for the loss of life and the destroyed ship, the U.S. government exploited the situation as a perfect excuse for war.
    On April 25, 1898, President William McKinley, with the consent of the U.S. Congress, made his infamous declaration of war against Spain. The United States would now be recognized as a world imperialist power. The military campaigns that followed impacted the lives of millions of people in the Philippines, Guam, Cuba and Puerto Rico. They were now to become subjects of a new colonial oppressor. On July 25, 1898, 26,000 U.S. soldiers stormed the shores of Guanica, Puerto Rico—the stepping-stone to the invasion of the entire island nation.
    The invasion was led by the notorious Gen. Nelson Appleton Miles—a reliable servant of U.S. capitalist expansion in the western U.S. states. Miles was infamous for his role in the suppression of the Pullman strike and other labor struggles. He was also known for his capture of Native leaders like Geronimo and Sitting Bull after hard fought resistance battles waged by Native people. But Miles’ most outstanding crime was the Dec. 29, 1890, massacre of 300 Indigenous men, women and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota.
    As the U.S. Army marched through the mountains of Puerto Rico, they encountered peasants who had been forewarned of the invasion’s brutality. These mountain people, armed solely with machetes, valiantly attacked the invaders. Those captured by the invaders were often bound to trees and shot. That resistance today symbolizes the beginning of the ongoing Puerto Rican resistance to U.S. colonialism.
    The U.S. military occupations in the Philippines, Guam, Cuba and Puerto Rico were the opening shots of a wave of imperialist invasions over the next decades in the Western Hemisphere and other parts of the world. U.S. troops were sent to Nicaragua in 1898 and again in 1899, 1907 and 1910, and from 1912 through 1933; to Panama from 1901 through 1914; to Honduras in 1903 and again in 1911; to the Dominican Republic in 1903; to Korea in 1904; to China in 1911; to Mexico from 1914 through 1918; to Haiti from 1914 through 1934; to Cuba in 1906 to 1909, 1912 and again from 1917 through 1933; to the Soviet Union from 1918 through 1922; and to Guatemala in 1920. The list continued throughout the 20th century. With hundreds of military bases around the world today, U.S. military interventions are a constant feature of world affairs.
    CONTINUED ANTI-COLONIAL STRUGGLE
    The big business mass media make every effort to disguise the foreign subjugation of Puerto Rico. But events take place that push the truth about the U.S. occupation to the surface. The FBI assassination of Machetero leader Filiberto Ojeda Rios in September 2005, the struggle to stop U.S. Navy bombing on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques in 2000 and the present fight against the Hedge Fund $73 billion debt imposed on the Puerto Rican people. Despite the many U.S. claims about Puerto Rico’s “progress,” the island’s people never asked to be invaded and colonized, have economic hardships imposed upon them or be forced to uproot and emigrate to the colonizing country. Within the United States, Puerto Ricans are among the poorest nationalities.
    The U.S. invasion of July 25, 1898, is why today Puerto Ricans have no say in any fundamental matters pertaining to the economic and political life of their homeland. The U.S. government’s colonial policy denying the Puerto Rican masses their right of self-determination and independence accounts for the continued people’s resistance there.
    QUE VIVA PUERTO RICO LIBRE! FREE OSCAR LOPEZ RIVERA, NOW!

  • Fight the Right, Bernie or Bust? Slogans and Strategies

    As the US primary season closes we are faced with a bitter choice between an uninspiring Democrat and a shockingly popular racist demagogue. As such, writers on the Left are bracing for the general election and lining up behind one of two supposed “strategies”: Fight the Right and Bernie or Bust.

    Fight the Right

    Max Elbaum makes his call to “crush the racist right” in this piece. Elbaum urges us that “thrashing the right is the immediate step needed to open a path toward more democracy … and the reconstruction of an inclusive working class-based movement.”

    In practical terms this means the Left should vote for and work to elect Hillary Clinton — even in safe states. The “thrashing” Elbaum describes refers to the need to “run up the score” against Trump (i.e. defeating him by huge margins) in order to thoroughly reject racist right-wing populism while isolating Trump and the racist far-right.

    Though many leftists agree with this argument, from a socialist perspective it is limited in several respects.

