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  • Mexican Teachers 'Indefinite General Strike' Faces Severe Repression

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    The National Coordinating Committee (la CNTE) and allied dissident groups in the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE) declared a general, indefinite strike on May 16. Tens of thousands of teachers left their classrooms, shutting down many schools in four states: Chiapas, Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Michoacán. There have also been protests in the State of Morelos and the State of Mexico.

    This is a huge movement, encompassing at least two hundred thousand of Mexico’s more than a million teachers and it involves both bold civil disobedience by the teachers and violent repression by the government. This time, the government seems out to destroy the movement that has been the strongest force in the Mexican working class since the late 1970s.

    The strikers in some locations have taken over highway tollbooths, shut down highways, and occupied government buildings. In Chiapas teachers took over four public and private radio and television stations while in Oaxaca teachers blocked the airport that links the state capital to the seaside resorts. In all of the striking states, teachers organized delegations to occupy public plazas in Mexico City the national capital.

    The repression has been severe. Some teachers say it is the most serious attack on the teachers movement since the 1980s. More than 4,250 teachers have been fired for missing four days of work, absences often related to their participation in strikes or other protests. The Mexican federal and state governments have mobilized police who violently attacked the demonstrators in Chiapas leading to a pitched street battle involving tear gas, sticks, and stones and lasting three hours. In Oaxaca, la CNTE leader Rubén Núñez told the media that teachers were being arrested, though there were no charges against them and no warrants for their arrest.

    In Mexico City the police blocked highway traffic on one highway into the city to prevent teachers from joining protests there. Mexico City police also dislodged teacher from plantóns or sit-ins in public plazas, though the teachers later returned to those or other plazas. In Guerrero police rough up teachers occupying a public plaza, forcing them to board busses to return to their hometowns.

    Dissident teachers argue that the Education Reform Law’s required tests are unfair, that the law weakens union rights, and that it will lead to privatization of the public education system. A spokesperson for la CNTE says that the dissident teachers will not be intimidated. “We will continue the work stoppage despite the threat of being fired. We will not take one step back.”

    Not Like the Past

    In past years, Mexico’s dissident teachers often struck for weeks and nearly always took over public buildings, blocked highways, and occupied the public plazas of the state capital and the national capital—struck almost every year—but almost all strikers recovered back wages, few were disciplined, and while there were sometimes confrontations, repression was seldom so severe. (Though in the extraordinary events of 2006 in Oaxaca police and civilian death squads attacked strikers and over several weeks of strikes and protests as many as 20 people lost their lives.)

    President Enrique Peña Nieto’s government and allied state governments appear to be bent on winning this one through a variety of tactics.

    ·      Striking teachers are being docked, and, if they miss four days of work, being fired.

    ·      A few union leaders have been charged with crimes while others are being arrested without charges.

    ·      Police are being forceful and violent in an attempt to intimidate strikers.

    ·      The government and the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE) are stonewalling the teachers, refusing to negotiate over the Education Reform Law or other issues.

    ·      Working teachers have received a contractual wage increase of 3.5 percent negotiated by the union.

    ·      Teachers who take the required tests are being praised, sometimes honored in public ceremonies.

    These tactics are intended to isolate la CNTE and its allies from the rest of the union and to discredit them in the eyes of the public.

    Strikes Again Coincide with Elections

    The teachers’ strike is taking place on the eve of the June 5 national elections when 12 states will choose governors as well as electing other local officials. At the time of the June 2015 elections, the union—to protest not only against the Education Reform but also against the September 2014 murder of six, wounding of 25, and kidnapping of 43 students of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College in the town of Iguala, Guerrero—called for a boycott of the election.

    The teachers union and the Ayotzinapa protest movement not only called for a boycott in June of 2015 but also attempted to force the boycott on the public by burning ballots and other election materials in Oaxaca City as well as in other places. In some areas that strategy led to conflicts not only with the authorities, but also with local communities who wanted to vote.

    This time la CNTE is calling upon its members, supporters, and the public at large to vote for the Movement of National Regeneration Party (MORENA), the party led by Andrés Manuel López Obrador. La CNTE argues that voters should cast their ballots for MORENA in order to punish the other congressional parties virtually all of which signed President Enrique Peña Nieto’s “Pact for Mexico” that laid the basis for the page of a series of so-called reforms, including the election reform.

    The president’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) holds the lead in polls in the State of Oaxaca; there are no elections this spring in the other states where the teachers are on strike (Chiapas, Guerrrero, and Michoacán).

    Also a War of Words

    The increasingly violent confrontation has been accompanied by a war of words. The Secretary of Public Education (SEP), Aurelio Nuño Mayer, told the media that, “An overwhelming majority of teachers have demonstrated their educational responsibilities by not participating in the unjustified work stopages promoted by the various currents of la CNTE in three states of the Republic.” Nuño Mayer has claimed that in Oaxaca and Michoacán approximately 85 percent of teachers were working, while in Guerrero the schools operated practically normally.

    La CNTE has denied the government’s claims that most schools were operating normally. In Chiapas and Oaxaca, where the strike is strongest, there have been huge demonstrations of tens of thousands teachers, parents and others, though in some cases the marches took place on holidays or Sundays when school was not in session. In some states hundreds and in others a few thousand teachers have blocked highways or seized public buildings, indicating strong support for the movement. Thousands of teachers from seveal states have protested in Mexico City.

    Dissident teachers have been demanding to meet with Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, the Secretary of the Interior (Gobernacion), the office that historically meets with and makes deals between the government and opposition movements. He said that his office would not meet with the dissident teacher organization until they accepted the education reform law.

    Teachers Evaluations and Firings

    The head of the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE), Juan Díaz de la Torre, argues that 98 percent of Mexican teachers have accepted the education reform and and have demonstrated that by taking the evaluations required by it. (Failure to take the examination can result in termination and a number of teachers have been terminated for failing to do so.) He argues that la CNTE and its allies disdain the opinion of the majority of teachers.

    De la Torre also accuses la CNTE of being controlled by “political interests that have nothing to do with education or teachers rights,” though he has not identified what those “interests” might be. He might be implying either the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) or the Movement of National Regeneration (MORENA) party, both of which have links to and have spoken up for the teachers.

    Labor and International Solidarity

    The dissident teachers have received support from other unions both in Mexico and abroad. In addition to parents who joined in support of the dissident teachers there have been some important instance of solidarity. In Juchitán, Oaxaca, some 500 members of the National Union of Health Sector Workers (SNTSS) marched in solidarity with SNTE Local 22, which is controlled by la CNTE.

    Trinational Education Coalition, an alliance of Canadian, Mexican, and U.S. teachers, meeting in Vancouver from May 13-15, passed a resolution to support the dissident teachers movement.

    The problem, however, is that as it has been for years, the dissident movement, powerful as it is, remains a force in just a handful of states. While there is widespread concern among teachers about the Education Reform Law, and though there are occasionally protests in other states, it is only in four states that the movement is strong. Only if la CNTE can mobilize teachers throughout more states in Mexico does it seem likely to be successful in turning back the Education Reform Law.

    Still despite opposition from the government and the official union leadership, the dissident teachers movement pledges to continue its strike, demanding negotiation with the government over the Education Reform Law.

     

  • The Left of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) Unites to Form Platform A

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    This is a translation of a statement by the Left Tendencies of the French New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) that are grouped under Platform A, originally published in La Izquierda Diario on January 27, 2016.

    In the indicative vote taken at the NPA’s National Political Council meeting, the platform of the left tendencies came in first with 45% of the vote, beating those presented by François Sabado and Olivier Besancenot (38%) and Alain Krivine and Philippe Poutou (16%).

    The NPA National Conference confirms the decision of its Third Congress [January 2015] to present an NPA candidate in the presidential elections. The text that follows defines the political framework of this candidacy.

    Platform A: for an NPA candidate in the presidential elections

    For workers and the popular classes, the balance sheet of the Hollande government is catastrophic. Unemployment and job insecurity have not stopped rising and the degradation of public services continues. All of society has been dragged into social and democratic regression by the capitalist crisis, with the politics of austerity and the race for competitiveness as its consequence.

    For the government, this anti-democratic and anti-popular state of emergency is permanent.

    These policies multiply the financial support given to the capitalists, destroy labour laws and accentuate inequality in all fields. The only ones who benefit are the capitalists that control the economy, the finances of the state and the monopolization of wealth.

    Hollande, along with the right, have no other project except continuing to make things worse. They line us up against the wall.

    Both here and across Europe, the difficulties that workers experience in retaking the offensive, in overcoming the dispersion of their struggles – in a word, in overcoming the politics of demobilization and illusions in the institutions of traditional political and trade union leaderships – have left the field open for the rise of reactionary ideas and forces.

    The growing discrediting of the government parties, parties that promote the same politics of making workers and the popular strata pay for the crisis, opens the door to the far right, to the Front National (FN – National Front).

    In this context where the traditional left and the right have ‘set the table’, Marine Le Pen attempts to give the FN a false image of a new and popular party, while maintaining its ideological and militant continuity with the extreme right. Today, the FN is a real threat, especially because of its influence among youth and workers.

    It would be illusory and dangerous to believe that the FN could give even a minimal response to the social regression provoked by the offensive of the ruling class and their state. On the contrary, it will only exacerbate it. The FN does not aspire to do anything else except serve the interests of the ruling classes and of the bourgeoisie, which their leaders are a part. And in order to ensure power for itself, the bourgeoisie tries to deflect popular anger and discontent, directing it towards those who are weakest, the migrants.

    The latter are in no way the adversaries of workers of this country. They are also workers, victims of all sorts of horrors and an illustration of the barbarity caused by the neo-liberal and imperialist policies of the great powers and of France.

    It is in the interest of all of us not to be divided

    Migrants need to be welcomed. It is necessary to open the borders in order to stop the violence and death of refugees.

    We must also put an end to the wars of which these populations are the first victims.

    The headlong rush in militarism which Hollande has sent the country into has only aggravated the chaos engendered by the imperialist wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Africa and the permanent war against the Palestinian people.

    This new military adventure demonstrates the inability of the ruling classes to provide even a minimal response to the horrors that their policies have given birth to. Their military and police responses do nothing except exacerbate tensions and provoke new horrors on a higher level.

    It is these policies that have given rise to the fundamentalist terrorists who are enemies of the workers, of the people, of democratic rights, and it is these policies that only end up serving the FN.

    To fight Daesh (ISIS) is to bring the wars that spawned it to an end, to stop airstrikes against Syria and withdraw French troops from Africa and the Middle East. It is to express our solidarity with the workers and peoples that in Syria, Iraq and the Middle East are struggling against the most reactionary dictatorships, as the continuation of the Arab spring. It is also supporting the struggle of the Palestinians against the State of Israel and the right to self-determination of the Kurdish people.

    No to the National Union, lift the state of emergency

    With the proclamation of the state of emergency, Hollande has taken a leap forward in his authoritarian politics and has reinforced the police character of the state. This hardening, accepted by the traditional left and the majority of the trade union organizations, aims to silence workers and the population in order to impose the policies of social regression.

    Since the attacks of November 13, in the name of war, Hollande presents himself as the man of “national union”, the only one able to stop the Front National while singing the same song as Marine Le Pen, appearing as defender of the nation, promoting xenophobic prejudices and reinforcing racism against Muslims and immigrants in particular.

    For Hollande, just as it was for Sarkozy yesterday or for Marine Le Pen tomorrow, if she ever comes to power, the defense of the nation does nothing more than mask the defense of the interests of the ruling classes, the rich and the privileged.

    All those who offer up the retreat towards nationalism as some kind of response to the crisis and protection for the popular classes are simply lying to us. They want to convince us that bosses and workers, the dominant and the dominated, all have the same interests. They want to divide us, make us face off against one another, stir up xenophobia, racism and fear towards foreigners.

    At a time when all of humanity is threatened by the climate crisis, the degradation of the environment due to urban, industrial and energy policies that are subject to the logic of profit and global competition, to retreat behind borders is not only a ridiculous proposal but a hoax.

    Faced with the gravity of the problems caused by the policies of the capitalist classes that strike the whole population, nothing less than an internationalist response is required, one that questions the very basis of this logic, capitalist private property.

    Responding to the social, democratic and ecological emergency requires a radical attack against the power of the capitalist class

    If we want to break with the policies of austerity, and guarantee jobs and a decent wage for all, the ending of unemployment, the development or reconstruction of public services, neither magical incantations, the announcement of policies to boost consumption or legislation to “bring morality to capitalism” will be enough.

    No, these good intentions of the anti-liberal left do not work because they do not attack the root of the evil.

    It will take a workers’ government to prohibit all dismissals and massively reduce working hours, end unemployment, cancel debts, form a single public bank, nationalize the major financial, industrial and commercial conglomerates and place them under workers’ control. All this without any indemnity or compensation: workers and the population have already paid more than enough to maintain the standard of living for these parasites.

    Confronting the ecological crisis, responding to global warming, requires tearing the economy out of the hands of the multinationals and ending generalized competition in order to lay the foundations of a planned economy.

    To carry forward the energy revolution that humanity needs to survive in all sectors of activity (housing, transportation, energy, agriculture), what is required is a break with the logic of profitability and productivity. This anti-capitalist rupture would make it possible to organize workers’ and popular control of production within the perspective of democratic planning and on the basis of social and ecological needs. This would allow for an end to nuclear energy, massive investments in renewable energy and removing or reducing parasitic production that does not correspond to our genuine needs.

    Let us become our own representatives

    None of the big institutional parties defends or can defend the interests of the workers and the lower classes simply because they defend the interests of the exploiters, employers and bankers. The electoral and democratic game boils down to placing a ballot in the ballot box to decide who manages the affairs of the bourgeoisie.

    The politicians that alternate in power act as a great immovable administration, they are granted privileges that guarantee them a lifestyle worthy of the ruling classes while asking us to “tighten our belts” and imposing austerity policies upon us.

    It is these very rules of this falsely democratic political game that need to completely change. Every representative should earn no more than a salary equal to that of the average worker and should be able to be recalled at any time. The presidential regime that concentrates exorbitant powers in the hands of a single person, along with reactionary institutions like the Senate, must be brought to an end.

    A truly democratic government cannot arise without breaking with capitalist institutions and property. This would result from the mobilization of the working class and the population as well as the emergence of assemblies composed of elected and recallable delegates in workplaces, communes, departments, regions and the national level.

    To move forward in this way, the workers, the popular classes and the youth need to regain confidence in themselves without being paralysed by the supposed “social dialogue” – the anti-labour policies that the ruling Socialist Party and the Medef (Employers’ Federation) want to involve the trade union leaderships in.

    We want to echo the discontent and overcome the anxiety of the exploited, bewildered by the politics of union leaders who are supposed to represent them, but leave strikes and struggles dispersed and without any coordination.

    We want to develop common action, a united front of all the organizations, tendencies, groupings of militants, in order to advance the struggle and impose our demands.

    We want to encourage workers to unionize and to reclaim their organizations so that they become genuine instruments for the defense of their interests; we seek to unite and coordinate all those who break with the politics of collaboration with employers and the state.

    For workers to take affairs into their own hands, what is needed is the preparation of a counteroffensive, an overall movement, of a general strike, capable of imposing the greatest demands and of bringing this system of misery and exploitation to an end.

    This is the only way to defeat the capitalists who hold the reins of the economy.

    It is the only way to conquer the right of the workers and the population to decide on and control the running of the economy.

    The only alternative is a workers’ and peoples’ government, born of the mobilizations and that breaks with capitalist institutions and property.

    For the transformation of society

    In contrast to a retreat into nationalism, such a government would call on the workers and popular classes of Europe to extend the mobilization. The fight against austerity cannot be conducted only at the level of France, of one country, for it is a European fight. As the failure of Syriza has shown, this fight cannot be waged without breaking with the politics that serve the capitalists, Brussels and the ECB (European Central Bank), with the Europe of the financiers. To attack the power of our national bourgeoisie is to break with the institutions of the European Union.

    Against the Europe of the troika, we defend international solidarity and stand for a Socialist Europe of the workers and the people.

    We denounce the security measures and permanent state of emergency put in place by the government after the November 13 attacks. We denounce the racism, in particular the Islamophobia, engendered in this policy.

    We fight against all forms of discrimination, for equality between women and men, between LGBTI and hetero, and for the right to choose for all women.

    We propose the immediate regularization of all “sans-papiers” (undocumented migrants), the right to vote in all elections for all foreigners, and the abolition of all immigration laws. We defend the right of people to self-determination, whether in Corsica or the former overseas colonies.

    Voting will not change our lives. But in this campaign just as in our everyday activities, we understand that we are the spokespersons for the workers, the popular classes, the women, the youth, the oppressed minorities, the sans-papiers and migrants; and for the denunciation of social, democratic and ecological havoc, and the denunciation of the social violence exercised by the pursuit of profit and globalized competition – the motor force for the domination of the capitalist class.

    Not only do we want to contribute to the regrouping of forces from the world of labour, we also want to build a bridge to those who are fighting or seeking roads towards another society. To bring the social and ecological struggles together, to bring together exploited workers with those who have no job or those organizing the struggles against the massive construction projects that damage the environment, to give strength to all those with rebellion in their veins and aspirations for a more just and better world, that is the meaning of our fight, of our campaign.

    We want to debate and open dialogue with the organizations and all those who refuse to abide by the regressive policies of the ruling classes and the parties that serve them.

    We fight for the regroupment of anti-capitalists and revolutionaries.

    We want to help the exploited and oppressed to secure their own representation and political expression in order to take their affairs in hand, and those of all society, in order to respect their rights and their needs and replace the capitalist logic of exploitation with the logic of solidarity and cooperation, both here and beyond our borders, constructing in the continuity of the struggle for socialism, communism, a society free from exploitation and oppression.

    Against the prevailing discourse about “insurmountable” capitalism, we defend the perspective of a superior social organization based on the collectivization of the means of production, the planning of the economy under workers’ and popular control in the enterprises and at every level of society for the satisfaction of the needs of all.

    This is the meaning of our actions, our campaign and our candidacy.

    To carry out this campaign, the NPA needs to regroup all its forces and mobilize all its energies. The Socialist Party government attempts by all means, in particular with the amendment to the “loi sur les parrainages” (sponsorship law *), to prevent the minority currents that are fighting from the left to express themselves. It is through such a broad regroupment that we can rise to the challenge.

    *The constitutional requirement for Presidential candidates to collect 500 signatures from locally elected officials before they can stand in elections.

    Translated by Sean Robertson. Reposted from the website of Left Voice.

  • This Is What Insurgency Looks Like

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    In a small church in the Albany, New York's low-income, predominantly African-American South End, forty people were gathered for a community meeting. They were organizing a protest against trains carrying potentially explosive oil — dubbed by the residents "bomb trains" — that were running through their neighborhood. City Counselor Vivian Kornegay told the group that many municipalities had opposed the bomb trains and other dangerous fossil fuel infrastructure, but had little power to protect their residents; it was up to a "people's movement" to do so. "What we want is for all of us to be free, healthy, and safe — and for our planet to be a better place to live."

    Maeve McBride, an organizer for 350.org, explained that the protest was part of a global campaign of direct action and civil disobedience aiming to keep 80% of all fossil fuels in the ground. Pastor Mark Johnson of the St. John's Church of God in Christ said, "I heard at a meeting last night that we have a constitutional right to clean water and clean air." Maeve McBride explained that the action was part of a "new wave" that was drawing on a "new paradigm" — "using civil disobedience to protect the public trust," which included water, air, and the climate itself.

    Organizers had met with officials from the police and sheriff's offices and reported, "they abhor the trains — and are very supportive of us." Then the group received direct action training. They read out loud the "action agreement" pledging nonviolent behavior and mutual support. Then they lined up to march and while police officers (played by the trainers) ordered them to move away, they scrambled onto an imaginary railroad track. Later that evening the steering committee for Albany Break Free planned outreach to supporting organizations, phone banks, canvassing, leafleting, and details of the action.

    The Albany organizers had learned about the "new paradigm" when 350.org North American co-organizers of Break Free From Fossil Fuels had decided to use the "public trust" principle to frame US Break Free actions and formed a Break Free Public Trust Work Group to spread the idea. Some on the The Break Free Albany steering committee had participated in the working group's webinar on using the public trust doctrine, and they decided to integrate the Public Trust Proclamation into their "topline message" and to hand out the Break Free Public Trust Proclamation to all participants. (The Proclamation appears at the end of this article.)

    A week before the action the Albany Break Free steering committee defined their basic message. Potentially explosive crude oil "bomb trains" roll through Albany and surrounding communities, polluting the air and contributing to the climate crisis. Primarily low-income communities of color are put at risk. The urgent need to address climate change means that fossil fuels have to be left in the ground and a transition made to a "twenty-first century renewable energy economy." They called for an end to all new fossil fuel infrastructure, including pipelines, power plants, compressor stations, and storage tanks. And they called for a just transition away from fossil fuel energy with training and jobs for affected workers, so "no worker is left behind."

    On Six Continents

    Meanwhile, reports of Break Free actions from six continents began flowing in. In Wales, protestors shut down the UK's largest open-pit coal mine for over twelve hours with no arrests. In the Philippines, 10,000 people marched and rallied demanding the cancellation of a 600-Megawatt coal power plant project. In New Zealand, protestors blockaded and shut down Christchurch, Dunedin, and Wellington branches of the ANZ bank, which had $13.5 billion invested in fossil fuels. In Indonesia, banner drops brought a coal terminal to a standstill for hours. In Germany, 4,000 people shut down a large lignite coal mine for more than two days.

    In Australia, 2000 people shut down the world's largest coal port with a kayak flotilla and a railroad blockade. In Brazil, thousands participated in a protest against fracking during a concert at an annual rural fair. In Nigeria, demonstrations called attention to the environmental and social devastation that followed in the wake of exhausted oil wells. In Indonesia, 3000 held a "climate carnival" at the presidential palace demanding a move from coal to renewable energy. In South Africa, drought-affected farmers and communities from around the country came together for a "speak out and bread march." In Ecuador, activists planted trees on the future site of an oil refinery to protest drilling in a national park. In Vancouver, Canada more than 800 people held a sit-in and a kayak swarm at the tanker terminal for the Kinder Morgan gas pipeline. In Turkey, community leaders led a mass action at a coal waste site calling for a halt to four fossil fuel plant projects planned for the area.

    Outside Seattle, thousands converged on two oil refineries with kayak flotillas, a march led by Indigenous leaders, and an overnight sit-in on the train tracks that led to more than fifty arrests. In Washington, DC, 1,300 demanded no new offshore drilling in the Arctic and off the Gulf Coast. Outside Chicago, dozens were arrested as 1,000 people protested a planned expansion of a BP refinery. In Los Angeles, 2,000 opposed the oil drilling that is conducted right within the city. In Lakewood, Colorado, hundreds of people delayed an auction for thousands of acres of public land for oil and gas drilling with disruption and a sit-in. Organizers called Break Free "the largest ever global civil disobedience against fossil fuels."[1]

    Creative Tension

    In some cases, Break Free evoked what Martin Luther King, Jr. characterized in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" as "creative tension." Some early Break Free statements in the state of Washington, for example, suggested that protestors might use direct action to shut down oil refineries. This was understandably alarming to workers in the highly-dangerous refineries. Break Free organizers and a retired union official initiated discussions with the local union that made clear that Break Free would not try to obstruct the plants or their workers and that took into consideration other safety concerns of the local union.

    Break Free had always advocated a "just transition," but discussions with the local union helped them better understand what that means from the workers' point of view. Break Free organizers say they came away committed to educating their constituency about the importance of fighting to protect and create family-wage jobs in the transition to a clean energy economy; protecting job security amidst declines in fossil fuel consumption; and minimizing job losses as the necessary action is taken to curtail dangerous climate change.

