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  • Paris Agreement on Climate Change: Interview with Daniel Tanuro, Ecosocialist

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    More than 130 of the leaders of the world’s nations are about to sign the Paris agreement on climate change. New Politics had the opportunity to interview Daniel Tanuro, the founder of Climate and Social Justice, a Belgian based environmental organization and author of Green Capitalism: Why it Can't Work. Tanuro’s writings on ecosocialism are well known to those in the European ecosocialist movements. New Politics co-editor Dan La Botz had an opportunity to interview Tanuro about the Paris agreement at the Swiss Solidarity Spring University.

    New Politics: Do the Paris agreements begin to solve the environmental crisis?

    Tanuro: No. The Paris agreement won’t solve the climate crisis. The nations signing the agreement have adopted the goal of a global temperature increase of 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius. But this is a phony claim. The important things in this agreement are the INDCs, that is the “intended nationally determined contributions,” or each nation’s contribution to reducing the global temperature. If one takes the INDCs and globalizes them and make projections on that basis, the likely increase in warming will between 2.7 and 3.7 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, or double what the agreement says.

    There are among the world’s leaders, some smart people, who understand the seriousness of global warming and the threat it poses to the capitalist system. For example, the former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore; Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England; and Nicholas Stern, a professor at the London School of Economic. They want to fight within the bourgeoisie over climate change. The Paris agreement is a victory for this current. Their problem will be to find a way to make up the difference between the goal of 1.5 degrees of warming and the INDCs 2.7 degrees, which is the overall objective of the agreement. If they’re serious in their strategy against climate change, they will have to find ways to make up that difference, at least partially.

    NP: How might they that do that?

    Tanuro: It’s extremely difficult because given the climate budget remaining for this century, in order to have a 66% chance of achieving the 2 degree goal, the world must emit less than 1,000 gigatons (GT) of carbon between 2011 and the end of the century. The carbon budget for 1.5 degrees is only 400 GTs. The annual emissions at present are about 40 GTs, so the remaining budget today for 2°C is about 800 GTs and for 1.5°C only about 200 GTs. 

    To stay within those budgets is totally incompatible with capitalism because it is incompatible with growth, and capitalism without growth is a contradiction in terms. There's no doubt that the carbon budget will be exceeded, so the only way to try to fill the gap, even partially, between 1.5C and 3.7°C will be the use of the so-called “negative emissions technologies.” That's why I say the agreement is not only insufficient, but it entails new threats, threats from geo-engineering on the one hand and threat of a massive appropriation of the ecosystems to capture carbons on the other.  

    NP: What do you mean by geo-engineering?

    Tanuro: The British Royal Society’s definition is this: Geoengineering is human intervention to change the climate system. The massive use of fossil fuels from the beginning of the industrial revolution until today was a kind of geo-engineering, so those who want to stop global warming will have to find something similar to reverse our current direction.

    NP: They need a technological solution then. Is there one?

    Tanuro: Yes, there are various things that can be done. The first thing would be planting trees, for example. Some research suggests that one could capture10 GTs of carbon yearly simply through the planting trees on a massive scale.

    But, there are two social problems with this. One is the appropriation of ecosystems and the other is competition with other land use, such as the production of food, of course. The appropriation of ecosystems would mean a new era of enclosures, something like Marx’s description of “primitive accumulation of capital.” For example, in Africa, where this is already happening, businesses investing in the carbon market expropriate the land from farmers and then turn those former farmers into workers to plant trees.

    We should be very critical of this approach because of its social implications. But there are also environmental issues. They aren’t planting forests. They’re engaging in monoculture, that is, planting just one specie such as eucalyptus tress. Or they may plant genetically modified fast-growing trees. I think we should oppose all GMOs, including trees, because new problems can be introduced. If one, for example, one introduces GMO trees, they might create new allergies that would affect humans

    NP: What about more high tech solutions?

    Tanuro: The major technology is called BECCS, that is, bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration. The idea is to combine the use of biomass as an energy source with the technology of geological capture and sequestration. This is very hypothetical. It has been done in Norway on a small scale and there are a few pilots in Europe financed by the European Union, but nobody knows if the gas will stay in the ground or how long it will stay in the ground.