    First, Trumpism was largely fueled by the center-left’s inability to provide a meaningful improvement in the lives of millions throughout the Obama administration. A coalition with the center-left, in this case Clinton, in-which Leftists work to “thrash” Trump at the ballot box, will only provide a short term (albeit important) solution: the immediate staving off of Trump. But unfortunately it will not prevent the long term issue of a rising racist Right. To do that we need to spend our time building genuine socialist electoral and social movement alternatives. Otherwise eight years of Clinton could easily end with another, perhaps more reactionary, candidate on the Right. Boosterism for Clinton relegates the radical Left to a cheerleader position rather than an oppositional and agitational pole.

    Some “Dump Trump” advocates argue that a crushing electoral defeat would signal the downfall of the Right for decades. This isn’t borne out by history. For instance, far from destroying the Republican party’s electoral viability in his 1964 landslide defeat to LBJ, Barry Goldwater helped to forge a new, more conservative (and wildy more successful) Republican party capable of controlling the White House for three consecutive terms in the 1980s and early 1990s. Others point to the similarly devastating rout of Democratic presidential candidate George Mcgovern in 1972 and the subsequent decline in the Democratic Party’s Presidential fortunes as evidence that a defeat of this calibre produces profound and enduring negative effects on the losing party. In this case, however, it was much less the defeat of McGovern and much more skyrocketing inflation, anemic growth, a Democratic Party incapable of learning the appropriate lessons of the ‘72 campaign, as well as the now fabled onslaught of neoliberalism in the late 1970s that debilitated the Democratic Party until its third-way turn in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

    When making any strategic decision we should take stock of our capacity (or lack thereof). We on the socialist Left are weak; we have neither the person power nor the organizational capacity to “Fight the Right” at the ballot-box right now. We have maybe 4,000 militant socialist activists in the country, so if we went all out for Clinton we would hardly move the needle an inch in her direction. If this is the case why sacrifice our political independence and put our local organizing efforts on hold to stump for a candidate we don’t believe in? If the socialist left commanded even 5% of the electorate the debate about our support would be a real one, right now it is mostly performative. In those relatively few cases where socialists in swing states indeed have a strong enough presence to make a substantive difference, the situation is different, but in the overwhelming majority of places this is not the case.

    For many the force of the call to Fight the Right relies on a moral argument rather than a strategic assessment of where we are and how we develop a meaningful socialist alternative. For them, working against Trump and for Clinton is an end in itself that individuals concerned about racism and xenophobia should pursue regardless of the effects of doing so.  From this perspective Trump represents such a threat to immigrants and communities of color that no insurance policy against his presidency (in the form of organizing, fundraising and the like) is too costly, even if upon rational consideration it appears to be a giveaway to a largely disreputable insurer (i.e. the Democratic Party with Clinton at the helm).  We are as frustrated (albeit not shocked) by the success of Trump’s misogynist and racist campaign as anyone else, but we don’t see why this should lead us to forgo any semblance of strategic thinking in favor of an antiracist categorical imperative.

    Others on the largely white socialist Left — though the two groups overlap considerably — see their role in the presidential elections as being good faith allies in the struggle to defeat Trump’s racism. For them, campaigning on Clinton’s behalf offers a chance to bolster their anti-racist bonafides and build deeper ties to organizations representing communities of color. Unfortunately, however, it is not at all clear that this strategy will yield its intended results. Simply “being in motion” with communities of color by attending canvasses and phone-banking sessions for the Clinton campaign does not seem to us to provide ideal conditions for building organic and lasting ties with communities of color. Further, most of the individuals we encounter through this work will be loyal Democratic party voters much less receptive to our ideas than the Sanderistas with whom we’ve been door-knocking over the last year. Organizing anti-Trump rallies and/or independent voter registration drives in communities of color hold greater promise than working directly through the campaign, but even these actions are limited in their efficacy relative to the alternatives we discuss below.

    There is a real tension between campaigning for Hillary and building an anti-racist, feminist, and more racially and gender-diverse socialist movement. Unlike Fight the Right advocates we do not see how building Hillary’s campaign represents a strategy for building our movement. If fighting the Right is a strategic decision for socialists it can only be so as a defensive posture against a dismal future, one that does not offer real opportunities to grow the Left. We would do well to acknowledge it as such. However, as discussed above even here a real assessment of our capacity limits our participation from a “defensive” position to the small set of swing states where socialists have enough electoral juice to influence the election’s outcome.

    Alternatively, advocating a Fight the Right position does risk alienating some of the most ardent Bernie supporters, these are the supporters we would like to see become socialist activists. Some of them are fantastic organizers and well respected in the grassroots movement for Bernie. That is a consideration Fight the Right advocates rarely acknowledge.

