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  • Et Tu, Bernie?

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    What an embarrassment for Bernie Sanders and those, myself included, who thought he would not descend so cravenly into the swamp of political sellout.

    It is one thing to hold one’s nose and vote for Hillary Clinton as the lesser evil. It is quite another to suddenly absolve the Clintons and other top Democrats who have, as Sanders repeatedly pointed out during his campaign, contributed so much to the national crisis.

    At one point in his otherwise uniformly obsequious endorsement speech, he sounded like the old populist Sanders, warning of the excesses of unregulated finance: “As a result of the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street, our economy was in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.”

    As Sanders repeatedly pointed out during his campaign, it was former President Bill Clinton’s radical deregulation of Wall Street that legalized the new, gilded age of Wall Street theft. But now we have the new Sanders, reinvented as a Democratic Party hack, insisting that this unfettered greed was exclusively enabled by the Republican leadership of the economy under George W. Bush.

    Sanders’ speech made no reference to breaking up the too-big-to-fail banks that packaged and marketed fraudulent collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) in the trillions of dollars to an unsuspecting world. It was Bill Clinton’s signature on the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that prevented the regulation of any of those suspect CDOs and the phony credit default swaps that pretended to insure them.

    It was that legislation that initiated the Great Recession, as Sanders pointed out convincingly in his campaign debates with Hillary Clinton. But suddenly, the very sentences that he formerly used to attack her now are the basis of his endorsement: “This election is about the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality that currently exists, the worst it has been since 1928. Hillary Clinton knows that something is very wrong when the very rich become richer, while many others are working longer hours for lower wages. She knows that it is absurd that middle-class Americans are paying an effective tax rate higher than hedge fund millionaires, and that there are corporations in this country making billions in profit while they pay no federal income tax in a given year because of loopholes their lobbyists created.”

    Really, Bernie, is that something you whispered in her ear during the hug? Or did she glean that wisdom from John Podesta, her campaign manager, who was once one of those lobbyists, or her son-in-law, Marc Mezvinsky, who was set up in the hedge fund business by Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who also paid Hillary so handsomely for her speeches?

    Did Bernie suddenly forget all of that Wall Street money that funded Hillary’s campaign? Or is the prospect of Donald Trump as president so staggering that all restraints of fact and logic need now be abandoned?

    Do the bipartisan policies of financial deregulation, lousy trade agreements and tax loopholes that defined the Clinton presidency have nothing to do with the massive resentment in this country over a rigged economy that has fueled both the Sanders and Trump campaigns? Or was the electoral revolt against the establishment of both political parties merely the achievement of particularly effective populists of the right and left?

    That would now seem to be the Sanders message. The progressive protest he led was not much of a political revolution if he believes the Democratic leadership that has held power for two-thirds of the past 24 years could now so easily accommodate it. What he has bought into is that the revolt on the Republican side is so irrationally hardcore that Hillary Clinton is now our only bulwark against an imminent variant of American fascist rule.

    That is the argument that now captivates the mass media, along with the rest of the establishment, and because Trump plays the devil part so well, many voters will feel they have no choice but to heed Bernie’s siren song.

    However, if it is the problems that create the demagogues, as historical example would strongly suggest, then it ill behooves Sanders to uncritically fall in line behind the lesser evil. Four more years of unchecked Wall Street greed will leave us with an even more alienated populace, on which scapegoating buzzards like Trump can feast.

    Critical thinking in this new political season will have to come from alternative candidates, such as the Green Party’s Jill Stein and Libertarian Gary Johnson.

    “I have known Hillary Clinton for 25 years,” the new Bernie gushes. “I remember her as a great first lady who broke precedent in terms of the role that a first lady was supposed to play, as she helped lead the fight for universal health care. I served with her in the United States Senate and know her as a fierce advocate for the rights of children.”

    A regular Eleanor Roosevelt, except that as first lady, Hillary Clinton turned health care over to the insurance companies and supported her husband’s so-called “welfare reform” that gutted the federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children program.

    Bernie, stop with the fawning. It’s not becoming.

    Originally posted here

  • The Arab Winter as "Morbid Symptom"

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    Gilbert Achcar, Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab UprisingStanford: Stanford Univeristy Press, 2016. 240 pp. $21.95.

    The title of Gilbert Achcar’s latest book is derived from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”.

    Although written as a sequel to his previous – and more detailed – book, The People Want, Morbid Symptoms qualifies as a stand-alone work of immense importance in its own right. Focusing largely on Syria and Egypt, ‘Morbid Symptoms’ skillfully explains the mutation of the ‘Arab Spring’ – though Achcar prefers the term ‘uprising’ – into an ‘Arab Winter’.

    Contemptuously rejecting the culturalist explanations of the Arab world’s democratic deficit, Achcar foregrounds two key factors to describe the mutation of the ‘Arab Spring’ into an Arab nightmare. First, he highlights the patrimonial and rentier character of the Arab states caught in the whirlwind of ‘Arab Spring’. Achcar argues that not only were the optimistic perspectives projected in 2011 proved to be flawed, a comparison with the fall of Stalinist regimes across eastern Europe in 1990 was equally problematic because these perspectives and analogies ignored, among other factors, the character of the Arab states.

    Historically, the exceptional state system in the East European countries was dominated by bureaucracies instead of propertied classes. Bureaucrats in these states could sense an improvement in their privileges. In fact, top bureaucrats could contemplate “their own transformation into capitalist entrepreneurs” under market capitalism. Hence, a relatively peaceful change.

    In most Arab states, “ruling families ‘own’ the state… to all intents and purposes, they will fight to the last soldier in their praetorian guard in order to preserve their reign”. According to Gilbert, these states are run by an interlocking trilateral ‘power elite’ – consisting of military and political institutions, and the state bourgeoisie – whereby every segment of the power elite is bent upon fiercely defending its access to the state, the main source of privileges and profits.

    This also explains the different trajectory of the Arab Spring in Tunisia/Egypt and Libya/Syria. In the former cases, the states were dominated by institutions. In the latter, the states had become family fiefdoms. In Tunisia/Egypt, institutions let go of individuals (Mubarak and Ben Ali) when they became liabilities in order to preserve institutional integrity.

    The second factor that catalysed the mutation of the ‘Arab Spring’ into an ‘Arab Winter’, claims Achcar, was a situation of: “one revolution: two counter-revolutions’. In this equation, the ancienregimes constituted one counter-revolution while the other was such regional powers as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Iran. This regional dimension of counter-revolution has translated into the ascendency of Islamic fundamentalism lavishly bankrolled by these three countries. A mutual rivalry between these three patrons of Islamic fundamentalism further complicated the situation leading to “the highly convoluted development of the Arab revolutionary crisis, compared to which most other revolutionary upheavals in history look rather uncomplicated”.

    Syria epitomises these complexities where a ‘secular and socialist’ (at least an original self-designation) Ba’athist regime has been shored up by Iranian Ayatollahs and the Hezbollah, apparently on sectarian grounds.

    The Alawite Assad regime, in turn, has facilitated the rise of Isis, a fanatical, anti-Shia force targeting Iraq – also Tehran’s ally since 2005. In fact, Isis has been Syria’s “preferred enemy”, says Achcar. Ironically, Isis is also a thorn on the side of the Saudis. Consequently, the House of Saud has re-adopted its estranged violent child: Al-Qaeda – at least, in Syria.

    The Kurdish resistance against Isis and their control of Rojava forced Turkey to support Isis, at least tacitly and temporarily. Ankara, along with Doha, has been supporting the Muslim Brotherhood while the Syrian Brotherhood and Isis have been at daggers drawn. However, Erdogan – under US pressure – also facilitated the Kurdish resistance (another complex story) against Isis.

    The irony is that Assad and allies (Russia, Iran, Hezbollah) as well as their rivals (Saudis, France, the US, Turkey) have been pounding Syria in the name of fighting Isis (Achcar explores these paradoxes). However, none of them has seriously engaged Isis. In the process, an unbearably heavy price has been paid by the Syrian people. Achcar describes it as the “abandonment of [the] Syrian people”.

    First, the Syrian people have been abandoned by the superpowers, notably the US. Achcar shows that the Syrian resistance, often ridiculed by knee-jerk ‘anti-imperialists’ as a US proxy, has been abandoned by Washington. The US policy, argues Achcar, has been guided by two concerns: the Iraq experience and Israel.

    In view of its Iraq misadventure, Washington single-mindedly pursued a Yemen-like solution in Syria. The idea was to retain the Ba’athist apparatus minus Assad. This policy not only proved to be counter-productive, but also inflicted a heavy toll on the Syrian masses. Second, Washington did not adequately arm the resistance in view of Israeli security; weapons capable of downing Assad’s jets might tomorrow be deployed to hunt down Israeli jets.

    Achcar also points out the abandonment of the Syrian people by the knee-jerk ‘anti-imperialists’. “When disastrous failures of imperialism happen at the cost of terrible human tragedies, there can be no schadenfreude from a truly humanist anti-imperialist perspective”. Before pointing out the confused silence of these anti-imperialists over US support for Kurdish forces, he wonders why the US arming the Syrian opposition is so harshly judged. Is it that anti-imperialists want US support only when their favourite troops are leading the fight?

    For the attention of puritan ‘anti-imperialists’ in the Muslim world, this reviewer would also suggest they pay keen attention to the role of brotherly Muslim countries (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar), assiduously documented by Achcar, in destroying Syria (and Libya). Likewise, for the attention of secular supporters of the Assad regime, Achcar has sizeable evidence not only on the murderous character of the Assad regime but also on how the primary responsibility for the Syrian tragedy lies with Bashar. The Ba’athist regime turned a peaceful intifada into a military affair. It also orchestrated inhuman hunger-sieges and massacres. For instance, of 56 sectarian massacres, 49 were conducted by the Ba’athist regime and its allies.

    In comparison, the march from Tahrir Square to the presidential palace in Egypt was a cakewalk. The relatively peaceful overthrow of the Egyptian pharaoh five years ago did not owe to any Gandhian inclinations he espoused. As mentioned above: unlike Syria and Libya, Egypt is not owned by a family. Rather, an institution (the military) dominates the state.

    When Mubarak became a liability, he was sent packing. The military stepped back, only to recuperate and stage a comeback. While Achcar analyses the Morsi government’s disastrous policies as well as the disastrous role of the Egyptian Left in facilitating-by-default the counter-revolution, what might intrigue is the performance of Brother Morsi as president.

    The Brotherhood’s apologists have been casting Morsi as an anti-Zionist and anti-American leader, overthrown unjustly through Washington’s machinations. Here is a brotherly chutzpah: On becoming president, Morsi wrote to his “great and dear friend” Shimon Peres to express his “strong desire to develop the affectionate relations that fortunately bind our two countries”, while wishing Israel “prosperity”.

    Originally posted here

  • Black Lives over Broken Windows

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    When protesters developed a platform to end police violence in the wake of the 2014 police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the first of their 10 demands was to end “broken windows” policing, the law enforcement paradigm marked by aggressive policing of minor offenses and heavy police presence in low-income Black communities.1

    Broken windows policing is what led Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson to approach Michael Brown simply for walking in the middle of the street. It is what motivated police to repeatedly harass Eric Garner, a 43-year-old Staten Island resident who was killed earlier that summer by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo, using a banned police chokehold during an encounter initiated over Garner’s alleged sale of loose cigarettes. And in 2015 it was what brought Baltimore police into contact with Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old Baltimore man who was initially stopped while allegedly fleeing from police officers in his low-income Black community—and who died after his spinal cord was severed while he was in police custody.

    The role of broken windows policing in each death quickly became the focus of protesters from the Black Lives Matter movement and other civil rights advocates. Just days after Brown’s death, national president of the NAACP Cornell William Brooks said, “The death of Michael Brown strikes me as the latest, sad chapter in an ongoing national narrative about a form of policing, broken windows policing, that is simply not right for the country.”2 In New York City, This Stops Today—an ad hoc coalition taking its name from Eric Garner’s words on the day he died to the officers who had repeatedly harassed him—made ending broken windows one of their 11 demands. (The 11 demands were issued in honor of the 11 times that Garner was seen on video telling the officers who killed him, “I can’t breathe.”3)

    Regrouping for day 3 of the week of outrage surrounding the denial of justice for Eric Garner on December 10, 2016. Source: hollow sidewalks License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

    Regrouping for day 3 of the week of outrage surrounding the denial of justice for Eric Garner on December 10, 2016. Source: hollow sidewalks License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

    Broken windows policing is not only all too often lethal, it also contributes to the use of excessive and illegal force in the context of the most mundane police encounters. It led a New York City officer to put Rosan Miller, a seven-months pregnant Black woman initially approached for grilling outside her home, into the same banned chokehold that had led to Garner’s death just a few weeks before.4 It was the excuse for another officer to slam Stephanie Maldonado to the ground in New York City’s West Village for “jaywalking” like Mike Brown.5 It was what led police to arrest Duanna Johnson, a Black transgender woman, for prostitution—one focus of broken windows policing—while walking down a street in Memphis, Tennessee, in 2008, only to beat her bloody with metal handcuffs at the police station in an incident captured on video because she refused to answer to “faggot.”6 Broken windows policing also created opportunities for recently convicted Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holzclaw to stop women as they walked down the street to inquire as to what they were doing and where they were going, thus facilitating his sexual harassment, assault, and rape of 13 Black women and girls.7

    THE “FOLK” ORIGINS OF BROKEN WINDOWS

    What does broken windows policing have to do with the Right? In part, the answer lies in where it came from: an outgrowth of the conservative “law and order” agendas of the early 1980s. Neoconservatives George Kelling and James Q. Wilson outlined the theory underlying broken windows policing in a 1982 Atlantic Quarterly article.  8 Kelling is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and Wilson, before his death in 2012, was a board member at the American Enterprise Institute, both right-wing think tanks.9 According to Wilson and his colleagues, liberal concessions to civil rights movements and protest cultures of the 1960s and ‘70s were significant contributing factors to the urban chaos broken windows policing purports to address.10 In 1985 Wilson co-wrote a book, Crime and Human Nature, with Richard J. Herrnstein, a co-author of The Bell Curve, which notoriously advanced a theory of racial differences in intelligence. Wilson’s own 1975 book, Thinking About Crime, argued that crime is the product of individual and social “predispositions,” rather than socioeconomic conditions. 11 His theories echoed those of his mentor, Edward Banfield, who theorized about a “culture of poverty,” which Wilson believed required a punitive response,12 and those of The Bell Curve’s other co-author, Charles Murray, whose arguments suggest that crime is the result of individual mental and moral deficiencies.13 Wilson decried single parenthood, claiming “illegitimacy was eroding the nation’s values,”14 and, as Pam Chamberlain wrote in PRA’s Defending Justice: An Activist Resource Kit, argued for “returning to a path where religion is influential and where families remain intact.”15

    New York City became the first municipality to aggressively implement broken windows policing theories rooted in these right-wing intellectual traditions in the early 1990s. Under the leadership of former Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and bolstered by right-wing media like the New York Post and right-wing think tanks like the Manhattan Institute, the city put Kelling and Wilson’s theories into practice with an internal police memorandum, “Reclaiming the Public Spaces of New York,” citing both the pair’s Atlantic article and the infamous 1965 Moynihan Report, which blamed social dysfunction on Black families, and particularly, Black mothers.16

    Rally outside of the Manhattan Institute on December 10, 2014. Source: hollow sidewalks License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

    Rally outside of the Manhattan Institute on December 10, 2014. Source: hollow sidewalks License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

    The broken windows theory, brilliantly summarized in a recent video created by Molly Crabapple,17 goes something like this: if signs of disorder—like broken windows—and minor offenses—like loitering, panhandling, and graffiti—are left unchecked, then it’s only a matter of time before a community descends into chaos and violence. According to Kelling and Wilson, the only way to prevent this from happening is through aggressive enforcement and prosecution of minor offenses. At its core, broken windows relies on fear-mongering, stoked by familiar right-wing themes about the need for increased “security” and a compulsion to root out certain groups of people as embodied threats to a particular way of life.

    But even Kelling and Wilson acknowledged back in 1982 that it is “not inevitable that serious crime will flourish or violent attacks on strangers will occur” if signs of disorder are left unchecked. Indeed, the two wrote that their entire premise is admittedly drawn from what they themselves call “folk wisdom” rather than objective data, based on the belief that perceived disorder somehow renders an area more “vulnerable to criminal invasion” such that “drugs will change hands, prostitutes will solicit, and cars will be stripped.”18 It’s a theory, they implicitly admitted, based more on people’s fears and beliefs than on hard evidence.

    The theory later evolved to advance the premise that individuals who commit minor offenses—like fare evasion in public transit—will, if not caught and punished, eventually commit more serious offenses: a sort of slippery slope of criminality. The new logic of broken windows, according to Tanya Erzen, a scholar of American conservatism, writing in Zero Tolerance: Quality of Life and the New Police Brutality in New York City, is that “graffiti taggers, turnstile jumpers and kids in a public park are either already criminals, or simply criminals in the making.”19

    Even the theory’s biggest proponent, New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton—who spearheaded its implementation in New York City under Mayor Giuliani, actively promoted its spread around the country both as a consultant and as Los Angeles Police Commissioner, and pursued it with renewed vigor in his second tenure in New York City under current Mayor Bill de Blasio—concedes that neither premise has ever been conclusively proven.20 In fact, several studies undermine the theory’s claims.21 In a comprehensive review of the literature and a summary of his own research, Columbia law professor Bernard Harcourt concludes that, “Taken together, the wealth of research provides no support for a simple disorder-crime relationship as hypothesized by Wilson and Kelling in their broken-windows theory…. What I have come to believe is that the broken windows theory is really window dressing, and it masks or hides more profound processes of real estate development and wealth redistribution.”22

    Like so many policies of the Right, broken windows policing is rooted in fear: fear of poverty, fear of youth, fear of unregulated sexuality and gender nonconformity, and deeply, at its core, a fear of Blackness.

    Like so many policies of the Right, broken windows policing is rooted in fear: fear of poverty, fear of youth, fear of unregulated sexuality and gender nonconformity, and deeply, at its core, a fear of Blackness. According to George Kelling’s recent defense of the theory in Politico, published a year after Michael Brown’s death, “The goal is to reduce the level of disorder in public spaces so that citizens feel safe, are able to use them, and businesses thrive.”23 Kelling concedes that it is, in essence, an approach based on public perception—that is, on feelings—rather than proof. In the end, fear—of crime, yes, but also, as the original article explains, of “being bothered by disorderly people,” like panhandlers, “addicts” or people living with mental illness—is the moving force behind the theory.24 As Bratton once put it, “Aggressive panhandling, squeegee cleaners, street prostitution, ‘boombox cars,’ public drunkenness, reckless bicyclists, and graffiti have added to the sense that the entire public environment is a threatening place.”25

    Although not explicitly stated, given that the communities described in Kelling and Wilson’s original article and others that followed are Black, it is clear that the “disorderly people,” the people driving “boombox cars,” and the graffiti taggers are also imagined as Black. As gentrification of New York City proceeded through the 1990s, “disorderly people” came to mean those displaced into public spaces in the context of neoliberal devolution and cuts to social programs.26 In other words, broken windows policing isn’t about reducing crime, it’s about assuaging white fear of poor people, Black people, and people of color—no matter how irrational or racialized.*

    FROM BLACK CODES TO BROKEN WINDOWS

    Scratching the surface of broken windows policing reveals that, in the end, the paradigm is simply a repackaged and sanitized version of the ways age-old “vagrancy” laws were enforced. These laws were explicitly created to criminalize and control the movements of people deemed undesirable throughout U.S. history: Indigenous peoples, formerly enslaved people of African descent, immigrants, women, and homeless and poor people. In his recent defense of broken windows, Kelling himself directly acknowledged the lineage, stating in reference to his 1982 essay, “Given the subject of our article, the Black Codes—vague loitering and vagrancy laws passed in the South immediately after the Civil War—were of special concern for us. Under these laws police arrested African Americans for minor offenses and, when they could not pay the fines, courts committed them to involuntary labor on farms—in a sense, extending slavery for many into the 20th century.”27 Without offering a means of distinguishing present-day broken windows policing from these practices, Kelling simply submits that he and Wilson were just arguing for “doing a better job at maintaining order.”28

    The question though, is whose order? In their 1982 article, Kelling and Wilson acknowledge that there are “no universal standards…to settle arguments over disorder…” and that charges of being a “suspicious person” or of vagrancy have “scarcely any legal meaning.”29 Ultimately, they wrote, “These charges exist…because [society] wants an officer to have the legal tools to remove undesirable persons from a neighborhood when informal efforts to preserve order in the streets have failed.”30

    This is to say that, since its inception, broken windows policing has self-consciously been about promoting a particular type of community, maintaining particular structural relations of power, and policing the borders of “desirability.” Delving deeper into its theoretical premise, a desirable community, as described by Wilson and Kelling, is one of “families who care for their homes, mind each other’s children, and confidently frown on intruders.”31 Broken windows policing is posited as the last bulwark against a “frightening jungle”—a term fraught with racial meaning—in which “unattached adults”—that is, single people—replace traditional families, where teenagers gather in front of the corner store, litter abounds, and panhandlers stalk pedestrians.32 In this framework, conservative values with deep racial overtones ultimately drive how an individual’s presence will be perceived and valued,33 and promote disregard for youth, adults living outside of hetero-patriarchal families, and low-income and homeless people who live in this idealized community.34

    WHOSE QUALITY OF LIFE?