    Despite this dialogue, the United Steelworkers union issued a statement critical of 350.org and Break Free. Noting that three USW-represented oil refineries were targeted locations, the USW said, "shutting down a handful of refineries in the U.S. would likely lead to massive job loss in refinery communities, increased imports of refined oil products, and ultimately no impact on reducing global carbon emissions." It added that "short-sighted and narrow-focused activitieslike 350.org's 'Break Free' actions this May make it much more challenging to work together to envision and create a clean energy economy." But they added, "The work of addressing climate change and building a more sustainable economy is too important to be derailed by a handful of groups organizing protests at our plant gates."

    As Dr. King wrote, "Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue." While Break Free and the Steelworkers by no means see eye-to-eye, they have begun to negotiate, and are even discussing cooperation around upcoming local energy issues.

    Personal and Global

    In Albany, a "climate camp" made preparations for the action, creating banners and other art work in an "artbuild," organizing logistics, and nailing down final plans. As Chairman Norman Bay of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission addressed the Independent Power Producers of New York, a group of Break Free protestors interrupted and drove him from the stage. "Why are you signing the death warrant for so many people?" one protestor asked Bay. IPPNY President Gavin Donahue said the protestors were "aggressive," "disruptive," and "out of line." "We were keeping an eye out, but we did not see anything before this," he said. "The protesters disguised themselves in suits and ties to blend in."[2]

    As the sun set over the Hudson River the evening before the action, a kayak flotilla provided a perfect photo-op. That night hundreds from the Northeast gathered in a historic neighborhood black church for a meal, a rally, and civil disobedience training. They shared stories from struggles to block pipelines, fracking, and other fossil fuel projects around the region and celebrated the state's refusal of permits for the Constitution pipeline after massive protests.

    Saturday morning more than 1,500 people arrived at Lincoln Park. Rev. Mark Johnson, welcoming people to the park where he had played as a child, said "We all deserve clean water, we all deserve clean air." Albany Common Council member Vivian Kornegay said, "We're tired of big oil coming to our communities and polluting. We should keep the oil in the ground and make our country a greener and safer place. My community is in danger. The people in the Ezra Prentice housing are facing asthma and cancer. The company says it wants to partner with us, but it is partnership where we assume all the risks and minimum benefits." Miss Charlene Benton, President of the Ezra Prentice Homes Tenants' Association said, "We're not going to be cremated without permission."[3]

    Rev. Johnson added, "We're going to stay on the right side of the law because the moral side of the law is the right side of the law."

    Then Rev. Johnson read the Break Free Albany "Action Agreements." Participants agreed "not to harm people or property"; to be "dignified in dress, demeanor, and language;" to attend action training; act "in accordance with our group's agreed plan for action."

    As the crowd started to march toward the Port of Albany, 500 of the demonstrators peeled off to show their support for the people of the Ezra Prentice Homes, a 179-unit housing development described as "ground zero for environmental racism," where "bomb trains" run next to the playground and the railroad parks its trains free of charge.

    As the marchers reached the train tracks, police were present but stood by as they occupied the tracks. An organizer hollered, "You came to block the tracks and that is exactly what you are doing."

    As people settled in on the tracks, law student Kelsey Skaggs asked those risking arrest to fill out intake forms for the legal team. Then she said,

    But I want to talk about a different kind of lawbreaking. Fossil fuel companies, and the governments that authorize their activities, are destroying the land, water, and atmosphere that sustain us. From my home in Alaska to here in Albany, we are being sacrificed for the profit of fossil fuel companies.

    But these companies have a problem. Their problem is that we — all of us — have rights to that land, water, and atmosphere.

    We have rights under a legal principle called the public trust. The public trust concept is old law — it's been around since ancient Rome. In American law, it means that the government has a duty to protect shared natural resources, and to hold them in trust for the public and for future generations.

    But our governments are violating this obligation by failing to regulate fossil fuel emissions. They violate this right by subsidizing fossil fuels, by approving new dirty energy projects, and by locking us into further, deadly emissions.

    The question — the critical question facing humanity at this moment — is whatwe are going to do about these violations of our rights.

    In the face of government's failures, there is only one answer that leads to a livable future on this planet. And that answer is: what each of you is doing, right here, today. Standing up and taking action to break free and end the era of fossil fuels. Enforcing the public trust. Demanding that the government fulfill its obligations to the people, not bow to corporate power.

    It's up to us to claim our right to a healthy climate, to stand up for the rights of future generations, and to stop the degradation of our planet and our communities and everything that we love. Thank you for doing that.

    More than 400 of the 1,500 people registered for the action said they would be willing to be arrested for physically blocking the trains.[4] The company had canceled trains through Albany for the day because of the protest. But sixteen miles up the track in Guilderland, climate activists Marissa Shea and Maeve McBride suspended themselves from train tracks on a railroad bridge. At the risk of serious or even fatal accident they blockaded a "bomb train" carrying fracked crude oil from North Dakota. They and three members of their support team were arrested after successfully delaying the train.

    Shea and McBride described their efforts as enforcing the public trust doctrine which requires that vital natural resources, in this case the atmosphere, on which human well-being depends, must be cared for by our governments for the benefit of present and future generations.

    "The global climate system, on which every human depends, is no longer stable because our governments have utterly failed us. So now, for our survival, we will act on climate ourselves," said Shea.

    The activists demand that the business as usual economy, which is currently reliant on fossil fuels, must be transformed into a new fossil-free economy that isjust and equitable, a just transition.

    "Most of my family lives within a few miles of where the bomb trains travel. Thisis personal and global. Their lives are at risk and millions of lives are at risk with rising seas, forest fires, violent storms, and all the havoc that global warming brings," said McBride, who grew up in Troy. "Today I felt called to directly obstruct the fossil fuel industry joining thousands of others around the world."

    McBride had earlier written Break Free organizers around the country,

    Many of us participated in the Public Trust webinar a couple of weeks ago, and we are excited for the paradigm-shifting opportunity that this presents. Organizers have asked those risking arrest to consider a court solidarity approach where, as a group, we will plead not-guilty and seek to bring our cases to court. While the DA is likely to drop the majority of charges, we are taking measures to ensure that we will have some viable court cases and will seek to argue them under the Public Trust Doctrine and/or necessity with a Public Trust spin. During the action we will distribute copies of the Break Free Public Trust Proclamation, as it could be important to have this document in hand during arrests [and for some political theater in court.]

    [Before publication an update on the legal process and defense of the defendants will be added. Also an account of the passage of the resolution opposing Pilgrim Pipelines at the Albany Common Council two days after the Albany Break Free action.]

    The call to Break Free from Fossil Fuels envisioned "tens of thousands of people around the world rising up" to take back control of their own destiny; "sitting down" to "block the business of government and industry that threaten our future"; conducting "peaceful defense of our right to clean energy." That's just what happened.

    Such a "rising up" amounts to a global nonviolent insurgency — a withdrawal of consent from those who claim the right to rule — manifested in a selective refusal to accept and obey their authority.[5] Break Free From Fossil Fuels represented a quantum leap in the emergence of a global nonviolent climateinsurgency — its nonviolent "shot heard around the world." It was globally coordinated, with common principles, strategy, planning, and messaging. It utilized nonviolent direct action not only as an individual moral witness, but also to express and mobilize the power of the people on which all government ultimately depends. It presented climate protection not only as a moral but as a legal right and duty, necessary to protect the Constitution and the earth's essential resources on which we and our posterity depend. It represented aninsurgency because it denied the right of the existing powers and principalities — be they corporate or governmental — to use the authority of law to justify their destruction of the earth's climate.

    [1] Oliver Milman, “’Break Free’ fossil fuel protests deemed ‘largest ever’ global disobedience,” The Guardian, May 16, 2016. Other details from https://breakfree2016.org/#locations. See also: https://breakfree2016.org/press-release/thousands-worldwide-take-part-in-largest-global-civil-disobedience-in-the-history-of-the-climate-movement/.

    [2] Brian Nearing, "Rancor, protests greet top energy official," timesunion, May 11, 2016. 

    [3] "Thousands Converged in Albany to Blockade Bomb Trains," release, and personal observation.

    [4] Lindsay Ellis, "Albany protest: 5 arrested after oil train delayed," Albany Times-Union, May 16, 2016. 

    [5] See Jeremy Brecher, Climate Insurgency: A Strategy for Survival (Routledge, 2016).

    Historian Jeremy Brecher is a co-founder of the Labor Network for Sustainability. A new, post-Paris edition of his Climate Insurgency: A Strategy for Survival will be published by Routledge in 2016.
     
    Originally posted here.

     

  • The French Stand Up

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    [Montpellier, May 26, 2016] “We’ve had enough” is the phrase on everyone’s lips as – against all expectations — the wave of strikes, blockades, disruptions and mass demonstrations begun eleven days ago continues to develop throughout France. Indeed, in the past couple of days, two new strategic groups of workers have joined the protest. Technicians at France’s nuclear power plants are now cutting back on production of electricity, and the railroad workers have massively joined the street protests while cutting back on trains. Meanwhile, there are long lines at the gas pumps as petroleum workers continue to blockade France’s major oil refineries.

    Surprisingly, most French people take these inconveniences in good humor, and the polls show broad public support for the movement’s goals and even its disruptive tactics. This popular sympathy is all the more surprising given weeks of blanketly negative media coverage, hysterical official statements and police tactics designed to discredit the movement. First the issue was the violence of the "casseurs" (wreckers) on the fringes of the big, peaceful, well-organized mass demonstrations, and the image of one flaming police-car in Paris kept popping up on every channel for days.[1] Then came the threat of the unions (government-subsidized and generally cooperative) taking over the country and destroying the economy. Next, the talking heads topic of the day the police, what a great job they do and how we should support them!

    Despite this propaganda campaign, the popular movement continued to grow and public sympathy with it, to the point that the governing Socialist party split — making it impossible for the Hollande administration to push its unpopular Labor Reform Bill through the parliament. The government, which had earlier made a few compromises, became afraid to give in to the majority and loose face, so it evoked paragraph 49-3 of de Gaulle’s tailor-made Constitution giving the President the power in emergencies to impose laws by edict, without a parliamentary majority. This high-handedness was the last straw for the democratic French, who had come to detest the anti-labor « reform » bill and the already-unpopular neo-liberal “Socialist” government that was shoving it down their throats. That’s when all Hell broke loose.

    Don’t ask me to explain the bill, except that it is part of a Brussels-imposed, Europe-wide economic liberalization plan and that it makes it easier for managers to fire workers, close plants, flexiblize work schedules, and cut back on overtime pay and severance pay. Most French people don’t understand the technicalities either, but with shrewd class awareness, they understand that the « reforms » are an attack by the 1% on the protections and regulations they have fought for over generations. They instinctively see them as another attempt to dismantle the Social Republic, officially so named in the Constitution of 1945, written at the time of the Liberation when the collaborationist French industrialists and their political tools were in disgrace while the slogan « from the Resistance to the Revolution » was still hanging in the air.

    Today’s struggle is, of course, a defensive battle, and so far there have been only a few barricades (blockading the oil refineries) – barely recalling the revolutions 1789, 1830, 1848, 1871 and the general strikes of 1936 and 1968. But apparently the rebellious instincts and radical temperament of the French working people have not changed all that much. Indeed, in 1995, there was also a weeklong runaway national strike among the workers in the public sector, sparked by an earlier government attempt at liberal “reform,” but according the accepted wisdom in media and governmental circles, the French people had by 2016 supposedly evolved, become “normal,” and now accepted liberalization as necessary and inevitable like every other nation. Guess not.

    I am happy (if somewhat ashamed) to report that I was overly pessimistic and somewhat hysterical in my last reports from France,[2] evoking the specter of acoup d’état and possible « civil war » in reaction to Hollande’s imposition of the State of Emergency and indiscriminate police raids after the terrorist attacks. So far, the Hollande government has refrained from evoking the State Emergency in today’s bras de fer (arm-wrestling contest) between a weak government trying to look tough on one side and on the other the combined forces of a young generation that sees itself being sacrificed on the alter of neo-liberalism, an organized labor movement responding to militant pressure from below take a stand, and an independent-minded public that has « had enough » of being manipulated.

    Whatever the outcome of this month’s May Madness, one thing is clear. There is a new radical awareness on the rise in France and with it a new revolutionary generation that correctly sees that it has no future to look forward to under capitalism. Student agitation, especially in the high schools has been boiling up across the country for months as have the nightly popular assemblies in the squares of Paris and a half-dozen other cities, known as Nuits debout (« Stand up all night »). These assemblies correspond to a rejection of the pseudo-democracy of the professional politicians and a desire for real participatory democracy and human community. They also function as hothouses for radical ideas, like « Occupy » and the Indignados of 2011.

    This intellectual revolution has only just begun, and it is likely to have a long-term effect on consciousness, just as “Occupy Wall Street” (minuscule in comparison) seems to have had on U.S. consciousness. Meanwhile, the French are not only debout (standing up) talking all night, they are also standing up for themselves and for all of us in the streets and on the picket line – standing up against the 1%’s relentless attacks on our living standards, on our rights, and on our lives. Maybe there is an alternative.

    So allow me to conclude this report by translating a few excerpts from interviews recorded[3] during yesterday’s big demonstration here in Montpellier and then close with a translation of the 2016 Platform of one of the Commissions of the

    Interviews – Paris Nuit debout at the Place de la Bastille.

    Anaïs, age 22, works in a school:

    “This is the first time I’ve come out to a demonstration. Unfortunately I only have a little time for this… I’m not an activist, I consider myself apolitical, even if I participate in Nuit debout when my schedule allows it. I don’t think demonstrations are enough to get us anything concrete; marching from point A to point B doesn’t bother anyone. If we want to be heard, we must totally block the country’s economy. And to succeed, we must get coordinated, even just for one day. I am totally conscious of the annoyances and privations that we might suffer as individuals, but now everybody has the duty to put aside their little personal comforts and to fight for the community.”

    Nicolas, age 39, looking for work:

    “My un-employed situation has an advantage: it leaves time to go into the street to defend our rights. I’m neither an activist nor a union member, I come as a citizen and I have only missed two demonstrations since March 9th. I am mobilized both on the street and on social media. The manipulations around pseudo-concessions on the proposed law and then the forced passage via the 49-3 edict have strengthened my motivation. Blocking, that’s our 49-3, Citizens. Perhaps we will pay the price, but striking the economy, that’s the only thing they understand. And if my help is needed in the blocking, I’ll go. The polls show that three quarters of the population is against this law, isn’t that enough?”

    “Elf,” age 16, resident high school student at the lycée Agropolis:

    “I only got political three months ago, since the first blockades, which be the way I help set up. Since then it’s gone very quickly: I’ve been to every demonstration. It was thanks to the high school that I became conscious of the importance of demanding our rights. Today, I have an impression the movement is losing speed, but if we don’t stand up it’s certain we won’t get anything! We must continue on to the end. But marches won’t be enough, we need to continue and reinforce the blockades, even if we have to suffer for a while: the economy is the only thing that interests them, so better to strike where it hurts!”

    Nuit debout, Paris: New Amendments to Plateforme 2016

    —Hiring the 6 million unemployed by adding one new job for each existing job.

    — A 25-hour week and an adjustable work schedule.

    —  Raise the minimum monthly salary to 1, 500€ ($1,700) ; a minimum of 1, 200€ ($1, 350 for retirement, student scholarships and unemployment benefits.

    — Public transparency of all salaries; male/female equality of salaries, open the books of all business enterprises.

    — Maximum income ceiling set at 4 times the minimum.

    — Free health, schooling and transportation.

    — Requisition of empty housing, abolition of rents and guaranteed right to housing. 

    — Expropriation of the great fortunes, abolition of private property of the means of production and exchange, direct collective self-management of enterprises.

    — All power to the Assemblies of workers/inhabitants for planning production on the basis of social needs and ecological imperatives.

    — Election of delegates with limited mandates and the permanent right of revocation of Assemblies.

    — Free Federation of industrial unions and residential communities.

    — Regularization of undocumented people and international cooperation of workers’ powers against underdevelopment, imperialism and war.

    [1] The police have been reported filtering these black-cowled angry young men through their lines, where they have clashed with GTU union monitors ; and somehow they never get arrested. Some have been revealed as actual undercover cops.

     

    Richard Greeman has been active since 1957 in civil rights, anti-war, anti-nuke, environmental and labor struggles in the U.S., Latin America, France (where he has been a longtime resident) and Russia (where he helped found the Praxis Research and Education Center in 1997).

     

  • Brazil: the coup d’état – After the 1964 tragedy, the sad 2016 farce

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    Let’s call a spade a spade. What has just happened in Brazil, with the dismissal of the elected president, Dilma Rousseff, is a coup. A coup which is pseudo-legal, “constitutional”, “institutional”, parliamentary, anything you want, but a coup all the same.

    Parliamentarians – deputies and senators – who are massively compromised in cases of corruption (the figure of 60% has been quoted) have established a procedure for dismissal against the Brazilian president, Dilma Roussef, under the pretext of accounting irregularities, adjustments to fill the deficits in the public accounts – a routine practice of all previous Brazilian governments! Certainly, several executives of the Workers’ Party (PT) are involved in the corruption scandal concerning Petrobras, the national oil company but not Dilma.

    In fact, the right wing deputies who have led the campaign against the President are among the most mired in this affair, starting with the President of the Parliament, Eduardo Cunha (recently suspended), accused of corruption, money laundering, tax evasion in Panama and so on.

    The practice of the legal coup seems to be the new strategy of the oligarchies in Latin America. Put to the test in Honduras and in Paraguay – countries that the press often deals with as “banana republics” – it has proved effective in eliminating presidents who are (very moderately) on the left. Now it comes to be applied to a country-continent.

    One can make a lot of criticisms to Dilma: she has not kept her electoral promises and has made enormous concessions to the bankers, industrialists, and latifundistas (big landowners). The political and social left has been demanding a change in economic and social policy for the last year. But the oligarchy of divine right in Brazil – the financial, industrial, and agricultural capitalist elite – are not content with more concessions: they want full power. They no longer want to negotiate but to govern directly, through their trusted confidantes, and to abolish the few social achievements of recent years.

    Citing Hegel, Marx wrote in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, that historical events repeat themselves: the first time as tragedy, and the second as farce. This applies perfectly to Brazil. The military coup of April 1964 was a tragedy, which plunged Brazil into twenty years of military dictatorship, at the price of hundreds dead and thousands tortured. The parliamentary coup of May 2016 is a farce, a tragi-comic affair, where we see a clique of reactionary and notoriously corrupt parliamentarians to overthrow a president democratically elected by 54 million Brazilians, on account of “accounting irregularities”. The main component of this alliance of parties on the right is the parliamentary bloc known as “the three Bs”: “Bullets” (members related to the Military Police, the death squads and other private militias) – “Beef” (large landowners raising cattle) – and “Bible” (the neo-fundamentalist Pentecostalists, homophobic and misogynistic). Among the most enthusiastic supporters of the dismissal of Dilma was the deputy Jairo Bolsonaro, who dedicated his vote to the officers of the military dictatorship and specifically to Colonel Unstra, a known torturer. Among the victims of Ustra was Dilma Roussef, at the time (in the early 1970s) an activist in an armed resistance group, as well as my friend Luis Eduardo Merlino, journalist and revolutionary, who died under torture in 1971 aged 21.

    The new President Michel Temer, inducted by his acolytes, is himself involved in several affairs, but has not yet been the subject of a review. During a recent survey, Brazilians were asked if they would vote for Temer as President: 2% responded favorably.

    In 1964, big demonstrations “with God and the family for freedom” prepared the ground for the coup against President Joâo Goulart; this time new “patriotic” crowds incited by the press have been mobilized to demand the removal of Dilma, and in some cases a return of the military. Composed mainly of white people (the majority of Brazilians are black or mixed) from the middle classes, these crowds have been convinced by the media that this is about “the fight against corruption.”

    What the tragedy of 1964 and the farce of 2016 have in common is hatred of democracy. The two episodes reveal the profound contempt of the dominant classes in Brazil for democracy and the popular will. Will the “legal” coup go ahead with minimal hassle, as in Honduras and Paraguay? That is not so sure – the popular classes, social movements and the rebellious youth have not said their last word yet.

    * Translation IVP: http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/

    * Michael Löwy, a philosopher and sociologist of Brazilian origin, is a member of the New Anti-capitalist Party in France and of the Fourth International. A Fellow of the IIRE in Amsterdam and former research director of the French National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS), he has written many books, including The Marxism of Che Guevara, Marxism and Liberation Theology, Fatherland or Mother Earth? and The War of Gods: Religion and Politics in Latin America. He is joint author (with Joel Kovel) of the International Ecosocialist Manifesto. He was also one of the organizers of the first International Ecosocialist Meeting, in Paris, in 2007.

     

  • New Jersey anti-BDS bill is an affront to the first amendment and basic human rights

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    On May 9, 2016, the New Jersey State Senate approved by a vote of 39-0 S1923, a bill prohibiting the investment of state pension and annuity funds in companies that boycott Israel or Israeli businesses. One of the bill's sponsors was liberal stalwart and Democratic Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg. Among the co-sponsors were Democratic Senate President Stephen Sweeney and Republican Minority Leader Tom Kean Jr. There is a similar bill in the Assembly, A925, still in committee. [Update: The bill was released by the Assembly committee on May 19, 2016.] Both bills are an affront to basic principles of human rights that many NJ liberals seem to support everywhere else in the world except when it comes to Israel-Palestine.  And both bills are an affront as well to the First Amendment.

    What follows are excerpts from S1923, along with an analysis.

    The State is deeply concerned about the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) effort to boycott Israeli goods, products, and businesses which is contrary to federal policy articulated in numerous laws.

    In fact, however, there are no federal laws that prohibit Americans from boycotting the goods of any country. If there were such laws, then this bill would be pointless, since it would bar investment of NJ pension funds in companies that are already breaking the law and therefore already illegal.

    …the elected representatives of New Jersey recognize and support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

    What is the meaning of the right to exist "as a Jewish state"? Do other states have the right to exist "as a Christian state" or "as a Hindu state"? In a Jewish state, what happens to the 20 percent of the population that is non-Jewish?

    If a Jewish state gives automatic citizenship rights to a Jew who lives in the United States and whose family has lived in the United States for more than a century, but denies citizenship to a non-Jew who was born in Haifa and whose family previously lived there for more than a century, to what extent are the values of that Jewish state consistent with what the bill refers to as the shared U.S.-Israeli "values of freedom, democracy, and equal rights"?

    Poll data show that 79% of Israeli Jews believe that Jews deserve preferential treatment and half of Israeli Jews believe that Arabs should be expelled or transferred out of the country. Are these views consistent with what the bill refers to as the shared U.S.-Israeli "values of freedom, democracy, and equal rights"?

    A bunch of NJ legislators recently went on a trip to Israel arranged for them by the New Jersey Association for Jewish Federations, which also paid their ground costs. Several members of Jewish Voice for Peace wrote to Nia Gill, their State Senator, suggesting that while in Israel she might want to visit Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has documented more than 50 Israeli laws that have directly or indirectly discriminated against Palestinian citizens of Israel in all areas of life, including their rights to political participation, access to land, education, state budget resources, and criminal procedures. She didn't reply, but apparently felt no qualms voting for a bill that celebrates the shared U.S.-Israeli "values of freedom, democracy, and equal rights."

    There is debate in Israel about whether Israel can be both a democratic and a Jewish state, but revealingly, this bill recognizes and supports only Israel's right to be a Jewish state.

    The bill also carefully avoids saying anything about Palestinians having a right to a state of their own. It is, of course, well-known that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his rightwing Likud party have often rejected the idea of a Palestinian state, but why would liberal Democrats support a bill that fails to even pay lip service to what the U.S. government under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama has nominally endorsed?

    Boycotts, divestments, and sanctions place economic and political pressure on business entities, and other organizations and institutions to influence their behavior against Israel.