    If there is an earthquake the gas could escape. Or perhaps the storage of gas might cause earthquakes. This has already occurred in the North Sea where Norway is experimenting and it also happened in British Columbia, where there was a 4.5 Richter scale earthquake last summer.

    BECCS is really the priority for these people and this would be one way that they might try to make up the gap between the goal and the global projection on the basis of the INDCs. According to some researchers, the technical potential of the BECCS could be greater than the 2°C carbon budget.

    There are other technologies of course. One is ocean liming. If you disperse lime in the ocean, the CO2 in the ocean will react with this lime and Calcium carbonate will precipitate to the bottom of the ocean. This would create a virtuous circle, because as the captured CO2 fell to the bottom, the water could also absorb more atmospheric CO2. This could be one of the most massive responses in order to lower the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and in the ocean (thus lowering the acidification), but nobody knows what might be the effect on the marine ecosystems—nobody knows that. Technically it would be quite tricky to organize. If you want to distribute enough lime to have an impact, you would also have to build as many new ships as currently exist on earth.

    NP: Are there other technologies?

    Tanuro: One technique is quite similar to the ocean liming, partly the same reaction between CO2 and lime, not at sea, but on the earth. After the reactions take place, the CO2 could be released to be stored in the ground. This would require an enormous economic investment in order to build the thousands of huge of devices that would be necessary.

    The problem then becomes, how does this affect economic growth. The consumption of matter – thus of energy – must be lowered in absolute terms if we are to solve the climate crisis. Certainly the developed countries should lower their consumption of matter and energy, or there is no possible solution to the climate crisis. Because the situation is worsening so quickly, it might even prove to be necessary to lower consumption of matter and energy on a world scale.

    The discussion of degrowth, therefore, is not absurd in my view. However, degrowth is not a project for a different kind of society. It is not a social alternative.

    This is a problem for these smart people that I’ve mentioned, because they know from the economist Joseph Schumpeter that you can’t have capitalism without growth. So they will want to use geo-engineering to deal with the issues.

    All of this can be seen in Nicholas Stern’s “Report” on climate change made for the English government. We need to stabilize at 450 parts per million CO2 equivalent, but that would cost 3 percent of the world’s GDP. To stabilize the climate at 550 ppm would take 1 percent of the world’s GDP. The economic costs thus lead Stern to recommend that we not do too much too fast. For him it’s all too expensive and too disruptive. But 550ppm most probably means a 3 to 4°C warming by the end of the century.

    NP: Well, what should those of us concerned about these issues do then?

    Tanuro: We need to block investments in fossil fuels. We need to throw sand in the productivist machine as happened with the XL Pipeline, and with the struggle against the new airport in Notre Dame des Landes in France, and as is happening with the struggle against the exploitation of brown coal and coal in general in Germany. The German government decided to phase out the nuclear plant but they didn’t change the nuclear power with renewable but by coal. So there’s a very important movement to block the mines. We need to throw more sand in the machine and stop these fossil fuel investments.

    At the same time, we have to put forward a program for the transition towards an ecosocialist society. Key demands are the expropriation of the energy and finance sectors – which are deeply interconnected – the development of the public sector and the reduction of hours in the workday. This is the only way to simultaneously solve the ecological crisis and the social crisis, particularly the problem of unemployment.  

     

  • Detroit Chassis in Avon averts strike by accepting temp workers in union

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    AVON, Ohio – Less than a day before temporary workers at the Detroit Chassis plant on Chester Industrial Parkway were scheduled to strike, the company agreed to their request to join a union.

    The plant is staffed by about 60 workers – all of them temps — who make between $9.50 and $11.50 an hour, according to workers helping with the organizing effort to have the UAW represent them. The workers want permanent full-time employment and better wages and benefits. Their duties include assembling axles for the F-650 and F-750 trucks being made at Ford’s Ohio Assembly Plant in nearby Avon Lake.

    “(W)orkers won a commitment from Detroit Chassis that averts a strike and sets in motion a process that will allow workers to achieve their goals—forming a union with the UAW, making them solely employees of Detroit Chassis rather than contracted temporary workers, and bargaining a fair contract that will transform these workers’ lives,” said Ken Lortz, UAW’s Region 2B director, in an email. “We will begin working with Detroit Chassis immediately to make these changes a reality.”

    Detroit Chassis is choosing not to discuss the matter.