    Bernie or Bust

    On the other side of the debate Kshama Sawant appeals to those in the “Bernie or Bust” crowd. These Third Party advocates aim to show how terrible the Democratic Party is (on this most of us agree), and would like to see Bernie either run as an independent or endorse the Greens and Jill Stein. The problem is that here too a strategic question is posited as a moral choice: either we are Bernie or Bust or we are hopeless reformists unable to see the existential truth that working within the Democratic Party in any way is fundamentally wrong (except, of course, for Bernie Sanders in 2016…)

    Firstly, Bernie or Busters will likely represent a small minority of Sanders voters come November, and to suggest that they will singlehandedly usher in a new party is wrongheaded at best and deeply cynical at worst.

    The cynical interpretation offered by Jill Stein suggests that “at least when Republicans are elected, people fight – when Democrats are elected, people are lulled into complacency and fall asleep.” This represents a tacit recognition that Stein knows she won’t win so voting for her is merely a means of punishing Candidate Clinton. Fair enough. But we should acknowledge (contra Stein) that a Trump presidency would not lead to an increased revolutionary fervor that could usher in a new era of radical organizing, but would more likely lead to increased political repression and demobilization. Further, under the Obama administration we saw both the development of Occupy and the Black Lives Matter movement, two of the most significant developments in American social movements in recent history. Are we to believe that under a Trump presidency Black Lives Matter would not suffer suppression? While we are critical of the general “Fight the Right” strategy, the millions of working class people who will vote for Clinton as a lesser-evil have compelling reasons to do so, and should not be chastised and reprimanded for their decision.

    Stein’s argument uses the same magical thinking that the “thrash” Trump position employs: somehow by eating into Clinton’s voter base we can expose the Democrats and discredit them in future elections. But in the best case scenario this too is highly unlikely. In 2000 when Ralph Nader won the most significant Green Party vote in history (2.74%), and despite securing more ballot lines for the Greens in new states he did not succeed in establishing the Greens as a national political force (let alone building a mass working class party). In fact, the result was quite the opposite. Subsequent Green campaigns were subject to tremendous abuse by the Democratic Party machine and the national media, and the party has only ever secured a fraction of one percent of the vote since (topping in 2012 at 0.36%).

    The more optimistic Bernie or Bust advocates assure us that their slogan represents a plan to break with the Democratic Party and build a new mass working-class radical party almost spontaneously. These advocates simply ignore sociopolitical reality in their call for a national Third Party today. Anyone with a basic understanding of the inherent biases of our national electoral system toward the development of two dominant parties, or of the extreme difficulties associated with mobilizing unaffiliated voters to a new party with no resources to entice them to do so can see that it’s premature to work for a national Third Party campaign.

    This is not to say we don’t need an electoral vehicle outside of the Democratic Party, but rather that any effective Third Party effort will be the result of decades of local electoral successes that may eventually be parlayed into influence at the national level (perhaps through a regional strategy a la the Brazilian Workers Party or the Canadian Co-operative Commonwealth Federation — which would eventually form the nucleus of the New Democratic Party) rather than the spontaneous rejection of the two major parties in one single Presidential election.

    Second, as Bernie has rightly and repeatedly noted, a Presidential candidate alone cannot lead a political revolution. Any of the reforms Bernie had fought for in his bid would not be actualized absent a mass movement (even if he were elected President). Socialists have long argued as much. Yet some in the Bernie or Bust crowd now suggest the exact opposite, that if only we vote for an independent Bernie run, or perhaps for Jill Stein we will get the social-democratic program that we wanted — a program that was thwarted only by the Democrats. In fact an independent run, due to the inherently limited number of voters such a campaign would reach, has less of a chance to ignite the kind of broad electoral and social movements necessary to push through Sanderista demands. Part of the strategic brilliance of Bernie running on the Democratic Party ballot line was his ability to quickly and effectively reach millions of voters and ignite a groundswell of national support. With the somewhat sui generis exception of Ross Perot in 1992, never has a national Third Party Presidential campaign in the modern era matched his success.

    Finally, Bernie or Bust advocates — like their Fight the Right rivals — argue that the Left should take a moral stance against Clinton. But again taking such a  position does nothing to develop the capacity and the legitimacy of the Left (although it does make us feel better about our remarkable powerlessness). The Left today is weak but, thanks in no small part to Sanders, growing in importance for the first time in decades. It’s critical that during this time of tremendous opportunity we move beyond the pathologies of moralism and self-righteousness that so often characterize ineffectual political movements — and unfortunately also much of the thinking both in the Fight the Right as well as Bernie or Bust camps.