    Those who advocate boycotts, divestment, and sanctions want to change behavior not against Israel, but against Israeli policies. In the same way, Americans who demonstrated or protested against Jim Crow laws or the Vietnam war or police brutality were not anti-American, but critics of American policies. People engage in all sorts of nonviolent activities designed to encourage or discourage particular government policies — usually that is called civic responsibility. Why only in the case of trying to influence Israeli government policy is such activity to be penalized?

    The Israel Lobby often claims that Israel is singled out. It is singled out, but for favoritism, rather than criticism. Is there any country in the world other than Israel whose violations of international law cannot be the proper subject of boycotts?

    The clause above lists "sanctions" as one of the things designed to influence Israeli behavior. But sanctions are not imposed by individuals or companies, but by governments and international bodies (as defined on p. 4 of the bill, lines 37-40). So this clause has only two possible targets. It might be aimed at governments who sanction Israel. But sanctioning Israel is hardly a radical idea. Among the U.S. presidents who have sanctioned Israel by withholding or delaying aid are Eisenhower, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush.

    The other possible target of this clause is individuals or companies who urge governments to impose sanctions. (For example, Amnesty International, which has called for the suspension of military aid to Israel because of its human rights violations.) But if so, then the bill is targeting advocacy. One would have thought that people have the right to advocate any policy they choose, no matter how ill-conceived others might consider it. But apparently the one thing that cannot be advocated according to Senator Weinberg and her colleagues are sanctions against Israel.

    That liberal Democratic politicians would want to vilify advocacy of sanctions against Israel is particularly objectionable given the results of a recent poll done by the Brookings Institution. Those who identified as Democrats were asked how the U.S. should react to new settlement construction by Israel in the occupied territories. Thirty seven percent favored the imposition of sanctions by the U.S. government or by the UN and another twelve percent wanted to take even more serious action. So the views that S1923 considers beyond the pale are endorsed by half of the nation's Democrats. Shall we punish all of them?

    Boycotts, such as those against Israel, do not make for effective business decision making, prevent a business from making the best use of the resources available to it and should be opposed as an impairment to the soundness of commercial contracting performance.

    This clause says that "Boycotts…should be opposed as an impairment to the soundness of commercial contracting performance."

    This would have prohibited the boycott of South Africa during apartheid, of grapes during the farmworkers' strike in the 1960s, of Sudan while it committed massacres in Darfur, of Myanmar during the rule of its military junta, or of U.S. states that discriminate against people on the basis of sexual orientation. Business interests should not be all that matters, and certainly not when human rights are at stake.

    Note that the New Jersey legislature does not actually think that boycotts should be opposed for impairing sound business. We know this because the legislature itself has imposed boycotts. It has banned contracts with companies doing business in Northern Ireland — a part of one of Washington's closest allies — unless they complied with certain human rights standards (NJ Rev Stat § 52:34-12.2 [2015]).

    It might be claimed that this clause in S1923 does not oppose all boycotts, only boycotts "such as those against Israel." But then what is it that characterizes boycotts against Israel? Only those that are aimed at countries that stand in violation of numerous UN Security Council resolutions? Only those that are aimed at countries who stand in violation of decisions of the International Court of Justice?

    But why would the NJ legislature possibly want to prohibit people from any nonviolent action designed to encourage compliance with Security Council resolutions or with ICJ rulings?

    Some claim that Security Council resolutions simply reflect the views of a biased, anti-Semitic body. But the United States has veto power in the Council. This means that any resolution adopted by the Security Council criticizing Israel could not have been opposed by the U.S. government. Washington has exercised its veto on behalf of Israel dozens of times, but even with this protection Israel is still one of the world's leading violators of Security Council Resolutions.

    Nationality-based boycott actions are often veiled discrimination, and it is against the public policy of New Jersey to support such discrimination.

    A lot of things are "often" true, but we only pass laws based on what is actually true in the particular case that is the focus of the legislation. It is also true that passing legislation to protect an illegal occupation — as this bill does — is "often veiled discrimination" against the victims of that occupation and it should be "against the public policy of New Jersey to support such discrimination."

    In her public comments supporting the bill, Senator Weinberg has avoided the hedging and explicitly declared that “New Jersey cannot support such biased practices as those of the BDS against our sister state” and this bill “will send a clear message that we stand against this kind of veiled discrimination.” But asserting discrimination does not make it so.

    A boycott of companies based in Israel because of their complicity with violations of international law or human rights is not "nationality-based" discrimination any more than are the boycotts authorized by the State of New Jersey against investments in Sudan, Iran, or Northern Ireland.

    …no assets of any pension or annuity fund under the jurisdiction of the Division of Investment in the Department of the Treasury, or its successor, shall be invested in any company that boycotts the goods, products, or businesses of Israel, boycotts those doing business with Israel, or boycotts companies operating in Israel or Israeli-controlled territory.

    The last phrase of this clause indicates that this bill would penalize anyone who didn't want to do business with Israeli-companies operated in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. So a U.S. company that heeded the call of Human Rights Watch for corporations to cease their complicity in violations of international law in the occupied territories would be penalized by the State of New Jersey.

    When Human Rights Watch called on companies to stop supporting human rights violations by purchasing diamonds from Zimbabwe or oil products from Sudan or logging products from Myanmar, human rights defenders cheered. But when Human Rights Watch makes similar recommendations regarding the Israeli occupation, the authors of this bill try to punish any who wish to comply. Of all the human rights abusers in the world, this bill would single out Israel for special protection.

    So where does this bill prohibit New Jersey from investing its pension and annuity funds? Here are some possibilities one can imagine:

    a.    The State of Israel. The Israeli government has banned the sale in Jerusalem of some dairy and food products produced by five Palestinian companies. These Palestinian companies are based in the occupied territories. Thus, the Israeli government is boycotting "companies operating in Israel or Israeli-controlled territory." But of course this is not what the bill's authors intend. Boycotts against Palestinians are fine; it's only boycotts against an illegal occupation that trigger S1923.

    b.    G4S Security, one of the world's largest security firms. G4S, which provided support to Israel's prison system, ended its operations in Israel, following a vigorous political campaign against it.

    c.    Veolia, a French-based transnational specializing in utility and transportation services. Targeted by activists for its construction of the rail link tying West Jerusalem to the illegal settlements, Veolia announced in 2015 that it was selling its stake in Israel.

    d.    Any other company that has withdrawn from the Israeli market or, indeed, failed to enter the Israeli market.

    Now it might be objected that this bill does not apply to entities or companies that do not do business with Israel for business reasons, but only to those that are boycotting Israel. But how can one tell the difference? The bill defines "boycott" as "engaging in actions that are politically motivated" (p. 4, line 32). But this means that the bill is not penalizing actions, but is judging political motivation. For the government (the State of New Jersey) to penalize someone for their political motivation violates basic First Amendment rights.

    If two companies engage in the exact same behavior, and the only difference is that one has political motives that the government approves of and the other does not, then to penalize one but not the other is an impermissible use of government power. Imagine if a Republican legislature passed a law saying that the State could only invest funds in companies whose officers endorsed the Republican platform. Clearly that would be improper. 

    The Supreme Court in its 1982 NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co. decision recognized boycotts as a First Amendment-protected form of political speech. This means that if it would be wrong for the State of New Jersey to penalize people for engaging in political speech (whether the legislature approves of that speech or not) then it would be equally wrong for the State of New Jersey to penalize people for engaging in a boycott (whether the legislature approves of that boycott or not).

    And if having the State of New Jersey assessing our political motivations isn't problem enough, the bill provides that the State's efforts to identify boycotters shall include "retaining an independent research firm to identify companies that boycott Israel." (Now that's a great use of New Jersey's scarce revenues.) So this bill would authorize the establishment of a data base of companies' political views. This represents a serious threat to civil liberties.

    This bill doesn't just penalize those companies that are boycotting Israel, but those that are boycotting Israeli companies, even a single Israeli company. So if a socially responsible investment firm in the United States chose not to invest in weapons manufacturers and some of the weapons manufacturers in which it chose not to invest were Israeli companies (Israel was the 8th largest arms exporter in the world in 2015), then it would be subject to this bill.

    Supporters of the bill might say, no, this socially responsible investment firm is not subject to the bill because its refusal to invest in an Israeli arms manufacturer is not because the company is Israeli, but because it's an arms manufacturer. But many BDS supporters could say the same thing: their refusal to invest in Israeli companies is not because those companies are Israeli, but because they contribute in some way to violations of international law or human rights. Those who call for the boycott of or divestment from Caterpillar do so not because it does business in Israel, but because it provides equipment that demolishes Palestinian homes in violation of, among other things, the Fourth Geneva Convention and Security Council Resolution 1544 (2004).

    Apparently, the sponsors of this bill have no problem with our investing so as to avoid tobacco products, or guns, or hydrocarbons, or blood diamonds — those are all fine. The only thing they won't permit us to do is screen our investments in such a way as to avoid supporting the continued Israeli oppression of Palestinians.

    One other danger of this bill is that it will contribute to anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry in the United States. Imagine an Arab-owned company in New Jersey. It imports various products from, say, Jordan. But was its decision to import from Jordan rather than Israel a purely business decision or was it based on a motivation to boycott Israel? Are the State Investment Council and the Director of the Division of Investment and the "independent research firm" retained by them now going to try to determine why the company imported Jordanian rather than Israeli figs?

    Some Jewish-Americans chose not to buy Volkswagens because of past German crimes. Some Korean-Americans, believing that Tokyo has not properly atoned for its crimes against "comfort women," may shun Japanese products. They have every right to do this, and no one investigates them for it. But if any Palestinian-American-owned companies feel uncomfortable investing in or buying from Israel, a country whose oppression of their people was not just in the past, S1923 would authorize examining their motives and punishing them.

    There is nothing New Jersey needs less than investigations into the business decisions of its Arab and Muslim population.

    This bill violates our First Amendment rights. It threatens to exacerbate Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment. And it aligns itself against the cause of human rights in Israel-Palestine.

     

    Stephen R. Shalom is a member of Jewish Voice for Peace of Northern New Jersey and teaches Political Science at William Paterson University in Wayne, NJ.

  • What’s Left of the Lesser Evil?: A Foreign Policy Critique

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    The Question of the Lesser Evil

    In a recent article for Counterpunch, Gary Leupp details the long history of Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy record and concludes with the question: is the possibility of her winning the general election in November 2016 really that much less frightening than the possibility that Donald Trump does? Here, we want to explore a potential answer to that question.

    While we all know that voting is just one small, overemphasized form of political activity, we think it is fairly intuitive that whom people decide to support now—given the hyper-focus on political candidates in the US electoral system—will have a significant effect on the degree of their political mobilization during this cycle, and this is especially important when we take into account the difficult decision many former Berners turned potential "oh fine, Clinton" voters will have to make—especially in swing-states.

    We want to give people on the Left, who are deeply afraid of a potential Trump victory, another good reason to withhold conceding to the Clinton machine. Our case is rather simple, though definitely speculative: it is irrational (or at the very least, not as obviously rational) to vote for Hillary Clinton because she represents the lesser evil in a choice between her and Donald Trump. Our hope is that by delegitimizing the superficial mythology that Hillary Clinton is clearly a “lesser evil” on foreign policy, we can make an effort towards keeping the probable impending electoral failure of Bernie Sanders from either simply demobilizing a large portion of a new generation of politically conscious young people or drawing them into the neoliberal clutches of the Democratic Party.

    Comparing Evils

    On domestic policy, it may very well be true that Hillary Clinton represents a lesser evil. Hillary is likely to support some small increase in the minimum wage (which is admittedly better than no increase or a decrease). Hillary is likely to support consistent funding for Planned Parenthood and the pro-choice agenda more broadly, especially through potential Supreme Court nominations. Hillary is likely to continue to support marriage equality (now that she isn’t opposed to it any longer). Hillary may even advance the fight for gay and transgender anti-discrimination laws—a position that the supposedly reactionary Trump has recently shown sympathy towards. She will likely do nothing for labor beyond the minimum wage. She will, however, likely continue her previous support for neoliberal trade policies, like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

    Beyond these reasonable assumptions, it is hard to tell what other domestic policies she might pursue, but they would likely be more “progressive” than Trump’s (It would be hard to do otherwise—again, assuming we can actually conceive of his platform ever becoming policy without massive popular resistance.

    Even if we accept that Hillary would be better on domestic policy, her foreign policy, we want to argue, could be more dangerous and harmful than Trump's—thus making her not the obvious lesser evil candidate she is often portrayed as.

    Hillary supports an activist, imperialistic foreign policy, but she also has the international (and domestic) legitimacy to implement her superficially benevolent, but nonetheless aggressive, foreign policy agenda. How can anyone say that Hillary is a far-and-away less harmful candidate? Simply because she would protect a certain set of existing privileges for certain Americans, all while destroying thousands if not millions of lives in other countries, all with an air of legitimacy that we fail to see how Trump could ever attain?

    Hillary has the perceived legitimacy of a legacy of ostensibly progressive but still-moderate politics on her side. She has her tenure as senator and Secretary of State that confer international legitimacy to her policy positions. She also gets to appear in opposition to the near-fascist, definitively and grotesquely illegal, proposals offered by Trump—who has openly called for actions that would easily meet the rather high standards for war crimes and crimes against humanity (advocating actions exceeding torture and the open targeting of civilian populations with military actions including air strikes). It is likely that due to the egregious nature and obvious illegality of much of Trump’s foreign policy platform that any attempt on his part to implement it would be met with extreme resistance in the US and internationally.

    What can we look forward to from Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy then? Likely it would include a continuation of her past practices, supporting military interventions to overthrow regimes who oppose US hegemony (like Saddam Hussein’s in Iraq and Muammar Qaddafi’s in Libya). We can look forward to a continuation, if not an expansion, of the US’s War of (sorry, on) Terrorism, including the illegal US drone program. She has called for increased US military action against ISIS (Daesh). Clinton supports the use of pre-emptive military force against Iran as well. There is little doubt we would be looking forward to the continuation of the massive US support for the illegal occupation of Palestine and the systematic oppression and occasional attempts at extermination of the Palestinian people. The lesser evil? We need to ask ourselves, what degree of “lesser” are we contented by?

    What is beyond question is that if we look at only Trump’s rhetoric, which would  assume he could accomplish what he has said, Clinton becomes a clearer lesser evil—but still a very evil lesser evil. However, the likelihood of Trump being able to accomplish his foreign policy agenda is low given just how flagrantly inhuman(e) and illegal most of the proposals are. The recent history of American military adventurism in Iraq and the eventual war fatigue it produced, alongside international opposition would make a drastic expansion of American militarism improbable—barring any unforeseeable crisis (or perhaps a crisis that will be, as they often are, vaguely predictable in hindsight).

    If upon realizing that his masturbatory fantasies of carpet bombing civilians and torturing the families of suspected terrorists aren’t exactly realizable due to a combination of international and domestic constraints, it seems likely that Trump, should he become President, would pursue a foreign policy similar to what Clinton would if she were President. If it were the case that Trump became President and pursued a policy agenda similar to what Clinton would, the GOP’s standard-bearer’s rhetoric would still likely be much more militant and aggressive—and as such would make attaining legitimacy for these mainstream hawkish Clinton positions more difficult for Trump than it would be for a more politically savvy and perceivedly legitimate President Hillary Clinton to do so.

    What seems possible then, regardless of whether a Republican or Democrat is victorious in November, is a continuation of the Obama administration’s “clandestine” militancy or a slightly more aggressive version of it. On the off chance that Trump is somehow able to win in a general election though (which is certainly not out of the realm of possibility), we sincerely hope our faith in the disciplinary potential of international norms, emergent social movements, and the recent memory of the American people is not misplaced—though we’ve been disappointed before.

    Towards a Lesser-Lesser Evil?

    If you can only see Secretary Clinton as an evil and not as the lesser evil some have argued she is, the response must not be to retreat from the political process. Become more active! Support one of the other Left “third party” candidates or organizations attempting to create real progress in the US. For many of these groups like Socialist Alternative, Solidarity, SPUSA and the Green Party, this progress must be made in opposition to all forms of imperialism and international aggression.

    In this case, the lesser evil becomes the potential for institutional political impotency that comes with supporting an actual left party or organization in the US—a structural problem that continues to plague a resurgent, but nascent, Left within the American electoral landscape. The lesser-lesser evil might well be the possible electoral failure produced by this necessary attempt to build a genuinely left political party outside the two major parties in the US.

    If, however, you still think a Trump presidency would do significantly more harm than a Clinton one when foreign and domestic policies are taken together, then sure, go ahead and make your “practical” vote in November, but just don’t fool yourself that there is a massive difference between the candidate(s) you oppose and the one you are voting for, at least when it comes to issues that directly affect the other 6.5+ billion people on the planet.

    If you’re telling yourself that you’ll vote for Hillary to stop Trump, but then plan to oppose her every step of the way once she is in office, just don’t make the mistake of voting for her and then forgetting why you really didn’t want to. Don’t forget that second step. This is the politics of demobilization we should be genuinely afraid of and actively guard against.

    Hillary and her corporate backers in the DNC win if we do not stand up and refuse to justify her positions on foreign policy by saying “well, she is much better on domestic issues” (which is probably true). We think we owe the other 6.5+ billion people in the world who don’t live in the US a much deeper interrogation of her foreign policy, and we certainly owe it ourselves on the Left to remain in vigilant opposition to significant aspects of her broader platform.

    While Trump may be more unpredictable, those on the Left considering voting for Hillary Clinton to avoid Trump winning the general election need to grapple with the fact that Hillary Clinton will certainly be predictable—predictably neoliberal and imperialistic. Perhaps the lesser evil is opposing both Trump and Clinton. The Left should thus refuse the predictably minimal lesser-evilism of Clinton, reject the unpredictable evil of Trump, and embrace the unpredictably radical potential of a genuinely progressive and democratic political movement. Blatant, extensive, and politically legitimated imperial militarism should never be lesser enough of an evil to garner substantial support, never mind from the Left.

    * Bryant William Sculos is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at Florida International University whose research focuses on Critical Theory, postcapitalism, and global ethics. His work has been published in Class, Race, and Corporate Power, Political Studies Review, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, and New Politics. He holds a Master’s degree in political theory and international relations and is an at-large member of Socialist Alternative.

    *Maylin Hernandez is a Ph.D. student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst studying political and social theory, including: feminist critique, the politics of literature and television, and political interpretation more broadly. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Florida International University’s Steven J. Green School of International and Public Affairs.

  • The Foreign Policies of Sanders, Trump, and Clinton: America and the World In 2016 and Beyond

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    [This article will appear in the Summer 2016 issue of New Politics. Corrections since it was initially posted have been included.]

    The world today is faced with crises on virtually every front, and any assessment of the foreign policy positions of the two major parties’ 2016 presidential candidates must be measured against how well they respond to these crises.

    BERNIE SANDERS

    The Sanders campaign has been a breath of fresh air on the American political scene. Bernie has taken into the political arena the Occupy movement’s outrage at the domination of the United States by the one percent. Whether or not he wins the nomination, his astounding success is a sign of the real potential for a new kind of politics in the country—inspiring whether or not one shares his Democratic Party strategy.

                Bernie has a strong domestic program—it calls for ending the domination of big money in politics, single-payer Medicare for All, free tuition at public colleges and universities, breaking up the big banks, raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy, support for workers and their unions, confronting climate change, and questioning the government’s mass surveillance programs. Moreover, despite his stubborn tendency to sound at times (though less and less as the campaign goes on) like he believes that economic inequality takes precedence over social inequality, Sanders does have good positions in favor of abortion rights, reform of the criminal justice system, demilitarization of the police, and the need to oppose institutional racism. If his campaign doesn’t end up as a faction entrapped within the Democratic Party, these positions could be the basis for beginning to build a lasting independent political party that can offer an alternative to the status quo.

                Sanders’ foreign policy positions are better than those of his Republican and Democratic opponents—though that’s not a terribly high bar, it must be said. He is the least hawkish of the major party candidates. As he has stated repeatedly, he’s proud that he voted against the war in Iraq—in contrast to Hillary Clinton, who has only grudgingly said that her pro-war vote was a mistake[1]—and note that even now she calls it a “mistake,” not a decision that was fundamentally wrong. Like Clinton, Sanders supported recent moves toward normalization of relations with Cuba. He also supported the nuclear deal with Iran; though Clinton too supported the Iran deal, with her trademark “muscular” approach to foreign policy, her tone is quite different from Sanders’: she has emphasized that, if elected, she would back up the U.S.-Iran nuclear agreement with the threat of military reprisal if Iran violated any of its terms.[2] Indeed, she seems coiled and almost looking for a justification to spring into action. Sanders condemns past U.S. interventions in Guatemala, Central America and Iran, and has sharply criticized Clinton’s embrace of Henry Kissinger. (Note by the way that Clinton doesn’t stand alone in Democratic Party establishment circles in her enthusiasm for Kissinger; in May 2016 President Obama’s Defense Secretary Ash Carter presented him with the Department of Defense’s Distinguished Public Service Award.)

                Obama, despite his frequent impassioned anti-nuclear rhetoric, has called for a trillion dollar modernization of U.S. nuclear weapons. Sanders strongly opposes the plan. In contrast, Hillary Clinton has been, in the words of Lawrence Wittner, “more ambiguous about her stance. . . . Asked by a peace activist about the trillion dollar nuclear plan, she replied that she would ‘look into that,’ adding: ‘It doesn’t make sense to me.’ Even so, like other issues that the former secretary of state has promised to ‘look into,’ this one remains unresolved. Moreover, the ‘National Security’ section of her campaign website promises that she will maintain the ‘strongest military the world has ever known’ —not a propitious sign for critics of nuclear weapons.”[3] Sanders favors the eventual complete elimination of nuclear weapons and says he would work to get U.S. and Russian weapons down to 1,000 each—a goal which Clinton too says she favors. Sanders calls for cuts in the military budget, but he gives no specifics and makes it sound as if the cuts will all come from eliminating waste and cost overruns—a standard politician’s evasion to avoid discussing policy. Such trimming of the fat in a military budget that stands at close to $600 billion will be too small to provide a real revenue source for Sanders’ social and infrastructure programs. (The likely Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, on the other hand, calls for a 50 percent cut in military spending and indicates how the saved funds will be used. Full disclosure: Stein is the candidate I intend to support.), and too vague to generate a useful conversation about a different sort of U.S. foreign policy, one that doesn’t depend on overwhelming military power.

    The Middle East

    Sanders has reflected and amplified a growing feeling in the American public— including among younger American Jews—that the United States shouldn’t automatically fall in line to uncritically support the Israeli government no matter how badly it treats the Palestinians. Sanders hasn’t gone far enough: crucially, he hasn’t called for an end to the U.S. military, economic, and diplomatic support that sustains Israeli policy toward Palestinians. However, his sharp words of criticism of Israeli policies during the Democratic presidential debates, even if those criticisms were limited, have helped further a much-needed public debate about the future of the U.S.-Israeli relationship. Moreover, Sanders' surprise appointment of prominent defenders of Palestinian rights Cornel West and James Zogby to the July Democratic Party convention platform drafting committee will accelerate and deepen the division on Israel within the party.  

    Unfortunately, Sanders’ foreign policy positions are too often inconsistent with his democratic and anti-elitist domestic politics. Taken as a whole, his foreign policy approach doesn’t come anywhere near constituting an agenda that addresses the needs of the global 99 percent (or, say, 90 percent) who suffer from today’s wars and the cruel global economic order of neoliberalism and austerity that the United States promotes.

    As recently as October of last year Sanders has said that he supports keeping U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan.[4] He voted for NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, which caused one of his staffers, my friend Jeremy Brecher, to resign in protest.[5] And Sanders voted for the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF), which has been used to justify U.S. military action in the Middle East (apart from the 2003 Iraq invasion) ever since.