    “It is our Company policy that we do not comment publicly on pending labor relations matters,” reads an emailed company statement.

    Workers successfully organizing to join a union isn’t that unusual. However, it is unusual for temp workers to unionize.

    “What happened here in Avon, Ohio, is the first time I remember seeing temporary workers stand up and say ‘enough is enough,’” Lortz said in the email.

    Successfully organizing is also unusual for these low-wage temps because they are in the auto parts industry, where workers have experienced declining wages for years. For example, workers at the Camaco plant in Lorain have been trying to get a union for a few years in the hope of winning higher wages. Auto parts plants now employ three-fourths of all auto workers in the country, according to the liberal National Employment Law Project.

    A 2014 NELP report, “Manufacturing Low Pay: Declining Wages in the Jobs that Built America’s Middle Class,” declining salaries among these workers. In Ohio, one-quarter of all manufacturing workers made less than $12.43 per hour, it found. As late as 2006 – the year before the start of the Great Recession — such jobs paid significantly more than the average private sector wage.

    The increase in using temporary workers has contributed to the low-wage trend, said Sarah Leberstein, a NELP senior staff attorney.

    “The plant that is benefiting from their labor is contracting with a staffing agency, even while it may call the shots about what they do, what they get paid and whether or not they get benefits,” she said.

    Leberstein said this has proven problematic because the temps are usually paid less and receive no benefits, even though they often work along side permanent employees, usually making higher salaries with benefits. She said it was unusual for an entire plant to be staffed with temporary workers such as at Detroit Chassis.

    “Workers are often on hold, months week or maybe even years waiting for full-time permanent employment,” she said.

    When Philaedonna Wade went to work at Detroit Chassis as a temporary worker about eight months ago, she said she was led to believe she would be eligible for permanent employment after 30 days. She makes $9.50 an hour, and believes no one working at the facility should make less than about $12, especially when one considers the price of the Ford trucks they help make can sell for more than $60,000.

    “I thought this was an opportunity to improve my life,” she said of what she believed was a chance to be hired full-time. “Then it looked like it was turning out to be a lie.”

    Wade said she was confused why the company was paying low wages when it emphasized quality in the production process.

    “Usually when you want quality, you are willing to pay for it,” she said.

    Dave Perrier, one of the workers helping to organize the union, said he hired on as a temp a year-and-a-half ago. He said he was among the first workers at the plant and was given no guarantees of being made permanent. Perrier said after a year on the job, he asked to take vacation.

    “I found out that there would be no vacation pay approved for anyone,” said Perrier, who makes $11. “That was rather frustrating. After a year of working some place, you weren’t going to be granted any vacation time?”

    Workers said they began speaking frequently among themselves about the low pay, no benefits and no chance at permanent employment. They decided to organize to get a union. Perrier said everyone knew they risked being fired because they had no job security. But he said the workers also knew their value. Without them, Perrier said it would take no more than a day to potentially shut down the Ford plant for lack of auto parts.

    He said these apparently vulnerable workers were able to tap into the one strength they had in order to form a union.

    “It couldn’t have happened if we couldn’t have stuck together,” Perrier said. “Everyone was on board.”

    Originally posted in Labor Notes.

  • Travel Notes – Impressions of the Left in Switzerland

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    I am in Switzerland to attend the Spring University of Swiss Solidarity, a radical socialist group most active in the French speaking region, for whose newspaper solidarities I write regularly. I’ve been talking to some of the group’s activists about the situation here, and they have given me some impressions of the situation of the left here. So these are my impressions, just impressions.

    There have been two important movements in Switzerland recently, the first in the Canton (state) of Geneva. Geneva, with a population of about 500,000 in the metropolitan area, is dominated by a conservative party that represents high finance linked to international capital and which is bent on imposing austerity on the country’s working people—but it has met resistance.

    The public employee unions in Geneva carried out an important 7-day long strike, and a demonstration of more than 10,000 people, just before Christmas last year. The unions struck, under the pressure of the rank-and-file workers, against a new budget being imposed by the canton government.