    Building in New York City with the words, "stop and frisk. just another quality of life offense" on March 27, 2014. Source: carnagenyc. License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/

    Building in New York City with the words, “stop and frisk. just another quality of life offense” seen on March 27, 2014. Source: carnagenyc. License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/

    Key to implementing broken windows policing is the proliferation of “quality of life” regulations, which criminalize an ever-expanding range of activities in public spaces, including standing or walking (recast as “loitering”), sitting, lying down, sleeping, eating, drinking, urinating, making noise, and approaching strangers, as well as a number of vaguer offenses, such as engaging in “disorderly” or “lewd” conduct. This broad range of potential offenses gives police almost unlimited license to stop, ticket, and arrest. According to one researcher, enforcement of such low-level offenses has become the “most common point of contact between the public and the criminal justice system.”35

    Of course, what conduct is deemed “disorderly” or “lewd” is more often than not in the eye of the beholder, informed by deeply racialized and gendered perceptions. Where offenses are more specific, they criminalize activities so common they can’t be enforced at all times against all people. When I speak publicly about broken windows policing, I often ask how many members of the audience have ever fallen asleep on a train or ridden a bicycle on a sidewalk at some point in their lives. Dozens of hands shoot up. When I ask how many have ever been ticketed or arrested for it, almost all hands come down—that is, unless I am at a drop-in center for homeless youth or adults, or in a low-income Black neighborhood. There, many hands remain in the air.

    As former Yale law professor Charles Reich notes, “Laws that are widely violated…especially lend themselves to selective and arbitrary enforcement.”36 As a result, both vague and specific “quality of life” offenses are selectively enforced in particular neighborhoods and communities, or against particular people, by officers wielding an extraordinary amount of discretion, largely unrestrained by constitutional protections. As legal scholar Dorothy Roberts notes in “Race, Vagueness, and the Social Meaning of Order-Maintenance Policing,” over the last several decades, conservative commentators have called for a relaxation of legal doctrines disfavoring vague offenses and reining in police discretion in the name of “law and order” agendas.37

    COMMUNITIES IN THE CROSSHAIRS

    Given all of this, it’s easy to predict who gets targeted by broken windows policing. Despite proponents’ contention that the approach targets specific behaviors, not specific people, the article on which the theory is premised explicitly names particular types of people—youth, homeless people, people perceived to be engaged in prostitution—as embodied signs of disorder.38 According to Pete White of Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN), a community organization that has been fighting the effects of broken windows policing on Los Angeles’ homeless population for decades, the inspirations for Kelling and Wilson’s 1982 article were much more explicit about the racial and gender make up of signs of neighborhood disorder: “young Black men, young women in short shorts hanging out on corners, interracial couples, and gay folks.”39 The result: dramatically increased frequency and intensity of police interactions with Black and Brown youth, low-income and homeless people, public housing residents, people who are—or who are perceived to be—engaged in street-based prostitution, street vendors (many of whom are immigrants), and anyone else who is hyper-visible in public spaces, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and gender nonconforming people.

    The results are striking. Broken windows policing has contributed to widespread criminalization of Black youth in New York City under a range of offenses, including disorderly conduct, unreasonable noise, turnstile jumping, performing on the subway, riding a bike on the sidewalk, and being in a city park after dark. Between 2001 and 2013, 81 percent of the 7.3 million people charged in the city with a violation were Black or Brown. 40  In 2015 the greatest number of arrests—29,198—were for not paying the $2.75 fare on city subways; 92 percent of those arrests were of people of color.41 In Park Slope, a Brooklyn neighborhood heavily populated by white families, police issue an average of eight tickets a year for riding bicycles on the sidewalk. In Bedford-Stuyvesant, a gentrifying but still predominantly Black community, police issue more than 2,000 a year.42 Eighty-five percent of summonses issued for “open container” violations in Brooklyn are issued to Black and Brown people, even as countless white revelers spill onto the sidewalks of the city on any given evening to smoke a cigarette outside a bar or art gallery while sipping on an alcoholic beverage, or pop open a bottle of bubbly to accompany a symphony in the park, without any consequence whatsoever. One judge presiding over summons court in New York City said he had no memory of having ever adjudicated an open container ticket given to a white person.43

    Contrary to Kelling’s recent defense of his broken windows theory, the results of this approach are not an error of application, but rather deeply embedded in the theory itself. In fact, the authors asked themselves in 1982, “how do we ensure that age or skin color or national origin or harmless mannerisms will not also become the basis for distinguishing the undesirable from the desirable?”44 Their answer was that they were not confident that there was one—except that police must understand the outer limits of their discretion to be that their role is “not to maintain racial or ethnic purity of a neighborhood,” only to regulate behavior.45 The statistics above suggest that officers are, in fact, exercising their discretion—just in racially discriminatory ways.

    CONSEQUENCES

    The consequences for those targeted are far from minimal. Broken windows policing not only places Black lives at risk of lethal and excessive force, as well as sexual harassment, assault, and extortion in exchange for avoiding a ticket or arrest, it also subjects Black people to the daily indignity of being stopped and questioned in their own communities, being ordered to put their hands on the wall and spread their legs to be frisked in front of their neighbors, and sometimes spending 24 hours wending their way through police vans, precincts, and central booking pens between arrest and arraignment. Even if they simply receive a summons, they are still required to spend at least one day in court defending themselves against minor charges, to pay exorbitant fines and criminal court fees, and to comply with community service and other mandates imposed on people convicted of offenses as minor as spitting or littering.

    Black people of all genders and sexualities come within the crosshairs of broken windows policing. In fact, one of the less frequently discussed realities is that it facilitates racialized policing of gender and sexuality.46 According to Tanya Erzen, broken windows policing “enables officers to act upon racial and gender biases they may have when they enter the police department—under the guise of enforcement of ‘unified guidelines.’”47 All too often, officers read actual or perceived gender disjuncture as inherently out of order, resulting in stops, harassments, and arrests of transgender, gender nonconforming, and queer people of color—along with anyone perceived to deviate from racialized “rules” of gender or sexuality—for “disorderly” or “lewd” conduct offenses.48 Stereotypes framing gender nonconforming people as inherently violent and deviant also lead gender nonconforming young women to be profiled and targeted in the context of “gang policing.”49

    Broken windows policing is also a driving force behind aggressive policing of street-based prostitution, which has been documented to have racially disparate impacts. These are rooted both in profiling of Black women and women of color—trans and not trans—as being engaged in prostitution based on age-old stereotypes, and also in the makeup of sex work which, like every other industry, concentrates Black women and transgender people in its most visible and risky sectors (such as street-based prostitution, which more Black women are pushed into, versus legal strip clubs, which frequently discriminate against women of color).50 Gay and gender nonconforming men, for their part, are profiled and discriminatorily targeted for enforcement of lewd conduct laws in public bathrooms and public parks. The broad discretion allowed in enforcement is fueled by perceptions of Black and Brown men—and particularly those who are gender nonconforming or perceived to be queer—as hypersexual uncontrolled manifestations of sexual deviance, with predictably racially disparate impacts.51

    BLACK LIVES OVER BROKEN WINDOWS

    Even as the broken windows theory trades in fear of Black people, it claims the mantle of protecting Black communities seeking more safety, and thereby, protecting Black lives.52 Heather MacDonald of the right-wing Manhattan Institute twists the logic of Black Lives Matter to argue that broken windows policing “has saved thousands of black lives, brought lawful commerce and jobs to once drug-infested neighborhoods and allowed millions to go about their daily lives without fear.”53

    Right-wing commentators claiming to be concerned with the welfare of Black communities are not alone. Progressives like David Thacher of the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy in Michigan, writing in a blog for The Marshall Project, have critiqued Campaign Zero’s call for an end to broken windows policing, pointing to Black communities’ right to safety and safe public spaces.54 Thacher, like Kelling, acknowledges the pitfalls of enforcing vague offenses like “disorderly conduct,” as well as more specific ones like bans on skateboarding or public drinking, which are not enforced in white suburbs as they are in Black communities. He acknowledges that, “As long as modern police forces have been around, they have used disorderly conduct statutes and many other public order rules to investigate suspicious and unpopular people in circumstances when doing so overtly would be forbidden,” noting that “the Ferguson Police Department’s intensive use of a city code provision regulating a pedestrian’s ‘manner of walking in the roadway’ to run warrant checks and question suspicious people is only one of many examples.”55 Although he argues for a kinder, gentler form of broken windows in the interests of Black community safety, Thacher’s arguments in fact support the notion that it is bound to produce the same results.56 Unfortunately, that hasn’t stopped some community leaders, legislators, and policymakers from continuing to promote and invest in this flawed approach in the name of safety for Black and Brown communities.

    The Black Youth Project 100's 2014 report "Agenda to Keep us Safe." Source: http://byp100.org

    The Black Youth Project 100’s 2014 report “Agenda to Keep us Safe.” Source: http://byp100.org

    Increasingly though, Black communities across the country are speaking for themselves, loudly and clearly, demanding safety from all forms of violence—including the violence of profiling, discriminatory enforcement, and police violence intrinsic to broken windows policing. They are resisting the false choices presented by broken windows proponents, demanding both authentic safety and an end to police violence, harassment, and surveillance, along with respect for rights and dignity. As the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement of New York City stated in the wake of Eric Garner’s killing, the “’broken windows’ philosophy of policing, which purports that focusing resources on the most minor violations will somehow prevent larger ones, has consistently resulted in our rights being violated.”57 They emphatically state that safety cannot come at the price of daily harassment, violation, and the taking of Black lives.

    Black voices and communities are articulating their own visions of safety through Black Youth Project 100’s Agenda to Keep us Safe 58 and Agenda to Build Black Futures, Campaign Zero, and demands articulated by Black Lives Matter59 and Ferguson Action.60 What ties many of these agendas together is the notion that the best strategy to promote safety in Black communities is to divest from policing and punishment and instead invest in and support Black communities, leaving no one behind.  Together, they issue a clarion call to combat and dismantle systems of structural discrimination that foster violence while limiting opportunities and life chances of Black people—including “broken windows” policing.

    *Editor’s note: PRA’s convention is to capitalize both Black and White, to emphasize that both are constructed categories. At the request of the author, this article departs from that convention.

    1 Campaign Zero, www.joincampaignzero.org (last visited January 18, 2016).

    2 Tierney Sneed, “From Ferguson to Staten Island, Questions about Broken Windows Policing,” U.S. News & World Report, August 14, 2014, http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/08/14/michael-brown-eric-garner-deaths-add-scrutiny-to-broken-windows-policing.

    3 “About #ThisStopsToday,” This Stops Today, http://www.thisstopstoday.org/aboutus/ (last visited April 5, 2016).

    4 Emily Thomas, “Pregnant Woman Allegedly Put in Chokehold by NYPD Officer,” Huffington Post, July 28, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/28/pregnant-woman-chokehold-nypd-rosan-miller_n_5628306.html.

    5 Jim Hoffer, “Investigation: Woman Claims Brutality Against NYPD Officer,” Eyewitness News, ABC 7 NY (New York, NY: WABC – TV, August 1, 2014). Available at: http://abc7ny.com/news/investigation-woman-claims-police-brutality-against-nypd-officer/229978/ (last visited January 18, 2016).

    6 Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock, Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011).

    7 Jessica Testa, “The 13 Black Women Who Accused a Cop of Sexual Assault, In Their Own Words,” BuzzFeed, December 10, 2015, https://www.buzzfeed.com/jtes/daniel-holtzclaw-women-in-their-ow.

    8 George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson, “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety,” The Atlantic, March 1982, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/03/broken-windows/304465/.

    9 Sam Roberts, “Author of ‘Broken Windows’ Policing Defends His Theory,” New York Times, August 10, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/nyregion/author-of-broken-windows-policing-defends-his-theory.html; Matt Schudel, “James Q. Wilson, scholar identified with ‘broken-windows’ theory of crime prevention, dies at 80,” Washington Post, March 2, 2012, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/james-q-wilson-scholar-identified-with-broken-windows-theory-of-crime-prevention-dies-at-80/2012/03/02/gIQA2eHynR_story.html.

    10 Alex Vitale, “The Neoconservative Roots of the Broken Windows Theory,” Gotham Gazette, August 1, 2014, http://www.gothamgazette.com/index.php/opinion/5199-neoconservative-roots-broken-windows-policing-theory-nypd-bratton-vitale.

    11 Matt Schudel, supra note 9.

    12 Alex Vitale, supra note 10.

    13 Jacob Ertel, “Broken Windows, Workfare, and the Battle for Public Space in Giuliani’s New York,” Cyrano’s Journal, January 8, 2015, http://www.cjournal.info/2015/01/08/broken-windows-workfare-and-the-battle-for-public-space-in-giulianis-new-york-2/.

    14 Matt Schudel, supra note 9.

    15 Pam Chamberlain, “James Q. Wilson: A Dominant Figure Among Conservative Crime Theorists,” in Defending Justice: An Activist Resource Kit, ed. Palak Shah, (Political Research Associates, 2005), 62. Available at: http://www.politicalresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2012/12/Defending-Justice.pdf (last visited April 4, 2016).

    16 Rudolph W. Giuliani and William J. Bratton, Police Strategy No. 5: Reclaiming the Public Spaces of New York, July 6, 1994. Available at: http://marijuana-arrests.com/docs/Bratton-blueprint-1994–Reclaiming-the-public-spaces-of-NY.pdf (last visited April 4, 2016).

    17 Molly Crabapple, “How Broken Windows Policing Harms People of Color,” YouTube video, posted by Fusion, February 3, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXI1QJRqPD8, (last visited January 17, 2016).

    18 Kelling and Wilson, supra note 8.

    19 Tanya Erzen, “Turnstile Jumpers and Broken Windows: Policing Disorder in New York City,” in Zero Tolerance: Quality of Life and the New Police Brutality in New York City, 19-49, eds. Andrea McArdle and Tanya Erzen, (New York: NYU Press, 2001).

    20 Ken Auletta, “Fixing Broken Windows,” The New Yorker, September 7, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/07/fixing-broken-windows.

    21 Randall Shelden, “Assessing ‘Broken Windows’: A Brief Critique,” Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, April 2004, http://www.cjcj.org/uploads/cjcj/documents/broken.pdf; Ken Auletta, “Fixing Broken Windows,” The New Yorker, September 7, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/07/fixing-broken-windows; K. Babe Howell, “Broken Lives from Broken Windows: The Hidden Costs of Aggressive Order-Maintenance Policing,” N.Y.U. Review of Law & Social Change, vol. 33 (2009): 271, 274; William Harms, “Study Conducted in Chicago Neighborhoods Calls ‘Broken Windows’ Theory into Question,” University of Chicago Chronicle, vol. 19, no. 7 (January 6, 2000).

    22 Bernard E. Harcourt, “Punitive Preventive Justice: A Critique” (University of Chicago Public Law & Legal Theory Working Paper No. 386 / Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Working Paper No. 599, 2012). Available at: http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/law_and_economics/401/ (last visited January 15, 2016).

    23 George Kelling, “Don’t Blame My Broken Windows Theory for Poor Policing,” Politico Magazine, August 11, 2015, http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/broken-windows-theory-poor-policing-ferguson-kelling-121268.

    24 Kelling and Wilson, supra note 8.

    25 Rudolph W. Giuliani and William J. Bratton, supra note 16.

    26 Jacob Ertel, supra note 13.

    27 George Kelling, supra note 22.

    28 Ibid.

    29 Kelling and Wilson, supra note 8.

    30 Ibid.

    31 Ibid.

    32 Ibid.

    33 Dayo F. Gore, Tamara Jones, Joo-Hyun Kang, “Organizing at the Intersections: A Roundtable Discussion of Police Brutality Through the Lens of Race, Class, and Sexual Identities,” in Zero Tolerance: Quality of Life and the New Police Brutality in New York City, 19-49, eds. Andrea McArdle and Tanya Erzen, (New York: NYU Press, 2001).

    34 Erzen, supra note 19.

    35 K. Babe Howell, supra note 20.

    36 Charles Reich, qtd. in: Phillip Beatty, Amanda Petteruti, and Jason Ziedenberg, The Vortex: The Concentrated Racial Impact of Drug Imprisonment and the Characteristics of Punitive Counties (Washington, D.C.: Justice Policy Institute, 2007), 14.

    37 Dorothy E. Roberts, “Foreword: Race, Vagueness, and the Social Meaning of Order-Maintenance Policing,” Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology 89, no. 3 (1999), 775, 777-78.

    38 George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson, supra note 8.

    39 Pete White, Los Angeles Community Action Network, presentation at preconference convening held in conjunction with U.C.L.A. Critical Race Studies Symposium, Los Angeles, CA, October 17, 2015.

    40 Sarah Ryley, Laura Bult, Dareh Gregorian, “Daily News analysis finds racial disparities in summonses for minor violations in ‘broken windows’ policing,” New York Daily News, August 4, 2014, http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/summons-broken-windows-racial-disparity-garner-article-1.1890567.

    41 Jeremy Berke, “REPORT: The NYPD Makes The Most Arrests for a $2.75 Crime,” Business Insider, May 10, 2016, http://www.businessinsider.com/nypd-farebeating-arrests-2016-5.

    42 Christopher Mathias, “This is What Broken Windows Policing Looks Like,” Huffington Post, October 9, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/broken-windows-policing-new-york_us_5617f428e4b0082030a2573f.

    43 Ibid.

    44 Kelling and Wilson, supra note 8.

    45 Ibid.

    46 Mogul et al., supra n. 6.

    47 Mogul, et al., supra n. 6; Tanya Erzen, supra note 19.

    48 Mogul, et al., supra n. 6.

    49 Amnesty International, Stonewalled: Police Abuse and Misconduct Against LGBT People in the United States, AMR 51/122/2005 (2005).

    50 See e.g., Shana Judge and Mariah Wood, “Racial Disparities in Enforcement of Prostitution Laws,” APPAM, November 6, 2014, https://appam.confex.com/appam/2014/webprogram/Paper11163.html; Noah Berlatsky, “Black Women Profiled as Prostitutes in NYC,” Reason, October 1, 2014, http://reason.com/archives/2014/10/01/nypd-profiles-sex-workers-too.

    51 Mogul, et al., supra n. 6.

    52 Ibid.

    53 Heather Mac Donald, “The New Nationwide Crime Wave,” Wall Street Journal, May 29, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-nationwide-crime-wave-1432938425.

    54 David Thacher, “Don’t End Broken Windows Policing, Fix It,” The Marshall Project, September 9, 2015, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/09/09/don-t-end-broken-windows-policing-fix-it.

    55 Ibid.

    56 Ibid.

    57 Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, “Statement on the Murder of Eric Garner by the NYPD,” July 19, 2014, http://mxgm.org/malcolm-x-grassroots-statement-on-the-murder-of-eric-garner-by-the-nypd/.

    58 Terrance Laney and Janaé Bonsu, Agenda to Keep us Safe, Black Youth Project 100, September 2014,  http://byp100.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/BYP100-Agenda-to-Keep-Us-Safe-AKTUS.pdf; Black Youth Project 100, “BYP100 Announces Release of the Agenda to Build Black Futures,” January 15, 2016,  http://byp100.org/bbf/.

    59 Black Lives Matter, Guiding Principleshttp://blacklivesmatter.com/guiding-principles/, (last visited January 18, 2016).

    60 Ferguson Action, Our Vision for a New Americahttp://fergusonaction.com/demands/, (last visited January 18, 2016).

    – See more at: http://www.politicalresearch.org/2016/07/06/black-lives-over-broken-windows-challenging-the-policing-paradigm-rooted-in-right-wing-folk-wisdom/#sthash.PArsDxJ7.In9lBuGP.dpuf

    Originally posted here

  • The Democratic Wager: why the Left must support the Syrian Revolution

    Image

    Jules Alford and Andy Wilson (eds.) Khiyana. Daesh, the Left and the Unmaking of the Syrian Revolution. Essays by Muhhamad Idrees Ahmad, Javaad Alipoor, Leila Al-Shami, Mark Boothroyd, Joseph Daher and Shiar Neyo, Sam Charles Hamad, Bodour Hassan, Michael Karadjis, Louis Proyect, Eyal Zisser. London: Unkant, 2016. 278 pp.

    The title of this book means “betrayal”: this is an angry book, and is designed to provoke. The articles collected set out the case against the majority of the international left for its failure to support the Syrian Revolution at best, and active support for counterrevolution at worst. The authors seek to explain the reasons for this betrayal, and to skewer the myths that have justified it.