    Notwithstanding his criticisms of Hillary Clinton for her inclination to favor U.S. military intervention around the world, Sanders himself has generally supported America’s wars. Rather than putting forward a progressive, non-imperial alternative to ISIS and Al Qaeda that can appeal to ordinary people in the Middle East, Jeremy Scahill reminds us that in the 1990’s Sanders supported the Iraq Liberation Act and the brutal economic sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and supported President Clinton’s bombings in Iraq that were packaged as part of the so-called no-fly zones. And this is not just in the distant past. For example, in October 2015 Sanders said he wouldn’t end Obama’s drone strikes in countries such as Pakistan and Yemen, saying only that strikes must be deployed “selectively and effectively.”[6]

    On MSNBC’s April 25, 2016 town hall moderated by Chris Hayes, Sanders repeated his endorsement of drone strikes, and said that he supported a “constitutional, legal” presidential kill list. He agreed with Obama’s action in sending 250 Special Forces operators to the ground in Syria, saying to Hayes, “I think what the President is talking about is having American troops training Muslim troops, helping to supply the military equipment they need, and I do support that effort. We need a broad coalition of Muslim troops on the ground. We have had some success in the last year or so putting ISIS on the defensive, we’ve got to continue that effort.”[7]

    The basic problem with Sanders’ approach is that he believes that the solution to the threat of ISIS, Al Qaeda, and their ilk depends on resolute action by reactionary Middle East governments, backed by the United States, Russia, and other powerful countries. But the solution actually lies in the opposite direction. What is needed is an end to intervention by outside powers (including regional heavyweights like Saudi Arabia and Iran) and a thoroughgoing transformation of the Middle East, a transformation that can only be begun by the revival of the grassroots democratic movements of Iran’s Green movement and the Arab Spring that challenged and threatened to replace despotic rulers across the region.

    Sanders summed up his anti-ISIS strategy on November 19, 2015, when he said:

    While the U.S. and other western nations have the strength of our militaries and political systems, the fight against ISIS is a struggle for the soul of Islam, and countering violent extremism and destroying ISIS must be done primarily by Muslim nations—with the strong support of their global partners. . . . A new and strong coalition of Western powers, Muslim nations, and countries like Russia must come together in a strongly coordinated way to combat ISIS, to seal the borders that fighters are currently flowing across, to share counter-terrorism intelligence, to turn off the spigot of terrorist financing, and to end support for exporting radical ideologies. . . countries in the region like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE—countries of enormous wealth and resources—have contributed far too little in the fight against ISIS. That must change. King Abdallah [of Jordan] is absolutely right when he says that that the Muslim nations must lead the fight against ISIS, and that includes some of the most wealthy and powerful nations in the region, who, up to this point have done far too little.[8]

    The governments of these reactionary “Muslim nations” can’t possibly offer the millions of people in the Middle East an attractive alternative to ISIS. Jordan uses a broad and vague counterterrorism law to strictly curtail freedom of expression and outlaws criticism of the king, of the government, and of Islam. Kuwait’s government aggressively cracks down on free speech. Qatar engages in the trafficking of ruthlessly exploited forced labor and provides for penalties of up to five years’ imprisonment for criticizing the emir or vice-emir. UAE courts have invoked repressive laws to prosecute government critics, and a counterterrorism law poses a further threat to government critics and rights activists. And Saudi Arabia’s hideous police state is a byword for blind and bloody repression—against women, religious minorities, and even the most peaceful of government critics[9]—little different from ISIS itself.

                These regimes are part of the problem, not part of the solution. But that’s equally true of the “U.S. and other Western nations” that Sanders believes can play a crucial role in the fight against ISIS. The international financial institutions the United States and other Western nations dominate, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, have helped to create the conditions that gave rise to ISIS in the first place. They pressed governments across the region to adopt policies of privatization, cutbacks in state investment, and government subsidies for energy and other day-to-day essentials. These governments—from Tunisia and Egypt to Libya and Syria—acquiesced to Western pressure and implemented such neoliberal policies, using their repressive state apparatuses to squelch popular discontent with the painful consequences. The Arab Spring was a rebellion against both despotism and the economic suffering inflicted by the despots.

                Sanders, then, is looking in all the wrong places for a lasting victory against ISIS. Bombings and military intervention by the United States and NATO, with their killing of hundreds of innocent civilians, have only succeeded in creating more terrorists and driving millions of people in the Middle East into passive acquiescence or sometimes actual support for ISIS and other reactionary fundamentalist forces. Likewise, Syria’s murderous Assad regime, with critical assistance from Iran and Russia, has killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians. Assad’s war against his regime’s opponents is not, as Sanders seems to think, the first step toward defeating ISIS. In fact, the effect has been the opposite, and the only way Assad can triumph is by turning Syria into even more of a wasteland than it already is, which will actually serve to encourage groups like ISIS.

                Unlike Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders isn’t drawn to dictators. Nor is he a macho warmonger by nature. The problem is that he hasn’t systematically broken with the foreign policy of the 1 percent. What is needed is a new, independent foreign policy of solidarity with grassroots movements for democracy and social justice around the world—an internationalist extension of Sanders’ domestic program. To the extent that Sanders enmeshes himself in the Democratic Party, an institution deeply entwined with corporate and financial interests, he will be unable to champion political or social revolution abroad, or, for that matter, at home. It is to be hoped that the millions of Sanders supporters will come to see that they need to build a new political party not only to reverse America’s militaristic, anti-democratic and imperial foreign policy, but even to achieve many of the more limited goals for which they are fighting today.

    Foreign Trade

                Sanders opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. So does Clinton, although many pundits consider her position to be totally opportunist, designed for battling Sanders in the primaries, and the president of the Chamber of Commerce has suggested that Clinton will switch to backing the deal if she wins the election.[10] Certainly, Clinton has been an enthusiastic supporter of corporate-oriented free trade deals for her entire career, whereas Sanders has consistently opposed them. Trump opposes the TPP too, but his stance is based in part on his belief that no one can negotiate a deal like he can, and also on his economic nationalism—which also leads him to threaten China with a 45 percent tariff.[11] Given the current U.S. tariff rate of about 3.5 percent,[12] Trump’s policy could not fail to create havoc in the U.S. and world economies.

    Sanders emphasizes fair trade over free trade, and insists that workers not corporations should be the beneficiaries. But he has done a poor job of articulating a progressive foreign trade policy that is not narrowly nationalist. It has to be admitted that the left as a whole has failed to outline such a policy, and that’s a challenge that lies before all of us. One thing certain, though, is that the type of global democratic economic planning that would be required to achieve economic security and wellbeing for all will never be adopted by the 1 percent.

    DONALD TRUMP

    As I write this article in May 2016, Donald Trump’s foreign policy views have captured public attention. He said the United States should not tolerate the continuing failure of its NATO, Middle Eastern and Asian allies to pay their fair share of military costs—a common complaint in establishment circles—but then shocked the pundits by saying that Washington should be prepared to tell these allies that they must fend for themselves if they don’t pony up their contributions to the United States in return for Washington defending them. He has even said that he’s willing to have Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia acquire their own nuclear weapons.[13]

    “Strength”

    The core of Trump’s foreign policy is the conventional establishment doctrine—treated as gospel by Hillary Clinton as well—that the United States needs to possess overwhelming military superiority. What’s distinctive is Trump’s crude, macho tone and his single-minded emphasis on the military, almost to the exclusion of other ways of exerting U.S. power. “The Trump doctrine is simple. . . . It’s strength. It’s strength. Nobody is going to mess with us. Our military will be made stronger.”[14] In his April 27, 2016 foreign policy speech, he blasted the way that U.S. military power has, in his view, been dangerously diminished: “Our military is depleted, and we’re asking our generals and military leaders to worry about global warming. We will spend what we need to rebuild our military. It is the cheapest investment we can make. We will develop, build and purchase the best equipment known to mankind. Our military dominance must be unquestioned.”[15]

    Concerning nuclear weapons, Trump has said: “It is highly, highly, highly, highly unlikely that I would ever be using them.”[16]—a not very comforting statement given the built-in danger of nuclear war erupting out of the conflicts among nuclear-armed states, and especially given Trump’s mercurial temperament. Trump has complained that Obama has allowed the U.S. nuclear arsenal to “atrophy”;[17] his willingness to countenance nuclear weapons for Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia has been noted already. Concerning nuclear non-proliferation treaties, he declared “I oppose such agreements for the same reason I oppose gun controls —when weapons are banned, only the outlaws have them.” Trump approved Israel’s bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981, saying he would do the same to North Korea (“Am I ready to bomb this reactor? You’re damned right.”[18]) He has also said he would abrogate the nuclear deal with Iran and he refuses to rule out the use of nuclear weapons against ISIS.[19]

                Trump reassures Americans that his insistence on a gargantuan U.S. military doesn’t mean he’s trigger happy. Asked whether he supported the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons, Trump replied: “No, no, we wouldn’t get rid of the weapons. Because you have so many people out there. But I would be somebody that would be amazingly calm under pressure.”[20] He says, in a not-so-veiled attack on Hillary Clinton’s and perhaps Ted Cruz’s hawkishness, “unlike other candidates for the presidency, war and aggression will not be my first instinct.” He adds, “You cannot have a foreign policy without diplomacy. A superpower understands that caution and restraint are signs of strength…. The world must know that we do not go abroad in search of enemies, that we are always happy when old enemies become friends, and when old friends become allies.”[21] Given Trump’s xenophobia, truculence, and obvious instability, these words are hardly reassuring, however.

                Trump says the United States should forget about “nation-building,” and must drop the “dangerous idea that we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interest in becoming a Western Democracy.”[22] In other words, what we need is a “stable” Middle East, not democracy in the region: those people “over there” don’t want democracy anyway—they’re not like us. Of course, U.S. policy is not and has never been aimed at making “Western democracies”; the United States has preferred authoritarian states whenever there’s a threat that democracy would lead to defiance of orders from Washington, a very real threat given the nature of U.S. foreign policy. In any case, Trump’s objection to nation-building doesn’t arise out of respect for the national self-determination of smaller countries whose people might prefer to build their own nations rather than living under the thumb of imperial powers; for him, it’s simply a cost-benefit issue.

    Strongmen are the Answer

    Though well known for contradicting himself, Trump has been remarkably consistent in his admiration for authoritarian strongmen. He said in a February 2016 press conference, “You know, Saddam Hussein was a bad guy,” but immediately added, “[However] one thing about him: He killed terrorists.”[23] In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper last October, Trump declared that the world would be a “100 per cent” better off if Saddam Hussein and Libya’s dictator Muammar Gaddafi were still in power.[24] His liking for Gaddafi is nothing new; recall that in 2009 Trump invited Gaddafi to pitch his large Bedouin tent on Trump’s Bedford, New York estate while in New York to attend the UN general assembly.[25] In another instance of his warm appreciation of dictators, Trump complained that President Obama abandoned Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak in his time of need, tweeting “Egypt is a total mess. We should have backed Mubarak instead of dropping him like a dog.”[26]

                Trump’s embrace of authoritarian leaders goes beyond the Middle East. He famously praised Vladimir Putin with statements like “I’ve always felt fine about Putin, I think that he’s a strong leader, he’s a powerful leader,”[27] and on MSNBC’s Morning Joe he said of the Russian president, “He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader, you know, unlike what we have in this country,” casually shrugging off accusations that Putin has journalists and political adversaries assassinated.[28] The Putin-Trump mutual admiration society has its parallel in Europe, where Putin and the far right—from Britain’s UKIP party to Jobbik in Hungary, Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, Golden Dawn in Greece, the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), and Bulgaria’s Ataka party—are warmly supportive of one another. National Front founder and former leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, notorious for, among other things, claiming that the Nazi occupation of France was not “particularly inhumane” and suggesting that Ebola might solve Europe’s “immigration problem,”[29] has endorsed Trump’s campaign.

                Trump did appear to snub a far right delegation led by Marine Le Pen, the National Front’s current leader,[30] but that occurred right after his campaign was embarrassed by the endorsement of David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan—which Trump refused to repudiate at first, finally declaring petulantly, “David Duke he endorsed me, OK? I disavow. OK?”[31] In any case, Trump clearly belongs to this international semi-fascist bloc, for which racism, especially Islamophobia, is fundamental. And he is not even the most moderate member; only one of its leaders, Geert Wilders of the Dutch Party for Freedom, has, like Trump, explicitly called for a complete ban on Muslim immigration.

                Attempting to take advantage of popular war-weariness, Trump says the Iraq war was a terrible idea—by now a widely accepted truth, though despite his current claims, there’s no evidence that he opposed the war before it began.[32] On Libya, Trump now excoriates Obama and Clinton for their intervention, while at the time he said the opposite, “But we have go in to save these lives; these people are being slaughtered like animals,” Trump said. “It’s horrible what’s going on; it has to be stopped. We should do on a humanitarian basis, immediately go into Libya, knock this guy out very quickly, very surgically, very effectively, and save the lives.”[33]

                Trump stunned the media when he said in February 2016 that the United States should remain “neutral” between Israel and the Palestinians so as to be in a position to broker a deal between the two sides. He later tried to deflect criticism of his stand by criticizing Obama for strengthening Iran, saying “President Obama has not been a friend to Israel. He has treated Iran with tender love and care and made it a great power in the Middle East—all at the expense of Israel, our other allies in the region and, critically, the United States.”[34] In May 2016, he went even further to prove his loyalty to Israeli government policy, saying in an interview with the UK’s Daily Mail that Israel should just “keep moving forward” in building settlements in the occupied territories.[35] Trump has acquired the endorsement of Sheldon Adelson, a leading supporter of Israel’s right-wing government, who said he believes that Trump “will be good for Israel.”[36] Two Republicans with access to his views have reported that Adelson is willing to contribute more to Trump’s campaign than he has to any previous campaigns, and could exceed $100 million.[37] Where Trump ends up on this and most other issues is anybody’s guess, but it appears increasingly likely that his “neutrality” between the Israeli government and the Palestinians will evaporate.

                Some might have assumed that Trump could be a kind of ally of the peace movement because he expressed a reluctance to go to war and has challenged some of the basic assumptions of the foreign policy establishment by questioning the uncritical alliance with Israel (though, as suggested above, he seems to be dropping that stance like a hot potato), and by implying that he’s willing to walk away from historic commitments to defend NATO nations, and countries like Saudi Arabia. But that would be a seriously mistaken assumption. A bully like Trump is as likely as not to explode and take deadly military action when the going gets rough—for instance if ISIS, the Chinese, the Iranians, or any other adversaries don’t fold in the face of his threats and bluster. He has already said that if elected he will abrogate the Iran deal.

                More fundamentally, Trump’s worldview—a misogynistic, crudely violent nationalism with fascistic overtones—is diametrically opposed to what are, or should be, the anti-war movement’s basic values: anti-militarism, democracy, egalitarianism, social justice, and a vision of an ecologically sustainable world of cooperation among peoples and, as long as they exist, nations. This Trumpian worldview gives a different meaning to even those positions that, taken out of context, seem on the surface to be the same as ours. Trump opposes the Iraq War (at least in retrospect), but says he will “quickly and decisively bomb the hell out of ISIS.”[38] He avidly endorses waterboarding “What do you think about waterboarding, Mr. Trump?’ I said I love it. I love it, I think it’s great. And I said the only thing is, we should make it much tougher than waterboarding…”[39] He supports bombing the families of those presumed to be terrorists. Asked in March 2016 about the head of U.S. Central Command’s statement that more troops on the ground are needed to defeat ISIS in Syria and Iraq, Trump said “We really have no choice, we have to knock out ISIS….I would listen to the generals, but I’m hearing numbers of 20,000-30,000.”[40]

                And of course Trump’s ugly climate-change denialism, his racist views on immigration, and his plan to block all Muslims, including utterly desperate refugees, from entering the United States, are completely contrary to the peace movement’s goals and values. He is no ally of ours.

    HILLARY CLINTON

                Despite what she might say during the campaign to attract Sanders supporters, Hillary Clinton stands squarely within the longstanding bipartisan consensus on foreign policy, and indeed, along with many Republican politicians, is on the more aggressive end of that consensus.

                It is highly significant that the Republican Party’s hawkish foreign policy elites, including many of the leading neoconservatives, prefer Clinton to Trump, even if some have said that they could not actually vote for her. One of the foremost neocons, Robert Kagan, told The New York Times that “I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy. . . . [I]t’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that.” Kagan himself prefers the term “liberal interventionist.”[41] Another neocon, Eliot Cohen, has said he would “strongly prefer a third party candidate” to Trump, but added: “Probably if absolutely no alternative: Hillary.” And one more luminary in this warmongering clique, Max Boot, has declared that Clinton “would be vastly preferable to Trump.”[42]

                Moreover, Clinton has made no secret of her closeness to arch-war criminal Henry Kissinger. “I was very flattered when Henry Kissinger said I ran the State Department better than anybody had run it in a long time,” she has said. And in a 2014 review of Kissinger’s latest book, she was forthright: “America, he reminds us, succeeds by standing up for our values, not shirking them, and leads by engaging peoples and societies, the sources of legitimacy, not governments alone.” She went on to call Kissinger “surprisingly idealistic.”[43]

                In fact, before the campaign for the nomination began, Clinton was more bellicose than Obama. She advocated extending the pullout date for U.S. troops in Iraq[44] and urged a longer troop presence in Afghanistan.[45] Once the campaign was under way, Clinton pointedly promised that she would invite Israeli Benjamin Netanyahu to visit the White House during her first month in office—a jab at Obama for his frosty relations with the Israeli Prime Minister. In a speech on March 21st to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), she declared: “The United States and Israel must be closer than ever, stronger than ever.” “We must take our alliance to the next level,” she said, calling for “even more intense security and diplomatic cooperation” and demanding that the United States arm the Israeli military “with the most sophisticated defense technology.”[46] Clinton continues to support the U.S. policy of nominal opposition to the settlements and backed the Iran deal, but when she called in her AIPAC speech to take the US-Israeli alliance “to a new level,” she was actually taking “her belligerence to a new level,” as Ben Norton commented in Salon.[47]

                Several progressive and left wing writers have scrutinized Clinton’s foreign policy history, and reminded us of her dreadful record. For example, Greg Grandin wrote a Nation article “A Voters Guide to Hillary Clinton’s Policies,”[48] recounting her anti-democratic policies in Mexico, Paraguay, El Salvador, Panama and Colombia and Honduras, where she helped to legitimize the 2009 coup against the democratically elected government of Manuel Zelaya.

                On El Salvador, Grandin writes, “In 2012, Hillary Clinton’s State Department, acting through its ambassador, Mari Carmen Aponte, threatened to withhold critical development aid unless El Salvador passed a major privatization law. . . . It wouldn’t be the only time that Ambassador Aponte, a political ally of the Clintons, menaced Salvador’s leftist FMLN government. Recently, she warned Salvadorans about the need to buy corporate manufactured GMO seeds, insisting that the FMLN’s seed-cooperative program violates the terms of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).[49]

     

                    Beyond Latin America, Stephen Zunes reminds us of Clinton’s obscene comment on Egypt’s dictator just before his fall, “I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family.” (She surely hopes we will forget that gaffe.) Zunes notes that “After Saudi Arabian forces joined those of the Bahraini monarchy in brutally repressing nonviolent pro-democracy demonstrators the following month, The Wall Street Journal reported that Clinton had emerged as one of the ‘leading voices inside the administration urging greater U.S. support for the Bahraini king.’ She has long considered a ‘top priority’ the promotion of arms transfers to Saudi Arabia, which is not only one of the world’s most repressive regimes but has been using U.S. jets and ordinance in air strikes in Yemen that have killed thousands of civilians. In her last visit as secretary of state to Uzbekistan—a brutal dictatorship that has gunned down hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators, boiled opponents to death in oil, and sends hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren annually into forced labor in the cotton fields —she declined to meet with leading human rights activists. Instead, she emphasized ‘the importance of Uzbekistan to the region and to our national interest.’”[50]

                On Libya, Jo Becker and Scott Shane note in The New York Times that Hillary Clinton’s voice was critical in persuading a hesitant President Obama to join in bombing Gaddafi’s forces. They write, “In fact, Mr. Obama’s defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, would later say that in a ‘51-49’ decision, it was Mrs. Clinton’s support that put the ambivalent president over the line.”[51]

     * * *

                The foreign policies of both Donald Trump and likely Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, despite their differences, promise a future of endless militarism, drone attacks, support for dictators, and savage neoliberal economic policies throughout the world. Far from defeating political fundamentalism and terrorism in the Muslim world, their policies—America’s own brand of terrorism—are guaranteed to strengthen these reactionary forces. A U.S. government that carried out a different foreign policy based on principles of democracy and social and economic justice could indeed come about only through a “political revolution”—but, alas, the foreign policy of Bernie Sanders remains far from that goal. At the same time, however, the aspirations of the millions who have rallied to Sanders point towards just such a revolutionary foreign policy. These millions need to go beyond Sanders and declare their complete political independence from the Democratic Party, which has shown itself to be a pillar of the status quo.

     

    Joanne Landy is an editor of New Politics and Co-Director of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy. She can be reached at jlandy105@gmail.com. Thanks to Stephen Shalom, Thomas Harrison, and Dan La Botz for their invaluable help with this article. The author alone is responsible for the views expressed.


    [1] Adam B. Lerner, “Hillary Clinton says her Iraq war vote was a 'mistake,'” Politico.com, May 19, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/jm77cuc.

    [2] S.A. Miller and Seth McLaughlin, “Hillary Clinton breaks with Obama, threatens war to enforce Iran deal,” Washington Times, Sep. 9, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/pxavmwp.

    [3] Lawrence Wittner, "The Trillion Dollar Question," Huffington Post, Mar. 17, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/j3owj9p.

    [4] “'This Week' Transcript: Ben Carson and Sen. Bernie Sanders,” ABC This Week 2015 interview by George Stephanopoulis, Oct. 18, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/zw6m9ok.

    [5] Michael Arria, “Bernie Sanders' Troubling History of Supporting US Military Violence Abroad,” Alternet, May 13, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/olot642.

    [6] “Jeremy Scahill: Clinton is Legendary Hawk, But Sanders Shouldn't Get Pass on Role in Regime Change," Democracy Now, May 3, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/zjfpbgl; “Bernie Sanders Rejects Syria No-Fly Zone, Backs Airstrikes,” Telesur, Oct. 3, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/gqhu8w2.

    [7] “Full Transcript MSNBC Town Hall with Bernie Sanders Moderated by Chris Hayes,” Apr. 25, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/hvccs3s.

    [8] “Senator Bernie Sanders on Democratic Socialism in the United States,” Bernie 2016, Nov. 19, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/o7c8fz5.

    [9] Human Rights Watch: Jordan, http://tinyurl.com/josb782; Kuwait, http://tinyurl.com/j2m7mrw; World Report 2015: Qatar, http://tinyurl.com/ztvxzjg; World Report 2015: UAE, http://tinyurl.com/h4nmcwl; and World Report 2015: Saudi Arabia, http://tinyurl.com/gnfylvq.

    [10] Robert Naiman, “Chamber of Commerce Lobbyist Tom Donohue: Clinton Will Support TPP After Election,” HuffPost Politics, Jan. 28, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/zbo4the.

    [11] Maggie Haberman, "Donald Trump Says He Favors Big Tariffs on Chinese Exports," New York Times (NYT), Jan. 7, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/jxx7qls.

    [12] Index Mundi, United States Tariff Rate, http://tinyurl.com/glwfvjt.

    [13] Gene Gerzhoy and Nick Miller, “Donald Trump thinks more countries should have nuclear weapons. Here’s what the research says,” Washington Post (WP), Apr. 6, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/zvrocsn.

    [14] “Interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper,” Oct. 25, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/zx232hp.

    [15] Donald J. Trump foreign policy speech, Apr. 27, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/jogexd7.

    [16] Chris Heath, “This Donald Trump Interview Is the Best. You’re Gonna Love It,” GQ, Nov. 23, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/php3qcd.