    The Geneva Canton government proposed budget cuts, arguing that if there were not cuts immediately there would soon be a deficit. If the original budget for 2016 had passed, it would over three years have reduced the overall wage (both wages and benefits) by 5 percent while also increasing the workweek from 40 to 42 hours. The proposed budget would also have reduced state funding for the para-state institutions, hospitals, universities, seniors’ assisted-living facilities, and cultural institutions museums and theaters. The proposed 2016 budget would also kept workers from receiving the small step increase in wages that are the norm.

    In the parliament the majority voted for strong laws against labor, passing a hiring freeze until the Canton of Geneva’s debt was under 7 billion francs, which would take about twenty years to achieve. The conservatives argued that the debt had to be reduced immediately, though the current debt of 12 billion francs costs almost nothing because the interest rate is close to zero. The public employees weren’t having it.

    With the workers up in arms, the Canton of Geneva government said to the unions, that it would try to pass another budget for 2016 trying to soften the 5 percent cut. The Geneva government, however, decided to simply extend the 2015 budget, though it was not adequate either. Then, surprisingly, the Geneva government somehow found almost one billion francs that had not previously been accounted for, leading the moderate Populist Party (some of whose leading members are police officers and public employees) to vote with the Socialists, the Greens, the radical Ensemble a Gauche against the Conservatives’ budget. In the end, the union could claim a small victory in the fight over the 2016 budget. Yesterday, at the initiative of Ensemble a Gauche, the majority of the Geneva Canton parliament voted a non-binding resolution to stop the cuts. Geneva is on the frontline, but the same battle against austerity is going on in every Canton in Switzerland.

    The second important development, called Collectif R in Laussane and called “No Bunkers” in Geneva, is a movement to safeguard asylum rights and for better conditions for asylees in Switzerland. It is called “No Bunkers” because some of those who had received asylum in Switzerland were being housed in bomb shelters and bunkers built during the Cold War out of fear at that time of Soviet aggression. The bunkers are hardly appropriate housing for immigrants who have received asylum. The movement’s slogans are “No Bunkers” and “No Borders.”

    While the movement has been around for years, but now new, young activists recently became involved and set up their headquarters in the Saint Laurent Church in Lausanne that has become the center and symbol of the movement. They have also occupied part of the University of Lausanne and carried their protests right into the Federal parliament.

    There are now two important political struggles taking place in the country, one dealing with the social security system and the other with taxation. Switzerland has a retirement system much like our own, with an employer-worker funded public fund and private funds like our 401Ks. The public system is inadequate and the private system is risky, so the Swiss left is pushing to bring the both funds under public regulation.

    At the same time, the right is pushing to reduce taxes on Swiss corporations, with the usual argument that reducing taxes will attract investment and make the country more competitive, and naturally the left is fighting against any such conservative change in tax laws.

    What constitutes the far left in Switzerland? In French speakig Switzerland solidaritiéS Suisse is the most important group, while in Germany the far left has several components. There are three important organized groups: The Young Socialists are affiliated to the German Swiss Socialist Party, but are to the left of it. Another group is Revolutionärer Aufbau (or simply Aufbau), an unlikely combination of Stalinist, Maoist, and autonomist groups, known for its violent tactics. Finally there is the Trotskyist group Movement toward Socialism. In addition to these three there are many small autonomist or anarchist groups.

    Well, based on conversations with a few activists, those are my impressions of the left in Switzerland, but they are just impressions.

  • Travel Notes: Impressions of the Left in Madrid

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    In Madrid to give a talk on American politics and the Bernie Sanders campaign at , I took time to meet and converse with some young organizers of Anticapitalistas and one longtime leader of the left who had to go into exile toward the end of the years of the Franco dictatorship.

    Spain, like much of the world, entered a new period with the economic crisis of 2008. In May 15, 2011, the Indignados and the movimiento de plazas grabbed the attention of the Spain and of the world. When the movement began to recede, Pablo Iglesias and his political team and Izquierda Anticapitalista joined forces to create Podemos. In May of 2014, Podemos succeeded in electing five European Parliament representatives. The two major parties each won less than 50%, creating what is described here as la crisis del partidismo, that is, the crisis of the two-party system. At about the same time, because of financial scandals, both the King and his son abdicated, as other financial scandals swirled around the Popular Party (PP) and the Socialist Workers Party of Spain (PSOE), the social democratic party.