    Mark Boothroyd takes on myths about the Syrian armed resistance. When Cameron made the case for British military intervention against Daesh (ISIS) in autumn 2015, he was mocked for claiming there were 70,000 “moderate” fighters on the ground ready to support the intervention. Precisely the wrong part of Cameron’s claim was attacked. Rather than exposing Cameron’s lie that the Syrian rebels welcomed any imperialist carve-up that would leave Assad in place, most critics replicated Putin’s lie that all of the Syrian rebels are al-Qaeda or Daesh. Mark demolishes both lies in forensic detail.

    Equally painstaking is the delineation of the origins, ideology and material basis of Daesh. Contrary to the conspiracy theories, Saudi Arabia does not fund Daesh: Sam Charles Hamad demonstrates why the ideological kinship between the Gulf state and the new proto-state actually underpins their “irreconcilable antagonisms”. The driving force for Daesh is instead located in the sectarian mass murder carried out by the Assad regime, Iran and Russia, while the Syrian rebels are identified as the only force capable of tackling Daesh or its actual cause.

    A series of articles aid understanding of the form the counter-revolution has taken. Javaad Alipoor argues that internal contradictions within Khomeinism have been turned outwards through Iran’s sustained and brutal intervention in Syria. Budour Hassan demonstrates why the international Palestinian solidarity movement must break with any support for Hezbollah or Assad. Michael Karadjis and Eyal Zisser analyse the class dynamics within Syria that have determined the changing composition of the Ba‘athist regime and its antagonists.

    So how did the left manage to get this so wrong? Sam Charles Hamad’s answer invokes Marx: “the ideology of the ruling classes is at all times the ruling ideology”. Critics of US and UK imperialism have often reproduced Islamophobic “war on terror” tropes about the opposition to Assad in Syria.  The obsession with the idea that the US seeks “regime change” in Syria has lined up many “anti-imperialists” on the side of the status quo actively supported by Russian and Iranian imperialists and tacitly supported by US and UK imperialists. Too often the left are impressed by the way regimes or parties describe themselves: Leila al-Shami and Shiar Neyo critique the way the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) has been romanticised, leading to selective solidarity that obscures the common struggle of Syrian Kurds and Arabs in Kobane.

    Can the left redeem itself? The introduction to this book urge socialists to take the “democratic wager”. The Syrian Revolution is placed in the context of a wave of uprisings for democracy, beginning with the Green Movement in Iran. The authors analyse how neoliberalism has shaped the class dynamics and political character of these uprisings, and follow Neil Davidson in arguing Trotsky’s concept of “permanent revolution” is now obsolete. If the left wishes to be given any hearing, it must “grasp that between democracy and dictatorship it always sides with democracy”: there are harsh words here for those who misinterpreted the 3 July coup that overthrew Morsi’s democratically elected government in Egypt.

    The catalogue of betrayals by left intellectuals, journalists and anti-war organisations itemised here is dispiriting. As Louis Proyect puts it, “It’s a tragedy for the left that so many who came of age in the 1960s like Tariq Ali cannot understand how much the Vietnamese peasant and his Syrian brothers and sisters today have in common.” Through their anger, the authors of this book offer a persuasive account of how this betrayal came about and a demolition of the falsehoods that sustain it.

    Meanwhile, for those provoked to take the democratic wager, Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila al-Shami’s Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution (2016) is an excellent place to learn more about the inspiring examples of self-organisation from below thrown up by the Syrian Revolution.

    ***

    Khiyana includes a longer version of Mark Boothroyd’s article The Syrian Revolution and the Crisis of the Anti-War Movement, which was originally published at: https://rs21.org.uk/2015/09/10/the-syrian-revolution-and-the-crisis-of-the-anti-war-movement/

    Originally posted here.

  • After Dallas: The Struggle Continues

    ImageStatement of the Steering Committee of Solidarity, July 8, 2016

    Last night, during a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas called in response to the killings of Alton Sterling and Philandro Castile, one or more snipers shot at least a dozen police officers. As of now, five are dead, as is at least one suspect in the shooting. Before his death in a standoff with police, the suspect indicated that he was upset with police shootings and with Black Lives Matter, and that he wanted to kill white people. He said he was working alone, and has no connection to Black Lives Matter or any other organized group. Our comrades in Dallas report that protesters were just as surprised and frightened as the police when the shooting started, and at least one protester was shot.

    Despite the increasingly clear lack of connection between the vigilante shooter(s) and organized protest activity, this tragedy will almost certainly lead to increased repression against Black Lives Matter and other Black political organizations in Dallas and around the country, as well as popular racist backlash. Right wing pundits are already issuing thinly veiled calls for retaliation. Likely, Dallas will become a popular excuse to call for a hiatus from protest.

    We face a difficult period ahead, and now more than ever must remain vigilant and committed to struggle. We must continue to be in the streets and to demand justice. Black liberation remains central to all liberation, and Black Lives Matter as an organization and a movement needs the support of everyone committed to the fight for a better world. We urge all activists and revolutionaries to maintain or increase our engagement in this fight, and to be prepared to defend those targeted by backlash and repression.

     

     

  • The Need for A Democratic Transformation of the Criminal Justice and Police System

    Statement of the DSA National Political Committee Statement on the Killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile and the Dallas Police Officers (July 12, 2016)

    Democratic Socialists of America condemns the recent police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. These are the latest in the endless taking of black lives by the excessive and precipitous use of deadly police force. Despite the increased attention to these arbitrary killings by the militant protest of #BlackLivesMatter, the deaths of Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Walter Scott and scores of others go unpunished.

    This devaluing of the lives of African Americans derives from a racist criminal justice system that serves to repress and contain low-income communities rather than promote peace and well-being. The close working relationship between prosecutors and police precludes the impartial investigation and prosecution of police violence. Thus, in addition to greater community control of policing and the demilitarization of police, DSA calls for independent investigation of all uses of lethal police force.

    As an organization committed to nonviolent political action to achieve social justice, DSA also condemns the murder of police in Dallas this past week. This senseless loss of life occurred during a peaceful protest against police brutality and in a city where a relatively integrated police force has taken some useful steps towards community and accountable policing.

    The right wing, however, has used the tragic deaths in Dallas to attack #BlackLivesMatter, a movement committed to militant, but peaceful organizing. DSA is committed to working as allies of #BlackLivesMatter and others fighting for racial equality, in part because a divided working class is an already defeated working class. We believe that people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds must understand their role in a white supremacist, capitalist system and build solidarity across their differences, but that white progressives have a particular responsibility to combat nativist and racist political movements that justify current police practices as necessary to protect “blue lives.”

    A truly democratically controlled criminal justice system should promote peace and justice, not arbitrary violence. Many matters now handled by police, such as drug use and community disputes, are best handled by mental health professionals and community-based mediation. When necessary to protect human life, police intervention must be as restrained as possible, with the use of firearms as an absolute last resort. In many societies that have more practical and effective gun policies than our own, most police do not carry firearms. Stronger gun control policies, as well as severe restrictions on police use of firearms, must be part of any restructuring of the role of police in our society.

    The United States can only achieve democratic forms of peacekeeping and dispute resolution if we comprehend the historic role of the police in reinforcing forms of racial and class domination.  Armed and professional police forces arose in the United States to capture fugitive slaves and to repress striking workers. Thus, the struggle for a democratic judicial and criminal justice system is integrally tied to the fight for racial, gender, and class equality. Mass incarceration and repressive policing cannot redress the absence of economic and educational opportunities that beset inner cities and increasingly inner suburbs and deindustrialized small towns. Nothing short of radical democratic change can alter a criminal justice system that works to perpetuate American apartheid.

  • Why Mexico's teachers are fighting: CNTE's program

    An activist/scholar in the Mexican teachers union democratic opposition (CNTE) has asked me to publicize this statement (copied below).  It explains the demands the movement is making on the government and fleshes out the short but excellent update on The Real News about the struggle.  As this statement shows, CNTE and its supporters  are struggling about far more than their jobs. They are risking their lives to demand a democratic, equitable, liberatory system of public education for all of Mexico's people.

    Lois Weiner

    Image

    The National Education Workers Coordinator has always claimed our disposition to an open and frank dialogue for the resolution of our demands. In these hard times for our homeland, it is our conviction to contribute in order to make the government and teachers´ conflict, derived from the Education Reform, find ways of solution.

    The amendments to the 3rd and 73rd articles, which give contents to the Education Reform, counteract other articles of the Mexican United States´ Political Constitution. It is not from stubbornness that the National Education Workers Coordinator rejects this reform –even more needless to say that our political action in the streets is not our way of acting and living.

    For over three years, we have shown the pedagogical inconsistencies of the reform and the assessment it promotes, as well as those of the labor conditions attached to this reform.

    The amendment to the education articles and the enforcement of the related secondary laws flagrantly violate individual and social guarantees[1]. In order to being able to discuss and solve the causes and consequences of the conflict the reform itself must be stopped. The Federal Government has the mechanisms: the Moratorium or Suspension of the Education Reform. This will allow the modification of the articles that violate the workers’ labor rights and the people´s social rights.

    GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

    1. The National Education System, SEN, from the very nucleus of the education process, must mobilize on its orbit the most important actors and social forces from the inside and the outside of Public Education; above all teachers, students, parents, communities and neighborhoods.
    2. The transformation of the National Education System must be based on a humanistic and integral education that substitutes the values of the market with the practice of such values as those which the very 3rd constitutional article claims: democracy, use and care of natural resources, comprehension of national issues, scientific work, best of human coexistence, strengthening and growth of culture, the society’s general interest, equity, fraternity, solidarity, and respect for diversity and as an integrative part of the Constitution: the right to free speech, to dignity in labor, and all human and labor rights without exclusion.
    3. The National Education System shall be available for all inhabitants of the country, no matter how far or small their community be or how huge the number of appliers to schools and institutions in the cities. And this education –creative and for all– is a responsibility of society that the state assumes through public, free and secular education. Education must be for all, at all levels, and it is necessary as well to recover for the curricula the ancient and modern pedagogical lessons which will allow us to offer children and young men and women an in-depth, broad and high-level education; in consequence, textbooks must be transformed, keeping them free of charge.
    4.  The financial effort of the 12 per cent of the GDP for education, in order to grant the widening of infrastructure, equipment and number of teachers for education at all levels.
    5. The National Education System will turn the students into true conscientious citizens who care for the “general interest of society” (3rd Constitutional article). In this sense, the school must be a community that develops in an environment of freedom, in absence of fear, and regulated by the agreements and principles that, in their respective fields, students and teachers build in the classroom, in the school, and in their relationship to their community. But this cannot be afforded as long as a legal structure prevails which establishes that assessment leads to the layoff or classroom segregation of thousands of teachers, which imposes seven new causes for dismissal and, moreover, which conveys the education authority the faculty to start a process for punishment on the mere suspicion that a teacher has committed an irregularity.
    6. Truly autonomous education in such a way that our schools have freedom to, in the framework of a national education, suggest and define how the curricula, the contents, and the pedagogical practices inside and outside the classroom should be.
    7. Substantial improvement of tenths of thousands of schools, supply of enough teachers to multilevel and unitary schools, school breakfasts, utensils, uniforms and footwear, as well as scholarships and books for all school levels.
    8. In the National Education System assessment is from bottom to top. A horizontal assessment made by teachers and students from the very schools and communities, developed as a dialogic exercise in each zone, region and federal entity. An assessment that, while describing the problems, analyzes the factors that provoke them, the remedies that can suit and that collects on the successful experiences of teachers and schools to improve education. For it to be sincere and really teacher-and-student engaging, this assessment must not be punitive or imply labor or administrative sanctions on the teachers.
    9. An Assessment Council to be formed in each school elected by the community, which considers various elements as education funding, the government responsibility in the main variables of the working of the education system, the material conditions of the school, education programs, teaching training and practice, administrative workload, students attendance, academic results, the performance of education authorities, sociocultural contexts and the assessment methods themselves. This model must repeat at the state and national levels.
    10. A true education transformation must not lay aside the teacher training institutions. We agree to a re-foundation of normal schools[2] to strengthen their historical mission. The discussion must revolve around three aspects: the ethical, the political and the epistemological, to make the Mexican normalism stronger and the automatic position appointment for every graduate of public normal schools in the country, who were credited by a training institution officially acknowledged and who qualify to the profile and the correspondent right. We do not support teacher-position sales or heritage, which are instruments for political patronage established by the “charro”[3] leaderships of the SNTE.[4]
    11. The National Education System must advance on the way of strengthening our pluriculturality, on the basis of our multiple identities and of building, from them, a country of diverse potentialities.
    12. Based on the individual and social guarantees in our Letter Magnus[5], the National Education system will provide stability to the education workers in all three labor, administrative, and pedagogical fields.

    For all hitherto said, we demand from the government:

    1. Absolute suspension of the Education Reform and all its implications, insofar as the 3rd and 73rd constitutional articles and the secondary laws are modified, which pose a risk to the free access to education, and which counteract the vision of a humanistic and integral education; as well as anything that threatens our job and labor stability.
    2. To start at once a social process for education transformation along with all the actors: education workers, parents and students, researchers, pedagogues, intellectuals, lawyers, writers. It means to develop a broad national debate in forums, lectures, work boards, conferences, etc., the results of which shall compulsorily be a part of the new education model. The whole of this process will happen in the framework of an accurate timing, with a wide dissemination campaign and a wide participation.
    3. To resolve the consequences and costs of the Education Reform, as related to victims, political imprisonments, layoffs and layoff processes, arrest warrants, pay suspensions, holding of union dues, etc.
    4. To regularize, in its faculty scope, the union life, as regards the bilateral relationship and the freedom of choice for both national and state union representatives.

     

    UNITED AND ORGANIZED, WE SHALL WIN

    NATIONAL EDUCATION WORKERS COORDINATOR



    [1] In Mexican Law, a “guarantee” is a law which protects the people from violations to their basic rights against powerful agents, e.g. the state. They are a consequence of social struggle since Mexican Revolution times.

    [2] “Escuelas Normales” is the name for the system of public schools for basic education teacher training across the country.

    [3] A "charro” leader is a government-appointed union boss.

    [4] Short for Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (SNTE), a yellow union of which CNTE is an independent and democratic branch.

    [5] “Carta Magna” is a common way of naming the country’s Political Constitution.

     

  • Why Bolivian Workers Are Marching Against Evo Morales

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    Over the past two weeks, thousands of factory workers, miners, teachers, and health care providers have mobilized and blocked roads in La Paz and Bolivia’s other departmental capitals to protest the firing of 1,000 state textile workers. The workers were abruptly dismissed last month, when Bolivian President Evo Morales announced the closure of Enatex, the state-run textile company.

    In response, the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB or Bolivian Workers Central, the national trade union federation) demanded the workers’ reinstatement and called for an escalating national strike— the first in more than three years. Ramping up from 24 to 48 to 72 hours, the mobilizations have intensified along with the predictable police response, with thousands tear-gassed, hundreds arrested, and scores wounded.

    Enatex was created in 2012, when the Morales government took over the failed textile manufacturer Ametex. It was a highly symbolic action, underscoring Morales’  commitment to protect Bolivian workers, nationalize strategic enterprises, and promote industrialization.

    Four years later, the state company’s demise is equally symbolic. It casts doubt on economic choices made by the Morales government and on the viability of Bolivia’s industrial policy in the context of global economic constraints, especially those dictated  by U.S. trade preferences. It also calls into question the tactical alliance between Morales and the COB at a crucial political juncture for Morales and the ruling Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS, or Movement Towards Socialism) party, and at a time when the threat of austerity poses critical new challenges for Bolivia’s popular movements.

    From Ametex to Enatex

    Founded in 1965 by Polish immigrants, Ametex was a successful Bolivian company—perhaps “the most modern private business in Bolivia,” according to the Fundación Milenio—that produced high-quality textiles for U.S. conglomerates like Tommy Hilfiger, Polo Ralph Lauren, and Nautica. At its height, Ametex employed 4,000 skilled workers in seven factories, at an average wage 135% higher than Bolivia’s minimum wage, and produced one million pieces of clothing per month.

    The key to Ametex’s success was the Andean Trade Protection and Drug Enforcement Agreement (ATPDEA), a U.S. treaty that, from 1991-2008, allowed Bolivia to export textiles and other products duty-free to U.S. markets. Originated under the “War on Drugs,” APTDEA was designed to provide Andean producers with alternatives to coca production, and required annual certification of the country’s compliance with coca eradication targets.

    In 2008, after Morales expelled the U.S. Ambassador (followed by the Drug Enforcement Agency) for allegedly assisting efforts by eastern lowlands secessionist elites to destabilize his government, the US retaliated by decertifying Bolivia from continued participation in ATPDEA. Ametex suffered massive losses and teetered on the brink of bankruptcy with substantial debts and liabilities, including to the state pension fund.

    In the new “framework agreement” negotiated with the U.S. in 2011 to provide the basis for renewed diplomatic ties, Morales elected not to negotiate the restoration of tariff protections, in the interest of asserting Bolivia’s national sovereignty. After Ametex workers paralyzed downtown La Paz for several days, the government arranged a $2 million line of credit from the Bank of ALBA in an effort to keep the company afloat (on top of a previous $5 million loan designed to offset the new U.S. tariffs).

    In 2012, after Ametex declared voluntary bankruptcy, the Bolivian government—with much fanfare—took over operation of its five remaining plants, assumed its $17 million pension liability, and ultimately purchased its assets for $15 million (to pay off creditors). Government officials pledged to secure replacement markets for Bolivian textiles in Venezuela and Brazil, and promised that Enatex would sell 30% of its output in the domestic market.

    A Failure Foretold?

    These promises did not come to fruition. Venezuelan and Brazilian markets proved to be unreliable, especially with the decline in commodity prices and resulting shrinkage of these economies. The “Buy Bolivia” campaign orchestrated by the Morales government to encourage consumers to purchase locally-made textiles was largely unsuccessful. Even with a drastic reduction of its workforce (down to the 1,000 remaining today), and a $69 million government investment over the past four years, Enatex, according to Vice President Alvaro García Linera, has never produced a profit and now faces growing debts and pension liabilities.

    For García Linera, Enatex’s failure is largely attributable to structural changes in the global economy. The restructuring of textiles from a labor-intensive, factory-based enterprise to a highly technological computer-driven industry, he argues, has left Bolivia at a severe competitive disadvantage. With low productivity, high costs, and the inability to even produce its own cotton thread, Bolivia has seen its textile exports decline in value by 52% over the past 13 years, while textile imports (principally from China) have grown by 91% since 2008. It would be irresponsible, García Linera has said, for a socialist government to maintain a failed enterprise.

    In response, Enatex workers and their allies blame the Morales government for allowing the domestic market to be undermined by cheap Chinese imports and illegal contraband, especially used clothes smuggled across the Peruvian border. Critics say the government packed the new state company with inexperienced but well-paid, MAS-affiliated administrators, while continuing to hollow out its workforce. According to Bruno Rojas of El Centro de Estudios para el Desarrollo Laboral y Agrario (CEDLA), a highly-respected Bolivian economic research organization, the government from the beginning lacked a vision of how Enatex could be sustainable.

    A true pro-worker industrial policy, critics contend, would aggressively impede contraband, restrict or prohibit textile imports, and create a sustainable domestic market— for example, by commissioning uniforms for the military, police, health workers, and students. In contrast, Enatex workers and COB leaders charge that the shutdown is an anti-worker, anti-popular measure signifying a return to neoliberal austerity politics by an increasingly conservative MAS government, in response to the looming economic downturn. Symbolically, COB Executive Secretary Guido Mitma has characterized Supreme Decree 2765, which authorized the closing of Enatex, as the “evil twin” of Supreme Decree 21060, the infamous 1985 edict that shuttered the state-owned mines, privatized other state enterprises, and dislocated thousands of government workers.

    The government responds that it is not privatizing or even fully closing down the state textile firm, but restructuring it as a technical support center for the industry — albeit with only 200 workers, whose labor will be governed by a regime that provides considerably weaker protections  Now that more than 80% of  Enatex workers have accepted severance pay, officials contend, the issue of reinstatement is moot.

    While Morales insists that the decree will not open the door to further public sector layoffs, he appeared in mid-June to announce the closing of Ecobol, the deficit-ridden state postal service that currently employs 700 workers. Workers say the government has undermined its own enterprise by continuing to use private mail services. The announcement was quickly walked back by cabinet officials, who are meeting with postal workers to discuss restructuring options.

    Defying rumors that the state-owned mining sector, plagued by falling mineral prices, will be next on the chopping block, Morales in mid-June committed a $36 million loan to Huanuni, its flagship tin mine and Bolivia’s largest. Perhaps not coincidentally, this strategic action effectively neutralized a key COB affiliate on the eve of the strike.

    A Looming Austerity Politics?

    Does Enatex represent a unique situation, or does it foreshadow a new era of austerity politics in Bolivia? To date, the impact of the global decline in commodity prices has been blunted by the economy’s continued growth, and the availability of substantial reserves which Morales has diligently accumulated. The official government strategy calls for continued pursuit of the Patriotic Agenda 2025, an ambitious program of accelerated public and private investment in infrastructure, energy, hydrocarbons, and industrialization to diversify the economy and bolster internal demand.