    [17] Trump foreign policy speech, Apr. 27, 2016.

    [18] Andrew Kaczynski, “The Donald Trump Foreign Policy Doctrine, As Explained In His 2000 Book,” BuzzFeed News, Sep. 28, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/jfkrwzx.

    [19] Ben Geier, “Donald Trump Won't Rule Out Using Nukes Against ISIS,” Fortune, Mar. 23, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/honrzyl.

    [20] Heath, “This Donald Trump Interview Is the Best.”

    [21] Trump foreign policy speech, Apr. 27, 2016.

    [22] Trump foreign policy speech, Apr. 27, 2016.

    [23] Donald Trump Press Conference in South Carolina, Transcript, CNN Newsroom, Feb. 15, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/zayjsv2.

    [24] Jeremy Diamond, “Jake Tapper interview with Donald Trump,” Oct. 25, 2015, CNN Politics, http://tinyurl.com/h4dkg7m.

    [25] Helen Pidd and agencies,“Muammar Gaddafi's tent finds home on Donald Trump's estate,” Guardian, Sep. 22, 2009, http://tinyurl.com/pt589gd.

    [26] Donald J. Trump, Tweet, Dec. 12, 2012, http://tinyurl.com/jndqtf6.

    [27] Natalie Andrews, “Donald Trump Praises Putin as ‘Strong Leader,’” Wall Street Journal, Dec. 18, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/z5vx733.

    [28] Jose A. DelReal, “Donald Trump on Putin: ‘Nobody has proven that he’s killed anyone,’” WP, Dec. 20, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/hj9bcfg.

    [29] Alan Yuhas, “Jean-Marie Le Pen endorses Trump days after ex-KKK leader urges support,” Guardian, Feb. 27, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/zyaba7s.

    [30] Nicholas Vinocur and Alberto Mucci, “Donald Trump ignores Europe’s far-right: Euroskeptic politicians flew to Washington to meet the billionaire,” Politico, Apr. 7, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/jms84wz.

    [31] “Trump "Disavows" former KKK leader's support,” Reuters, Feb. 26, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/j6gmhod.

    [32] Eugene Kiely, “Donald Trump and the Iraq War,” Factcheck.org, Feb. 19, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/zqfaygv, and Alex Kaplan, Nick Fernandez & Cydney Hargis, “16 Times The Media Let Trump Falsely Claim He Opposed The Iraq War From The Beginning,” May 5, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/jldghfu.

    [33] Aaron Sharockman, “Donald Trump's Pants on Fire claim he never discussed Libya intervention,” Politifact, Feb. 25, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/jfqzqkp.

    [34] Donald J. Trump foreign policy speech, Apr. 27, 2016.

    [35] “Trump to Israel: Keep Building Settlements,” Israel Today, May 3, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/ho58qjx.

    [36] Thomas Kaplan and Maggie Haberman, “Sheldon Adelson says he will support Trump,” NYT, May 6, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/glnywck.

    [37] Jonathan Martin, “Sheldon Adelson Is Poised to Give Donald Trump a Donation Boost,” NYT, May 13, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/h5r5qmt.

    [38] Rebecca Kaplan, “Donald Trump promises to ‘bomb the hell out of ISIS’ in new ad,” CBS News, Nov. 18, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/pdttcnm.

    [39] Steve Guest, “Trump On Waterboarding: ‘I Love It, I Think It’s Great’ [VIDEO], DailyCaller.com, Apr. 20, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/gnmmw3d.

    [40] Matthew Nussbaum, “Trump calls for ground troops in Iraq, Syria,” Politico.com, Mar. 10, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/zl7xgzt.

    [41] Leslie H. Gelb, “Countering the Neocon Comeback,” Democracy, Winter 2015, No. 35, http://tinyurl.com/j7d5wov.

    [42] Michael Crowley, “GOP hawks declare war on Trump,” Politico.com, Mar. 3, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/j3m5dfw.

    [43] David Corn, “Hillary Clinton and Henry Kissinger: It's Personal. Very Personal,” Mother Jones, Feb. 12, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/jddu77s.

    [44] Josh Rogin, "Hillary Clinton Pushed Obama to Keep Troops in Iraq," Daily Beast, June 18, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/ntkrc9q.

    [45] Jo Becker and Scott Shane, "Hillary Clinton, 'Smart Power’ and a Dictator’s Fall,” NYT, Feb. 27, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/hxuqcgg.

    [46] "Read Hillary Clinton's Speech to AIPAC," Time, Mar. 21, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/z7z96jm.

    [47] Ben Norton, “'She sounds like Netanyahu’: Hillary Clinton goes extra hawkish in her biased, die-hard pro-Israel AIPAC speech," Salon, Mar. 22, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/hjgrb4f.

    [48] Greg Grandin, "A Voter’s Guide to Hillary Clinton’s Policies in Latin America," The Nation, Apr. 15, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/z2uuhsx.

    [49] Grandin, "Voter's Guide."

    [50] Stephen Zunes, “Hillary Clinton’s double standard on human rights,” National Catholic Reporter online, Apr. 11, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/hzn3orj.

    [51] Becker and Shane, “Clinton, 'Smart Power’ and a Dictator’s Fall.”

     

  • Women of DIP (Turkey) Persecuted

    ImageDear Comrades and Friends,

    Six women members of the Revolutionary Workers’ Party (DIP) of Turkey are being persecuted for their activity around the International Working Women’s Day. They are now being tried in court for support to and propaganda of terrorism simply because they have expressed solidarity with Kurdish women brazenly repressed and humiliated by security forces.

    On 6 March 2016, the six women were distributing a DIP leaflet appealing to women to join the action to be held on women’s day in the main square of Çorlu, an industrial working class city west of Istanbul, when police took them under custody because there was reference to state repression of Kurdish women in the text of the leaflet. The public prosecutor later indicted our comrades and the court case is opening at the Assize Court of Çorlu next Thursday, 26 May 2016.

    The allegation of support to and propaganda of terrorism is absurd. After having touched upon a series of forms of women’s oppression, the DIP leaflet then points out that some months ago, within the context of the war stepped up by Tayyip Erdoğan and the AKP since last summer, the naked body of a Kurdish woman guerrilla had been dumped in the midst of a Kurdish city for display so as to sow terror amongst the population. The leaflet severely condemns this brazen act of humiliation of women, expresses solidarity with Kurdish women subjected to this and similar other acts of aggression, and salutes the struggle of Kurdish women engaged in self-defence against such practice on the part of security forces. It was this that the prosecutor immediately labelled as support to and propaganda for terrorism.

    In its struggle against women’s oppression and for women’s liberation, in the face of a tremendous increase in violence against women, the DIP has systematically called for “self-defence groups” composed of women to fight violence against women, both in the Western parts of the country, in the industrial heartlands amongst working women and on campuses for female students and, quite naturally, in the Kurdish regions of the country as well. The fact that it is security forces that have committed this brutal denigration of women does not make this demand any less urgent.

    The court case against the six DIP women is a case of attempted repression of women’s struggle against oppression, of solidarity between the Turkish and Kurdish peoples and of the struggle of DIP for a just and free society.

    We call on all forces that fight women’s oppression and for the legitimate rights of the Kurdish people to express, in whatever way they deem appropriate, their solidarity with the defendants in this case before the opening session of the case next Thursday.

    Women of DIP

    Email: Sungur Savran <sungur.savran@gmail.com>

  • Book Review: Caio Prado Junior: The Contradictions of Brazil’s Communist Historian

    Image

    Luiz Bernardo Pericás, Caio Prado Júnior uma biografia política. Sao Paulo, 2016. 484 pp. Photos. Illustrations. Acronyms. Chonology. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Available only in Portuguese at this time.

    Pericás’ Caio Prado is a well researched, well documented biography of Caio Prado, the renowned and important Brazilian historian. This biography is distinguished by the author’s concern to present Prado not only as a Marxist intellectual but also as a member of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) and a committed political activist–and to show the relationship between the two. The author argues that Prado’s politics were integral to his work as a historian.

    Certainly anyone who reads this book, whether or not they were already familiar with his career, will learn a great deal about Prado. Born in 1907, Prado was a child of one of São Paulo’s wealthiest families, educated as a child in Brazil and England, he graduated from law school in 1928, though he never practiced law. He became active in the Democratic Party (PD) and was arrested in 1930, but within two years had joined the Brailian Communist Party (PCB), remaining a member until he died. In 1935 he became the president of the National Liberation Alliance (ALN) a broad opposition group led by the Communist Party. He was elected to the state legislature in 1947, his only elected post.

    Throughout the period from the 1930s to the 1960s he was a Communist Party second-tier leader, arrested and imprisoned several times. He used his wealth to create and finance leftwing journals and publishing houses, while as a Marxist intellectual he contributed his intellectual training and talent, writing both party pamphlets and academic studies of Brazilian history. He remained throughout his life loyal to the Stalinist Communist Party and after the death of Stalin to bureaucratic Soviet communism. In his books The USSR: A New World (1934) and The World of Socialism (1962), following visits to the socialist countries, he praisd Communism in the Soviet Union, the Eastern European Communist nations, and China, while lauding Cuban Communism in other writings.

    Yet in his historical writings, particularly in his most important works, the Formation of Contemporary Brazil (1942), the Economic History of Brazil (1945), and The Brazilian Revolution (1936), Prado developed an analysis of Brazilian history that was at odds with the Soviet Union’s and the Brazilian Communist Party’s views. His commitment to his own interpretation of Brazil’s history brought him into conflict with the PCB leadership, so that he was sometimes accused of being a Trotskyist or a Maoist (he was neither of those) or at other times of being a reformist.

    Prado argued in Formation of Contemporary Brazil that Brazil’s history could only be understood if we grasped “o sentido da colonização,” that is, “the meaning of colonization.” Prado understood colonization as a more than an economic system that produced products for the European marke; for him it was also a system of political and religious institutions, as well as a unique culture. Prado’s method meant that among the historians of his generation he paid more attention to international economic relations and to the slave trade, slavery, and racism than did most academic or Marsist historians of Brazil (excepting Gilberto Freyre, author of The Masters and the Slaves: a Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, 1933). For Prado, Brazil’s development was characterized “instability” as the country passed through economic cycles in which it advanced and then degenerated. 

    Such views contradicted the Stalinist Communist conception of development (taken from earlier Social Democratic models) that looked almost exclusively at the economic system as society progressed through certain predictable regular stages, from slavery, to feudalism, to capitalism. The Communists held the view that Brazil was a society with feudal characteristics, and therefore the working class had to ally with the bourgeoisie to overcome feudalism and enter a capitalist stage of development before fighting for socialism. Prado rejected the existence of continuing feudal elements, arguing that Brazil was a country of wage labor integrated into the capitalist world. Similarly, while the Communists argued for an alliance with the national capitalist class, Prado believed that the national bourgeoisie was integrated into first British and later American imperialism.

    The author using a wide variety of sources narrates Prado’s life, gives brief summaries of his major historical works in passing, and describes briefly the major intellectual and political debates in which he was involved. Yet, while Caio Prado is a model of academic research and documentation, the writing is often tedious—given over to listing. There are Prado’s lists of publications, people he knew, events in which he participated, cities he visited, books in his library, magazines he received, etc.—and at times in its discussion of political disputes or of the reception of Prado’s books is pedantic.

    Most problematic, however, is the author’s failure to go beyond narration and to critically analyze Prado’s thinking and action at many key points in his life and in the history of Brazil the international Communist movement. While Pericás makes clear by making a remark here or there that he is critical of Prado’s thoroughly Stalinist politics, yet he never pauses to reflect on those politics and provides the reader no incentive to do so.

    Without going into detail, suffice it to say that the author has almost nothing critical or insightful to say about Prado’s relationship to Luis Carlos Prestes, the heroic and charismatic leader of the “lieutenants’ revolt” of the 1920s and later of the Communist Party. Pericás offers no insight into Prado’s acceptance of the Stalinist suppression of the opposition, the show trials of the Old Bolsheviks, or the forced collectivization of agriculture and the forced march to industrialization over the corpse of the Russian revolution. The author offers us only one sentence: “There was no questioning or public criticism by the Paulista intellectual regarding the years of Stalin’s consolidation of power, nor of the human costs of the five-year plan.” (p.  84) While this is true, it fails to ask why Prado was no unquestioning, what that said about his politics, about the Brazilian Communist Party, and about the Communist movement more generally.

    Similarly with so many other issues where there is hardly even a sentence suggesting that there is something worth talking about regarding issues such as: the Communists strategy vis-à-vis Gertulio Vargas’ dictatorship and the Estado Novo, the Popular Front, the USSR-Yugoslavia controversy, Khrushchev’s 1956 speech to the 20th Congress of the CPSU, the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, the theory of peaceful co-existence, the Sino-Soviet conflict, the Cuban Revolution, and the suppression of the Czechoslovakian Revolution in 1968 which Prado at first criticized in a letter to the Soviet government but then refused to publicly speak out about, remaining a member of the Communist Party. All of these issues and Prado’s positions are described, and some at length, but the questions are not contextualized and illuminated for the reader. Even in dealing with Prado’s intellectual work, Pericás gives only brief remarks that fail to explain the significance of his ideas for his time and for ours.

    Prado’s life was a contradiction. His Stalinist politics blinded him to the realities of the Communist societies. Yet as a historian he developed a complex and subtle analysis of Brazilian history anticipating the new “new history” from below of the 1960s. While he acquiesced to the Communists’ political line in every period, he strongly defended his own interpretation of Brazilian history, even when it came into conflict with the party line.

    Luiz Bernardo Pericás’ Caio Prado Júnior is a useful book that belongs in university libraries, but it is not the kind of analytical and critical biography that one wants when we are dealing with such an important, complex and contradictory intellectual and political figure.

     

     

      

     

  • Borders: Refugees and Responders

     ImageThis talk was given at the Washington State Council of Fighters Educational Convention for 350 Delegates in Spokane, Washington, on April 20, 2016.

    Good Morning. Thanks very much to your leadership and staff for this invitation.  I’ve been out of the country for the past six months and just got back to Olympia last Sunday. But, “home” for me is the back roads of Eastern Washington. I’ve been driving up Pine Canyon out of Orondo to Waterville since I was sixteen. Then out through Mansfield, over to Leahy Junction and down through Grand Coulee.  That drive helped me get home.  Thanks for that.

    I also was to thank you for your 2014 resolution on oil trains. You passed it here in Spokane.  As first responders you saw a danger to our communities.  You said in your resolution that these oil trains should stop coming through our communities until they are proven to be safe. You called for an immediate halt.

    You saw a danger. You acted as a witness to that danger. Just as importantly, you told your broader community about that danger.  Based on the legitimacy and support of the WSCFF and your resolution, community groups across this state have been successfully stopping proposed oil tank farms, marine transfer stations, oil refineries and propane tank farms.  So, thank you for your leadership.

    I saw another danger recently. It’s been called the largest refugee crisis since World War II. It’s as large as the 4.6 million refugees created by the Afghanistan War. There are 4.8 million Syrians trying to find a safe place away from the war in their country.  I spent the month of February on the Greek island of Lesvos trying to be helpful to Syrian and other refugees coming by boat from the coast of Turkey. 

    The danger I saw was the refusal of governments, whether the Greek government or the 28 nations of the European Union, to see these refugees, to meet their basic needs, to help them. 

    But I also saw the amazing work of first responders trying to meet their needs, witnessing what was going on and telling the broader community what they saw.

    My conclusion is this. If first responders are not present providing aid, acting as a witness and telling the broader community, these people, whether it is Syrian refugees or the American homeless, will be met by state violence, criminal gangs and paramilitaries. The politics of force.

    Thinking about this reminds me of New Orleans and Katrina.  A few years ago you asked me to come and talk to you about New Orleans. Why?  Because fire fighters and first responders were kept out.  You know and I know what happened next…. the largest use of US military force on domestic soil since the Civil War.  This was followed by the sacking of this city’s public wealth, busting of its largest union, assaulting its public schools led by the predatory Bill Gates foundation and the forced removal of 400,000 citizens, almost half of its metropolitan population.

    So, I want to talk to you about my experience on Lesvos and why war refugees are coming there.  I hope you had a chance to look at the material I passed out yesterday.

    There are something like 2.7 million Syrian refugees in Turkey trying to escape the ravages of the war. They have no right to seek asylum in Turkey.  Under Turkish law only Europeans can seek asylum and Turkish immigration is for Turkic people or people of Turkish culture.  And, as you know, Turks are from the Altai mountains of western Mongolia and China. They are not Arabs.  As a result, these Syrian refugees are considered “guests” by the Turkish government and have no right to stay in Turkey permanently.

    Many of them make it to the western shore of the Aegean sea, north of the Turkish city of Izmir.  From there they can see “Europe”, the Greek island of Lesvos. They cross this five or six miles of open sea, generally at night, in small boats or open rubber rafts with small outboard motors sold by the Turkish traffickers. Thirty or more people packed together. Old people, kids, babies, families, moms and dads, wearing “life jackets” that for the most part would be useless if they fell into the sea.  They tended to arrive on the northern shores of Lesvos.

    In 2015, something like 850,000 came this way to a Greek island.  Close to 500,000 landed on Lesvos. If they landed on the north shore near the village of Molivos, they had to walk about 50 miles south to the port city of Mytilene.   This walk, which included a walk over a mountain pass, would take at least two to three days. In Mytilene they could get an overnight ferry to the Greek port of Piraeus on the Greek mainland. After Piraeus, they would somehow go north to the small Greek village of Idomeni, cross the Macedonia border and head farther into Europe seeking asylum and a safe place.  The people that do this are not just Syrians, but also Iraqis, Afghans, Iranis, Pakistanis and many others. I met them all while I was in Lesvos. 

    Initially, there was no positive governmental response to this on the island, but then the “first responders” took action.  These were the Greeks who lived on the island. Fishermen, villagers, hotel owners. These Greeks know what it means to be a refugee. After the Turkish Republic was founded after World War I,  there was a population exchange in the mid 1920s. Close to a million Greeks living on the mainland of Turkey were forced to come to Greece.

    These Greek first responders rescued people sinking in their harbors, provided them with food, clothing, first aid. They set up a tent camp just outside the village of Molivos that hosted over 200,000 refugees in 2015.  The villagers demanded buses and the UN started to supply buses so refugees didn’t need to walk to Mytilene.  Then, these first responders started telling the whole world what they were witnessing and called for help.  Many people think these Greek villagers should get a Nobel Peace Prize.  I’m one of them.

    First responders from all over the world came to Lesvos. They brought food, medicine, clothing, interpreters, rescue boats and organizational savvy. They set up 24 hour look outs, tent camps, child care centers, medical facilities, round the clock food services. They provided a human welcome and direction to frightened people.

    So many groups were there. Groups like The Danish Rescue Committee, I AM YOU, Samaritan’s Purse. Isiah 58, the Salaam Cultural Mission which is based in Seattle, Better Days for Moria, Swiss Cross, etc.

    One group really got my attention. The Dirty Girls of Lesvos.  I read about them in a newspaper while I was living in County Cork, Ireland in November and I went to see one of their leaders, Cathy Sharma.  These Irish women and others who worked on Lesvos as volunteers saw all the clothing that was being discarded by the refugees.  They decided to set up a collection and distribution system all over the island. They collected the discarded clothes, laundered them and then redistributed them back to all the camps and relocation centers.  Their work was one of the reasons my wife and I decided to go to Lesvos in February.

    Sometimes I think this is the real story. The capacity of humans to cross all language, national and cultural barriers and work together to build a caring community outside market and money relations.  People that came to help on their own dime and did what they could with an amazing spirit of cooperation.

    The is one thing, however, that these first responders can not provide and that is legal and safe access to asylum. That’s government’s job. They are still not doing it.

    I want to show you some photos.

    Here’s Molivos harbor.  Molivos is a village of about 2200 people. When my wife and I walked down to this harbor on February 1st to report in to Starfish, the local group we signed up with, it was a nice sunny day. The small harbor was full of outdoor tables with people eating and drinking.  Then, all of a sudden, we noticed there was a group of about 40 people standing right in front of us. They had just gotten off a Greek coast guard boat. They had picked them up on the sea. They were “refugees.” We stood in silent shock. We knew we weren’t going to sit down and order a Greek salad, but we did not know what to do.  You guys would have known what to do. We eventually learned, but it was a surreal moment.

    This is a shot of  the Turkish coast, just across from Molivos harbor, about five miles away.  This is where the smugglers and traffickers launch their rubber rafts.  This is a shot from the Cesme harbor looking out to the Greek island of Chios.  You can see how close it is. Chios is, of course, Europe to the refugees.  But Cesme is too close to the large city of Izmir so not many refugees make this crossing.  They go farther north to a less populated section of the Turkish coast and head for Lesvos.  These are shots of the rubber raft and type of boats they come over on.  The beaches of Lesvos are littered with the remains of these rubber rafts.

    These are shots of the men’s sheds and family dormitories located inside the Moria Relocation Center on the southern part of the island near Mytilene.  It’s a jail surrounded by razor wire, but it’s an open jail.  Most refugees ended up here.  It has a capacity of about 3,000. The European Union (EU) called this operation a “hot spot.”  Here refugees can be registered.  Once registered,  they get a card that allows them to stay in Greece for six months or one month.  With this card, they were legal for the moment. They could stay in a hotel or buy a ferry ticket.  Who got the six month card changed often, but generally it was for Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans. The point of the card, however, was for them to get on a ferry and get out of Greece. This camp was run by volunteer first responders under the auspices of the UNHCR.

    Next door to the Moria Relocation Center was an informal camp site, initially known as “Afghan Hill.”  This photo shows the tents that were set up. It was for refugees that did not want to go to Moria or for overflow from Moria. Finally, there is a shot of refugees exiting a Greek ferry at the Port of Piraeus on the Greek mainland.

    All of this changed on March 20, 2016, the date an agreement between the EU and the Republic of Turkey came into effect.  Negotiations on this agreement had been taking place for months prior to this date.

    The purpose of the agreement was to stop the flow of refugees to Europe. The borders to Europe like the one in Macedonia would remain closed to refugees. Anyone landing on a Greek island after March 20th would be sent back to Turkey unless they could and did apply for asylum in Greece.  For every Syrian returned to Turkey, one Syrian would be sent to an EU country up to a maximum of 72,000.   What would happen to all those returned to Turkey, including any Syrians, was unclear.

    In exchange for this “service,” the EU would send Turkey six billion euro to help cover costs for keeping Syrian refugees in Turkey,  allow Turkish citizens to travel visa free to the EU’s 28 countries and restart the talks regarding Turkey’s membership in the EU.

    So, what did this deal mean for Lesvos?    It meant the Moria Relocation Center was now a closed prison run by the Greek army.  All first responder organizations that had provided food, clothing, medical assistance, etc were excluded. It meant Afghan Hill was closed down. It meant all the first responder organizations were being isolated from the refugees.  It meant those refugees returned to Turkey were accompanied by armed guards from Frontex, the EU border police.  It also meant the daily average of refugees coming by rubber raft from Turkey declined significantly, from a daily average in March of 851 to a daily average in April to 151 (As of April 13, 2016).

    What is my feeling about this?  First responders provided basic humanitarian aid in emergency situations to these refugees. They witnessed what was going on and we learned about it from them.  The removal of first responders means these “refugees”, just like other refugees such as America’s homeless, the dispossessed from years of neo-liberalism, or those displaced due to the climate crisis are officially “nobodies.”  They will be the subjects of stereo-typing and fear mongering. They will be subjected to state violence and criminal gangs.  This is a major danger. No good will come of it.

    I want to talk a bit about why these refugees are coming to the island of Lesvos.