    A Way Forward for the Left?

    Both “strategies” then, are born of a deep moral purity and/or strategic thinking that is misaligned with sociopolitical realities: many in the Bernie or Bust crowd know they won’t win, but for them endorsing Clinton is simply beyond the ethical pale, whatever the consequences. Others mistakenly believe that a Republican presidency would actually strengthen the Left by somehow awaking a level of militancy among the population that would be absent under a Democratic presidency. For their part, much of the Fight the Right crowd insists that we must help Clinton win, despite knowing that our efforts toward that end will be largely symbolic, while others either conclude that working within the Clinton camp will open up opportunities for deepening their ties to communities of color and/or that a rout of Trump will usher in a prolonged era of Republican weakness at the national level.

    If the Left wishes to maintain the credibility it has recently won through the Bernie campaign and help to defeat the far Right in the long term we should start building meaningful local alternatives where we can make a real impact. We need to prove to Sanders supporters — and many others who are potentially open to our politics — that we are indeed building electoral and social movement alternatives that they can see themselves being a part of.  Neither a blank check approach to Democrats based on fear of the racist Right nor a Third Party approach lacking a coherent strategy is the best way for socialists to intervene in our long-term struggle for an anti-racist, feminist and anti-capitalist mass movement in the United States. A better approach would be to support strong socialist candidates down ballot and to  deepen our engagement — as explicit socialists —  with communities of color fighting against police brutality and illegal deportation, as well as fighting for affordable housing and high quality public education for all. In our view this is the best way to attract new folks to the socialist Left, both Sanderistas currently looking for a political home post-Bernie as well as thousands of other grassroots activists who weren’t involved in the campaign but who are looking for a radical alternative to failed strategies of the past.

    We place a particularly strong emphasis on local-level socialist campaigns, because such campaigns 1) offer an ideal context for building connections across varied communities that rarely have the opportunity to forge organic ties with each other, and diverse issue areas that are often considered only in isolation, 2) provide Sanderistas an electoral space — the political terrain where many Sanderistas feel most comfortable — to continue the political revolution, and 3) provide socialists with a highly visible and sustained platform to explicitly push an alternative vision from that offered by mainstream liberals to continue the political revolution The goal should be to build a socialist electoral base and concomitant socialist organizations capable of offering a genuine alternative to the politics of the liberal Left, and strategically flexible enough to operate within the confines of our current political system. Debbie Medina of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is pursuing such a goal by running as a socialist for State Senate in Brooklyn. While our small numbers could barely impact a general election they would seriously boost the prospects of such socialists winning in their local races. We should make these and other socialist electoral bids widely known and we should work together nationally to build their local campaigns.

    Let voters vote as they will come November, but the rest of us should be using this time to start to build a real alternative for the midterms and beyond by supporting democratic socialist candidates at the local level and building ties to communities of color by fighting against neoliberal education and housing policies, as well as our racist criminal justice system. Sanders lost the nomination but the Left need not lose its momentum either in a doomed Third Party run or an uninspiring bid to “thrash” Trump. The only way we can do that it by putting forward a strategic alternative and outline for how to transform Bernie voters into the Labor or Socialist Party militants of the future.

    Dustin Guastella is a member of Philadelphia DSA and a graduate student in Sociology at Rutgers University

    Jared Abbott is a member of DSA’s national political committee and a graduate student in Government at Harvard University.

    Originally posted here. 

  • Why the Movement for Black Lives Is Shutting Down DC and NYC Police Union Headquarters

    ImageActivists affiliated with the Movement for Black Lives and Black Lives Matter staged a sit-in Wednesday at police union headquarters in Washington, D.C., and New York City, as part of an action to demand police accountability in excessive force cases.

    More than a dozen protesters had blocked traffic outside of the Fraternal Order of Police’s legislative offices at Massachusetts Avenue and Fourth Street NE near Stanton Park in Washington, D.C. A similar action was taking place simultaneously at the Patrolman Benevolent Association headquarters at Broad Street near FDR Drive in New York City.

    Organizers at the New York action told Mic that police were arresting protesters who had chained themselves together at the PBA building. A spokeswoman for the Black Youth Project 100, a Black Lives Matter-affiliated group, said 10 protesters were in custody at the New York Police Department’s 7th Precinct and were awaiting charges Wednesday afternoon. The NYPD confirmed the arrests but did not provide information on the charges.