    Still, the warning signs are inescapable. In June, Moody’s derailed a new bond offering for hospital construction, citing Morales’s refusal to cut government spending even as government revenues have declined by $6 billion in the past 2 years.  Budget deficits are expected to reach a 13-year high in 2016. Government debt, at 37% of GDP, is more than double its 2014 levels, causing significant investor concern.

    This past May 1, in keeping with tradition, Morales announced minimum wage and public sector salary increases of 9% and 6% respectively, well ahead of inflation. He also confirmed that the double end-year bonus (doble aguinaldo), which companies have been required to pay since 2013 when economic growth hits 4.5%, will continue. At the same time, for the first time in his ten-year administration, he imposed a freeze on retirement pensions and conditional cash benefits for the elderly, pregnant mothers, and schoolchildren, among the most vulnerable popular sectors.

    The COB and the GOB

    The May 1 compromise package was negotiated with, and fully endorsed by, the COB, which for the past 3 years has supported the Morales government in a strategic alliance. Previous relations between the two sectors were often stormy, with the COB leading popular mobilizations against government fuel subsidy cuts (the 2010 Gasolinazo), limited wage increases (2011), repression of the TIPNIS marchers (2011), and proposed pension reforms (2013). The COB even supported the formation of an independent workers party to challenge Morales’s re-election in 2014. .

    However, at the end of 2013, the COB, under new pro-MAS leadership, agreed to back Morales in exchange for the legally-mandated doble aguinaldo and the Agenda Patriotica, promising continued economic expansion and jobs. In October 2014, 15 COB leaders were elected to the Plurinational Assembly on the MAS ticket. Last February, the COB actively supported Morales’s failed referendum bid for a fourth presidential term in 2019.

    Despite erroneous reports in the western media, the COB has not formally broken with the government. Still, the Enatex controversy has strained its relations with Morales virtually to the breaking point, with escalating rhetoric on both sides. The COB leadership is exploiting the threat of a split to maximum advantage, and has pointedly refused to align itself with the MAS-affiliated social movements’ call for a repeat referendum.

    A rupture with the COB would be highly symbolic and detrimental to Morales at this political juncture. In the wake of his referendum defeat, Morales needs the COB to help restore his credibility, and that of the MAS party, outside of their traditional rural peasant base.

    Still, the COB—once the vanguard of the most combative trade union movement in Latin America, and perhaps the world—is today a shadow of its former self, with only 30% of Bolivia’s labor force engaged in the formal economy.  And while the COB disputes the government’s claims of minimal strike participation, it’s unclear how many of its affiliates have actually joined in the mobilizations.  In its currently weakened state, the COB may be equally in need of maintaining its strong relationship with the government.

    At this writing, the COB leadership is in negotiations with top government officials. Discussions are focusing on additional benefits for laid-off Enatex workers with special needs, a prohibition against the closing of additional state enterprises, and guaranteed retention by Senatex of the 180 workers who have not accepted severance pay, with full labor protections. The outcome could be critical in shaping Bolivia’s post-referendum political landscape, and in prefiguring how Bolivia’s popular movements will fare in responding to the coming austerity challenges.

    Originally posted here

  • Orlando: Making Sense of a Mass Killing

    ImageWhat could have brought Omar Matten, on the night of June 12, 2016, to coldly murder 49 patrons at Pulse, an Orlando Florida nightclub that catered to a mostly Black and Latino, gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) clientele? Primarily, his hatred of the LGBT people and the people of color he befriended discreetly at night, a hatred fueled by the hyper-masculinity, homophobia, and racism of his day work environment. He was an employee of G4S, a giant private military contractor, infamous for abuses against immigrants.

    A Religious Homophobia

    Homophobia is an inherent aspect of patriarchal societies, thus found in all religions. Every year, thousands of murderers appeal to religion to justify their crimes against LGBT people. The morning after the tragedy, two Baptist ministers called for the execution of the “sodomites.” One regretted the low number of “predators” and “pedophiles” killed. “I wish the government would round them all up, put them up against a firing wall, put the firing squad in front of them and blow their brains out.” The other went on: “The good news is that at least 50 of these pedophiles are not going to be harming children anymore… The bad news is that a lot of the homos in the bar are still alive.” (Washington Post, June 15)

    In the countries dominated by fundamentalist Islam, LGBT people suffer incarceration, corporal punishment, and executions. In less rigid countries, the majority of Imams, including those deemed “liberal,” still condemn homosexuality as a sin, despite often calling for compassion for the sinner. St. Petersburg’s Catholic bishop (responsible for Orlando) spoke accurately when he said, “It is religion, including our own, that targets, mostly verbally, and often breeds contempt for gays, lesbians and transgender people. Attacks today on LGBT men and women often plant the seed of contempt, then hatred, which can ultimately lead to violence.” (Washington Post, June 13).

    From Racism to Queerphobia

    In the United States, religious “tolerance” of homosexuality is a relative matter. A major opinion poll carried out in 2014 shows that only 36% of Evangelicals and Mormons consider homosexuality socially acceptable, compared to 45% of Muslims, 66% of members of other Protestant denominations, 70% of Catholics and 80% of Jews and Buddhists. This variability is more indicative of the different weight of traditionalists within each religious community than of actual doctrinal differences. In the U.S. South, racist and reactionary religious Christian groups have responded to the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision legalizing gay marriage with new homophobic laws, all in the name of “religious freedom.”

    But the greater part of the U.S. establishment has taken a different path, bestowing social respectability on middle-class gays and lesbians—at least those who are white or who put on a “white mask,” in Franz Fanon’s words—and extending to them the right to marry. Some 58% of Americans are in favor, and so, crucially, is the Supreme Court, which legalized gay marriage in June 2015. An important lobby of large corporations has committed to defend this right against the Christian Right. Are these not the assigned standard bearers of a homo-nationalist rampart against a barbaric Global South, a Global South that haunts both the foreign regions dominated by the empire and the non-white inner cities of the United States itself, a Global South cast as intolerantly Muslim and violent and yet also as a vector of suspect and shady (queer) sexual practices?[1] Was not the massacre Omar Mateen committed in an African-American and Latino LGBT nightclub in Florida the product of a hatred that was more Queerphobic than homophobic?

    The Weapons of the US Special Forces

    It was not by chance that the murder weapon in Orlando was the well-known Sig Sauer MCX, developed for the U.S. Special Forces. This shocking act of war drew inspiration from the same sources that feed the admiration for Donald Trump: the morbid fascination with the imperialist “special ops” and their signature light, silent, and lethal firearms.[2] The Orlando killer could identify equally well with, on the one hand, the NYPD—which rejected him—the Green Berets, the agents of the private military contractor G4S, and, on the other hand, the Hezbollah and Da’esh units—in many ways their mirror image. These professionals of violence, often operating in the twilight of both law and ordinary morality, held the same appeal for him, regardless of their professed political allegiance.

    Should that be surprising when we know that Saudi Arabia and the other Wahhabi oil kingdoms are the United States’ largest arms-trading partners, and that the State Department works with Putin’s Russia and the Islamic Republic of Iran—which is Hezbollah’s ally—against Da’esh in Syria and Iraq? Aren’t the repercussions of this endless war felt also in the streets of American cities, where local police departments receive surplus army equipment and deploy it with excessive force, particularly against members of minority groups and people of color? 

    As the ongoing investigation reveals, Omar Mateen was not remote-controlled by Da’esh or any other terrorist organization. He carried inside him the most explosive contradictions of a world in which the war of all against all, and often of each against himself or herself, disarticulates the social body along the fault lines of class, race, nation, gender, sexual orientation, etc. For the most vulnerable and wounded, religion is sometimes no longer capable of expressing even, in Marx’s words, “the sigh of the oppressed creature” and “the soul of a soulless world.” It happens then that one would prefer a horrible death to the horror of everyday life, whatever the cost for oneself and others.

    *Jean Batou is a Professor of International History at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.


    [1] See Peter Drucker, Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism (Chicago, Haymarket Books, December 2015).

    [2] According to one expert, the Sig Sauer MCX is as quiet as an MP5, as deadly as an AK-47, and more modular than anything ever designed.”

     

  • Mexico's teachers face more repression, win more support

    Support for resistance to the current model of education reform in México continues to grow after the Mexican Secretary of the Interior, , to Oaxacan protesters and members of Section 22 of SNTE, urging them to stop their blockade of highways. Chong said, “time had run out” and that the state would shortly “take measures to allow for transit and provisions to get through.” Indigenous authorities from la Mixteca in the state of Oaxaca jointly affirmed their continued support of protestors resisting the reform, stating they rejected Chong’s ultimatum and the .’ Adriana Marcelina Linares Arroyo, parent leader of Oaxaca’s state Committee of Mothers, Fathers and Guardians in Defense of Public Education (Coordinadora Estatal de Madres, Padres y Tutores en Defensa de la Educación Pública), publicly stated her group’s support for the blockades, arguing that there was no need for transnational food purveyors to deliver food to the area. Linares Arroya pointed out that the Oaxacan people had their own food, such as eggs from chickens raised by families and atole (cornflour drink). She said this food was healthier and safer than the often spoiled milk and other unhealthy foods supplied by Soriana and Aurora, two major food store chains in México. Oaxacans flooded social media with photographs of fully-stocked fruit and vegetable stands and other food items in indigenous markets in the area, further refuting government claims that there were food shortages because of the protestors highway blockades.

    In addition to Chong’s ultimatum, the tragic events of the past weeks, especially the armed attack on civilians in Nochixtlán, Oaxaca that resulted in the death of 9 individuals at the hands of federal and state police, have mobilized more actors in the resistance. Jalisco-based organizations called for a protest of Secretary of Education, Aurelio Nuño’s, visit to their state this past Monday, July 4th. On this same day, the CNTE began a national 72-hour period of struggle that will include highway blockades and a march for the nation’s teachers in México City on Tuesday, July 5th. México City teachers have declared a general strike beginning Tuesday, July 5th that will continue indefinitely, a Wednesday, July 6th national sit-in, and departure of a motorized caravan from México City to Nochixtlán, Oaxaca to denounce the crimes against humanity committed on June 19th as well as to deliver food and other goods. On Thursday, July 7th, the Democratic Movement of Workers in Education of Guanajuato (MDTEG) have called for a 4 pm demonstration; Ciudad de Libres in the state of Puebla will hold a dialogue on education and organizers in the sate of México will hold planning sessions for the July 16th march scheduled there. Mobilizations are scheduled until the end of July; a meeting with the Mexican Attorney General’s Office to demand the presentation with life of the 43 forcibly disappeared education students and protests in the states of Michoacán, Veracruz, and Guerrero are scheduled. In August, there will be a mega-mobilization across the nation. Professor at the National Autonomous University of México (UNAM), author, attorney, and outspoken critic of the education reform, John Ackerman, recently pointed to the limits of using state force in this process, “Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong’s threats…about the imminent use of force to end with the teacher’s movement, are no more than barks of the proverbial dog that cannot bite. A new violent repression against the teachers' movement will not extinguish the flame of the resistance, but instead ignite the prairie of indignation in all México. The only way to resolve this conflict is through dialogue and negotiation.”

    CNTE has been the key node in organizing resistance to this current U.S. style of corporate education reform in México since 2013. Prior to the July 12, 2013 public dissemination of CNTE’s official position of opposition to the reform, the then leader of SNTE, the politically co-opted Elba Esther Gordillo, surprisingly announced in December of 2012 that there would be “a peaceful and civilized resistance” to the reform. . Though the charges of money laundering and diversion of funds were real, her arrest was, nonetheless, the public performance of presidential power—the message was clear: Education reform is a state matter

    By Marta Sanchez, Assistant Professor Social Foundation, Donald R. Watson College of Education, first published at www.teachersolidarity.com

    University of North Carolina,  Wilmington

  • June Surprise: Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt Upholds Abortion Rights Against Restrictive Texas Law

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    Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt is a consequential decision, although far from a decisive victory for abortion defenders. Hellerstedt strikes down a Texas law that would have made legal in-state abortion in practice all but unobtainable for poor and rural women. The decision contains a number of surprises that will hearten supporters of reproductive rights. Surprise number one is that the swing justice, Anthony Kennedy, contributed the fifth vote. Kennedy is hardly a reliable supporter of abortion rights; but with his vote the Hellerstedt majority would have been secure even if Justice Scalia had lived to cast his reliable anti abortion rights vote.

    Justice Stephen Breyer wrote the majority opinion. In it he hugs the 1992 Supreme Court precedent, Planned Parenthood of Pennsylvania v. Casey. That decision “saved” Roe v. Wade, then endangered by the large conservative majority on the Court. Only two justices were prepared to leave Roe untouched. A troika of more moderate conservatives led by Justice O’Connor and backed by Justices Kennedy and Souter (before Souter’s move to the left) wrote the controlling opinion. They came up with the Casey formula that retained the fundamental right to abortion but allowed states more scope to regulate (cut back) abortion. States could regulate even during the first trimester of pregnancy as long as regulation did not unduly burden the right to choose abortion. 

    The surprise in Hellerstedt is that almost nothing had been held to unduly burden the right to abortion despite 25 years in which hundreds of restrictive laws were passed, all designed to stop women from getting abortions. State legislatures hostile to abortion have passed a wide and ever expending assortment of restrictive laws, including informed consent provisions, waiting periods, parental notification, and many laws much like those in Texas House Bill 2 piling onerous requirements on doctors and clinics under the guise of protecting maternal health. H.B.2 was held to unduly burden the right to choose abortion.

    H.B. 2 boasts two aggressive health measures, demanding that doctors providing abortion have admitting privileges at local hospitals and that abortion facilities be equipped and regulated as “ambulatory surgical centers.” When the first of these measures went into effect in 2013, 20 of the 40 abortion clinics in Texas closed. Were the second to be permitted to enter into force, only seven or eight abortion clinics, all in major population centers, would remain in this vast and populous state. Texas is one of at least 20 states with laws similar to H.B.2. All of these laws are now in peril of constitutional challenge. 

    Justice Breyer handed another surprise to Texas and other anti abortion state legislatures: He sided with the district court and against the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in holding that federal courts must scrutinize the evidence presented by the contesting parties as the whether the legislation in question burdens the fundamental right to abortion. He rejected simply deferring to the legislature. Texas got caught short. It did not expect this scrutiny and had no evidence that the H.B.2 measures would protect maternal health. (“Trust me”) The petitioning abortion providers had a wealth of evidence that H.B.2 was a catastrophic burden on the ability of women, poor and rural women in particular, to exercise their right to choose. Breyer had no difficulty concluding that when weighed in the balance H.B.2 unduly burdened the right of women to choose with no offsetting gain in maternal health.

    It has been widely noted that Justice Breyer’s opinion is merely workmanlike, no poetry, no ringing phrases, as might be expected to adorn an important opinion repurposing Casey as a bulwark against the worst state legislative assaults on the reproductive rights. Workmanlike it is, but Breyer’s discussion of the evidence of the impact of H.B.2 is a devastating unmasking of what the Texas legislature has done and is prepared to do to poor and rural women.

    Hellerstedt throws the fight over abortion back into the state legislatures where it has largely been since Roe v. Wade. Roe had not prevented anti-abortion forces from pursuing restrictions through state legislatures even before Casey diluted Roe. In 1980, long before Casey, the Supreme Court held that Roe was not violated when congress denied public funding for abortions for poor women. The federal government and a large majority of states do not fund abortions through Medicaid programs. We will know that the fight for reproductive rights is robust when public funding is a seriously contested question.

    Texas and her sister red states will respond to setbacks under Hellerstedt by relentlessly passing new restrictive legislation designed to test the limits of this new Casey-with-teeth, let’s-see-some-evidence approach. Red state legislators have every incentive to keep generating restrictive laws and to defend those already on the books – money, votes, publicity—and in addition to these positive incentives to fear being primary’d from the right. Only popular mass state-by-state campaigns in favor of reproductive rights can defeat these state laws.

    It would be a great thing if Bernie Sanders progressives who heed his call to contest state and local elections were to elevate reproductive rights to the top of their issues list and invigorate state level campaigns to repeal restrictive laws. The Sanders campaign reveals what any reader of polls knows, that public support for abortion rights and so much else has failed to register gains for lack of effective forms of political organizing rather than lack of resonance. Few prospects are more satisfying than would be the sight of red state legislators running for cover from reproductive rights activists with mass support.

  • With Friends Like These…

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    Doug Henwood, My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency. O/R Books, 2016. 200 pages. Paperback, $15.

    In introducing his 1959 novel Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs wrote that its title “means exactly what the words say: naked lunch, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.”

    Doug Henwood’s My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency (O/R Books), published in late 2015 when it seemed like she’d take the Democratic presidential nomination without a significant challenge, does a masterly job of exposing the unappetizing corporate-Democratic slop on the end of Clinton’s fork. Hillary Clinton talks a populist game now, but throughout her career, she has acted as a neoliberal warrior-cum-austerity-freak, not a genuine force for social change. Feeding off corporate money, she is certainly not a liberal, a progressive, or a populist.

    Assaying her deficits is where Henwood shines. Reminding readers “the U.S. president is essentially the chief executive of the global elite,” he charts Clinton’s rise from “the Rose Law firm, which represented the moneyed interests of Arkansas.” In that job, she was the architect of a legal challenge to a Little Rock ballot measure that had significantly shifted electricity rates from residential to commercial customers. She argued that the rate change was an unconstitutional “taking of property” from corporations. 

    Could Donald Trump, Paul Ryan or Rand Paul have put it worse? 

    In defending her husband’s welfare “reform” initiatives, which gutted public assistance to the poor, Clinton declared that the plan “would motivate and equip women to obtain a better life for themselves and their children,” when, as Henwood notes, “the whole point of welfare reform was disciplining the poor, not helping them.” She has repeatedly promoted “personal responsibility” over government-aided social solutions, and her record on economic issues includes her embrace (until recently) of free trade over fair trade, six years on the Walmart board, and spearheading and crashing what Henwood calls an “impossibly complex” health-insurance scheme in 1993-94.

    When covering her 2000 Senate race, The New York Times wrote that “she went out of her way to note her support for the death penalty, welfare restrictions and a balanced budget.” 

    As a senator, she was uninspired. Henwood, using the upper chamber’s argot, likens her “to a workhorse, not a show horse.” She worked prodigiously long hours, but with “not much to show” for it … other than an unwholesome friendship with the Republican leadership and the chamber’s fundamentalist prayer group. In 2003, she “cast her vote for the Iraq war without having read the full National Intelligence Estimate,” Henwood notes. That report, available to Congress uncensored, was skeptical of the Bush administration’s claims that Iraq had chemical, biological and potentially nuclear weapons, and that dictator Saddam Hussein had connections to al-Qaeda. Then-serving Florida Sen. Bob Graham, no noted peacenik, read it before voting against authorizing the war. Why didn’t Clinton?

    “Other than warmongering, defending creditors and eagerly making friends with the opposition, her Senate accomplishments were minimal.” Henwood writes. 

    As Secretary of State, Clinton was among the most vociferous opponents in the Obama administration of reversing the 2009 coup against Honduras President Manuel Zelaya. In her ghostwritten memoir, Hard Choices, she admits she used her position to ensure that Zelaya would not return to office, even though he had not finished the term Honduran voters had elected him for.

    The Guardian in June characterized her as “the leading champion in office to push for the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, despite Pentagon reluctance.”

    She also used her position for what she loftily called “economic statecraft” — aiding corporations with financial deals abroad. Microsoft, Boeing, GE and others returned those favors with massive contributions to her family’s ostensibly philanthropic nonprofit Clinton Foundation. The foundation’s philanthropy, Henwood demonstrates, was both business-centric and hugely incompetent when it came to helping the world’s poor in job creation and disaster relief, as in its failed reconstruction efforts in Haiti.

    The foundation’s deals, “like the Clinton family itself, are beautiful emblems of our political economy at its highest level: the intimate bonding of public and private through money,” Henwood concludes in one of the book’s strongest chapters. “[The Foundation’s] impact points to profound structural limitations of the philanthropic approach to social problems — a strategy promoted by the neoliberal stripping of the state of its better functioning and passing off the business of melioration to foundation program officers.”

    Unlike Bernie Sanders, Henwood does think that Clinton’s use of a private server for emailing was a big deal, “certainly symptomatic of her desire for secrecy and control … To normal people, those not intoxicated by the Clinton charm, it still looks shady.”

    After the valiant Sanders challenge, Clinton has again emerged as the great hope to stop a Donald Trump presidency and a Republican-dominated Congress. While the plus side of defeating Trump’s personality cult of loudmouthed bigots is clear, the actual benefits of a Clinton administration would be meager. She wouldn’t appoint outright reactionaries to the federal courts, and there might be a modest increase in the federal minimum wage or maybe Social Security benefits if the Sanders-Warren wing of the Democratic Party can prevail upon her.

    Hillary Clinton is no second coming of the New Deal. She will never say, let alone act on, what Sanders told his supporters: “We understand that our mission is more than defeating Donald Trump. It is transforming our country.”

    When I catch her act, I don’t think first of enlisting in a popular antiracist front against the fascist noise of Trump and his supporters. I think of Emile Zola‘s line in Germinal, “There’s only one thing that warms my heart, and that is the thought that we are going to sweep away these bourgeois.”