    Near the end of World War I, two people, Mark Sykes representing Britain and Francois Picot representing France were assigned the task of dividing up parts of the collapsed Ottoman Empire which we now know as the “Middle East.”  Countries which we know as Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Kuwait, Jordan, Palestine were artificial creations that were to be ruled either directly or indirectly by either Britain or France once the war was over.  This became known as the Skyes-Picot Agreement. 

    The countries and boundaries created by this agreement were basically artificial nations ruled by autocratic rulers under the supervision of western imperial powers. When Britain and France withdrew from this area in a military way in the mid-1950s, the US took over as the imperial supervisor.  As you can imagine there was a great deal of resentment about this agreement even up to the present time.  For example, when ISIS announced the formation of its Islamic State in 2014, it bulldozed the border between Syria and Iraq and announced the end of Sykes-Picot.

    Secondly, the US invaded Iraq in 2003 and occupied that country until 2011 when the last US troops were withdrawn.  In a few days after taking Baghdad, Paul Bremer, the newly installed administrator of the US occupation, dismissed 65,000 to 70,000 of the elite leadership of the Iraqi Army.  He also criminalized the leaders of the Baathist political party that had ruled Iraq for the past three decades. In doing these two things, Bremer dismantled the two key institutions of the secular Iraq nation state. 

    In its place, the US installed a sectarian government ruled by a religious sect of Islam, the Shi’a, under the premiership of Nuri al-Maliki.  While the Shi’a are the largest Islamic sect in Iraq, the Sunni sect has a significant presence in Iraq and world wide makes up by far the largest portion of the Islamic world of 1.3 billion followers. 

    I mean it was something like if a foreign power came to this country, dismissed every officer of the Army, Navy and Air Force, criminalized every member of the Republican and Democratic parties and set up a Christian government that criminalized or at least discriminated against all the Catholics.

    For the next ten years, this sectarian government structure in Iraq led to violent conflict between these two branches of Islam, one of which controlled the government apparatus.

    Just after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, al-Qaeda Central (AQC), still run by bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri, sent a Jordanian operative known as Zarqawi to Iraq.  He set up or al-Qaeda in Iraq, but later changed its name to the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI)  Although he was killed by a US airstrike in 2006, he set the tone for what was to take place in Iraq and it was very different than what AQC wanted.

    He said the main problem was Shi’a rule, whether in Iraq, Iran or Syria.  He believe that the Shi’a were apostates, people who had forsaken their religion and in fact should be killed. He intended to mobilize the Sunni population against this Shi’a rule.  Unlike al Qaeda who believed the problem was the “far enemy” like the US, he believed the “near enemy” was the problem, in other words, the Shi’a and the Shi’a rulers. 

    He also believed in a particular type of jihad.  You know,  jihad can be as simple as a commitment to being a good Muslim.  That is, making your profession of faith, saying your prayers daily, paying you tax to the mosque, fasting during Ramadan and, if you have the funds, traveling to Mecca in Saudi Arabia sometime during your lifetime. 

    Jihad to Zarqawi, however, was only an offensive war against the Shi’a or anyone else that did not believe in his way of doing things. I read parts of the strategic manual that he followed and is followed by ISIS today.  It’s called the Management of Savagery.  It’s basically the use of overwhelming violence to assert your dominance and then being prepared to manage the chaos.

    When I was reading this, it made me think about the “shock and awe” strategy of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld when they invaded Iraq.  They believed their use of overwhelming violence would also establish their authority.  And, just like ISIS who calls for a war against all, so Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld said you were either with us or against us as they began their regime of “perpetual war.”

    So what seems to be happening in Iraq and Syria today is our system of “perpetual war” meeting the “management of savagery.”  You can see the results.  Neither side is going to “win” but their strategies will produce a lot of refugees.

    There was one final difference with AQC.  The ISI leadership believed they could create an Islamic State in present time by taking and holding territory.  AQC, or al-Qaeda Central, believe that an Islamic State would only be possible once the imperial powers, like the US, had concluded they should leave the Middle East and the Muslim world alone.

    By 2011, the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) had been rebuilt under the new leadership of al-Baghdadi, and also had more room to maneuver.  This happened for two reasons. 

    First, al-Maliki, the Iraq premier, continued to criminalize the Sunni population even though some of them had helped the US troops defeat AQI in 2006.  This gave more credence to the notion that the Sunnis as Sunnis needed to organize and that the US had in fact given Iraq to the Shi’a and to Iran, which has a Shi’a government. 

    Second, Bashar al-Assad, the ruler of Syria and a member of a Shi’a like sect, had severely repressed the civilian protests in his country which were a part of the Arab Spring protests of 2011.  In the process of repressing these non-violent, civilian protests in the southern city of Daraa, his security forces arrested and tortured some middle school kids who have sprayed painted some anti-regime graffiti.  There are a lot of things people will put up with from their governments, but torturing their children is not one.  

    This action, as well as a host of other grievances, led to the civil war that is still raging.  It led to something else.  al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISI, sent his agents into Syria to organize Sunni opposition to the al-Assad regime and by June 2014, al-Baghdadi had announced the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

    At this point in time, ISIS has control of the Syrian city of Raqqa and the Iraqi city of Mosul and an area containing around six million people.  They control the majority of oil production in Syria and 1/3 of it wheat production.  They are estimated to have $2 trillion in assets and an annual revenue of $2.5 billion. 

    What does all this mean for Syria?

    Half of this nation of twenty-two million people is either internally displaced persons (6.5 million) or refugees (4.8 million). It also has at least a quarter million dead and 1.8 million wounded. Its economy is in shambles and it is currently being bombed by a long list of nations: the US, Australia, Bahrain, France, Jordan, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Britain, Turkey, Russia and its own regime under Bashar al-Assad.  As of February 2016, the US DOD says it has carried out 3,447 air strikes just in Syria alone since August, 2014.

    Here’s a photo of Aleppo. What’s that man with a kid in each hand walking through this rubble supposed to do?  Aleppo was a city of 2.2 million people.  I was there in 2010.  The eastern part of that city had 1 million people in it, now there are 40,000. 

    Many of them decided that they must leave Syria.  There are 2.7 million in Turkey, 1.2 million in Lebanon. Jordan has about 1 million.  Germany took about 500,000 in 2015. Obama said he has a goal of 10,000.  Since 2012, the US State Department’s resettlement program has accepted 2,174 Syrian refugees, half of whom are children.

    What’s this all mean for us? 

    Unless we stop this policy of perpetual war there will be a lot more refugees created, either from war, neo-liberal trade agreements or climate chaos.  If first responders are not present to meet their needs, act as a witness and tell the broader community, we won’t even know they exist.  At a minimum, we need to demand a safe and legal access to asylum and resettlement.  If we can’t accomplish this, war will be the only condition, the politics of force.

    I’m going to leave you with a short video of refugees coming to the shore of Lesvos and being greeted by first responders. The refugees are asking for safe passage. 

    Thanks.

    *In preparing for this talk, I have benefited from reading several texts:  Demystifying Syria, edited by Fred H. Lawson, A History of ISIS by Fawaz A. Gerges and ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan.

     

  • Brazil: Dilma to Be Impeached, The Left Braces for a Hard Right Turn

    ImageBrazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff of the Workers Party (PT) will very likely be impeached today, leading to her immediate, temporary removal from office and to a trial that could remove her permanently. Waldir Maranhao, the acting speaker of the lower house, had annulled the impeachment process just a couple of days ago, but then Renan Calheiros, the head of the Senate, said that he would proceed with the impeachment anyway, and it is going forward. This impeachment, which the left calls a kind of golpe de estado or coup d’état could be the end of Dilma’s presidency and the beginning of a new rightwing government that will impose greater austerity and do so by repressing the social movements.

     Brazil is in the midst of its most serious political crisis since the the military dictatorship that began in 1965 and with the return to democracy in 1985. Hundreds of thousands have in recent weeks joined in massive marches against Dilma’s government, calling for her removal. Rightwing judges, politicians, the media have been working for months to see her impeached her for her alleged inappropriate handling of the nation’s finances—though those politicians who have accused her have themselves been investigated for far more serious crimes of embezzlement and fraud. Investigations called Lava Jato (Car Wash), have implicated dozens of politicians, but, even before the current wave of enquiries, members of the administration of former President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, and the president himself, had been found to be involved in corrupt practices.

    President Dilma Rousseff, a former leftist guerrilla—imprisoned and tortured under the military government—first assumed the presidency in 2011, succeeding Lula, founder and leader of the party for decades and two-term president. Created by militant labor and social movements in the 1980s, the Workers Party during Lula's presidency adapted to parliamentary politics, engaged in political payoffs, and proved adept at neoliberal economics accompanied by social welfare programs. Under Lula, the country’s banks and corporations prospered even during the Great Recession while the Workers Party government pushed through congress programs to redistribute wealth to assist the poor—without changing the system that produced them. But Rousseff took power during an economic downturn, and her turn to austerity has only made the situation more difficult.

    Taking advantage of the president’s discomfort, Eduardo Cunha, the former speaker of the lower house, led the attack on Dilma and the PT, but he has now been suspended from office while his wrongdoings are investigated. Cuhha is a leader of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), created by the military dictatorship as the official opposition party. Brazil’s vice-president Michael Temer is also a member of this party, and if Dilma is impeached, he will assume the presidency. The PMDB, to which both of these men belong, is an alliance of regional oligarchies with no real program for the future of the nation and principally acts to defend its constituents’ economic and political interests,

    The Left Resists

    With Rousseff facing impeachment, the PT leadership contemplates calling upon Lula to run for president—if he is not indicted and imprisoned. There is the problem, however, that Lula’s and Dilma’s policies have over the last 13 years turned from social liberalism and redistributive programs to policies of greater austerity. Consequently the PT has lost support among its traditional bases of organized workers and the urban and rural poor.

    The question facing the left then is: How to resist the right without supporting Rousseff, Lula, and the Workers Party? More specifically, how should the far left relate to the various coalitions that have been formed to resist the right?

    The PT has organized its own coalition, Frente Brasil Popular, made up of dozens of popular organizations, including such important groups as Via Campesina, but, most important, it includes the two largest labor federations: CTB (Central dos Trabalhadores e Trabalhadoras do Brasil) and CUT (Central Única dos Trabalhadores). The far left hesitates to join this coalition because it defends Lula, Rousseff, and the PT and, of course, doesn’t criticize the ruling party’s faults and failings.

    There is another front, however, called Povo sem Medo or People without Fear, that was initiated by the Movimento dos Trabalhadores sem Teto or Movement of Homeless Workers (MTST). This coalition, also made up of many popular organizations, is independent of the PT government, and its posture of defending democracy but not the government makes it attractive to the far left. Some sections of the Party of Socialism and Freedom (PSOL), for example, back the Povo sem Medo coalition. 

    At the same time, far left parties—Party of Socialism and Freedom (PSOL), the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), and the United Socialist Workers Party (PSTU), which often join together in electoral coalitions, are working together make a new coalition of their groups called the Left Socialist Front (Frente de Esquerda Socialista) into a more activist organization in society. The founding congress took place on March 23 with the participation of 500 members from the three participating organizations. They are committed to making a campaign to build the both in the elections and in the streets and social movements.

    Much of what happens politically will depend ultimately on the labor and social movements. The two large labor federations already mentioned, the CTB and CUT, have become business unions that work in partnership with the employers, and they are discredited as well in the eyes of some by their connection to the Workers Party. Some former CUT unions have been leaving the federation are now joining either one of two alternative federations: CSPConLutas or Intersindical.

    There are in Brazil an enormous number of community organizations, ethnic associations, feminist groups, and environmental organizations; and though many of them are affiliated with the Workers Party, there are also many independent groups. The events of June 2013, when millions took to the streets to protest government policies, showed the enormous potential of this movement, though at the moment there are no such mass movements.

    Brace for a Hard Right Turn

    Temer of the PMDB, once he assumes the presidency, will be looking for political allies, and he is mostly like to find them in the center-right Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB), the party that has been the main opposition to Lula, Rousseff, and the Workers Party for more than a decade. The party’s symbol is colorful toucan parrot with its huge yellow bill and its leaders are called toucans. Recently the PSDB voted to cut the education budget for children’s lunches, leading the left to joke: Question: “What is eating the children’s lunches?” Answer: “The toucan.”

    With the PMDB and the PSDB dominating the congress, not only children’s lunches, but all progressive social legislation will be threatened. The government can be expected to take action against the interests of the left political parties, the labor unions, and the social movements. Under such a government, social conflicts—such as the occupation of the schools now taking place in Rio de Janeiro—will be handled by the authorities with greater violence. Brazil is making a right turn and the left will be hard pressed to defend its parties, its unions and movements, and the country’s working people and poor.

     

  • What can we in the United States learn from the left in Europe and Brazil?

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    What can we in the United States learn from the left in Europe and Brazil?

    During the last two weeks of April I visited three European countries speaking about Bernie Sanders and the American elections. I spoke in Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, and in French-speaking Switzerland, while in May I spoke in four Brazilian cities: Rio de Janeiro, the Rio suburb of Niteroi, Vitoria, and Fortaleza. In Paris I spoke to Ensemble, part of the Front de Gauche, in the suburb of Bagnolet. In Madrid and Barcelona, I spoke at meetings organized by the journal Viento Sur which is linked to Anticapitalistas, the leftwing of Podemos. In Switzerland, I spoke at the Spring University of solidaritiéS Suisse, an independent, multi-tendency left wing group.

    In Brazil my talks were sponsored by either the Party of Socialism and Freedom (PSOL), which came out of a leftwing split form the Workers Party (PT) several years ago, or by Insurgencia, a Trotskyist (Fourth International) group active within PSOL. In addition to speaking before these groups, I also met and talked with local activists and leaders and sometimes with national leaders. And I visited union halls and strikes and spokes with union activists and also joined and participated in protest demonstrations around a variety of issues. While these are very different countries and even regions of the world, one can see some general similarities in the situation of the left in both Europe and Brazil.

    In France, Spain, and in Brazil, the labor and socialist parties in power have been utterly discredited among many working people: the young, environmentalists, feminists, and other social activists. In France, François Hollande of the Socialist Party has not only imposed austerity policies on the country, but also, with the excuse of terrorist attacks, he has taken authoritarian measures, banning social protests. Environmentalists, labor unionists, and youthful activists have defied the proscription of demonstrations and taken to the street in the Nuit debout occupation of the Place de la Republic in Paris.

    In Spain, the political duopoly of the conservative Partido Popular and the Socialist Party (PSOE) has been discredited, neither won 50 percent of the vote in the last election, and both were unable to form a government. Podemos, the new leftwing political party that came out of los indignados, also known at the movimiento de las plazas, is engaged in talks with the United Left (la Izquierda Unida), a group that years ago came out of the old Spanish Communist Party. If they unite in an electoral coalition, Podemos-IU could displace the PSOE as a new, radical, and activist socialist party. In Catalunya, a region with its own national identity and political parties, the situation is the same, though the party names are different.

    In Brazil, the Workers Party (PT), a labor party that came out of the movement against the military dictatorship in the 1980s and which has held power now first under Lula and then under Dilma Rousseff for 13 years, has lost support both because of the austerity policies it has imposed, but also because of corrupt practices that it and all of the major Brazilian parties have been involved in, as revealed by a government investigation (Lava Jato). The far right has seized the opportunity to attack the PT and Dilma, calling for her impeachment. The radical left groups, such as Insurgencia and many others in PSOL want to defend democracy, but don’t want to have to defend the PT government or Dilma. They want to build a genuine socialist alternative. The common element of these experiences are supposed labor or socialist parties that have either become corrupt, authoritarian, or pro-austerity or all three in varying degrees, leading to new, more radical left parties.   

    In France, Spain, and Brazil, there have been and continue to be attempts to found new broad left, radical socialist parties as an alternative to the Social Democrats. In France we have seen both the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) and the Front de Gauche, in Spain Podemos, and in Brazil, PSOL. These efforts can be compared to those in the English-speaking nations where Jeremy Corbyn in the British Labor Party and Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party clearly represent a similar popular reaction among youth and sections of the labor movement to the conservative policies of Labor and the Democrats.

    What is the role of the far left in these movements? Several–though not all–of the groups that invited me to speak have their roots in the Trotskyist tradition. The New Anti-Capitalist Party came out of a merger of former members of the French Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) with environmentalists and other social activists. Anticapitalistas was formed by people out of the Spanish Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), also Trotskyist. Ensemble in France, which participates in the Front de Gauche, has members who come from the Socialist and Communist Party, as well as from NPA and the Trotskyist left. Similarly, solidaritéS Suisse, though it has Trotskyist roots, has also incorporated those from other traditions.

    These groups, if they were Trotskyist in origin, have by and large turned away from many of the characteristics once associated with Trotskyist organizations. At one time many of these groups held a dogmatic view of socialist ideology based almost exclusively on a very particular and narrow reading of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky—though for a while they also included Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara among their revolutionary heroes. They worked to organize “vanguard parties” based on a supposedly “democratic centralist” model and often attempted to take control of and to dictate to labor unions and popular movements. Dominated by male leaders, they often had a machista culture. Those practices are no longer found among the groups for which I spoke and the people with whom I met and talked. The Fourth International identified with Ernest Mandel (1923-1995), has developed a more broad-minded view of revolutionary socialism, and so have most (but not all) of its affiliated organizations.

    Today most of the far left groups that I visited, whether or not they are affiliated with the Fourth International, work to create organizations that have a more genuinely democratic character while at the same time attempting to create a dialogue with the unions and the movements with which they interact. There is no doubt that the practices of the feminist, environmental, indigenous, and poor peoples’ movements have had a salutary effect on these organizations, leading to more democratic practices and a fuller understanding of the human condition and the struggles before us. The goal for most of these groups and their members is no longer to study the Marxist catechism and then teach it to others, but to develop on the basis of Marxist principles a critical and creative relationship to contemporary social movements and politics.

    Anticapitalistas provides an interesting example of what this means in the actual building of a radical left organization. Starting in the 1980s with about 85 members, today they have more than 700, and the great challenge is to educate and train cadres. At one time, this would have meant reading “the classics” under the tutelage of one of the group’s leaders. They believe there is still value in reading those classics, but today they use articles in Viento Sur as the basis for discussion. These articles, mostly about the contemporary situation, raise questions that often have no “correct answer,” but rather require the discussants to collectively use the Marxist method to analyze a problem. The method is similar to that used by DSA with its involvement in the Jacobin reading groups. At the same time, Anticapitalistas finds that in dealing with the struggle in Podemos against Pablo Iglesias’ populist politics, it actually needs not only more cadres but a stronger organization.

    There are, of course, still Stalinist, Maoist, and orthodox Trotskyist groups on the far left in the countries I visited, and some have a real social base in some movement or labor union organizaton. The United Socialist Workers Party (PSTU) of Brazil, followers of the Argentine Trotskyist Nahuel Moreno, for example, has a significant labor union base in industry. (The PSTU is not associated with the Fourth International.) So one cannot say that the more democratic groups that reject a substitutionist vanguardism necessarily have become dominant, though in some countries they are.

    What conclusions do I draw from my admittedly short, shallow, and in many ways superficial experiences?. First, it seems to me clear that the Socialist Parties (or Social Democratic Parties) of Europe have clearly created governments that administer capitalist states, have neoliberal politics, and impose economic austerity and at times authoritarian measures. The Socialist Parties in these countries are no longer on the left in any meaningful sense. Second, in several instances activists are working to build new radical socialist parties out of upheavals such as the indignados and Nuit debout. Third, that many of the Fourth International parties and some others parties have made a fundamental break with the old method of functioning in the twentieth century and are at work to create new parties that are revolutionary socialist and internationalist, but also democratic groups committed to building independent labor and social movements. Finally, I think that those of us on the left in groups such as Solidarity and DSA or involved in the journal New Politics should recognize ourselves and our methods as part of this new left tendency and work to build networks of international solidarity with such groups. (Solidarity is a permanent observer at Fourth International meetings and has ben for several years.)

    *Dan La Botz is a member of Solidarity and of the Democratic Socialists of America and a co-editor of New Politics.

  • Rio de Janeiro: Teachers on Strike, Students Occupy 76 Schools

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    Teachers in the city of Rio de Janeiro, and in the state of the same name, have been on strike for more than two months now. More than a month ago students at one high school occupied their school in support. The student occupation spread to other schools and are there are now 76 schools occupied throughout the state of Rio de Janeiro and as many as twenty in other states to which the movement has spread. Students have been joined by parents and teachers and by volunteers from left political parties and individuals.

    The school occupations have been spontaneous and completely self-organized, creating a loose network of organized schools. The Rio de Janeiro State Teachers Union has attempted—not entirely successfully—to create a structure to bring unity and organization to the movement. At the Amaro Calvalcani State School, a school that has received awards for excellence from the Rio de Janeiro State Secretary of Education, the fences and walls were covered with posters about the occupation and the gates were padlocked shut—the keys in the hands of the students.

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    I talked with biology teacher Lenir Jane Rodrigues and Portuguese language teacher Edna Bandeira Prestes about the reasons for the strike and the occupation. The teachers explained that they were resisting privatization, demanding an end to cuts in the school budget, better maintenance of the buildings, an increase in wages, and improvement in the students' breakfasts and lunches.

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    Students Laura Maria Araujo Bernardo and Gabriel Richard explained to me that yesterday, Mothers’ Day, many parents had joined the students at the school, celebrating both the mothers and the strike and occupation. At the moment, the school is dedicated to various cultural events. Today teachers were instructing students in a traditional dance based on women’s work washing clothes.

    While the regular school is not in session, various left organizations such as the Party of Socialism and Freedom (PSOL), the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), and the United Socialist Workers Party (PSTU) visit the school offering classes on various subjects: on the history of the military dictatorship in Brazil form 1964 to 1985, as well as chemistry and the Spanish language.

    A Difficult Situation

    The teachers went on strike on March 2. Now in its second month, the strike and the accompanying student occupations have faced a series of difficulties. First, while the teachers have their demands, each of the occupied schools also has its own, so there is no common set of demands.

    Second, at some schools, students have faced repression from the Military Police who have beaten occupiers. In the worst case, an exception to be sure, in one neighborhood a fight between drug dealers and police that left one police officer dead—but then the police returned to kill 11 people, supposedly drug dealers, but who according to neighbors some had nothing to do with criminal activities. Some of those killed were family members of teachers and students involved in a local school occupation.

    Third, in some schools, groups of seniors, who hope to graduate soon, have invaded the schools to break the strike and occupation, which they see as frustrating their plans for college or work.

    All of this, of course, is taking place in the context of a deeply divided government, where the conservatives have been attempting to impeach President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers Party (PT). 

  • True Confession: I’ve Lost that Bernie Feeling

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    I’m not feeling the Bern anymore. The Bern has gone away. The Bern has turned to heartburn, if not yet reflux.

    And it’s not because our favorite son is so woefully behind in the delegate count leading up to this summer’s Democratic National Convention.  It’s not because of his campaign themes; anyone who says on the electoral stump that the US has a “rigged economy” and points to the Walton family’s fortune comprising more than the combined wealth of the nation’s poorest 40 percent is a truth-teller worth backing. And it’s not because of what some left fantasists write, who, in their latest popgun-burst contribution to the internecine war of the sects, opine how

    Bernie Sanders is shifting into the next phase of his mission on behalf of the American ruling elite, seeking to corral the millions of youth and workers who responded to his campaign and direct them behind the war criminal and Wall Street stooge Hillary Clinton. In parallel, the various pseudo-left organizations that have promoted Sanders are seeking to adjust their tactics to better perform their assigned task of blocking the development of a genuinely socialist movement of the working class.

    Even such measured, saner Sanders critics as the International Socialist Organization don’t explain it. Writing in Socialist Worker (May 2) Paul D’Amato acknowledges that Sanders is indeed

    …giving voice to discontent and creating unprecedented interest in radical, socialist ideas—though these ideas were already percolating before the election cycle began, as various opinion polls during and after Occupy show. But Sanders is also corralling that discontent, and he will, to the best of his ability, try to convince his supporters to help him “revitalize” the Democratic Party…Our task as revolutionaries is to see both sides of this contradictory process and act accordingly. We are excited by the Sanders phenomenon regarding the door it has opened regarding socialism. Which is all the more reason why we must also take on the other side of the contradiction—where this enthusiasm is being channeled.