    The action in Washington, which began around 7 a.m. ET, passed the seven hour mark Wednesday afternoon. Police has not made any arrests, Samantha Master, an organizer for the BYP100 in DC, said in a phone interview.

    The actions spurred from a long-held criticism within the movement that police unions protect officers who kill and wound civilians, and ensure that those officers receive paid administrative leave while shooting or excessive force cases are investigated internally.

    Clarise McCants, organizer of the BYP100 DC, released the following statement:

    “The FOP acts like a college fraternity and is responsible for maintaining the harmful, lethal, unethical, and unaccountable culture of policing while the families and communities impacted when officers brutalize civilians are left to mourn with little, if any, semblance of justice. Just like college frats that further rape culture by closing ranks to protect members who are sexual assailants, the FOP has proven that their primary commitment is to protect the worst of their members behind the ‘Blue Wall of Silence’ – even in the most heinous of circumstances. The FOP is the most dangerous fraternity in America and they need to be stopped.”

    In New York City, the local BYP100 chapter and Million Hodies NYC attempted to lock down the PBA until New York Police Department leaders agreed to terminate Officer Wayne Isaacs, who fatally shot Delrawn Small on July 4. Isaacs, who had been off-duty when he shot Small, was on administrative leave pending an investigation.

    The BLM actions Wednesday also follow the police shooting deaths of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, which have sparked nationwide protests and renewed calls for police accountability and transparency in excessive force cases.

    July 20, 2016, 2:30 p.m.: This story has been updated.

    Originally posted here. 

  • The (Almost) Coup in Turkey

    Image

    People in Turkey are no strangers to military coups. Following more than twenty-five years of single-party rule after the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, a coup in 1960 toppled the government of the Democratic Party. In 1971, 1980, and 1997 the military either overthrew or deposed sitting governments.

    The result of a coup attempt on July 15, 2016, was different—for a variety of reasons. The 1960 takeover was greeted by public demonstrations of support in Istanbul and Ankara; not so in 2016. However much half of the Turkish population may loathe President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), there was little support for yet another antidemocratic military putsch. At Erdoğan’s behest, thousands poured into the streets of the two largest cities, and dramatic images of coup opponents confronting soldiers attest to people’s determination to resist the takeover.

    The military faction leading the coup also proved hesitant in contrast to 1980, which was implemented by head of the military Kenan Evren with brutal determination. In 2016, by contrast, top commanders were taken hostage by plotters and the bulk of the armed forces was uninvolved. An awareness of public opposition as well as the ubiquity of the media in contemporary culture seems to have bypassed the hapless plotters, as well. Though a number of media outlets were occupied by troops, instant reports of an air bombing of the parliament and images of popular protest were broadcast across the world. Even the social media-hating Erdoğan took to FaceTime to encourage followers to publicly defy the military.

    The plotters, calling themselves the “Peace at Home Committee,” emphasized in early public statements its intention to respect human rights and democracy while claiming the government had violated Turkey’s secular traditions. This is a customary stance taken by coup makers that makes clear their commitment to a Kemalist defense of secular government. While many oppose the Islamist tendencies of the government, equally menacing is the increasingly authoritarian and dictatorial aspirations of Erdoğan—and the exchange of one dictator for another failed to obtain mass appeal in 2016.

    Erdoğan immediately accused a “parallel state” under Fethullah Gülen, a conservative cleric residing in Pennsylvania, of being behind the failed putsch. Ironies here abound. Gülen was himself exiled by state forces in 1999, and was for a number of years an ally of Erdoğan and the AKP. While there are ideological differences, both groups share a conservative religious outlook tinged with nationalist Turkish, or neo-Ottomanist, political leanings.

    A power struggle between the AKP and Gülenists emerged in 2012, however. The break climaxed in late 2014, when the government blamed accusations against high-level AKP leaders of corruption on Gülen’s followers. Since then, Gülenists in official positions as well as in civilian organizations like the media and universities have been under attack. Indeed, AKP responses to problems that cannot be blamed on the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) are now reflexively attributed to the parallel state.

    While followers of Gülen have unarguably been prominent in the military, police, and judiciary for years, the extent to which Gülen’s Hizmet (meaning “Service”) movement can be blamed for AKP problems, and specifically for a military coup, is fanciful. Gülenists may well have been involved in the putsch, but the notion that the coup attempt was orchestrated from a compound in Pennsylvania defies logic and sense.