    Hillary Clinton is the same person who 16 years ago launched her Senate campaign by describing herself as “a proud New Democrat.” There’s nothing proud about that. She’s the non-Trump, the default candidate. Her biggest appeal: that Donald Trump is worse. Me, I live in New York. Trump is highly unlikely to carry the state. I’m voting Green.

    Originally posted here

  • Spain: The Two-Party System Still Hangs On

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    With abstention up by 4% from the last parliamentary elections in the Spanish state on December 20, 2016 (69.84% participation against 73.2%), the results of what we might call a “second round”, with the right wing Popular Party (PP) increasing its number of votes (600,000 extra votes and 33% of voters) and its number of seats to 137 (against 123 previously), and a Socialist Party (PSOE) which, despite losing 100,000 votes (22.7% of voters) and five seats, remains the second biggest political force in the country.

    There is relief for the regime which had to deal with the pressure of Unidos Podemos (UP) which, losing more than a million votes, has not managed to appear as the political expression of change. The good news comes in the substantial decline of Ciudadanos which lost 400,000 votes and eight seats to the benefit of the PP which was able to exploit the theme of the “useful vote”. In Catalonia, one can only note the persistence of a majority in favor of autonomy with 56.6% of the vote going to the autonomist/pro-independence parties.

    It will take time to analyze this result, very different from what most polls predicted, and among the explanations, study notably the impact of Brexit on the movement of votes of the undecided in favor of the right. Nevertheless, we can see now that it will not have tipped the balance toward change, but on the contrary towards conservatism and reaction.

    In any case, it will not be easy to put a government in place: the PP must rely not only on the support of Ciudadanos (32 seats) and “Coalicion Canaria” (1 seat) but also on the abstention of the Basque PNV (right autonomist- 5 seats) and the PSOE (82 seats) to form a government. Ciudadanos and the PSOE must also accept, under pressure, that this government would be led by Rajoy (PP), who emerges strengthened from these elections, after having ruled out this hypothesis during the campaign. A pressure which is already at work, particularly on the PSOE, if we look at today’s editorial in El Pais (the largest Spanish daily newspaper), which says that it is necessary that the PSOE “allows, with its abstention, the establishment of a government by those in favor of what the ballot boxes have decided”.

    While Brexit demonstrates the failure of the project of the European Union and that the euro area is still more polarized between creditors and the debtors, we find ourselves in a situation of uncertainty where the only thing that is certain is the growth of inequality and the social and political movements against austerity.

    The challenge remains knowing which forces are able to respond to this real malaise: either those who surf on “the politics of resentment” against refugees and immigrants to rebuild a neo-fascism which accommodates to economic globalization or new socio-political alternatives that militate for a restoration of solidarity between the peoples, starting in the south of Europe, and against the dictatorship of debt and xenophobia.

    As to UP, in spite of coming first in Catalonia, the Basque Country and Navarre, it is obvious that the hopes raised by the coalition of Podemos and Izquierda Unida (IU) have not been fulfilled in the ballot boxes and it did not outpoll the PSOE as the polls had predicted. We will of course need to analyze the reasons and the choices of more than a million lost voters. One reason could be the juxtaposition of different discourses in a short period of time which must surely have confused the potential electorates of both IU and Podemos.

    Thus, after a “national-populist” discourse which had shown its limitations in the Catalan elections of September 27, 2015, a more “pluri-national” approach was adopted before finally returning to a new idea of “homeland”, which, as we see it, was counter-productive. Simultaneously, from December 20, 2015, we have gone from the discourse of the “people against the caste” to a more conventional “left” discourse, including classifying the PSOE as part of the left. This is to respond to the aspirations of IU, who wanted to regain the space of the so-called left of rupture and were finally taken by the somewhat chaotic discourse of Pablo Iglesias, whose erosion as a charismatic leader is now palpable.

    The limits and contradictions of this discourse have only been more flagrant with the programmatic ambiguity around the fundamental questions like the attitude to be taken to the Troika, the debt or again a critical assessment of the experience of Syriza, to mention only the most obvious. These limits have been all the more important because UP has not reached its goal of winning a territorial anchor with an organization different from the other parties. This “model”, that of the electoral war machine, proved to finally be very conventional, top down and not very pluralistic, which has generated numerous internal crises and sapped the efforts to construct the organization needed to irrigate the territories and complete the very necessary but insufficient television and internet campaigns.

    However there is no question of self-flagellation or settling of accounts, what matters is rebuilding an atmosphere of solidarity, fraternity, respect of pluralism, to seek a new framework of consensus to work together because “yes, we can”. For this, we need more “wars of position” on all fronts. It is now our role as an opposition to reformulate what unites us and to propose politically in a coherent fashion so as to rebuild links with the social organizations which support change and a rupture with austerity and with the regime which applies them.

    Originally posted here

  • Sherrl Yanowitz: 1942 – 2016

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    Sherrl Yanowitz, who has died aged 74, was a lifelong revolutionary socialist and anti-racist fighter.

    Sherrl was born Shirley Grosse – she hated the name – on 13 January 1942, in Toledo, Ohio, an industrial city in the US Midwest. Toledo had seen the great Auto-Lite strike of 1934, but Sherrl didn’t encounter much in the way of radical politics at home; she later reflected that it had never even been mentioned at school, even though the fathers of some of her schoolmates had likely been involved in the strike. Sherrl’s father was Jewish and had moved to the US from Kosice in modern Slovakia; most of his family didn’t make it out and were murdered in the Holocaust.

    As a seven year old, Sherrl decided to mark Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, by wearing drab clothes. When her grandmother shouted at her to wear something nice because people will see her at the synagogue, she burst into tears and decided that she wasn’t interested in a God who only wanted people to show off. Her family were staunch Zionists. Indeed, one of her uncles was an advisor to the fledgling Israeli colonial-settler state. He once hit Sherrl for suggesting there were black Jews as well as white ones. At an early age, Sherrl had embraced the anti-Zionism and anti-racism that would guide her politics throughout her life.

    Sherrl rebelled against her family as a teenager, hanging around gay clubs, and visiting Black store-front churches to listen to the singing. She was an avid listener of Black radio stations broadcast from Detroit, less than 60 miles away. Most dramatically, in her mid-teens, she and some friends stole her father’s car and drove thousands of miles from Toledo to California along Route 66!

    intheusmid60s001

    After graduating from high school, she spent a short time at the University of Toledo and then the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles. Whilst at the latter she attended a screening of the notorious propaganda film Operation Abolition, which had been produced by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to undermine student protests at the University of California, Berkeley. As Jo Freeman wrote:

    HUAC saw enormous propaganda value in the student protests and subpoenaed television film of the demonstrations. The resulting film, Operation Abolition, was made part of HUAC’s official report and shown to millions all over the country. Juxtaposing clips of protesting students next to Communists who had been subpoenaed by the Committee, the film said the demonstrations were Communist led and inspired. Operation Abolition put Berkeley on the map as the protest capital of the country; for years to come it attracted politically conscious students to come to where the action was.

    Sherrl was one of them, transferring from USC after just a few months, first to Oakland Community College, then to Berkeley itself. Prior to going to college Sherrl had not been involved in politics, though she had been a supporter of JFK. At Berkeley she joined a range of organisations. As Joel Geier, her comrade and a current member of the International Socialist Organisation in the US, remembers, he had known Sherrl:

    since 1963 when we both members of the Berkeley YPSL (Young People’s Socialist League) and of Berkeley Campus CORE (Congress of Racial Equality). It was CORE’s mobilization of students for sit-ins against racist employers that led to Clark Kerr’s attempt to ban student political action, producing the Free Speech Movement, of which Sherrl was a dedicated activist. She was then a militant in the next stage of the 1960s movement, against the Vietnam War and American imperialism. I knew Sherrl in those days as a young, uncompromising fighter against injustice.

    She was also a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), formed by young black activists. During her time in California, Sherrl helped young men fleeing the draft during the Vietnam War to get to Canada, and was involved in organising boycotts in support of Cesar Chavez’s National Farm Workers Association.

    In 1965 Sherrl married Richard Yanowitz, a red-diaper baby who, like her, was involved with the newly formed Independent Socialist Clubs that met in Hal Draper’s living room. In 1967, they decided that the US was turning fascist and decided to leave for Europe once Sherrl completed her degree. In August 1968 they arrived in Paris. They met Richard’s uncle, Hy, who had been a member of the French resistance in World War Two and was a friend of Sartre.

    On January 13, 1969 they moved to London which would be Sherrl’s home for the rest of her life. Her marriage broke up on arrival and Sherrl had to rebuild her life from scratch in a new country. She started writing for Peace News, and covered the Isle of Wight festival in 1970.

    Throughout the 1970s Sherrl was heavily involved in the women’s liberation movement attending most of the national conferences. In the early 1970s she helped to run a women’s centre in South London and was roped into teaching a women’s studies course in Tulse Hill school – something she had no training for. Later she was heavily involved in the National Abortion Campaign, particularly in Central London.

    In 1974 Sherrl took a job at Dillon’s bookstore on Malet Street in London (now Waterstones). The pay was low but workers there supplemented their wages by liberating books. Sherrl initially worked in technical mail order. During this period, the French composer Olivier Messiaen ordered some books on birdsong from the store, which Sherrl sent him without charge with a note telling him she loved his music. The shop was unionised and Sherrl became a keen union member. During a strike at the shop the Communist Party historian Eric Hobsbawm crossed the picket line – buying books came before his solidarity with striking workers.

    The International Socialists (the forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party) had several members at the shop who formed a workplace IS branch. One was Noel Halifax who helped recruit her into the IS. Through Noel she met Neil Rogall, another IS member. After Neil was flooded out of the flat he was staying in, he moved in to Sherrl’s new rented flat in West Hampstead in the summer of 1975. That December they entered a relationship at the end of the year which lasted for over 40 years.

    In 1976 Sherrl became the secretary of the Central London Right to Work campaign, delivering solidarity to the Grunwicks strike along with members of the local Women’s’ Voice group, and marched from London to Brighton on one of the Right to Work Campaign marches. She was centrally involved in the campaign against a fascist National Front election candidate in Swiss Cottage in 1976, organising everything from leaflets to a jumble sale. When the Anti Nazi League and Rock Against Racism were formed she naturally became deeply involved.

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    Sherrl had been collecting badges (or buttons as they were known in the US) since her late teens. By the time she left the US, she had a large collection of radical political badges. The rise of punk in the mid 70s saw an explosion of badge wearing, and Sherrl’s collection grew dramatically. In the run-up to the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, Sherrl decided to produce a badge to mark the occasion – the now infamous Stuff the Jubilee badge. As Sherrl herself put it in 2011:

    I designed this badge with Neil McFarlane . It was my first badge design. When I ordered 4000 badges from the Universal Button company in Bethnal Green, they sort of laughed at me. The same company had the order for hundreds of thousands of pro-monarchy items. We advertised the badge mainly through a small advert in Private Eye and inSocialist Worker. The badge became a campaign. In the end we sold over 40,000 badges in less than three months. There were stickers too. and Stuff the Jubilee parties in a number of cities.

    She was arrested on Jubilee eve for spray painting anti-Jubilee anti-cuts slogans on the Finchley Road but was released without charge

    In 1976 Sherrl began a decade of working as a clerical worker in newspapers on Fleet Street, getting a job in the Observer cuttings library. She was an active NATSOPA, later SOGAT 82, union member. She helped to organise Fleet Street against the Nazis, but resigned from the Observerafter one too many arguments with a co-worker who was going out with a National Front organiser. After coming back from an eight month trip with Neil to South Asia in 1981, she trained as a Pitman’s secretary. Working as a temp at the Times, she was asked to gather some dirt on Arthur Scargill, leader of the National Union of Mineworkers; Sherrl told her boss to fuck off and resigned on the spot. Later, while working at the People, Sherrl was involved in a strike which prompted her to re-join the SWP a number of years after resigning in protest at being called an “anarchist”.

    Sherrl was a member of the Fleet Street Miners’ Support Committee during the Great Miners Strike of 1984-85. The Fleet Street SWP branch was twinned with the pit village of Hemsworth and she and Neil put up miners and miners’ wives who were visiting London to raise funds for the strike. When the first miners visited she panicked and called Noel Halifax to ask him “What do you feed miners?” Noel replied “Ask them what they like.” It turned out they liked Indian food, which was Neil’s speciality. One of the miners came home one night in tears after collecting money at pubs in Kilburn. An ex-soldier who had served in the north of Ireland, he was stunned by the generosity of Irish workers.

    In November 1985 Sherrl got a permanent job working for the features editor at the News of the World. Soon afterwards, it was revealed that Rupert Murdoch’s News International corporation, which owned the paper, had secretly built a new plant in Wapping with the intention of transferring production and undermining the unions. Sherrl became the face of the SWP during the strike and a leading fighter in the dispute as part of the News of the World clerical chapel committee. She attended at least two demonstrations a week over the year long strike and toured the country speaking at strike rallies organised by union branches and the SWP.

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    Tim Evans recalled:

    In 1986, when the Wapping dispute kicked off, I was branch secretary of NATFHE (now UCU) at Dacorum College, Hemel Hempstead. Since the defeat of the miners the previous year, a sense of demoralisation had gripped much of the trade union movement, including the Dacorum branch. Whenever proposals for industrial action came up, there were always some who argued “If the miners couldn’t win, what hope have we?”

    Although it was a defensive action, and was in essence a lockout, the Wapping dispute showed, I felt, that despite the defeat of the miners, there were key sectors who were still prepared to fight. It was a two-way process – the print workers needed solidarity, and our NATFHE branch needed to see that workers were still fighting, so through the Socialist Workers Party I made contact with print workers who were prepared to come and speak.

    It was Sherrl who came up. Her speech at our branch meeting was exactly what was needed. Clear, inspiring and humorous, it proved that the assault on the trade union movement could still be resisted. Several NATFHE members were also surprised, and impressed, that a woman was an activist in such a male-dominated industry. The collection at the end raised a decent amount of money, and we began posting regular updates on the progress of the dispute on the NATFHE noticeboard.

    Several of us also began travelling down to Wapping to join the Saturday night mass pickets to block the fleets of lorries from distributing Murdoch’s rags.

    Sarah Cox, who was a teacher and National Union of Teachers activist in Brent at the time, remembers inviting Sherrl to speak at a meeting of her branch, which was dominated by the Communist Party:

    I proposed that we invite a speaker from the print dispute to the branch and that speaker was Sherrl. (Because the officers left it to me to convey the invitation). She arrived just before the meeting and sat at the back of the room. When the long winded and boring business of the meeting was concluded, I reminded the chair about the print worker. “You can bring him in now,” said the chair to which I replied, “She’s here already”. Audible intake of breath, but of course Sherrl spoke brilliantly and a donation was agreed. She told me afterwards that ours was the most bureaucratic union branch she had ever been to.

    Despite such efforts, the strike was defeated in February 1987. Sherrl was shattered; the campaign had been physically and emotionally exhausting, especially after the death of her mother in the middle of the strike. She inherited a sizeable amount of money from her mother and decided not to go back to work. She spent the next 15 years taking courses at a number of colleges and universities, many in photography and the visual arts.

    Sherrl left the SWP in the mid-1990s but decided to throw herself back into political activity after the 9/11 attacks, attending the founding meetings of the Stop the War Coalition. She helped to organise Newington Green Against the War and was a steward on the enormous protest against the Iraq war on 15 February 2003. She volunteered at the offices of Globalise Resistance and attended a number of European Social Forums, exhibiting her artwork at the London ESF in Alexandra Palace as part of Artists Against the War.

    Sherrl was a committed anti-Zionist activist throughout her life. In 1987 she renounced publicly her ‘Right to Return’ to Israel along with many other anti-Zionist Jews, and was one of the first signatories of Jews for Justice for Palestinians. In the last few years, she became active in the London Palestine Action direct action group, attending pickets of Sabon, an Israeli cosmetics shop in Covent Garden and was involved in the attempt to shut down the Israeli owned arms factory in Shenstone near Birmingham.

    During the SWP crisis of 2012-13, Neil became heavily involved in the ‘In Defence of Our Party’ faction. Around this time, Sherrl began to meet some of the younger members of the party who were involved in the faction and developed friendships with many of them. When hundreds of members left the SWP and formed Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century (rs21), Sherrl joined the new group and experienced a political renaissance. As Shanice McBean recalls

    Sherrl and I used to have heated conversations where I’d make sweeping statements such as “feminists in the 60s and 70s didn’t care about women of colour”. She’d stop me, with her usual matter of fact but loving tone, and remind me of all the working class, socialist and black heroes of feminism for whom it is not the case they never existed, but were just whitewashed from history… In all the conversations we had she was so willing to learn about your experience, as well as offer her own.

    Tragically, Sherrl was diagnosed with lung cancer in late April 2016, and died on 2 June. She had spent more than half a century in the heart of the struggle, a contributor to some of the most crucial and inspiring campaigns in the US and Britain. While our movement is diminished by her loss, her inspiration and insights have imbued members of a new generation of revolutionaries with her spirit and tenacity. As Jaz Blackwell Pal puts it:

    The thing that always struck me about Sherrl, apart from her wicked sense of humour, was her complete no-bullshit attitude to life, politics and people. She would cut through the crap in a conversation like a laser, she wasted no time, and everything she said came from passion and conviction. Talking to her was to be reminded of why you were a revolutionary in the first place.

    Originally posted here.

  • Making sense of the Brexit tide of reaction and the reality of the racist vote

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    The Leave / Brexit vote in the referendum came in the end as a surprise, a narrow win for Remain was expected. This may be because the core Leave vote was in the run-down white working class communities of the now desolate English and Welsh industrial zones. A population trapped in conditions of long-term unemployment and poverty who no one really pays much attention to anymore.

    Some on the left have seized on the makeup of this core vote to suggest that there was some progressive element to the Brexit vote despite the campaign being led by racist hatemongers and wealthy US-oriented neoliberals. Mostly that’s a mixture of wishful thinking and post hoc justification for having called for a Leave vote in the first place, but it is true that a section of the working class, C2DEs in marketing speak, voted to Leave in close to a 2:1 ratio. Is the class composition of that vote enough to automatically make it progressive regardless of content? And what does it tell us that a section of the radical left seems to think the answer to that question is yes, that it is enough to be anti-establishment?

    Or was it that this is the story of a sizeable enough, but still minority of the working class, with reactionary ideas being energized and mobilized by the toxic racist nationalism of the English colonial project. Essentially a whipping up of all those older racist relatives that turn up at family events and that everyone wishes would just shut up? Something like Donald Trump has managed to do, using similar rhetoric about migrants and elites, in the USA, ‘Take our Country Back’ could well be a Trump slogan, ‘Make Britain Great Again’ could well have been the Leave slogan.

    From anecdotal stories, geographic voting and most importantly actual polling of 12,000 voters it becomes clear that these communities, who were smashed by neoliberalism from Thatcher to Blair, were successfully tricked into taking aim at the wrong target in order to ‘take our country back’. But it goes deeper than trickery, the poll results make clear that many of the Leave voters hold a toxic blend of reactionary views, glued together by the common cement of English colonialist nationalism. And ‘English’ is the correct term, one fascinating aspect of one voter survey is that 79% of Leave voters identify as English rather than British, while 60% of Remain votes identified as British not English.

    The geographical breakdown of votes indicates that with important exceptions (Scotland, Wales, London) the areas with the highest Leave votes were those hardest hit by the neoliberal restructuring of the UK economy.  According to the Times (article behind paywall)

    – 86% of Local Authorities (LAs) with a high number of manufacturing jobs voted Leave

    – 82% of LAs where more than 25% of the population lacked good GCSEs voted Leave

    – 77% of LAs with average weekly earnings below 452 pounds voted Leave

    – 75% of LAs where more than 87% of the population is white voted Leave

    We can dig into the motivations of those who voted further because of polling of 12,000 people who had voted by Lord Ashcroft Polls. Michael Ashcroft is an interesting character, the former Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party and the 74th richest man in Britain, the Sunday Times reckons he was worth 1.32 billion in 2015. The polling seems to be part hobby, part philanthropy, or as he puts it “if it doesn’t sound too pompous, there is an element of public service in keeping politicians on their toes”. He is pro Brexit so the damning nature of some of what follows isn’t a result of bias against Leave voters since he is one.

    In any case it’s frequently the case that after an election or referendum you wish you had information about who voted which way and why they did so. Endless arguments go on based on people’s presumptions about this. Ashcroft did us a huge favour. “On referendum day I surveyed 12,369 people after they had voted to help explain the result.” Political parties do this sort of polling all the time but seldom release results unless they can make particularly favourable stories out of them. And this isn’t a favourable story.

    Class and Leave

    The first interesting finding is the breakdown of Leave votes by class. Definitions of who belongs in what class are enormously controversial and could be fought over all day. Left groups tend to use the term working class in both a broad sense that includes almost everyone (if they are trying to recruit you) and in a narrow sense (if they want to denounce you). We’d offer the health warning that we are not so keen on the classification Ashcroft uses. But it’s way better than nothing.