    Channeling the enthusiasm! But away from what? A left party-building of the mind? The laying down of prodigious tools for recruiting to one’s own de minimis mass party? My response to D’Amato’s concern that supporting Sanders risks radical ruin is this: relax. Let Sanders try to redirect this generation of enrages. He can’t. At the risk of stretching the point, I’m reminded of the Petrograd police spy Father Gapon, who is barely remembered as a Tsarist double agent but as the irreplaceable activist whose work sparked the 1905 Russian Revolution. So if revolutionary history and Comrade Lenin can give the shadowy Russian Orthodox cleric a pass, we can forgive Bernie for the Hillary shilling he will likely be doing soon enough.

    Bernie helped ignite a generation, just as did Occupy, tapping into a rebellious, justified and long gestating radical Geist. You could even argue that our debt to Sanders is greater than to Occupy; at least he put forward a challenge to the State, something the anarchists who monopolized Occupy media outreach squelched for fear of validating government by acknowledging government’s legitimacy to even meet radical demands.  And Bernie’s remarks, which I heard attending mass meetings in Northampton, Massachusetts and Richmond, California  before he announced his presidential candidacy, were masterful in drawing the connections between social problems, corporate causes and the need to build popular movements and electoral networks that outlast any campaign.

    He’s also running for the nomination against Hillary Clinton, whose negatives are so high that even Indiana Democrats rejected her. Sanders can say what Fiorello LaGuardia is often credited with coining, that “I can run on a laundry ticket and beat these political bums any time.” Certainly this political bum, and in states with open primaries and holding simultaneous contests in both parties, as in Indiana.

    So with Sanders doing more to promote socialism and solidarity than any American figure since Eugene Debs, what’s my beef with Bernie? It comes after Sanders couldn’t deliver the substantive coup de grace to Clinton at any of the debates watched by millions of voters. Battle fatigue on his part? More like poor generalship, if we are honest, as Bernie stoked a fire under millions of Americans but couldn’t muster campaign 2.0 beyond a fund-raising bonanza (no small thing) and promises of a confection of free stuff courtesy of the state, yet with too little attention to Hillary’s and Bill Clinton’s role as abettors of the very corporate oligarchy he so despises and has otherwise sketched so well.  It’s that he muffed the ample nationally televised debate opportunities he had to demolish HRC as someone who could deliver nothing but misery, when his programs properly advocated and elaborated were not only desirable but defensible and necessary. 

    On the stump, campaigning against class-based injustices, Sanders was nonpareil. Not in the debates, though. In boxing lingo, facing what by elementary logic and evidence was his social and political enemy, he never laid a glove on his party primary opponent. Poor debating style? Poor staff preparation? Fear of overstepping? Of charges of sexism? Concern with aiding and abetting the GOP come November? Whatever: Sanders stumbled in front of millions of viewers nationwide against a deeply reactionary and properly maligned neoliberal. We lost, too.

    He also mistakenly shifted his discourse (at least in widely reported appearances leading up to the May 3 Indiana primary), thinking that key to his success was not so much ratcheting up and filling in his anti-corporate language but tactically “flipping” the formally unpledged super delegates away from HRC.  It wasn’t missed by the media that the chief public trasher du jour of the political oligarchy was pinning his hopes on playing footsie with the elite’s enablers.

    When could his opposition research have been be better brought into play? Doug Henwood’s explosive My Turn (O/R Books, 2015), the definitive exposé of the Clintons, alone offered enough information to demolish Clinton’s claims as a liberal pragmatist. Henwood showed her as neither liberal nor pragmatic, at least in the sense of delivering for working people and not the Clinton Foundation, which she did with brio as secretary of state. Was there no staffer available to write an executive summary for the candidate?

    Why couldn’t Sanders speak meaningfully about race at a time when police murders and vigilante violence are rife? Why was his initial take on Black Lives Matter (something he was quick to correct) so indecisive? Why so phlegmatic in his criticisms of the far-right, homicidal Israeli coalition government, esp. after Clinton’s hair-shirt prostration in front of AIPAC?  Compared to the three wise monkeys approach to Israeli policy every other major Democrat takes, Sanders—to his immense credit—also discussed the rights of the Palestinians and the “disproportionate” response by Israel in Gaza. As one New Politics editor rightly wrote me, “it was courageous in the context of a Democratic Party debate and it was a welcome opening up of discussion. I recognize the bar on this is pretty low, but I think Bernie took an important step.”

    True that! And his refusal to appear before AIPAC was smart, esp. after they spurned his offer to teleconference in.

    But why not take it further still? Why not use the debates to articulate a democratic and non-imperialist foreign policy as central to his solid critique of the U.S. oligarchy, rather than pose militarism as an unneeded excess to be reined in? Or now offering more than taking “the fight” to the convention’s platform and rules committees, at best a consolation prize if not just a self-gratifying exercise some Bernie supporters on the Left actually advocate.  The Nation’s John Nichols (May 3) cites Working Families Party grandee Dan Cantor approvingly that  “the [Democratic] party has to take a big-vision stand.” It does, but the big vision—if the next big thing is looking toward a convention pie-fight over a platform few read and candidates shun, or rules that don’t take effect for years, or nibbling away at super delegates—will likely be a squint. Unless his delegates win every reform needed—and they can’t —opting for success in a Clinton-dominated convention is nothing to celebrate; it’s like agreeing to and heralding a harsh plea bargain.

    Bernie suffered from another flaw, committing the sin that’s more deadly than being wrong, at least in politics. With each debate he got more boring. His mantra of free public university education, Medicare for All and campaign funding overhaul—all necessary policy and just the beginning of wisdom—seemed with repetition to channel Michael Dukakis’s 1988 paean to “Good Jobs at Good Wages.” These may be great slogans to start a campaign. By election time they are stale. Not just unbelievable when so barely elaborated by Dukakis, but boring. Even the Republican Party’s 1928 slogan promoting a vote for Herbert Hoover as ensuring “A Chicken in Every Pot, A Car in Every Garage,” had a certain pre-Depression cachet. Consistency aside—and Samuel Johnson’s warning about “a foolish consistency” still holds—Sanders’ call for “free stuff” absent pointing to why health care and schooling and jobs are so severally rationed (and by whom) has a short shelf life.

    True, those of us supporting Bernie were not hobbled by the campaign from independently raising vital issues, from cop killings, the salience of Black Lives Matter, and justice for Palestinians, to a full elaboration of Medicare for All, as understood by Physicians for a National Health Program and others. We were free to make a bold critique of union leaders who, with some notable exceptions such as the Communications Workers’ Chris Shelton and Larry Cohen, took the business-unionist route and backed Clinton redux. But even as Sanders was bushwhacked in New York by the state’s peculiarly restrictive voting laws, all he could muster was his being “really concerned about the conduct of the voting process [in the state] and I hope that process will change in the future.” Forget rage. Where was the anger at palpable voting fraud?

    Forget, too, about the demon of closed primaries—if we had a mass socialist party in the U.S. we’d want closed primaries—the fact that the city Board of Elections purged hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls (more than 125,00 in Kings County [Brooklyn] alone) calls for more than concern. (A re-canvass was started for Brooklyn and Manhattan on April 27. Results are pending.)

    Even the things Bernie was clear about weren’t in his debate remarks. HRC’s whole attack on him, echoed by the punditry, was that Bernie’s economic plans “didn’t add up,” or read as Pollyannaish. Robert Reich had to take to his own blog (March 2, 2016) to justify the veracity and cogency of Sanders’ economic plans.  Including how support for a single-payer health system was a twofer that not only would provide health care for all but also serve as a federal expenditure to “permanently improve economic performance. How could it not,” Reich said, “when healthcare expenditures constitute almost 18 percent of the U.S. economy.”  

    Why didn’t Bernie use that? Or ask pointedly where Hillary stood on Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats’ efforts to retard moves to lower pharmaceutical costs. (HuffPost, 4/27/16.)

    Could we, the left, have done more? Were we so fascinated by the seemingly spontaneous aligning of millions with Bernie to forget that even a citizens’ army needs good generals? Bernie was nothing but clear in saying that “I can’t do this by myself” and that the movement had to be bottom-up. Was it?

    Jason Schulman, my fellow NP editorial board member, in an otherwise smart piece on the tactical wisdom of Sanders running as a Democrat in what sociologist Oliver C. Cox appropriately called one of “two factions of the same party,” was that it gave we reds an opportunity to offer constructive and critical support to the first overtly socialist campaign to reach any number of voters since Gene Debs’ race in 1912. Looking back, we all acted like roustabouts helping erect a giant carnival tent.  The “critical” in critical support was stillborn.

    Again, this isn’t to demean or minimize what Sanders did accomplish or the hard scut work activists including Labor for Bernie, DSA, and so many others put into the campaign. But the debates were watched intently by people planning to and mostly eligible to vote. Consider Hillary as a pustule ready to pop. Maybe Bernie had an endgame fear of destroying the likely winner and giving the race to the ur-human GOP, or feared ripping up the road between Sanders and the party apparatchiks should he actually win the convention and need at least their acquiescence.  Or just poor debate preparation on his part despite HRC’s vulnerability on palpable issues. With the exception of Hillary’s refusal to release her likely fawning Goldman Sachs private remarks (a stupid error on her part) Bernie could have peeled her faux liberal credentials like skin off a ripe banana. Instead he set himself up for the canard of New York Times op-ed contributor Timothy Egan (April 22), who called with some faint justification Sanders’ rhetoric as

    “shouted shibboleths,” naming Sanders ‘a sloganeer with authenticity. But a rant, no matter how dead-on,’ Egan continued, ‘is not a governing blueprint. His answer, on a number of occasions, to complex issues has been ‘I haven’t thought about it a whole lot.  In many areas, he’s almost substance-free.’”

    To his credit, Egan submits that Clinton has no big ideas at all, calling her “the shrug candidate.”

    Okay, the New York Daily News editorial Egan cites as proof of Sanders’ lack of grounding was a caricature of what Bernie actually told its board of editors (the transcript is available HERE) and Bernie is hardly substance-free. Campaigns writ large don’t call for blueprints so much as road signs pointing out general directions, but he certainly came out as thin in the debates, where his direction posts might as well have been jocular Burma Shave roadside poesy. Was his performance really much better and more pointed facing down Hillary than this:

    Statistics prove

    Near and far

    Wall Street honchos

    Gambling madly

    –Are!

    Bernie Shave.

     

    Sadly, no, his wasn’t. At least that bit of whimsy wouldn’t be boring.

    Michael Hirsch is a longtime board member of New Politics, a Portside moderator and a supporter (still and despite the above) of Labor for Bernie.

  • Travel Notes – Impressions of the Left in Rio de Janeiro

    ImageI was invited to speak here in Rio de Janeiro by the Socialism and Freedom Party (Partido Socialismo e Liberdade, PSOL) and spoke last night to an enthusiastic and very well informed crowd of about 200 students at the university (UFRJ). I also sat down to talk with PSOL leaders and activists here about the local political situation and the social movements. So here are my impression, though they are just impressions of the political situation, of the teachers' strike, and of the school occupations.

    Brazil is in the midst of an enormous political crisis, the result of corruption involving all of the political parties, as well as an expression of the severe economic downturn. The right wing—including all of the conservative parties and politicians, the media, and mass demonstrations of over one million people—are demanding the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers Party (PT). The man leading the fight for impeachment is Eduardo Cunha, a rightwinger who is himself implicated in the corruption investigations.

    While there is not yet a call for new elections, which would require a constitutional amendment and a new law, such elections could be on the horizon. Dilma could not run again herself, but her mentor and PT founder and longtime leader Ignácio “Lula” da Silva could stand for president—if he is not indicted first.

    The country’s leftists hesitate to defend Dilma or the PT that has been involved both in the corruption and in the implementation of policies of austerity. The far left takes a position against impeachment and opposing austerity, but not defending Dilma or the PT. Yet there are tremendous pressures for the far left, such as the PSOL, to enter into an alliance with the PT, to defend the PT from the right-wing attack.

    Teachers Strike and School Occupations

    At the same time, there is a major struggle take place over education. Teachers and other public employees in Rio de Janeiro have been on strike over wages and the education budget. Alongside the teacher strike, but organizationally independent, is the month-long occupation of 70 public primary and secondary schools by students and their supporters. As one person told me, this is “an entirely spontaneous and self-organized movement.” The occupiers are supporting the teachers strike, but they are also protesting the problems of the schools’ physical plant and the lack of teachers and educational resources. The occupiers have formed a network of public school activists throughut the state of Rio de Janeiro. I'll be back in Rio in a week and hope to interview some teachers and students then.

    Well, I go on tonight to Vitoria, the capital of the state of Espiritu Santo. I’ll see what’s happening there and send along my impressions.

  • A May Day Message to Teachers – On the Front Lines of a War on Public Education

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    (These are my remarks at an evening panel of what its organizers referred to as a "non-conference" so as to convey the need for participants to interact with one another's ideas, rather than present papers. Sessions spanned two full days. The two evening sessions were videotaped. When they are made available I will post them on New Politics.)

          First, thanks to NYU professors Gary Anderson and Carol Anne Spreen for their thoughtful, critical work in assembling the people at this “non-conference” on privatization of education globally. They have contributed to our understanding by creating space for us to learn from and with one another and by including discussion of teacher unionism, so often ignored by educational researchers.

              Thanks also to NYU/Steinhardt for sponsoring the event. The university and college involvement shows that despite what has been lost in the push for universities to corporatize, scholars can still leverage resources and privileges of our positions to advance social justice in education.

              A commendation goes to Education International (EI), the international confederation of teachers unions, for its co-sponsorship, and to Randi Weingarten, President of the AFT (American Federation of Teachers) and Lily Eskelsen Garcia, President of the NEA (National Education Association) for being respondents in the panel. Their involvement invests what we do here with a special significance because of unions’ situation in the society, unions’ access to power that emerges from their being mass membership organizations that represent and can call on the resources of millions of teachers and education workers, internationally.  The power and the potential unions have to be the backbone of mass mobilizations against privatizations explain the viciousness of the attacks on teachers unions in the corporate media and political forces pushing to “marketize” schools and de-professionalize teaching.

              My current research is with and about teacher activists who are building social movement unions, primarily by creating reform caucuses within the existing union structure. The caucuses are the embryos of a new kind of teacher unionism committed to social justice; mobilization of union members with community allies as respectful partners; and thorough-going union democracy, beginning at the school level. Collaborations between social justice activists, academics, and teachers unions are extraordinarily important today. When we say teachers are on the “front lines” we imply they are at war.  In my remarks I will try to clarify what the forces are in this war and what is at stake, posing three challenges for us.  

              While privatization is an aspect of the neoliberal project in education as many speakers have noted, in fact education is being transformed by policies that cannot be separated from a more fundamental drive: to make all human activity, including intellectual and artistic work, subject to what is called the discipline of the market, but is, in fact, the control of powerful elites who manage capitalism and are using the state to extract profit from what is viewed as an  untapped source. Educational researchers in the UK have recently noted that the notion of “dispossession” better captures what occurs in the policies associated with “austerity.” “Dispossession” gets at the transfer of wealth and power that is at the heart of capitalism’s shift in operations in this stage we call neoliberalism.

              My first challenge to teachers unions is to name privatization of education as a function of capitalism’s ethos of putting profit over people and to use union resources to oppose this distorted value system. We limit the explanatory power of our campaigns against privatization if we do not say explicitly that public resources belong to the public and must be allowed to remain so. There is no room for profit in the public sector. We need to stand unequivocally against educational policies that give business access to services provided in public education, whether it is teacher evaluation, professional development, or school management. Moreover, the public sector has to be overseen through democratic means. Operationally this means protecting or creating elected local school authorities. It means insisting that capitalist elites and the politicians in their thrall do not have the right to dictate terms of educational policy to communities or nations as an ostensible quid pro quo for loans and financial assistance.

              The systemic dispossession of the global south and poor communities of color within the global north is a transfer of resources from vulnerable, impoverished people to corporations and the wealthy few. Like the original colonial project, the current economic dispossession destroys cultures and is racist.

              My second challenge is to understand the different roles of academics, social justice activists, and unions in encouraging understanding – and resistance to – this global project of capitalism. The challenge for teachers unions is especially complex and difficult as they must represent all members fairly and well. Unlike advocacy groups organized on the basis of shared principles, unions are mass membership organizations. If they are the exclusive bargaining agent they include members with highly divergent, contradictory political beliefs and values. Mass membership makes building consensus more difficult, but union democracy, starting at the school site, supports the process. We should expect that key policy decisions, like whom the union endorses for President of the United States in party primaries, are  taken to members, providing an opportunity for political education and reinforcing members’ understanding that they – not officers or staff – “own” the union.

              Not everyone on the front lines of this attack on public education, teachers, and their unions sees this war as we have configured it in our discussions. Social class, race, gender, religion all influence how teachers view this war.  As we see in the excellent website Mary Compton hosts, www.teachersolidarity.com, the assault is global as is the resistance. Teachers who must strike to be paid wages owed them for months; teachers who are assaulted, kidnapped and jailed for exercising the rights as citizens and workers often see how privatization relates to the degradation of their work and their society’s resources. In the global north teachers are experiencing assault but in less violent ways. While the assault is global, it is not experienced in the same ways.

              Feeling disempowered and alienated from vehicles for resistance, some teachers identify students and parents as their adversaries. This occurs especially in schools that are under-resourced and repressive, where students and parents lack formal education and are members of communities that have been historically oppressed. Teachers are human and are not immune to toxic social prejudices and bigotry. As we see all over the world, those who are economically oppressed often turn against those who are equally or more oppressed. Rage obscures the more distant political and economic forces that create and maintain economic dislocation.

              Unions must respond to members’ wishes but often in so doing they ignore the powerful educative potential of vibrant union democracy and mobilization. Hence unions at all levels, local, national and international adopt policies that assume the irreversibility of members’ current beliefs. In so doing they paint themselves into a corner of adopting what seem “pragmatic” policies: accepting pay for performance; standardized testing; buying into the validity of PISA testing regime; collaborating with the OECD and the World Bank; accepting donations from our foes for purposes that seem to favor our interests. In reality these seemingly “practical” policies undercut possibilities of successful resistance by alienating our potential allies and demoralizing the most politically conscious union members.

              What is a truly “practical” union approach to deal with extraordinarily powerful opponents who aim to destroy all that we stand for and must protect? A seasoned leader of the NUT (National Union of Teachers) explained to me how he understands what unions must do to defend teachers and public education:

    Seeking to engage with governments and employers but ON TERMS YOU DEFINE with a movement you have built behind you that requires them to engage is the only way in a functioning civil society that unions can bring about change. We try in our own small way in the NUT with campaigning platforms like Stand Up For Education and Exam Factories to create the context for encouraging members to act and parents to support us. Their expectation is that this will eventually lead to talks that give us what we want. The fact that we get talks sometimes and are offered little or nothing is to be expected.

    He warns that the success of this strategy is not guaranteed:

    It is a measure of the quality of leadership and the upward pressure from membership whether we get drawn into legitimising things we are opposed to, or whether we "expose" the duplicity of those we deal with in how we report what is taking place, and try to use this to press on with the campaign.

    The dialectic he describes is between union democracy (upward pressure of members) and leadership – its courage and vision.  I would broaden the scope of struggle, adding to this dynamic an understanding that communities and parents must be supported in their own campaigns about social justice that do not directly involve schools.  Support and respect must be mutual if we expect public support for teachers on the front lines.

                My third challenge is to invite frank dialogue between critical researchers, activists, and union officers about resistance to neoliberalism’s global project. This discussion is difficult to organize and sustain, in part due to scarce resources but also due to the insularity of our institutions. Another impediment is the understandable defensiveness of unions, attacked viciously by so many opponents. Still, hearing the critiques of friends, whether activists or academics, who show their support in struggles, is essential for us all. The critique must be accompanied by support. The support must be accompanied by critique.

              We face enormously dangerous, powerful opponents in this war. They aim to destroy public education and with it democracy. They want to control what children learn and how they are taught, so as to produce workers and citizens who will fit into a world order that refracts human need through the lens of profitability.  Teachers on the front lines need transformed unions. They also need support of academics and social justice activists, to develop a critical understanding of this war, of their real enemies and allies, of successful tactics, and an inclusive vision of education that maximizes human potential, not profits. 

     

    Lois Weiner is professor of education at New Jersey City University and Director of the Urban Education and Teacher Unionism Policy Project.

  • Challenges Facing the Left in Spain

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    Podemos, meaning “We Can,” is one of the most exciting developments taking place on the left in Europe today. For years politics in Spain had been dominated by two parties: the conservative the People’s Party (Partido Popular or PP), headed by Mariano Rajoy, and the Socialist Workers Party of Spain (PSOE), led by Pedro Sánchez. But, in the last election held in December of 2015, the new left party Podemos won five million votes, fundamentally votes by the lower classes against the economic elites and their austerity plans. That represents 20% of the electorate, and 69 out of 350 seats in the house of deputies.[1]

    Podemos has its roots in the Spanish Occupy 15-M movement, also known as the indignados (indignant ones) or movimiento de las plazas (the movement of the plazas) that began on May 15, 2011. Eventually over six million Spaniards participated in the 15-M protests that from occupation of the public squares developed over two years into tides of mobilization against unemployment and government privatization of public services such as the national health system and public education. This movement reflected the lack of confidence of large parts of Spanish society, specially educated youth, in the old parties’ system, including the traditional social liberal PSOE that enacted and supported  the austerity policies, but also lack of confidence in the social democratic Izquierda Unida (United Left, IU).[2] That long wave of mobilization eroded the legitimation of the bipartismo or two-party domination of the political system that had been set up in the transition from the Franco dictatorship to democracy that took place in 1978.

    The success of Podemos in the 2014 elections for the European Parliament led others with more conservative views to set up a new neo-liberal party, Ciudadanos (Citizens) that got support from people disenchanted with the inefficacy and corruption of the PP. The success of Podemos on the left and Ciudadanos on the right meant that neither the PP nor the PSOE won over 50 percent of the vote. Consequently, neither PP nor PSOE could rule alone, and, since they could not agree to join together, one or the other would be forced to form a coalition in order to rule.

    The PP attempted to form a coalition with the new right party, Ciudadanos, while the PSOE was hostage to its loyalty to neoliberal politics and it also preferred a coalition with Ciudadanos—or even a suicidal broad coalition with the PP—rather than a progressive coalition with Podemos. Therefore, after 128 days, no government had been formed. So on April 26, PSOE went to King Felipe VI to tell him that a government could not be formed and that there would have to be new elections in June.

    Podemos, the party expressing the demands of the 15-M movement, was created by two groups. The first was a group of political scientists and consultants in Spanish universities, while the second was a radical left organization called Izquierda Anticapitalista (Left Anti-capitalists) that evolved out of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist League (LCR). Podemos adopted many practices of 15-M political culture, such as a wide network of open and democratic assemblies that allowed it to expand fast, currently reaching 300,000 members and, as mentioned, won over 5 million votes in the last election. Of those 300,000 members, about 20,000 can be characterized as activists.

    The composition of Podemos comprises three main groups: The two original founding groups, the group led by Pablo Iglesias and Íñigo Errejón, Anticapitalistas group, and a third group of people whose main political experience was in the 15-M movement. Pablo Iglesias, a former member of the Communist Youth of Spain, leads the young academics that have the support of the majority of the organization. Iglesias is a charismatic figure and he and his inner circle tend to make decisions and then hand them down to the members, largely through social media. Their tendency is to create a populist organization based on the charisma of the leader and plebiscitarian participation, that is, the leaders hand down decisions that the members vote to endorse. Most recently there has been a break within this tendency between Iglesias and Íñigo Errejón, the party’s second most important leader.