    Yet the AKP, and Erdoğan in particular, feed off a sense of being besieged, and the idea of traitorous sedition (from foreigners, leftists, Kurds, etc.) has worked to the government’s advantage in the past. Conspiracy theories and the notion of outside forces working to undermine the state have a long tradition in Turkish history, with the current government drawing on fears of internal and external subversion.

    Though the defeat of the attempted coup is a hopeful sign that Turkish society rejects military rule as a solution to the nation's problems, Erdoğan has predictably already begun to use the putsch to further consolidate his power and eliminate opponents. As of July 18, 2,700 judges had been detained, 7,850 police officers were fired, and more than 6,000 were arrested. Threatening to end the death penalty for accused traitors (which would end Turkey’s bid for EU membership), the AKP has demanded the U.S. extradite Gülen and vows to “cleanse” the country of Gülenist traitors.

    In addition to eliminating perceived enemies on a mass scale, the coup also increases the chances Erdoğan’s desire to change Turkey’s constitution to a presidential, rather than parliamentary, system will succeed. The failed putsch has made the president appear for the moment like an advocate for democratic rule, and he has attempted to maintain popular momentum by calling on supporters to remain in the public squares.

    The rapid failure of the coup, and Erdoğan’s dramatic escape from attack while on holiday in Marmaris coupled with his heroic return to Istanbul, will inevitably lead to questions about whether the attempt to overthrow the government was genuine, or whether minor military personnel were tricked into an intentionally doomed escapade. If the AKP can fan paranoid fears of outside subversion, it is only to be expected his opponents will draw similar conclusions in an opposite direction. Gülen himself has vehemently denied involvement and suggested the coup was staged. For many in Turkey, high government and/or military officials provoking chaos and violence for their own personal ends is an old—and not inaccurate—story.

    For the Turkish left, already marginalized in the last two years by severe repression and the attempted silencing of dissent, the coup will serve to further isolate critical voices. Critics will be accused either of membership in the PKK or Hizmet, leading to accusations of treason and support for undermining the state. In an important sense, therefore, the post-coup environment will simply be a continuance of recent trends. More ominous, however, have been a number of mob attacks against Alevi and Kurdish neighborhoods in the wake of the failed putsch.

    Yet while the AKP government has proven itself remarkably adept at turning domestic unrest to its political advantage, no amount of nationalist propaganda can mask an economic slide that began almost a decade ago. Unemployment, rising prices, and precarious employment continues to plague Turkey, and the contradiction between the government’s populist discourse and neoliberal policies can only coexist for so long.

    At the same time, considerable labor militancy has surfaced—and has continued despite the state’s connivance with owners to simply end strikes and force workers back to work. A massive—and successful—wildcat strike by tens of thousands of metal workers against the Renault auto company in the spring of 2015 gave workers a sense of their power at the point of production. After the cosmetics giant Avon fired eight women workers for joining DGD-SEN (the Warehouse, Storehouse, Ship Building and Naval Transportation Workers' Union), workers have been picketing the country with numerous supporters and women’s groups. On June 21, over 900 Nestle workers went on strike—suggestively the labor action is in Bursa, where the wildcat metal workers strike began. Most recently, in the consistently turbulent coal mining industry thousands of miners and their allies have risen in protest against the privatization and possible closure of the Turkish Hard Coal Agency (TTK).

    While labor actions have been sporadic and the vast majority of workers remain unorganized, it is in the workplace and in working-class neighborhoods and communities that the formation of popular opposition to the ruling power must begin. Consensus on the left seems to be that dark days lie ahead in Turkey. Yet it is also the case that the crowds hoped for by Erdoğan in the aftermath of the coup have been relatively small. Though political repression may intensify, daily life will go on. It is here that the left must concentrate and build.

  • What Is The Next Left?

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    At this moment I find myself swinging between optimism fueled by the previously unimaginable appeal of Bernie Sanders’ “socialism,” the energized base of young people attracted to his campaign, this evidence that the neoliberal consensus is dead, and despair about the HUGE gap between this political opening and the organizational capacity of the revolutionary socialist left. Like many others, I’m asking: can anything be done?

    Mainstream forces are already organizing to pivot Bernie supporters to a “STOP TRUMP” campaign (Van Jones). The broadly progressive “left” (e.g. National Nurses United, ex-Occupiers, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance) hope to capture the momentum of the Bernie campaign to build a more permanent national organization around a social-democratic platform (The People’s Summit, Chicago June 17; The People’s Revolution, Philadelphia, July 27).