    He uses the 50 year old NRS system, a common market research classification. NRS standing for National Readership Survey at its origins lie in advertisers’ desire to know what sort of people read different publications in order to crudely target their advertising on that basis. Broadsheets often boast of having a high ABC1 readership to attract high value advertising as that segment has much greater disposable income.

    Wikipedia table of the NRS

     

    A

    upper middle class

    Higher managerial, administrative or professional

    B

    middle class

    Intermediate managerial, administrative or professional

    C1

    lower middle class

    Supervisory or clerical and junior managerial, administrative or professional

    C2

    skilled working class

    Skilled manual workers

    D

    working class

    Semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers

    E

    non working

    Casual or lowest grade workers, pensioners, and others who depend on the welfare state for their income

    The NRS class classification system is flawed, apart from anything else the ruling class are invisible in it, presumably because although the power and wealth of that group is enormous their numbers are too few to make a distinct division worthwhile. The classification being 50 years old is rather tied to old ideas about the relative merits of manual labour and desk jobs, desk jobs are middle class as it appears are retail and service workers.

    You can see the problem with the classification when you look at the raw numbers of those polled and see how many are in each category

    5148 = A+B

    3179 = C1

    1653 = C2

    2360 = D+E

    In other words, if you took the working class / middle class labels of the CRS system at face value then, for this poll, voters in the UK referendum were 33% working class, 67% middle class with no ruling/capitalist class, not even as the often over stated 1%.  These figures are partially so low because voting is always disproportionately dominated by ABC1s with relatively larger numbers of C2DEs staying at home. The C2DE composition in the UK population is considerably higher than in the vote poll, the NRS classification in 2015 gave 46% in their C2DE definition of working class and 54% as middle class.

    Instead we would work off looking at whether people have to make a living through working for others (the working class), have enough skills, tools and space to independently work for themselves (the middle class) or have so much wealth that most of their income comes from having the rest of us work for them. For the UK that would give you more of a 80%+ working class, 20%- middle class and 1%- ruling class, with the actual section of that class that rules being more like the top 0.01%.

    But in any case what the Ashcroft polling tells us is that for the C2DE categories, which are working class by any definition, 64% of those who voted chose Leave. This is way ahead of the national average of 51.9% for Leave.

    National averages are broad categories that can disguise a lot of important data so let’s not confuse that 64% as ‘the working class’. It’s not, it’s just a big segment of that part of the class that depends on doing manual work. Importantly a big section of this part of the working class didn’t vote on the day – the Ashcroft poll only talked to people who had voted and as we shall see this is an important distinction.

    What was the turnout of C2DE voters?

    Voter turnout was around 72%, differing a bit by region. But as we already recognised, voter participation is not equal across classes, far more ABC1s vote than C2Des, arguably because the C2DEs understand that politicians in power only listen to the As. So we can be fairly sure less than 72% of C2DEs voted, the question is how much less. The Ashcroft poll enables us to make a good guess at this. C2DEs are 46% of the UK population but only 33% of the Ashcroft poll, that missing 13% indicates the scale of the higher non-voting rate.

    Using that gap a reasonable quick estimate would be that turnout for C2DE was possibly slightly less than 52% of those registered. (Ben Pritchett did some proper maths on this) But we also need to do a few final subtractions. The first is of people entitled to vote but not registered, that number I haven’t been able to estimate but it’s probably not huge. The second is those not yet of voting age, who I’m going to ignore beyond noting that because the young overwhelmingly voted Remain it’s probably the case that most of these would have been Remain.

    The third subtraction is far more politically important: migrants who were not from the former colonies (the Commonwealth and Ireland) and who therefore did not get a vote. In terms of migrants from other areas of the EU that’s over 2 million people excluded from the vote – a shocking figure when you consider the vote was essentially on their future. And migrants not from the Commonwealth or Ireland also number in the hundreds of thousands. Remember less than 1.3 million votes separated Leave from Remain, if the 2.5 million plus migrants had been allowed to vote on their own future Brexit probably would not have happened. It’s an important aside, and the point to make here is that these migrants are overwhelmingly working class and therefore their exclusion from the vote reduces further the proportion of the C2DE working class that actually voted leave.

    How many C2DE working class Leave voters were there?

    Some very crude maths now. The population of the UK at the time of the last census was 63 million. If 46% were C2DEs this gives about 30 million people, about 23% of whom were below voting age, so about 22 million. From this we need to subtract the C2DE immigrants who can’t vote, let’s guess about 1 million people. Of the 21 million remaining we’ve worked out above that about half voted, so 10.5 million, or 1/3 of the total voters. Out of that the Ashcroft poll suggests 64% voted Leave, that’s 6.7 million people. 6.7 million is also about 39% of the total Leave vote. As the Leave vote totaled 17.4 million we see Leave was also mostly ABC1s even though it captured almost 2/3 of voting C2DEs.

    I wanted to do these calculations because it’s going to become clear that the many Leave voters are pretty damn reactionary and not just on migration. And a section of the left that foolishly advocated a left Leave vote are now defensively trying to exaggerate the ‘working class’ composition of the Leave vote as a form of strange self-justification. The reality is that a significant section of the white English working class buys into English colonial nationalism and has backed some terrible right wing figures from Enoch Powell to Margaret Thatcher as part of that. The core of the C2DE Leave vote seems to be an expression of that bloc, not an expression of the C2DE working class as a whole. The relatively high percentage of C2DE voters voting Leave (64%) is as much because the campaign mobilised those hostile to migrants whereas there would be few C2DEs with any love for the EU.

    From the calculations above we see that even if we restrict the working class to C2DEs, only 23% of the C2DE working class actually mobilised to tick Leave. If we exclude those too young to vote that rises to about 32%. So, for a variety of reasons, including being denied a vote, 68% of the C2DE working class of voting age did not vote Leave. We’d speculate that amongst that number are a substantial amount who were horrified by the racist nonsense of their neighbors and relatives but who were not going to save the establishment by voting Remain. Perhaps a major motivation for the 18% who did vote Remain was opposing those racist neighbours, in particular as that 18% was probably drawn from the sizeable number of C2DEs that are not white.

    Even of those C2DEs who were allowed to and did vote, some working class areas of London, for instance Tottenham and Walthamstow, voted overwhelmingly for Remain. The same may well be true of Scotland, and some of the bigger cities of the UK. From the referendum returns it appears the Leave C2DE vote was concentrated in smaller cities, towns and villages, and the further out suburbs.

    What was the ‘working class’ Leave vote?

    When you compare his data with the geographical results it becomes clear that the huge working class Leave vote was a citizen white C2DE working class from those areas that have been decimated by neoliberalism, in particular the once industrial and mining north of England and Wales and the agricultural counties of the south. Of course the north of England and Wales have comparatively fewer migrants than in Remain-voting London because there aren’t that that many available jobs. This maps onto a common observation that in electoral terms the far right tends to do well in areas where there are not actually as many migrants as the areas they do badly in. Its racist fear rather than reality that garners them support.  In the agricultural south, a much grimmer story is found as agricultural work is sometimes dominated by gangster capitalists with groups of insecure migrants under illegal pay and conditions under their control. This is typical of agricultural work in the wealthier countries where regardless of migration controls the state allows situations that create pools of very cheap insecure labour with raids and deportations serving to maintain that insecurity and prevent organising.

    So what has caused a large enough section of the C2DE working class to scapegoat migrants in the process of siding with one particular gang of rich white neoliberals? Yes there is competition for jobs & houses but not only is the scarcity that creates competition a product of capitalism it’s also the case that the worst racism is not found in the areas where there is greatest competition. Housing is at its most expensive in Leave voting London, costs are not only lower in the old industrial zones but in many cases there is a large amount of empty housing stock visually demonstrating that a shortage of decent housing is not down to a lack of buildings.

    So what is it that can glue some of those living in the poorest and more marginalised districts to rich white millionaires like Farage and Boris? Clearly racism was one of the mechanisms used, in particular by Farage but the answer is deeper than that and quite visible in the Ashcroft polling and the referendum material produced by the Leave side. The answer is in ideology and in particular the toxic ideology of English nationalism, a nationalism steeped in ideas of colonialism, empire and monarchy.

    Just before the referendum The Daily Mail produced a Leave poster for its windows of a 100m high Norman crusader knight with the St George cross on his shield gazing with hostility out to sea from the cliffs of Dover. His speech bubble reads, “We demand our country back.” When a friend first shared this on Facebook I presumed it was a piss take, but nope it was the real thing. It stands in as a good visual representation of the sort of hyper masculine, militaristic English nationalism that has such a deep hold over English workers, one that has always been used to bind them to their masters. But enough of symbolism, on to some figures about what Leave voters think, 39% of whom are C2DE workers.

    The heart of reaction

    We can start by repeating the very direct figure that “79% of Leave voters identify as English rather than British”. But the post vote polling gives us a load of information on what voters thought about some key reactionary / progressive dividing lines.

    This bit of Ashcroft’s polling data is presented in a way that’s easy to misread. It’s not showing the percentage of those who “voted Y who thought X”, it is showing the percentage of people who “thought X who voted Y”. A lot of people have read this the wrong way around, which would make the Leave voters a bloc so reactionary that we’d be talking of a mass actual fascist movement coming into being, thankfully it’s not quite that bad.

    What this presents is the percentage of Leave voters who thought each of the following were a ‘force for ill’, and the remainder out of 100 being Remain voters who thought that item was a force for ill. So to take the first one

    Multiculturalism – 81%

    Of those voters polled who though multiculturalism was a force for ill 81% voted Leave and 19% voted remain. Again this doesn’t translate into 81% of the people who voted Leave, Fredrik deBoer checked the original data and says this is actually “14% of Leave voters think multiculturalism is “very much a force for ill.””

    And so on for

    Social Liberalism – 80% Leave

    Feminism – 74% Leave

    The green movement – 78% Leave

    Immigration – 80% Leave

    While there is room for argument around what people might have understood by some of those terms I’m going to say on aggregate that thinking any of these as a ‘force for ill’ is a reactionary position. And of the voters polled, those with a reactionary position were consistently falling on the Leave side in enormous 3:1 and even 4:1 ratios.

    Again don’t misunderstand these numbers, it’s not that 74% of Leave voters were anti-feminists. It’s that 74% of those who identified as anti-feminist voted Leave. Ashcroft is a political pollster that used to do polls for the Tories – hence what seems at first to be a strange way of presenting the data, this is designed to identify blocs of opinion that can be easily mobilised. It identifies people hostile to feminism as a good target group to mobilise for a Leave vote.

    MORI also did some polling on attitudes to immigration and they presented their data in the more obvious form of how many Leave voters thought immigration has had a bad impact. They found 65% of Leave voters said it has had a bad impact, against only 20% of Remain voters. Confirming that the Leave vote didn’t just attract reactionaries but was also largely composed of reactionaries, at least when it came to the free movement of people. However 19% of Leave voters thought immigration had a positive impact, again a warning that it would be an error to assume all Leave voters were racist, we just need to recognise that some people with progressive attitudes ended up in the Leave camp, perhaps partially as a result of some of the radical Left parties pushing the Leave vote as well, in a de facto Red-Brown alliance.

    Ashcroft asked those who voted if they thought Capitalism was a force for ill. Leave and Remain voters who thought it was were split about 50:50 (51 to 49 to be exact).  In other words we can be certain that neither vote can be considered anti-capitalist, not really a surprise given the choice was between capitalism under Westminster alone or Capitalism under Westminister with some EU oversight. But this lack of difference on capitalism coupled with the extreme differences seen above nail the myth that there was any significant progressive component to the Brexit vote. It’s by far the worst terrain in which to try to build any sort of progressive movement, even if for one rotten moment we’d allow you to throw migrants under the bus for movement building purposes.

    Now someone might hope these reactionary views were very concentrated in the ABC1 Leave vote but a quick look at the Ashcroft poll data tables suggests this isn’t the case and in fact unfortunately it’s the reverse. If anyone has the time and inclination it would be useful to use his data tables to do a C2DE class breakdown of attitudes. A PDF of his data tables.

    A side note on the Remain vote

    I’m not going to dissect the Remain vote beyond noting that it also includes some racists, anti-feminists etc. My own perspective is that if I’d had a vote I’d have abstained or spoilt it because although the problem with the referendum was that it mobilised and energised racists the legalistic reality of it is that it offered only a choice between a rock and a hard place. The choice between being ruled from London or being ruled from London with some EU supervision isn’t much of a choice at all.

    One of the factors that Trump, and Bush before him, were able to use in the US is an entirely fake identification with the ‘common man’ who lives outside the artsy intellectual bubble of New York City. So New England liberals sneering at their way of communicating, or ill informed remarks, became a way of bringing out a reaction from those who felt that they were also being sneered at. Remain commentators seem shocked that Leave votes were concentrated in areas that get the largest EU funding but this expectation of the poor to be grateful misses the that is the reason ‘Take our Country Back’ has such appeal.

    The Remain campaign reaction to the vote brought out the worst in elitist and unthinking class snobbery precisely because it refused to recognise that neoliberal capitalism has been a disaster for very many Leave votes.  You’ll find my more detailed thoughts on all this expressed in Observations on Brexit and Lexit in the UK EU membership referendum and 10 point guide for post Brexit resistance as racist right wins EU referendum.

    The working class is not a monolith

    The Ashcroft polling also showed up important differences by race and religion amongst those who voted. “White voters voted to leave the EU by 53% to 47%. Two thirds (67%) of those describing themselves as Asian voted to remain, as did three quarters (73%) of black voters. Nearly six in ten (58%) of those describing themselves as Christian voted to leave; seven in ten Muslims voted to remain.”

    Again these specific figures are also useful for preventing us falling into the trap of constructing false monoliths. Given the nature of the campaign there were a sizeable number of black and Asian Leave voters. And a substantial minority of whites voted Remain. But in general the Leave voters, including the working class Leave voters, were very disproportionately white in the voter population and even more disproportionately white in comparison with the actual population. Likewise the ’force for ill’ questions do show that Leave was where the mass of reactionary voters were found but not all of them, a quarter to a fifth of reactionary voters were on the Remain side, not that much of a surprise since many, if a minority, of Tory voters went Remain.

    The Ashcroft polling also confirms that Leave voters tended to be those whose lives have been destroyed by the neoliberal restructuring of the British economy while Remain voters tended to be those who are doing better, or at least expected to. Remain was a 57% majority in the A and B NRS class division, which includes the sections of the working class doing better economically under neoliberal restructuring, and those sections of management doing so well that they are properly part of the middle and ruling class.

    In general Leave voters were far, far more likely than Remain voters to think that for children growing up in Britain today life will be worse than it was for their parents, and to think that life now is worse than 30 years ago. The gap between the two is enormous on these measures although it’s significant that there is a smaller 2:1 gap when that question is narrowed down to the economic ‘more threats to my standard of living than there will be opportunities to improve it.” In other words, in terms of their expectations Leave voters are 2:1 of those who feel left behind but other fears (i.e. of the influence of immigration, feminism and environmentalism) in addition to the economy make far more Leave voters fearful of the future and nostalgic for the past.

    We have a problem

    This leaves those on the left with a difficult problem. What is a substantial minority of the C2DE working class in England and Wales have taken up a range of solidarity-destroying stances, that amount in total to an ideological link to the right and far right. This in itself isn’t a new problem as that minority has always existed: a segment of reactionary working class opinion that identifies with the Monarchy, Empire and the colonial project. The new problem is that this reactionary minority has been mobilised by the referendum and energised by the result. That has been seen in the events of the days after the referendum where there has been a huge upsurge in both verbal and physical attacks by racist white people on what are perceived to be migrants. Although many feared this consequence the scale of it has come as a surprise.  Very often these attacks are based around, or accompanied by, the demand that people ‘go home’, or are from the organised far right groups calling for deportations.

    In the short term the immediate need is to drive those carrying on these attacks off the streets by physical defence where possible and by mass mobilisations to make it clear that there isn’t a popular licence for racist attacks. In the longer term the left needs to take a lot more seriously the impact the ideology of English nationalism has in creating and sustaining a reactionary core in the working class. Given how deeply it’s rooted in a colonial project of conquest, empire and slavery, there is an argument that English nationalism is of a similar reactionary nature to the confederate nationalism still too common among white workers in the southern USA. This parallel has grown stronger in recent years as racism has shifted somewhere from being expressed based on people’s skin colour to being expressed based on their religion. In case you haven’t noticed the English flag is the same Crusader Cross that the armies that slaughtered the population of Jerusalem and other cities bore as they sought to expel muslims.

    Past experience shows that intense economic struggle can win over people wedded to such a deeply rooted reactionary ideology, for at least short periods. The orthodox left loves stories of this in struggle and sometimes makes the mistake of thinking repeating them is a solution. But that sort of intense economic struggle has been thin on the ground since the Miners’ Strike and Poll Tax. So while actual intense economic struggle is part of an alternative, the act of advocating it is not in any significant way. What was completely unacceptable was the left versions of anti-migrant rhetoric coming from the Socialist Party leader – this sort of populism doesn’t combat racist views, it simply confirms and entrenches these attitudes.

    If there is a silver lining to the referendum it is in providing a strong example to the left that it needs to shift from an economistic analysis to an intersectional one. The economistic analysis of parts of the radical left led them to back Brexit as an anti-establishment movement and ignore (or worse, deny) the reality that Leave brought together the most reactionary elements of British society including the most reactionary section of the working class. Doing so involved only focusing on the fact that a significant section of workers were backing Leave and ignoring the views of many of that section, but also the consequences of energising that vote for migrants in the UK, the vast majority of whom did not even have a vote.

    Originally posted here

  • Beyond Bernie: Still Not With Her

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    Since the June 7 California primary, the historic upheaval that coalesced around Bernie Sanders’ campaign has continued to defy the demands of the political establishment, but has also increasingly turned into a search for the way forward. After a powerful, yearlong mass campaign over the hostile terrain of a rigged primary, our political revolution is at a crossroads.

    The post-California period began with a revolt, following the AP’s preemptive anointment of Clinton. In the hours and days after this corporate media assault and the initial ballot results, there was a wave of angry social media reaffirming Sandernistas’ rejection of the establishment’s demands for capitulation. Elizabeth Warren’s full-throated endorsement of Clinton came shortly thereafter, and hundreds of thousands of people un-liked her Facebook page and otherwise registered their disgust online. The petition that Movement4Bernie and I launched two months ago, calling for Sanders to run independent or Green, caught on fire. It tripled its number of signatures in just a few days time, at an initial rate of 1,000 people an hour, and now has over 115,000 total.

    A huge debate is unfolding among millions of Bernie’s backers, providing an enormous opportunity for the left to raise the need for a political alternative to the Democratic Party. That’s why Movement4Bernie and Socialist Alternative are organizing a series of forums in dozens of cities across the country titled “Beyond Bernie: We Need a Party for the 99%.” These forums will both mobilize for the largest possible protests at the Democratic National Convention and create space for a broad-based debate on the way forward for the political revolution. My message at the events will be clear: If Bernie refuses to break from the Democratic Party, our movement should back Jill Stein as the strongest left alternative in the presidential election and use 2016 to prepare the ground for building a new movement-based political alternative.

    Unfortunately, Bernie’s livestream speech a week after California pointed in a different direction. While Bernie refused to formally concede and reaffirmed his intention to continue the political revolution into the Democratic National Convention, he also sent the message that he was beginning to retire his campaign. His plan to contest the nomination in Philadelphia was left aside, while he took further steps toward Hillary in saying he looked forward to working with her to change the Democratic Party.

    It was one part political revolution, one part concession, and five parts Democratic Party reform. Speeches by Bernie since then have further developed this changed approach. This has helped kick off a process that, no doubt, has some Sandernistas beginning to second-guess their commitment to not support Wall Street’s favored candidate, Hillary Clinton.

    But the rebellion is far from subdued. A Bloomberg Politics poll on June 14 showed that barely half of Sanders supporters are prepared to vote for Hillary.

    While the Bloomberg poll left out Green Party candidate Jill Stein – the clear standard bearer for our political revolution going forward in this election – the latest poll that does include Stein shows support for her has increased to 7% nationally. While still an early reading that does not yet reflect the huge coming pressures to support “the lesser-evil” Clinton, it does show potential. It’s clear that despite a large majority of people still being unaware of Stein’s campaign and politics, there’s a real opportunity to win a strong left vote, numbering in the millions, to continue our political revolution.

    Jill Stein’s platform has a great many similarities to Sanders’. She’s calling for Medicare for all, a $15 minimum wage nationally, a rapid transition to renewable energy, and an end to mass incarceration. In some ways she goes further than Bernie, calling, for example, to cancel student debt altogether – which is absolutely correct – rather than merely reducing it. Her campaign and the Green Party also have political weaknesses, and I don’t agree with them about everything, but there can be no doubt that Stein deserves the strongest possible support from Sandernistas. If a large section of our movement is able to resist the growing pressure to fall into line behind Clinton, and instead put its energies into Stein’s campaign, it will spur the development of a much bigger fight back and lay the groundwork for building a new party of the 99%.