    The second founding component is Anticapitalistas, an organization of about 700 members that works through the discussion and organizing circles that form the base of Podemos in an attempt to make the organization more democratic. Though small in numbers, Anticapitalistas activists exert an inordinate influence because of their role in the circles and because their anti-capitalist politics tend to both better explain the current situation and provide better answers.

    Anticapitalistas is a revolutionary current that evolved from a classical working-class based Marxist organization with a deep involvement in social movements such as the feminist movement and the movement that rejects Spain’s joining NATO. During the current financial crisis Podemos has been built and gained influence through its members’ involvement in social movements such as the 15-M, Juventud sin Futuro (Youth with no Future), the Plataforma de Afectados por las Hipotecas (PAH, Platform of those Affected by Foreclosures ), and most recently the Mare Mortuum (Sea of Death) movement protesting European policy toward Syrian and other immigrants. Anticapitalistas does have a relationship to the labor movement, supporting the wave of autonomous struggles and  strikes often outside the framework of the major unions (like Coca-Cola and the subcontracts of the cellphone operator Telefónica).

    Anticapitalistas is not an old left organization with a single doctrine and a disciplined membership. It does, however, attempt to be a radical, democratic organization. All of the party’s major decisions are made in public at mass meetings. The party exerts no discipline over its members in the social movements whom it trusts to make responsible decisions.

    The third component is a large and diverse group of people which with no previous political experience participated in the 15-M movement. There they drew the conclusion of the need of a political tool beyond the assemblies in order to cope with the systems’ institutions and change the balance of power in society. This group thus conveys 15-M's political culture of democratic open assemblies.  In the internal debates and decision processes of Podemos, this group does not participate as an organized collective, used to maintain pragmatic positions and to shift alliances with the other two groups.

    For the upcoming elections, Podemos has been negotiating a coalition with IU. There is widespread support for this coalition because the million voters of IU may help the left overtake the PSOE as the second political ticket in the parliament, and if that happens it will represent a dramatic change in the political situation. The support for this coalition also stems of the success of Peoples’ Unity platforms in the May 2015 local elections. These platforms, formed by Podemos, IU, and the municipal assembly slates of 15-M in various cities, allowed the left to win the majority of the big Spanish cities in these elections. Most important, in Catalunya (a region within the Spanish state with its own strong sense of national identity), the coalition Barcelona en Comú succeeded in electing the organizer of the PAH Ada Colau to mayor of Barcelona (the second biggest city in the state).

    The agreement between Podemos and IU may also end in a merger, especially since several former currents of IU have already joined Podemos, taking positions of power within the party structure and electoral lists. The possibility of this merger represents both a new opportunity and a challenge for Anticapitalistas.

    Today Podemos is debating four central questions: 1) What is the relationship between Greece and the Syriza party on the one hand and Podemos and Spain on the other? 2) What is the relationship between reforming the existing system and moving toward the creation of a socialist society? 3) What kind of internal organization should Podemos have? 4) And what is Anticapitalistas doing in Podemos; that is, what role should it play?

    Anticapitalistas has an important role to play these debates because it sees the central issue as being the capitalist system itself and therefore has a different program. As Manolo Gari told the solidaritéS Suisse’s Spring University, “We are for the nationalization of the electrical industry. We are for refusing to pay the debt. We are for auditing the debt.”

    The coming elections present Podemos with the opportunity to become the leading party of the left and challenges Anticapitalistas to find a way to build a stronger radical current within Podemos. We will be watching these developments with interest.

    *Dan La Botz is a Co-Editor of New Politics and a member of both Solidarity and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Hector Grad is a member of Podemos and Anticapitalistas.

    [1] The following article is based in part on the talks of Andreu Coll and Manolo Gari, both of whom are members of both Podemos and of Anticapitalistas, on April 25 at the Spring University of solidaritéS Suisse (Swiss Solidarity) held near Lausanne,  supplemented by conversations with other members of Anticapitalistas..

    [2] IU was founded in 1986—after the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) did poorly in the 1982 election—as a coalition of the PCE and other smaller left groups. The IU’s politics were a continuation of the Eurocommunism of the PCE; that is, the attempt to turn the former Stalinist Communist Parties into social democratic parties.

     

  • C.L.R. James and the Race Question

    On March 25, 2016, New Politics sponsored a forum centered on its release of a never-before-published lecture by Afro-Trinidadian socialist C.L.R. James on Oliver Cox’s Caste, Class and Race.

    Speaking at the forum were:

    Paul Ortiz, oral historian and CLR James expert whose University of Florida research team restored the lecture.

    and

    Scott McLemee, a C.L.R. James expert and a member of the New politics editorial board.

    The panel was moderated by Nancy Holmstrom.

  • Statement of Purpose for the Alliance of Syrian and Iranian Socialists

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    Five years after the beginning of the popular Syrian Revolution which demanded democracy and human rights, the Syrian revolutionaries have been decimated through the combined military force of the Assad Regime, the Iranian regime with its sectarian militias, Russian air strikes and military assistance on the one hand, and the ultra-terrorist ISIS and other Salafist – Jihadist organizations on the other hand.   Nevertheless a partial reduction of airstrikes by Russia and the Assad regime in early March led to an immediate revival of mass protests of the democratic opposition across the country with banners such as the following in Idlib:  “Our peaceful revolution is still in progress until toppling Assad and imposing justice all over Syria.”

    Almost half a million people, mostly Sunni Arab Syrians, have been killed mainly by the Assad regime. The population faces a situation that is worsening daily. Russian air raids, Hizbullah and Iranian supported ground forces as well as the December 18, 2015 United Nations Security Council Resolution backed by the U.S., Russia, China, France and Britain have all given new life to the Assad Regime.

    At the same time, the Saudi monarchy and the Iranian regime are intensifying their competition for control over the region by fanning the flames of religious sectarianism.   The Turkish government has in turn intensified its attacks on and repression of the Kurds in Turkey and northern Syria and also plays a role in promoting religious sectarianism in the region.   President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has praised Hitler’s “presidential system” as a model of “efficiency.”

    The Syrian refugee crisis, with over 8 million refugees inside and over 4 million refugees outside Syria has become a much larger version of the Palestinian al-Nakba. The European Union is setting refugee quotas, closing its gates and implementing an agreement with Turkey based on which Turkey would take more refugees in exchange for 3 billion Euros and a possible future membership in the European Union.   This is clearly not a solution.   Neither Turkey nor any other country in the Middle East region is willing to admit over 12 million refugees and give them the possibility of a decent life.

    As Syrian and Iranian socialists, we call on you to join us in taking a stand against this inhumanity and for finding real solutions:

    First, we refuse to accept the myth that the Assad regime is the lesser of the two evils and that stabilizing it will end the war in Syria or stop the rise of ISIS and other Jihadists.   On the contrary, the Assad regime is responsible for the majority of the deaths which are now estimated at half a million.   This regime’s destruction of the democratic forces embodied in the Syrian revolution has created a fertile ground for the rise of ISIS and other Salafist-Jihadist groups.

    Secondly, given the fact that both the Assad regime and ISIS are capitalist, racist, misogynist governments, no viable alternative to them can be shaped without tackling the class/ethnic/religious divisions and gender discrimination that are present in the Middle East.

    Thirdly, while we insist on upholding a principled position of support for the Kurdish national liberation movement and its struggle for self-determination in Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran, we think it is also necessary to challenge many of those on the left who separate the struggle for self-determination of the Kurdish people in Syria from the dynamics of the Syrian revolution. It was the 2011 Syrian revolution that made it possible for the autonomous cantons in Rojava to come into existence. Without a Syrian revolution there can be no democratic Rojava. The latest evidence of the coordination and collaboration between the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), the Syrian regime and the Russian air force is alarming and does not bode well for the Kurds. The liberation and emancipation of the Kurdish people is linked to the liberation and emancipation of the people of the region.

    It is time for Syrian and Iranian socialists to work together to challenge class, gender, ethnic and religious prejudices and speak to the struggles of women, workers, oppressed nationalities such as Kurds and Palestinians, oppressed ethnic and religious minorities, and sexual minorities.     It is time for us to restate socialism as a concept of human emancipation not only opposed to the regional and global capitalist-imperialist powers but also as an affirmative vision distinguished from the totalitarian regimes that called themselves Communist in the former Stalinist Soviet Union and Maoist China.

    Toward that aim we are asking you to join us by collaborating with the forthcoming trilingual (Arabic, Persian, English) website of the Alliance of Syrian and Iranian Socialists. Our goal is to promote solidarity between Syrian and Iranian socialists on the basis of addressing some very specific questions, both through articles and through joint activities such as conferences. Questions such as the following:

    1. How can we challenge Shia and Sunni prejudices that promote hatred in the region?
    2. What will happen in Syria if Iranian and Russian support for the Assad regime end?
    3. How will Syrian and Iranian socialists answer the criticisms/concerns of Kurds and other nationalities who want self-determination?
    4. Do Syrian and Iranian socialists think that federalism can be an initial solution?
    5. What is your vision of social justice when it comes to class and gender struggles?
    6. What does socialism mean to you and how do you distinguish your concept of socialism from the totalitarian regimes that existed in the Stalinist Soviet Union and Maoist China?
    7. What appropriate joint actions of Syrian and Iranian socialists would you suggest in order to help us express our opposition to the Assad regime as well as ISIS and other jihadist organizations, and engage in solidarity with the Syrian democratic opposition?

    If you would like to participate in this effort, please contact us.

    info@allianceofmesocialists.org

    Endorsers:

    Frieda Afary, producer of Iranian Progressives in Translation Blog, U.S.A.

    Anthropos, translator, Greece

    Forough Asadpour, writer and translator, Denmark

    Joseph Daher, producer of Syria Freedom Forever Blog, member of the Revolutionary Left Movement in Syria, and Assistant Professor, Lausanne University, Switzerland.

    Razan Ghazzawi, activist and producer of Exiled Razaniyyat Blog, U.K.

    Riska Javedan, journalist, Holland

    Abbas Kakai, political activist, Germany

    Mehdi Keshavarz, political activist, U.S.A.

    Yasser Munif, activist and professor, Emerson College, U.S.A.

    Ghayath Naisse, Member of Revolutionary Left Movement in Syria, France

    Nahid Navid, psychologist, U.S.

    Praxis Collective (Praxies.org), Europe

    Nasser Rahmaninejad, actor and theatre director, U.S.A

    Aboud Shlhoub, independent activist, Holland

    Siamac Sotudeh, writer and journalist, Canada

    Yaaser ezZayyaat, blogger (yalzaiat.com)

    March 15, 2016

  • International Conference of Agrarian Reform: Marabá Declaration

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    (Marabá, April 17, 2016) We are more than 130 representatives of La Via Campesina member organizations and allies from four continents, 10 regions and 28 countries of the world. We are here in Marabá, Pará, Brazil, to analyze, reflect and continue our collective processes to develop our ideas, proposals, and alternative projects for confronting the offensive of global capital against the peoples and natural goods of the countryside, coasts and seas. More than anything, we come together to struggle for our territories, and for a different kind of society.

    We are organizations of peasants, family farmers, indigenous peoples, landless, farm workers, herders, fisherfolk, collectors, forest dwellers, rural women and youth, as well as allied organizations from across the world. We are here to remember the massacre of rural workers in El Dorado dos Carajás, Pará, which took place exactly 20 years ago and led to the creation of the International Day of Peasant Struggle, celebrated every year on April 17th. We are also here to demand that the governments of the world follow through on their commitments to agrarian reform, made 10 years ago at the FAO’s International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD) in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

    The current situation: The offensive of Capital against our territories throughout the world and the attacks on democracy

    We have listened to our brothers and sisters from our organizations in the Americas, Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East, and we can see that everywhere we are facing the same enemy and the same problems. There are ever more cases of land-, forest- and water-grabbing, attacks against democracy and popular will, political prisoners, etc. in Latin America, Asia Africa, Europe and North America. In the current historical period, we are witnessing the emergence of an alliance between financial capital, transnational corporations, imperialism, broad sectors within national states (almost without regard to their purported ideology), particularly but not only judicial and public security institutions, the private sectors in industrial agriculture, fishing and food (including agribusiness and aquaculture), mining, construction, forestry and other extractive sectors, and the mainstream media. The members of this new alliance are promoting an avalanche of privatizations, grabbing and taking over the commons and public goods, such as land, water resources, forests, seeds, cattle raising, fisheries, glaciers and entire territories. In order to achieve their goals, they are using financialization to convert everything into commodities, free trade and investment agreements, the corruption of our politicians and leaders, control of the mass media and financial system, and  mergers and acquisitions of companies.

    Lately we have noted, with increasing alarm, how this alliance—and Capital in general—no longer tolerates the implementation by democratically elected governments of public policies that show the slightest independence, no matter how weak. This alliance has become the main force behind a wave of coup d’état attempts, many of which are taking place right now. These coups range from “soft,” “technical,” “parliamentary,” and “judicial” coups, to the most “hard-core,” military and violent coups, all of which disregard the law, constitutions and popular will. This is the case in Brazil, where we find ourselves together now. We add our voices to the voices of the Brazilian people, who struggle to defend democracy against an illegitimate coup attempt, and try to push forward the political reforms needed so that democracy can get out of the dead-end it is in toda

    Why we struggle against agribusiness

    The offensive of Capital is threatening rural life and our entire society, including our health, Mother Earth, the climate, biodiversity, and our peoples and cultures. Mass migration, the destruction of the social fabric of our communities, urban sprawl, insecurity, agrochemicals, GMOs, junk food, the homogenization of diets, global warming, the destruction of mangrove forests, the acidification of the sea, the depletion of fish stocks, and the loss of anything that resembles democracy, are all symptoms of what is taking place.

    The emergence of this new alliance between financial capital, agribusiness, the State and mass media—and its capacity to dispute territories, public opinion and the State, even where the government is “progressive”—has forced us once again carry out a process of reflection and reformulation of our concepts and proposals, as well as our strategies, forms and practices of struggle.

    Here in Brazil, we have seen how financial capital has transformed the old enemy of peasants and landless workers—the unproductive large landholdings or latifúndios—into capitalized agribusinesses, mines, industrial fishing and aquaculture, and energy projects. In reality, all these so-called “productive” sectors are mostly “producing” extreme poverty and environmental devastation. In this transformation, capitalism no longer requires a “classical agrarian reform” to raise productivity in rural areas. In the past, the landless peasantry formed alliances in favour of this kind of agrarian reform, with factions inside the parts of the State that represented the interests of productive capital. But this change takes any alliance with a fraction of capital off the table, leaving future agrarian reform squarely in the domain of class struggle. It also reduces the usefulness of the old argument for agrarian reform, that so much land in the hands of people -who do not even use most of it- is an injustice in the face of so many more people with no land at all. But at the same time it creates the basis for a new call to all of society and to all working classes, both rural and urban, to question the very basis of the project of Capital for the countryside.

    Any resistance by rural peoples is demonized by the mainstream media, as organizations, their leaders and supporters face repression, criminalization, persecution, assassinations, enforced disappearances, illegitimate jailing, administrative detentions, sexual harassment and rape. Laws are being changed to criminalize peasant and working class struggles even more, as well as granting total impunity to perpetrators of crimes against peasants, workers, fisherfolk, indigenous peoples and all rights defenders.

    Facing this terrible panorama, rural peoples, and our organizations, movements, alliances and convergences, currently represent the best hope for humanity and Mother Earth. We are on the front lines of the territorial and political fight against this dark alliance. Our proposals for food sovereignty, popular agrarian reform, the building of agroecological food production territories, and peasant agriculture to cool the planet, represent real alternatives and solutions to the problems created by the capitalist system and by this barbaric alliance in particular.

    What we defend and call for: Popular Agrarian Reform

    In La Via Campesina and the Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform we have more than 20 years of history in the struggle for land and the defense of land and territory. In 2012, in Bukit Tinggi, Indonesia, we took stock of this history, how it has evolved in the context of a changing world and our own accumulation of experiences and dialogues, and identified key elements of a common strategy for agrarian reform. But in 2012 we were only beginning to see the scope of the ascendance of financial capital and its growing dominance over other kinds of capital. This changes the nature of the game, and how we approach society on the question of rural territories.

    Now we ask, which is better? Do we want a countryside without peasants, trees or biodiversity? Do we want a countryside full of monocultures and feedlots, agrochemicals and GMOs, producing exports and junk food, causing climate change and undermining the adaptive capacity of communities? Do we want pollution, illness, and massive migration to cities? Or do we want a countryside made up of the food producing territories of peasants, indigenous peoples, family farmers, artisanal fisherfolk, and other rural peoples, based on human dignity and diverse knowledges and cosmovisions, with trees, biodiversity, and the agroecological production of healthy food, which cool the planet, produce food sovereignty and take care of Mother Earth?

    In this sense, we consider the proposal of our Brazilian comrades for a Popular Agrarian Reform, an agrarian reform not only for landless peasants, but for all of the working classes and for all of society. This agroecological and territorial approach to agrarian reform can only be won through class struggle and direct confrontation of the project of Capital, including its profits, media outlets and its national and international agents. This is an agrarian reform to maximize the potential of peasant agriculture, economy and territory.

    Throughout the Americas, Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, our organizations, movements and convergences are putting forth similar proposals and territorial approaches in their dispute with the global project of Capital. These include the convergence among our diverse popular and traditional knowledges and ways of knowing the world in agroecology, artisanal fishing, traditional herding, and in our diverse strategies and ways of life. Our proposals, though similar, differ based on the nature of our different realities. In places where land is concentrated in few hands, we struggle for its redistribution. In some countries, we speak of an “agrarian revolution.” In places where our peoples still hold onto their lands and territories, we struggle to defend those territories, and prevent land and water grabbing. Meanwhile, in places where land was nationalized and is now being conceded to foreign entities by governments, we struggle for the return of ancestral land rights to our communities. The fisherfolk among us speak of the struggle for the recovery and defense of artisanal fishing territories. In Europe we have once again taken up the strategy of land occupations, and organized struggles against land use changes, making clear to all that the problems of land grabbing and concentration are also a growing problem in Northern countries. In Palestine we struggle against a brutal occupation and we call to boycott Israeli products. And everywhere, there are burning struggles by young people to access land and other resources.

    We have achieved great victories, such as the massive agrarian reform carried out after peoples’ land occupations and recuperations in Zimbabwe, the “Education for and by the Countryside” policy in Brazil, the cancellations of mining concessions and plantations in many parts of Africa and Asia, and the permanence of Cuba’s agrarian reform and its successful “peasant-to-peasant” agroecology movement. We also have partial but promising victories, such as the possibility of a large scale agrarian reform in Indonesia, for which we must mobilize in order to make our governments follow through on their promises.

    We have organized our struggles by providing political and agroecological training for both leaders and grassroots members of our organizations. We have built training centers and peasant agroecology schools in all continents, and provided educational alternatives for our children. We have learned from the indigenous peoples of our movements that “the life of people and nature are one.” We have old and new tactics, such as occupation and recovery of land and territory, solidarity, caravans—such as in East Africa and in Bangladesh—as well as alternative media outlets, art and culture. We continue to develop our popular peasant feminist, humanist, environmentalist and socialist values, youth mobilization and creativity, new rural-urban alliances, the voluntary guidelines of the FAO, the Peasant Rights Charter, and other efforts. We need to continue to adjust and innovate new tactics, especially since the enemy quickly evolves new ways of taking our territories. We need new approaches and strategies, such as the construction of autonomous spaces and self-provisioning, as well as the scaling-up of peoples’ agroecology.

    Our challenges

    – We will transform the struggle for land into the struggle for territory, along with developing a new productive model for food sovereignty, based on a more “independent” agroecology by using our own local resources and inputs and recovering our ancestral knowledges.

    – We will organize the struggle for public policies supporting peasant and small farmer production as well as health, education, culture and sports in our communities.

    – We will carry out our political and ideological training on a mass scale, fortify our work with our membership and our work with the masses, in order to improve the internal structure and operation of our organizations, and progressively integrate the leadership and participation of woman and youth.

    – We will confront the ways by which the mass media demonize our movements and promote the culture of consumption and the hollowing out of democracy. We will work hard to build our own media, which foster dialogues with our membership as well as with the working class and the entire society.

    – We will oppose more effectively the criminalization and repression of our movements as well as militarization, and organize an international struggle in support of our political prisoners. We will organize an ongoing solidarity campaign that will be based on the principle of sharing what we have rather than on sharing only what we don’t need.

    – We will continue to carry out our permanent task of building class alliances, without dependencies, between the country and the city, between food producers and consumers, and with progressive researchers, academics and support organisations that share our vision.

    – We will denounce and oppose so-called “anti-terrorist” laws and their use against our legitimate struggles.

    – We will increase our solidarity with the struggles of the Palestinian and Kurdish peoples as well as other peoples that are subjected to military aggression. We condemn military occupations and the militarisation of lands and territories.

    – We will develop an analysis of the role played by drug trafficking in the destabilization of our territories with the complicity of capital and governments, as well as a strategy to fight this problem more effectively.

    – We will take on corporate concentration in different sectors of the economy, especially agro-industrial farming, fishing and food, media and financial systems, as well as the frontal attacks against democracy. We shall create forms of struggle that generate economic losses for capital, transnational corporations, banks and other agents of capital.

    – We will build convergences and greater unity based on common objectives and our diversity (women and men, peasants, workers, fisherfolk, pastoralists, indigenous peoples, urban populations, consumers, etc.).

    – We will oppose the ascendance of conservative and right-wing religious fundamentalism, racism and cultural discrimination. We will fight the new wave of neoliberal privatization laws and treaties.

    – We will rethink the relation between our popular movements, the State, political parties and electoral processes, taking into account the specific history and context of each country, and fight the generalized undermining of international and national human rights mechanisms.

    – We will fight against US imperialism, and while we recognize the importance of multi-polarity in the world, we sound the alert about the emergence of new economic, political and military imperialisms.

    – Through our organizations, we will strive to build convergence movements around alternative popular projects developed through collective constructions; we will also work to improve the organization of production, such as cooperatives, promote small- and medium-sized agro-industries in order to add value to our products, and we will work to achieve more and improved short and medium marketing circuits, and promote cooperation.

    – We will struggle to address the issue of credit: how to obtain more credit for the peasantry and at the same time produce without credit and with less debt.

    – We will oppose the institutional tendency (for example by the World Bank, FAO, and some academia and NGOs) to try to dilute the content of concepts such as “agrarian reform” and “agroecology”, by launching “light” versions of these concepts, as in “access to land”, “corporate social responsibility” and “industrial organic” food production in monocultures, with the objective of green-washing agribusiness.

    – We will struggle to achieve international mechanisms to defend and support our visions and strategies that are not “voluntary” but rather compulsory and actionable.

    – We will stop the approval and proliferation of dangerous new technologies, such as “terminator” seeds and synthetic biology.

    – We will strengthen the participation of women and youth in our social movements. We will develop mechanisms to increase the number of youth who remain in the countryside. We will struggle against the dominant model of patriarchy in the capitalist system, and demand the full rights of peasant and indigenous women to land, water and territory.

    – We will carry out ever more unified international struggles to oppose our common enemies.

    Defending the land and honouring life

    On this 17th of April, International Day of Peasant Struggles, 20 years after the El Dorado dos Carajás massacre in the State of Pará, Brazil, we are meeting once again, inspired by the thousands of men and women who defend the right to life itself, who fight for a more just society through a permanent struggle for peoples’ rights to land and territory, for the promotion of food sovereignty and agroecological production, to end hunger and poverty.

    Globalize the struggle! Globalize hope!

    Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform of La Vía Campesina

    Delegates from 4 continents and 10 regions, united to Defend Land and Honour Life.

    Originally posted here.