    While a national network organized around a social-democratic “platform” is appealing — and I would say certainly worthwhile — I am not sure that the social-media and email fueled network that the Sanders campaign has accomplished is sufficient for creating the kind of organizational infrastructure necessary to turn political ideas into on-the-ground movements that can build power.

    In my conflicted state, I am more intrigued by the possibilities of a local electoral political front based in grassroots movement organizations. There is no question that electoral politics is potentially a useful arena of struggle — but the very thing that makes electoral politics attractive is also electoral politics’ weakness.

    The big advantage of an election is of course that there is the possibility of winning and that it is a relatively short-term effort with a clear end. Election campaigns can therefore energize people who otherwise are not already politically active.

    Some people engaged with campaign work do move on into issue-based activism, but they mostly drift away once the election is over. Although Bernie showed that a relatively left set of policies can gather wide and deep support, elections (where the goal is actually to win) also tend to put a certain limit on how radical the messaging can be.

    Even more problematic, in campaign mode there is little time for political education of activists or for engaging activists in thinking through how we can connect demands that immediately resonate with the public (e.g. raise the minimum wage) to longer term and more radical ideas (e.g. basic minimum income).

    Recognizing these limitations, many revolutionaries counterpose electoral work to “building grassroots power.” My experience here in Portland (OR) around legislation (at city and state levels) is that we have built relatively strong movements around particular goals (minimum wage, paid sick leave, defense of the houseless). But once we gain enough traction the campaigns are (to a greater or lesser degree) derailed by big organizations — most notably the unions and NGOs that are so well-connected to the Democratic Party. And this is true even for local organizing in relation to a city government that is putatively nonpartisan.

    Missing Political Instrument

    One of our biggest frustrations is that our grassroots organizations do not have our own political instrument with candidates emerging from our movements and office holders who have gotten into office based on grassroots fundraising and committed volunteer efforts.

    In the long run, only an “on-the-ground” activist organization ready to build and lead movements — organizations that educate, mobilize and disrupt — will shift the political balance of forces. But I’m not convinced that grassroots movements are undermined when they organize their own electoral expression.

    The outcome depends on how that electoral organization works, how it draws its horizon of possibility, and how it seeks to penetrate and open up government once its members are in office. (Consider for instance, participatory budgeting established by the Workers Party in Sao Paulo, Brazil; or the experiments in democratizing governance by radicals engaged in the London Council Government headed up by Ken Livingstone).

    I think it is going to be very difficult to build national organizations that function under the control and as an expression of grassroots movements at this point; however, I think there is some real possibility for accomplishing this at the local level. And if we start locally we could also from the beginning support and call for similar efforts in cities within our region and state, with the longterm goal to leverage the power of multiple city governments at the regional and state level.

    The other advantage of working at the local level is that we have more of an opportunity for committed revolutionaries to collaborate in a project broader than ourselves. No matter how many individuals may be recruited to existing revolutionary groups, the vast majority (and it is growing) of people who are anti-capitalist have not been and will not be attracted to existing left organizations.

    I think the possibilities to build something new for the revolutionary left — whether we think of that as new forms of revolutionary organization and/or new kinds of politics — are much greater at the local level. Certainly working within a local project that is broader than ourselves, we are more likely to create the relationships of respect, trust, and appreciation that I believe are crucial for the left to break free of our baggage and boundaries.

    I think also that at the local level it is more possible to develop the creatively intersectional politics that has been lacking in national campaigns. It is not surprising, for example, that a radical Black activist organization with intersectional politics, like the Black Youth Project 100, was not part of the originating groups for the People’s Summit and the People’s Revolution.

    Organizers say they are committed to bringing organizations like BYP 100 into the planning and hopefully they will. Still, real tensions between discourses of class and race politics have been an ongoing problem. (See for example Sanders’ stumbles on reparations, and struggles at Occupy). Local organizing built on acts of solidarity are necessary to overcome this tension in practice, as in the Chicago Teachers Union’s engaged defense of schools that face closing in Black/Latino communities.

    Positive Examples

    An organization capable of mounting an effective and principled electoral campaign will not be built overnight. It will not be built through immediately going out to run individual candidates for office.

    Instead, we on the left could help to establish urban coalitions that are based in existing grassroots organizing, where activists from the base run for election not as individuals with the right politics but as representatives of a platform that they pledge to implement in office.

    There are several efforts we can learn from. Just two are Richmond Progressive Alliance in Richmond CA, and Guanyem Barcelona in Spain.