    But while the recent polls show that a great many Sanders supporters aren’t ready to drink the Clinton Kool-Aid, they also hint at the largely unanswered questions many hold at present: whether to support Stein, to hold their noses and vote corporate Clinton, or to protest instead by voting right-wing “anti-establishment” with either libertarian Johnson or billionaire bigot Donald Trump. Johnson is at 9%, which gives a sense of where things could go if the left fails to build for Stein. This spread also illustrates something that my organization, Socialist Alternative, has been saying since long before this year’s race got underway: if we want to defeat the right we cannot do so by supporting corporate, neoliberal Democratic politicians. Until we build an organized left alternative, the political void will be up for grabs, and the establishment will move again to re-insert itself.

    Dozens of high-profile messengers, including a long parade of left luminaries, will each in different ways make the case for a lesser-evil vote for Clinton in the coming weeks and months.

    While these arguments will increasingly have a big effect, the genie has come out of the bottle, and even the corporate establishment is beginning to recognize that U.S. politics are not going to go back to the way they were.

    But nothing is automatic. The right wing can also potentially strengthen itself out of this mass anger, just as the Tea Party built itself out of the fury at the Wall Street bailouts, while the left largely made excuses for Obama. For the left to win the things Bernie Sanders has demanded and we have fought for, we will need build a powerful mass movement based on our political independence from the two parties of neoliberalism.

    To succeed at this we’ll need to confront and answer the genuine fears people have about not voting for Clinton to stop Trump. We should recognize we’ll be running up against decades of propaganda which has attacked independent politics and asserted that progressives must “vote blue, no matter what.” We need to sympathetically explain the case for supporting the strongest vote for Jill Stein; the case for a new mass party of the 99%; and why voting for Clinton undermines our political revolution. But we should not exaggerate or damage our own arguments, by saying things like “Clinton is worse than Trump,” or that there is “no difference,” or that it “doesn’t matter” if Trump wins. We have to genuinely and politically take on lesser evilism, by addressing the strategic questions about what’s really necessary to defeat the right. We won’t win over everyone right now. But our goal is to bring as many people with us as possible to not capitulate to the Democratic Party in November. The discussions with those we don’t convince will continue next year as they experience (most likely) Hillary Clinton in office.

    As I explained recently in Jacobin, collapsing our movement behind a neoliberal Democratic politician like Hillary Clinton would sabotage the political revolution, abandon the incredible momentum and energy we have built over the past year, and in the end would help right-wing populists to gain strength. It would effectively throw more fuel on the fire, because it is the genuine anger of middle and working class people at bipartisan and blatantly pro-corporate policies that has helped created the basis, in a distorted way, for Donald Trump in the first place. We need to present a clear pro-worker alternative. The most important task will be building powerful mass movements of working people and youth to fight boldly for our interests and against the disastrous system of capitalism. Occupy Wall Street, the Fight for 15, and Black Lives matter, all show what is possible, only we need to take the fight to a higher level and on a much greater scale.

    But we cannot ignore the presidential race in a presidential election year. Concretely, the continuation of the political revolution after Sanders means supporting Jill Stein.

    The People’s Summit

    The stated purpose of The People’s Summit last weekend was a mass discussion about the way forward. The event brought together an estimated 3,500 people in Chicago. The enormous potential to build a powerful movement was clear, with so many coming together eagerly looking for how to continue the political revolution.

    Unfortunately, the answers to the key questions facing Sandernistas were not on offer: discussion of who to vote for in November was shockingly kept off the agenda, Jill Stein was denied a chance to speak, concrete strategies were not put forward (except to support “down ballot” Bernie Democrats), no organizational forms were proposed, and audience participation (by “the people”) was excluded.

    At the Summit’s first session, Juan Gonzalez of Democracy Now!opened by telling a cautionary tale of 1968, when some activists refused to vote for establishment Democrat Hubert Humphrey, ending with a warning not to repeat the “mistakes of the past” (translation: not voting Democratic). These comments were later repeated and fleshed out for Monday’s Democracy Now! audience.

    Of course the balking at demands to vote for Humphrey, especially by young people, had everything to do with a (correct) rejection of a Democratic Party administration that had just escalated the horrors of the Vietnam War. And what Gonzalez left out of his political parable was the broader outcome of the anti-establishment movement’s refusal to support the Democratic Party’s candidate that year. Republican Richard Nixon, under enormous pressure from that same revolt of youth and working people that was refusing to back down, was forced to concede more gains to the 99% than virtually any other president in U.S. history (with the exception of FDR’s concessions to the labor and socialist movements with the New Deal). These included the creation of major public programs for environmental protection (the Environmental Protection Agency), for workplace safety (the Occupational Safety and Health Act), and for racial and gender equality (Affirmative Action). It also resulted in, for the first time in U.S. history, a war being stopped by a protest movement, including a powerful revolt of the soldiers themselves.

    None of this was because these policies in any way matched the conservative Nixon’s politics – they reflected instead the establishment’s need to stave off a deeper radicalization and upheaval driven by that same militant movement.

    Had activists instead fallen in line and poured their energies into making a lesser-evil case for Humphrey, the brakes would have been put on the struggle, it would have been demobilized and demoralized. The apologetics for Humphrey, Johnson, and the Democratic Party would have become the theme of 1968, instead of revolution. Fortunately, what did happen was a powerful, ongoing, anti-establishment revolt that not only forced massive concessions from Nixon, but also later led to the outright defeat of a sitting president, again for the first time in U.S. history.

    Bernie Sanders’ supporters are witnessing the beginnings of a spectacle of lesser evilism that will play out in multiple acts, over multiple weeks, in the time remaining before the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. While paying lip service to the “political revolution,” its underlying intent is the exact opposite – to charm, sway, and bully Sandernistas to finally support Clinton.

    There was a reason, of course, why this was done indirectly in Chicago. When Frances Fox Piven (co-chair of Democratic Socialists of America), in the “Democratic Socialism” workshop where I spoke, disagreed with my call for Sanders to run independent or on the Green Party ticket with Jill Stein, she also openly said that she would be voting for Clinton. There were boos from the crowd – a very large number of Sanders supporters are still angrily rejecting such appeals. The slow wooing of Sandernistas is the whole point of this carefully controlled dance.

    For my workshop, I was warned in advance not to talk about third party politics. But I did it anyway, for which I was admonished multiple times by the chair of my session. Meanwhile, no Bernie Or Bust representative of any stripe was allowed on the main stage.

    We did hear some discordant notes. National Nurses United Executive Director, RoseAnn DeMoro, blasted the Democratic establishment in the first session on Friday night. The day before on Democracy Now!she had gone even further, wondering aloud whether the Democratic Party could be reformed: “We saw the manipulation in the DNC of this election. We saw the horrendous campaign obstacles that we had to confront. It was a real eye-opener for the nurses, in particular, because they were across the country on the Sanders campaign, and they were, at first, quite stunned by the level of corruption, but eventually understood that you have to change things at a systemic level. So when Senator Sanders says that we have to transform the Democratic Party, we all kind of turn and look at each other and wonder, ‘With Wall Street’s money so invested in that party, is that possible any longer?’”

    DeMoro raised the issue on the minds of many Sanders supporters. She’s absolutely right to pose the question, but it also urgently needs answering, because Sandernistas will increasingly be on the receiving end of some very bad advice, from people they thought they could trust.

    The Next Five Months

    If we take real stock of the situation, we have to recognize that Bernie said all along he was going to support the nominee of the Democratic Party. This was a fundamental contradiction built into his campaign when he launched it. When he chose to fight a political revolution against the billionaire class from within a party controlled by that same billionaire class, he also signaled his intent to support Wall Street’s candidate if he wasn’t able to defeat her in the rigged primary.

    But leaving Bernie aside, a lot has been learned by Sandernistas along the way this last year.

    An important minority, having experienced both the successes and limits of the Sanders primary campaign, now sees clearly the corporate and corrupt character of the Democratic Party. They’ve witnessed a seemingly endless series of undemocratic events over the past months, as well as the exposure of a number of prominent “left” Democrats.

    Not least of which was the recent example provided by Elizabeth Warren.

    It says a great deal about both Warren and the Democratic Party, in which she is the most high-profile “left” politician, that she never endorsed Bernie and has now enthusiastically endorsed Hillary. It would not be a stretch to say that had Warren endorsed and campaigned for Sanders, it could well have been the difference needed to defeat Clinton in the primary. But she did not.

    It says a great deal about the whole of the Democratic Party leadership – which claims that its key priority is to defeat Trump – that it has fiercely backed Clinton in spite of the fact that the polls have shown Sanders to be the far stronger candidate in every matchup.

    Because of course the problem is much larger than just Warren, Clinton, or Debbie Wasserman Schultz. At the heart of the matter is a political party that is thoroughly undemocratic and corrupt to its very core – one that answers to Wall Street, not working people. It’s the second most pro-capitalist party in the world, after the Republican Party.

    If we are to break the stranglehold of corporate politics and stop the economic and environmental disaster they are creating, ordinary people will need to build a new mass party of our own – a party of the 99%. This is not optional. We will never win what we’re fighting for without our own political organization that fights with us, rather than against us. Had it not been for the backing of my organization, I would never have been elected and re-elected as a socialist in Seattle, because the Democratic Party has opposed me at every stage.

    The next five months present a historic opportunity to build on what we’ve started and take a huge step in organizing the progressive forces prepared to take the next step. We simply can’t afford to waste that.

    We can’t only fight against Clinton and Trump, we also have to be clear about what we are fighting for.

    We need a party that, like Bernie, rejects all corporate cash and corporate influence. That fights alongside our movements. A party with genuine democratic structures; with a binding party platform; and with a bold, fighting, socialist program basing itself on solidarity and needs of the 99%. That stands for working people, youth, the LGBTQ community, people of color, women, the poor, and all the oppressed.

    Such a party would need an active mass membership holding its elected leaders accountable, and with the ability to democratically recall them. It should include the participation of other smaller parties like the Green Party and Socialist Alternative, who could affiliate and make the case for their own politics inside it, while also helping to build it.

    It is precisely these sorts of mass working class political parties that helped lead to real gains for ordinary people where they have existed. Bernie has often referred to how programs like socialized medicine, free higher education, and paid parental leave have been implemented in virtually every other major country. This is true, but they did not just materialize out of thin air or because of cultural peculiarities. They were won, in large part, because the working class rejected the “leadership” of big business and organized their own political parties. No genuine gains happen for working people under the rotten system of capitalism without an almighty battle – and for that our organized political independence will be vital.

    With Bernie stepping out of the race, and likely endorsing Clinton, it will be up to us to continue the political revolution and to stand up against both Clintonism and Trumpism.

    I hope you can attend our Beyond Bernie meetings, and get involved in the ongoing struggle. And if you haven’t already, please sign ourpetition calling on Bernie to run all the way, and share it widely.

    Lastly, the Democratic National Convention at the end of July will be pivotal for our movement. This will be a huge organizing opportunity, if we use it effectively, to stand up en masse against the Democratic Party leadership and build support for Jill Stein. Organizing a huge turnout in Philadelphia, ideally with big walkouts from the DNC itself, can be a powerful act in driving our movement forward.

    See you in Philly.

     

  • BLOODY JUNE: MEXICAN GOVERNMENT KILLS 9, WOUNDS MANY IN BATTLE WITH TEACHERS

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    The Mexican Federal Police and Oaxaca State Police killed nine people and wounded more than one hundred others, while dozens more were beaten and yet others were arrested and jailed in what has been the most violent and bloody attack on teachers and their supporters in Oaxaca since the tremendous upheaval of 2006. Several teachers leaders have also been arrested and jailed on a variety of charges; warrants have also been issued for others.

    The state murder of nine people led to an immediate outcry and demands for investigation by national and international human rights groups, such as the Mexican Office of the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights. Amnesty International also called for an investigation into the human rights situation in Mexico. Consequently, for the first time in a year, the Mexican Minister of the Interior agreed to negotiate with the National Coordinating Committee (la CNTE) of the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE).

    Meanwhile protests by teachers and their supporters, which have been ongoing in Chiapas and Oaxaca, spread to ten states: Chihuahua, Guerrero, Jalisco, Mexico State, Michoacán, Morelos, Tamaulipas, Veracruz, and Zacatecas. These protests represent a significant expansion  of the movement from its core states of Chiapas, Guerrero, Michoacán and Oaxaca. Teachers in all of these states engaged in marches and other forms of protest, while in Oaxaca teachers blocked more than 35 different roads and highways. Members of the Independent Union of Workers of the Autonomous Metropolitcan University (SITUAM) also engaged in a workstoppage in support of the Oaxaca teachers.

    Murder Followed by Negotiation

    On June 19 in the small town of Nochixtlán, whose population is made up of indigenous Mixteco people engaged in small-scale commerce, the Federal and State police using high-powered automatic weapons attacked teachers, students, and residents, killing 8 and wounding scores. A ninth person, an innocent bystander, was killed in the city of Oaxaca.

    The Nochixtlán massacre comes less than two years since police in Guerrero were involved in the killing of six, wounding of 25, and disappearance of 43 Ayotzinapa Rura Teachers College students.

    Faced with another international scandal, Minister of the Interior Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong agreed to meet with leaders of la CNTE, the organization that has headed up the massive demonstrations in Oaxaca and other states. Osorio Chong said, however, that the purpose of the negotiations was only to reduce tension and restore order to the state, and that the Education Reform Law would not be up for discussion. Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, on a tour of Canada before the meeting of North American heads of state, reiterated the point, saying that there would be no negotiation of the Education Reform Law.

    Once again, as in the case of Ayotzinapa, there have been demonstrations in solidarity with the Oaxaca teachers and protests against the Mexican government at its embassies and consulates in Canada, the United States, and in Europe. As Peña Nieto toured Canada, on his way to the “Three Amigos” summit his steps were dogged by protests over the government killing of the teachers.

    La CNTE, a dissident caucus within the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE), has argued that the Education Reform Law exists solely to weaken the teachers union, to exert greater control over teachers, and that it represents the cutting edge of a policy aimed at the privatization of education. Peña Nieto has denied that the government has any intention of privatizing the schools.

    Negotiators for la CNTE reported that the first day of negotiation had been fruitless and that with the government refusing to discuss the law the expectation is that they will continue be drag on without issue. The government appears to be engaging in negotiations only to enhance its image. So, as bloody June ends, there seems to be no end in sight for the conflict between Oaxaca’s teachers and the Mexican government. More protests, more repression, and more bloodshed can be expected.

  • Mexico – Behind the Protests

     ImageTwo new articles provide useful, accurate analysis about what's behind the protests in Oaxaca Mexico about education reform. One explains the economic factors that compel the government to respond with such vicious repression and are behind its refusal to compromise about its policy to replace the existing teacher workforce with contract labor. Another piece explains the complicity of the "official" pro-government teachers union, SNTE, in supporting the government reforms, against the will of thousands who have taken to the streets. The protests are being led by a reform movement, CNTE, within the official union.  An activist in the Chicago Teachers Union who has done work with CNTE has organized a fund-raising appeal.  Money will to directly to CNTE, which is fighting with unbelievable courage against reforms that are planned for the rest of the world. Yes, the US as well.

  • BDS: Discussing Difficult Issues in a Fast-Growing Movement

    ImageIsrael’s attacks on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and other human rights defenders living under occupation, such as Al Haq staff, have dominated the headlines in recent weeks, including the direct threats made by leading Israeli officials against BDS activists and in particular against the movement’s co-founder Omar Barghouti.

    Beyond the headlines, the work goes on, as does continuous debate and discussion to further the movement amongst Palestinians at home and abroad as well as among global solidarity activists. There is much to discuss and some of the issues are difficult ones, including questions of framing. Al-Shabaka Executive Director Nadia Hijab discussed some of these issues in a wide-ranging conversation with Omar Barghouti.

    Omar began by clarifying that all the views he expresses here are his and his alone; they do not necessarily reflect the views of the wider BDS movement or its Palestinian leadership, the BDS National Committee (BNC).

    Omar, thanks for making the time at this especially difficult juncture (to put it mildly) for the movement and for you personally. The BDS movement’s goals – self-determination, freedom from occupation, equality for the Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the right of return – encompass Palestinian rights under international law. But we know that the BDS movement will not on its own achieve Palestinian rights. What other movements are needed and what mix of strategies is necessary? 

    Boycotts have historically been one of the main popular resistance strategies available to Palestinians of all walks of life, and today, in the realm of international solidarity, BDS is the most important and strategic form of support to our struggle for self-determination. The BDS movement has never claimed that it is the only strategy to achieve full Palestinian rights under international law. Nor is it possible to expect it to deliver Palestinian rights by itself. Among other strategies are, for example, local popular resistance against the wall and colonies as well as legal strategies to hold Israel and its leaders accountable for the crimes they have committed against the Palestinian people.

    In fact, one of the most significant strategies available to us that is hardly being pursued is diplomatic and political work with parliaments and governments across the world to isolate Israel’s regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid and have sanctions imposed on it similar to those applied to apartheid South Africa. Taking this path is primarily blocked by a complicit Palestinian officialdom that lacks a democratic mandate, principles and vision.


    “The BDS movement has never claimed that it is the only strategy to achieve full Palestinian rights…Nor is it possible to expect it to deliver Palestinian rights by itself.”


    A very important component of Palestinian resistance to Israel’s regime are Palestinians in exile, who represent half the Palestinian people. We are not just talking about refugee communities, who are clearly the most important to consider, but also Palestinians, like those active in Adalah New York, Students for Justice in Palestine chapters, social movements in the UK or Chile, and their equivalent across the world of Palestinian communities in exile, who play a leading role in promoting Palestinian rights, including through BDS-related actions.

    Palestinian citizens of Israel are also often forgotten when people talk about Palestinian resistance, despite their crucial role not only in steadfastness in the face of Israel’s regime of Zionist settler-colonialism but also their active popular, academic, cultural, legal and political resistance to the regime and its institutionalized and legalized racist structures and policies.

    Some Palestinians in exile, however, claim they are unwilling to support BDS because “Palestinians don’t ‘do’ solidarity with our own people.”

    But the traditional Palestinian political discourse of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s is largely gone. In South Africa, the national liberation movement remained active until the very last minute, but we have, unfortunately, lost much of what made up the Palestinian national liberation movement largely due to the Oslo agreements. The Palestinian leadership, with the explicit or implicit endorsement of most Palestinian political parties, has surrendered basic Palestinian rights and accepted dictates by the United States and European Union to adapt to most of Israel’s regime of colonial oppression.

    The Palestinian people is now in a state of loss and disarray. There is no longer a Palestinian “national consensus,” if ever there was one. Even the Palestinian political parties, right and left, Islamist and secular, with almost no exception, talk of “independence” and not national liberation, often forgetting the refugees and always omitting Palestinian citizens of Israel from the very definition of the Palestinian people.

    It is up to the entire Palestinian people to determine its future and the solution to this colonial conflict. In the meantime, every Palestinian individual, group or coalition must strive to weaken the Israeli regime of oppression, as a prerequisite to attain Palestinian rights under international law. We in the BDS movement have opted for developing one, time-honored form of Palestinian resistance and the most effective form of grassroots international solidarity with it, based on rights, not political solutions.

    BDS of course recognizes that there are other strategies and approaches; we’re just saying that we chose to focus on the rights, not the solutions, because for any political solution – determined by the majority of Palestinians everywhere – to be just, comprehensive and sustainable it must accommodate our rights under international law. Moreover, to be effective you need to have something close to a Palestinian consensus, and to achieve that we had to stick to the most principled and strategic lowest common denominator, to the most significant and least controversial goals of the Palestinian people that hardly anyone can object to: Ending the 1967 occupation, ending the system of apartheid, and fulfilling the right of return of Palestinian refugees to their homes and properties from which they were ethnically cleansed during and since the Nakba. And we adhere to these rights strictly.

    This approach has brought us broad support amongst Palestinians. The BNC recently organized a relatively large rally in Ramallah in a show of popular Palestinian support for BDS. I personally do not see that kind of street mobilization as a decisive indicator of popular support, but my colleagues insisted we needed to do it in order to demonstrate to the world the popular appeal of BDS. There were over 2,000 people and many speakers from political parties and grassroots movements and unions, all of whom expressed strong support for BDS. One of the outcomes of that rally was to defuse the perception among some local circles that BDS was “elitist”.

    There are those who don’t want to support the nonviolent BDS movement because it’s “below their political ceiling.” Being revolutionary, in my view, is not about raising “revolutionary” slogans that are not implementable and that therefore have little chance of contributing to processes aimed at ending the reality of oppression. What is truly revolutionary is raising a slogan that is principled and morally consistent and yet conducive to action on the ground that can lead to real change towards justice and emancipation. Otherwise you remain an armchair intellectual.

    And yet the way the BDS movement is sometimes represented makes it sound as though it alone can actually achieve Palestinian rights. The frequent references to South Africa convey that impression, whether intended or not.

    We Palestinians always compare our strategies and progress to South Africa and other movements for justice, self-determination and human rights – and we know that we’re missing key pillars that were critical to their success.