    Richmond Progressive Alliance was formed in 2004 as a collaboration between the local Green Party and progressive Latinos from the Democratic Party. Since then, RPA has organized to elect members to the city council and organized many successful issue campaigns that span environmental, social and economic justice. At the moment they are organizing a ballot measure campaign for a rent control/just cause eviction ordinance.

    RPA will not endorse any candidate accepting corporate funding nor do they accept any for their organization. RPA functions with a fairly minimal framework of political agreement; supporters may be members of any party. It draws its strength from members of local grassroots organizations who are part of the Alliance as well as engaging individuals as members of RPA. [1]

    In May, 2015 Barcelona en Comu (Barce­lona in Common) won the mayor and 11 positions on a 41-member city Council. Capturing the energy of both the M15 movement and social justice organizations. It employs a horizontalist organizational model and its original “platform” emerged from a neighborhood-by-neighborhood and sector-by-sector process through which each group outlined its ideas for action based on its arena of organizing. When the 2015 elections rolled around, the radical left party Podemos chose to support the candidates of Barcelona en Comu rather than running.

    The Guanyem Barcelona platform is both practical and visionary. It calls for a transformed city, ecologically sustainable, focused on the needs of the people, and radically democratic in its political structure. The shorter-term urban policies and governmental changes Guanyem Barcelona advocates link to these broader goals.

    In their founding call, Guanyem Barcelona captured some of the optimism and determination that we on the left might draw on to take a leap into heretofore uncharted territory:

    “Our most successful experiences show us that, if we organize around specific objectives and practices, we can reach goals that may have seemed impossible.”

    While the economic crisis has been tough, a historic opportunity has opened up that we can’t and won’t let pass by. We are living in an exceptional time that demands brave, creative initiatives. If we are able to imagine a different city, we will have the power to transform it.

    [1] See www.richmondprogressivealliance.net

    Johanna Brenner is a community activist in Portland, Oregon and an advisory editor of Against the Current. She has also written for New Left Review and Monthly Review. She is Professor Emeritus at Portland State University. She also served as director of the University’s Women’s Studies Program. Her books include Women and the Politics of Class (Monthly Review Press, 2000) and Rethinking the Political: Women, Resistance, and the State (University Chicago Press, 1995).

    Originally posted here. 

  • No To The Military Coup!

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    On the night of July 15, the Turkish society watched a military coup attempt, live on TV. For some it was so difficult to make sense of it that they chose to interpret the whole event as “staged”, being a member of a society inclined towards conspiracy theories. How could one call this a real military coup?

    Let us not forget that Turkey’s history is replete with not only “successful”, but also “failed” military coups. Whether a military intervention succeeds in reaching its objectives or not, will depend on three factors: 1) A social and political crisis conducive to a military coup; 2) domestic and overseas social support; 3) political and military capacity.

    Turkey is undergoing a deep political crisis for a long time. Başlangıç, and the Left in general, have described and analyzed this crisis through different perspectives. It was argued in these analyses that one possible outcome of this crisis, further aggravated by the government’s implementation of a war strategy following the general elections of June 7, 2015, could be a military intervention. Naturally, no one could make any estimation about its timing.

    Tonight, a junta inside the army has attempted a military coup. While doing so, they assumed that the current acute political crisis would readily guarantee them domestic and overseas social support, as well as the required capacity. However, they were wrong. In a short space of time, statements clearly against the attempted military coup were issued from within the army (top commanders of the navy, first land army and special forces), major political parties, capitalists’ professional associations (TÜSİAD, TOBB), as well as international powers -as soon as they got a grasp of what was going on. Spokespeople of the civilian government made calls for resistance via private TV channels -which had continued their broadcast without disruption, not because the coup was “staged” (as argued by some), but because it had a limited capacity.

    The AKP government will most probably turn this attempted coup into a political opportunity for itself, and use it as a pretext to initiate yet another wave of authoritarianism; however, we should not have any scruples about the coup. In this age, where even wars and coups are broadcast live before our eyes, only true democracy can be the antidote to military or civilian authoritarian regimes. And true democracy rests on the people’s own power, and nothing else.

    This attempted coup will do nothing but turn pitch-black the darkness we are currently going through. Tanks can never be the antidote to unbridled authoritarianism, autocratic tendencies, and the suppression of democracy. Without any doubt, we have to stand against this military coup attempt, which, despite targeting an antidemocratic government, is so reckless as to bomb the parliament. We must say no to all attempted military juntas and coups, without “but”s and “maybe”s.

    Başlangıç, July 16, 2016

    Originally posted here.