    In South Africa, for example, the African National Congress-led struggle identified four strategic pillars for the struggle to end apartheid: Mass mobilizations, armed resistance, an underground political movement, and international solidarity (particularly in the form of boycotts and sanctions). There is no “copy-paste” strategy to achieve liberation and human rights – every colonial experience is different and has its unique particularities. We have been engaged in evolving our own Palestinian strategies that suit our environment of struggle for justice and dignity.


    “Being revolutionary… is not about raising ‘revolutionary’ slogans … What is truly revolutionary is raising a slogan that is principled and morally consistent and yet conducive to action on the ground that can lead to real change towards justice”


    In the case of the Palestinian struggle, the pillar of the underground movement is limited to Gaza, where it is isolated. International law upholds the right of any nation under a foreign occupation to resist it by all means, including armed resistance, so long as all forms of resistance themselves adhere to international law and human rights principles. Aside from that, as human rights advocates, we are obliged to consider the cost-benefit of this pillar at this stage and to measure the human price of any resistance.

    As for mass mobilization, what we can do in the occupied Palestinian territory in terms of popular resistance, for example, against the Wall, is fairly limited. And it is not really a mass movement in the way that, for example, the recent teachers’ strike was popular, or the strikes against the Salam Fayyad government’s neo-liberalism or against the social security law were popular.

    The whole question of the effectiveness of different forms of resistance is key and we in the BDS movement engage in the question of the effectiveness of our nonviolent, international law-abiding strategies at every stage.

    Another concern is that some of the BDS movement’s discourse makes it sound as if Palestinians are on the point of achieving their rights. That comes out not only in the frequent references to the South Africa “moment”, but also in statements that say that a “tipping point” has been reached.

    Yes, but when we speak of a tipping point, we mean a tipping point only in terms of the specific pillar of international isolation. The measure of effectiveness is whether you’re achieving your goals or not. BDS is one of the strategies of internal resistance and it is also the most important international strategy. We never claimed otherwise. Why, then, should BDS be held responsible, say, for the inability of the Palestinian people to achieve our goals of self-determination and national liberation? At least give us credit for being realistic.

    There are many and growing critiques of the international law framework. Does that pose a problem for the BDS movement given it is grounded in international law?

    To be effective in mobilizing international pressure by groups and individuals of conscience against Israel’s regime of oppression, as well as morally consistent, we must adopt human rights principles that are as universal as possible as well as a language that can touch people across the world and inspire them to action. That’s the language of international law.  We know the inherent flaws of international law as well as anyone. But we also know that it is either that or the law of the jungle, and the latter does not work for us, on principle and practically, given that we are by far the physically weaker party.

    We don’t want symbolic rhetoric: We’re sick and tired of rhetorical support. We need effective, strategic action that has a chance to undermine the system of oppression in order to make it more realistic for the Palestinian people to realize our UN-stipulated rights. The minimal action people can take is to end their complicity. That’s a profound legal and moral obligation to end this injustice; it is not an act of charity.


    “We Palestinians always compare our strategies and progress to South Africa and other movements for justice, self-determination and human rights – and we know that we’re missing key pillars that were critical to their success.”


    What are the alternatives to international law? It’s true that the colonial empires wrote it. It’s true that it is not weighted in favor of the peoples of the world, but it is not a dogma or a static set of laws that are engraved in stone. There is a simplistic view of international law that doesn’t see it as something dynamic, as something where we, through our persistent and mass struggles, can affect the interpretation and the application. After all, we are not asking for the moon; we are simply working to consistently apply international law to Israel and to end its exceptional status as a state above the law. That is a simple yet far-reaching demand that requires years of strategic struggle.

    There is lack of clarity around the normalization guidelines that is often a source of tension with activists – and especially among Palestinians who may engage in activities that are said to be “normalizing” and who don’t appreciate what seems like having their nationalism called into question.

    The normalization guidelines are very clear. The reference document to that was adopted by consensus at the first national Palestinian BDS conference, held in November 2007. Normalization, in this context, is understood by Arabs, including Palestinians, to mean making something that is inherently abnormal, like a relationship of colonial oppression, appear deceptively normal. According to the BDS guidelines, there here are two main principles in order for a relationship between a Palestinian (or Arab) party and an Israeli party not to be considered normalization. The Israeli side must recognize the comprehensive Palestinian rights under international law, and the relationship itself should be one of co-resistance to oppression, not “co-existence” under oppression.

    The whole point is that such relationships should not legitimize, fig-leaf or whitewash Israel’s violations of Palestinian rights. To consider an example that may not be immediately obvious, say an organization in the United States is organizing a conference and has received sponsorship from Israel or an Israeli institution that is complicit in violations of Palestinian rights. And let’s say that the US organization is willing to have a panel that would include Palestinian speakers so as to provide space for a Palestinian voice. Participation under these circumstances would mean that we are effectively normalizing Israeli sponsorship – in other words normalizing the violations of our rights. This is too high a price to pay for our voices to be heard, as important as that is, given the mainstream media’s suppression of these voices. So we work closely with partners to apply pressure to rescind that Israeli sponsorship, and if that fails we call for a boycott.

    But there are still gray areas, and it is in the gray areas where problems can arise – especially as some people take it on their shoulders to speak on behalf of the BDS movement and to lay down the law when in fact they have no authority to do so.

    There are always gray areas. I would say 90% of the cases that we deal with are indeed gray. When we come across a gray area, we go back to the principle and try our best to measure profit vs. loss. BDS, after all, is not intended to be a dogma, but rather an effective strategy to contribute to our struggle for our rights.

    Some Palestinians want to have their cake and eat it too. They allow themselves to engage in projects and activities that clearly conflict with the anti-normalization guidelines, adopted since 2007 by the broadest coalition of political parties, unions and networks in Palestinian society, yet they reject any characterization of those activities as normalization simply because they are “patriotic” and “no one should call that into question.” In the BDS movement, we do not call into question anyone’s patriotism and we never ever label anyone or resort to personal attacks; that would conflict with our principles as a movement. We also reject any suppression of freedom of speech and the simplistic and harmful dismissal of those engaged in normalization activists as “traitors.”


    “We attack positions and statements but not individuals, and we don’t believe in blacklists or any form of McCarthyism. It negates our principles, it’s an abuse of power, and it’s counter-productive.”


    The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) simply mobilizes moral pressure to expose normalization activities in order to undermine normalization. It is vital to counter normalization activities because they constitute a key weapon that Israel has used against the movement and against the Palestinian struggle for rights in general.

    And sometimes we do things that are seen as ahead of their time or use language that is not yet accepted. For example, when we first used apartheid as a key facet of Israel’s regime of oppression or insisted on the right of return in our international discourse, both were frowned upon not only in the mainstream but even in some Palestine solidarity circles in the west. Also, when the 2004 call by PACBI (the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel) mentioned Zionism as a racist ideology that has been a pillar in Israel’s settler-colonial regime, this issue was hardly discussed in most Palestine solidarity circles in the west in the post-Oslo period.

    It’s important not to conflate opposition to Zionism and to Israel’s regime of colonial oppression and apartheid as being an opposition to Jews: it is absolutely not. The BDS movement has consistently and categorically rejected all forms of racism, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. The fact that 46% of non-Orthodox Jewish-American men under 40 support a full boycott of Israel to end its occupation and human rights violations, according to a 2014 poll, partly attests to the inclusive, anti-racist character of the movement.

    Can you give an example of what you do when there is a gray area?

    We never take decisions as individual members of the BNC or of its academic and cultural arm PACBI when there’s a gray area; we always go back to the group and decide collectively, based on the agreed upon principles, not the personal opinions and biases of each of us. We don’t give our advice or recommendation until we reach consensus. If we have a deadlock we say to the person seeking advice that we don’t have clear advice to give them. We pick our battles. We don’t chase everything, and we ignore so many targets based on cost-benefit calculations.

    We don’t issue edicts; rather, we issue advice. We never say “thou shalt”.


    “It is vital to counter normalization activities because they constitute a key weapon that Israel has used against the movement and against the Palestinian struggle for rights in general.”


    And we never use ad hominem attacks – we have never done so since BDS was founded in 2005. We attack positions and statements but not individuals, and we don’t believe in blacklists or any form of McCarthyism. It negates our principles, it’s an abuse of power, and it’s counter-productive. Personally, I’ve never engaged with anyone who, for example, attacks us as “agents of imperialism” or similar ultra-left nonsense. We pick our battles, as I said earlier, and we keep our eyes on the real enemies.

    When we engage to stop a normalization activity, our objective is always to first and foremost convince the person involved to stop normalizing. You can’t use ad hominem attacks and expect that person to side with you. And in fact many Palestinians who were engaged in normalization 10 years ago are now BDS supporters, and that’s partly because we avoid personal injury. It’s wrong on principle and it’s pragmatically wrong.

    When someone has a question, we recommend seeking advice from PACBI or the BNC, or one of our partners in any given country and we seek to resolve it through interactive debate. We now have much better mechanisms to implement the guidelines.

    There is a gray area that was cited to me as an example of something Palestinians don’t understand, and indeed find problematic – that of Arab passport holders entering Israel on a visa issued by an Israeli embassy being treated as normalization, as opposed to getting a permit issued by the Israelis at the request of the Palestinian Authority (PA). People don’t get the difference because Israel issues both.

    That is a sticky point and a very difficult one. After extensive debates, community meetings and discussions with many Palestinian artists and cultural organizations, we concluded that when an Arab passport holder receives an Israeli visa he/she is normalizing Arab relations with the regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid by treating this regime as if it were normal. Whereas obtaining a permit from the Israeli occupation authorities through the PA is not, despite the problematic nature of the PA’s role, to put it mildly, because Palestinians under occupation are in a coercive relationship with Israel: Palestinians have no choice to receive family or friends from the Arab world without dealing with the Israeli authorities. But such dealings do not per se recognize Israel’s regime as normal.  Still, we recognize this as a difficult area, and we admit that it is not the most robust or irrefutable of our guidelines.

    My question is this: Why don’t Palestinian BDS critics at home or in exile write to us if they seek clarification or want to share their criticisms in a constructive way that strengthens our collective movement? We get hundreds of emails daily from solidarity activists but very few from Palestinians. A few Palestinians attack BDS without bothering to first write to the BNC and express their critique in a way that can help make this already effective movement better and more able to handle the many challenges facing it. We are open to and we sincerely encourage discussion and debate among Palestinians in our diverse communities. I beg those with questions, criticisms, or comments to communicate with us – just write to pacbi@pacbi.org or info@bdsmovement.net. Despite the workload we, as volunteers, have to deal with, we do our utmost to respond to every email we receive, especially one coming from a Palestinian sister or brother.

  • Brexit: A Victory for the Populist Right

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    The British electorate issued a stunning rebuke to the establishment by demanding, by a surprisingly respectable margin, withdrawal from the European Union. Just weeks ago, this outcome was considered remote. For David Cameron and the Conservative mainstream, it was – or so it seemed – a clever gamble.  Let the nativists of the right, the Tory backbenchers and the UK Independence Party bigmouths test their outsized claims to speak for Britain.

    And should they fail, as most respectable opinion once confidently expected, they could crawl back into the corners of political life, isolated, discredited but grateful to have had their fifteen minutes of notoriety. The plebiscite originated as a transparent ploy to consolidate power, risibly camouflaged as a magnanimous concession.

    And it blew up in Cameron’s face.

    The outcome is widely interpreted as a referendum on globalization, combining the impact of EU trade regulation with the fear of population movements from the European periphery and Southwest Asia; occasioned by the global recession and bolstered by the Schengen visa agreement that permits those who gain entry anywhere in the EU to move freely among EU member nations.

    The reaction is, to put it bluntly, a toxic mix of little England racism and anti-establishment populism that, like all populisms, ransacks the grievances of the left and twists them into grotesque distortions.  It pillories the ruling establishment, not alone for the austerity, the inequalities, the loss of security, the declining living standards that it alone imposed on the nation, but even more resoundingly for betraying the nation in partnership with but also in service to the unaccountable political and financial elites of Frankfurt and Brussels.

    As George Monbiot rightly stated, the EU is a “festering cesspool of undue influence and opaque lobbying.” But the handful of laws in health, safety regulation and refugee/asylum protection that the Brexiters have condemned are preferable to what the Conservative UK political class, unencumbered, would impose. And – most significantly – neoliberal devastation is entirely home grown. Unlike Greece it was imposed not in response to pressure from above but solely from within, by successive UK governments, both Conservative and Labour, answerable to the demands of British capital.

    Across the globe, reaction was swift. Cameron resigned. Global markets tanked. And the far right throughout Europe were high fiving one another, stoking fears that similar referendums would debilitate the host. Europe is becoming ungovernable, and the rightwing nationalist tide is poised to overwhelm the existing system.

    The EU bureaucrats are unlikely to treat Britain more kindly than Greece. Although they have far less leverage, given the sheer size of the British economy (fifth-largest in the world) and the UK’s monetary sovereignty that insulates it against ECB pressure tactics, the EU is nevertheless positioned to act decisively. The EU’s power resides in the threat to change the terms of access for the 40% of Britain’s exports now linked to the Eurozone. Any decline of trade would adversely impact employment, income, tax receipts and domestic investment. It threatens the viability of the successor British government. This is no small cudgel, since the alternative – a pivot to the US and Atlantic trade – would take years to cement.

    Article 50 of the EU Treaty, which contains the heretofore-unused exit clause, ostensibly provides for a two-year negotiation period and an automatic renewal of EU membership thereafter. That, in principle, should have given Cameron leeway to negotiate better terms and present that as a parliamentary justification for refusing to dissolve the government in response to this nonbinding plebiscite. And that may well have been his plan B: use this challenge, if need be, to reclaim the nationalist high ground and triangulate his would-be conservative challengers, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, and the UK Independence Party (UKIP), by riding the tide of nationalist resentment to his own ends.

    But if so he again badly miscalculated. Despite what Cameron might have liked, EU president Donald Tusk, and European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker and others have said that the UK must quit “as soon as possible.” “Any delay,” they insist, “would prolong uncertainty.” There will be no new deals. And perhaps no UK , as Scotland and Northern Ireland weigh the possibility of breaking away in favor of the EU rather than submitting to the economic retaliation that awaits.

    And should this fragmentation occur, left bastions of the UK’s labor movement will be peeled away, leaving the British and Welsh working classes at the mercy, for the foreseeable future, of the right.

    There may be a left-wing case for leaving the EU. The British Socialist Workers Party and others made one. They continue to assert, against all evidence to the contrary, that “the rich and powerful … have suffered a massive reverse.” The Socialist Party of England and Wales, whose American affiliate is Socialist Alternative, claimed that this was a “working class revolt” and a symptom of the “collapse of the Tory Party.”  

    If this sentiment was meant to replicate the spirit of Greece’s Left Platform (a Syriza faction), it was entirely misunderstood. Greek socialists did not wish to leave the EU and their left wing never demanded this as an immediate or future option. They intended only to depart from the Euro currency, itself a difficult, fraught and complex maneuver. There were stopgap measures that might have been taken along that path. But it was a maneuver essential to regain control over the fiscal levers of government and to free Greece from the Troika’s stranglehold over its economy and social support network. Failure to find a path to break with the Euro doomed Syriza.

    Britain, however, is already in the very enviable position to which the Greek socialists could only aspire.

    Yes, there may be a left case. Is it persuasive? Coherent? It really doesn’t matter because it is not the Lexit/Leave Campaign that prevailed here. It is not the multinationals, the investment banks, the hedge funds that will be damaged. It will not be a blow against austerity, neoliberalism or the growing debt peonage of financialized capitalism. Trade unions will not be empowered. The Labour right wing has in fact seized on the debacle to call for Jeremy Corbyn’s head.

    Cameron’s exit will not create opportunities for the left.

    And in fact, most of the left with the exception of some isolated pockets referenced above, understood that. What the broader left in Britain and elsewhere has been unable to do is provide a convincing alternative to neoliberalism. The right wing of the labor movement accepts the parameters of capitalism, but attempts to manage them more equally than would conservatives. As long as the far left argues that, short of a socialist transformation, no real social conquests are possible, those looking for immediate remediation will look elsewhere. A rising nationalist tide will, then, constantly threaten to overwhelm capitalism.

    Right-wing governments and social democratic regimes alike have heeded the call of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and financial elites everywhere. Public monies, money created by government fiat, have been spent into the banking system directly recapitalizing them or to transfer nonperforming assets off their balance sheets in an effort to restore the banks to profitability. Reviving the financial sector has only propitiated the creation and accumulation of financial assets that create no value on their own, but profit from extracting existing and future values from the productive sectors of the economy. Freely available public money is the backstop for private debt-generated (bank) money needed for the expansion of business and government services.

    When industrial sectors are profitable and growing, the financial sector activates idle balances and recycles them in support of capital accumulation. Finance shares in the additional profits its loans help leverage.  The growing tax base occasioned by economic expansion becomes the collateral needed to augment public services through bond sales.

    When, as has long now been the case, manufacturing profitability is weak, any preexisting partnership between the financial and productive sectors completely disintegrates. Symbiosis turns into parasitism, as finance feeds on the dying host, asset stripping firms and bankrupting governments. Private money is debt money and private finance must end in crisis, austerity and growing social inequality when debt can no longer be sustained.

    The left has to find a way to use public money for public purposes. Clearly, reviving the banking system will not translate into a broader economic revival. Financial assets may inflate, the stock market might bubble and there might even be a slight wealth effect, in which some well-placed consumers who, having hit their savings target, may begin to increase spending.

    This can never be a recipe for a broad based revival. It will never reduce social inequality and it will never provide a firm base for the expansion of social entitlements.

    But the same public money that is spent into the banking system, can be alternatively spent and spent debt-free by government for investment in green and other socially necessary industries, to purchase working class consumer and student debt, to pay for the expansion of free day care, college tuition and other public services.

    The left needs to make the case that it has an alternative, a credible alternative; and that this alternative is implementable on the path to social transformation, and not simply as a byproduct. It first may have to convince itself.

  • A Story from El Salvador: Julio Molina, Saving Historic Memory

    ImageThere are 500 delegates from more than 100 political organizations in the Americas here at the São Paolo Forum being held this year in San Salvador. Yesterday at the opening session I found myself seated next to Julio Molina, a delegate from the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) of the host country, El Salvdor. We introduced ourselves and when the session ended went out to talk about our mutual interest in history.

    While I am a historian, Julio dedicates himself to preserving the “historic memory” of the generation that was involved in the 12-year civil war that took place here from 1980 to 1992 between the rightwing government of the oligarchy and the revolutionaries of the FMLN. “We have many tasks today,” he says, “but one of them is the preservation of the historic memory.” Now 65, he was himself part of that struggle, having fought for nine years with the FMLN guerrilla army and, after military ranks were established in 1984, having become a captain.

    “The word ‘history’ comes from the Greek, meaning ‘to see’,” he tells me. “We have here many still living who were there, who saw, and we have to preserve that historic memory.” He dedicates himself to interviewing FMLN survivors of the civil war alive today, but, he tells me, he only interviews those who came from his own political organization because he believes that others from other groups will have reservations and may not be forthcoming.

    The FMLN, he explains to me, was a front made up of many different political parties of the left that had arisen after the so-called “Football War” between El Salvador and Honduras that broke out on July 14, 1969. The Communist Parties of both El Salvador and Honduras supported their respective governments in the war, leading to the break up of those parties as small groups disgusted with the old leadership left and formed new left organizations. Within a decade those organizations turned to the strategy of guerrilla warfare, followed as well by the Communist Party of El Salvador.

    Julio joined one of the new political organizations, the Popular Forces of Liberation Farabundo Martí (FPL), and became a guerrilla fighter. He felt then and believes today that the FPL was a group with a revolutionary ethical compass.

    The United States supported the Salvadoran government, providing millions in military assistance, but the war dragged to a stalemate. Finally, in January of 1992, the Chapultepec Peace Accords were signed in Mexico City. With a new framework for political democracy, the FMLN entered electoral politics and Muricio Funes was elected president in 2009. Today Fumes’ vice-president, Salvador Sánchez Cerén, another FMLN guerrilla leader, is president.

    Julio tells me that while the various political tendencies that formed the FMLN may not formally exist anymore, people feel very loyal to those with whom they fought and worked politically. He believes that President Sánchez Cerén has done well in office, especially in taking on one of the country’s most difficult problems today: the marasMaras are the criminal gangs that originated among Central American immigrants in the United States; when the gang members were deported, they set up organizations in their home countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador selling drugs, engaging in prostitution, and defending their businesses against rivals and the government with high-powered weapons. The Mara Salvatrucha is perhaps the largest and certainly the most famous of the gangs. The gangs’ internecine warfare has made El Salvador one of the world’s deadliest places.

    The difficulties facing El Salvador, says Julio, are great. The tide seems to be turning in Latin America as left governments have lost elections in Argentina or been removed by the courts as in Brazil. But Julio has great confidence in the president Sánchez Cerén, who was one of the members of the FPL and who he believes still has a revolutionary ethos. “The most important thing,” he says, “is the moral force which attempts to make revolutionary thinking into reality.”