    The question was, what kind of party would Podemos be? Pablo Iglesias, a charismatic leader, tended to turn it into a Latin American style populist party, which meant a top-down internal organization. Anticapitalistas fights for a democratic, pluralistic party, based on the círculos, the circles organized in the towns and in the barrios of the large cities on which Podemos is based.

    There have been a series of elections in the states and municipalities, though in the September 27, 2015 election Pablo Iglesias made a mistake by trying to put the social question ahead of the national question in Catalunya. Now having recognized that mistake Iglesias has adopted the concept of the state of Spain as being pluri-national in character. At the same time, a new party appeared on the right, Ciudadanos, a kind of conservative mirror image of Podemos.

    Anticapitalists, the young organizers explain to me, has about 700 members of whom 30 percent are women. The average age of activists is around 30 years; 70 percent of the organization they estimate is under 40. The organization has grown through its involvement in the social movements, and the organizers are proud of the fact that they are the ones known for their ability to organize and mobilize social protests.

    Yet the group that has grown rapidly doesn’t have enough cadres, that is, experienced leaders. This makes education of new members particularly important. While this organization has its roots in the old left, it has attempted to break with the old-style indoctrination once common on the left. They organize their educationals as discussions of article from Viento Sur, the Spanish socialist magazine and website for which I write.

    In the evening I spoke at the monthly Viento Sur forum held at the beautiful Traficante de Sueños (Dream-Dealers) bookstore on the topic of American politics and the Bernie Sanders campaign. A well informed audience asked all of the most important questions.

     

  • Travel Notes: Impressions of the Left in Catalunya

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    I spent a few days in Barcelona, meeting with older and younger activists, some of them former members of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), others younger activists in the group Anticapitalistas or in Procés Constituent. I also joined two protest demonstrations and gave a talk at the Ateneu Rebel for the journal Viento Sur for which I write. Here are my impressions, just impressions.

    On the afternoon of April 18, I joined two demonstrations in Barcelona. The first was a demonstration by Plataforma de Afectados de Hipoteca (PAH) at the offices of the Partido Popular de Barcelona to demand the passage and implemntation of a new law dealing with foreclosures and housing issues. My hosts tell me that this has been the most important social movement of the last couple of years, while the movimento de las plazas, that is of indignados was the most important political movement.

    The housing movement in Catalunya pushed for this law that, I am told, that would be the best law in Europe, but the government will work to have it overturned by the Supreme Court. Under this law, people could only be expelled from their apartments if they were given either with a low-rent apartment or an apartment in public housing. In Spain, if one suffers a foreclosure, not only does he or she lose their house, but they have to pay the difference between what the bank paid for the foreclosed house and what is owed on the mortgage.

    The second demonstration an hour later was a Mare Mortum movement protest at office of the Commission of the European Union. Mare Mortum movement, or Sea of Death, refers to the refugees coming to Europe from the Middle East, many of whom have died at sea. As many as 600 bodies of refugies, for example, remain in a boat that sank off the coast of Italy. There were about 100 people at the demonstration until it was joined by about 100 of those coming from the foreclosure movement demonstration, and the 200 or so protestors blocked the Avenida de Gracias.

    In the evening of April 19, I went out to talk with four of the leaders and activists of Anticapitalistas, men and women in their 20s to 40s. They came out of older left organizations and began organizing about fifteen years ago with less than 100 members, today they have some 700 throughout Spain. They participate in and are a factor in the young political party of the left, Podemos.

    That same night, as New Yorkers were voting, I spoke in Ateneu Rebel about the American elections and the Bernie Sanders campaign to an enthusiastic crowd of about 50 people. Surgi Cutillas of Plataforma per l’Auditoria Ciutadana del Deute (Platform for a Citizen Audit of the Debt) also spoke about the economic and social situation of the European Union.

    The crowd’s questions indicated that they well informed not only about Europe, but also about American politics. And afterwards we were off to do an interview for a local public television show. Like us, people in Europe are hoping that the Sanders campaign represents the beginning of a new era in American politics.

     

  • Travel Notes – Impressions of Paris and the Left

    ImageWhile in Paris in mid-April, I had conversations with a number of mostly older, leftist intellectuals: professors, publishers, editors and writers. These are men and women who historically have had close ties and involvement in the labor and social movements. I also went to political protests and attended a socialist meeting. Here are my impressions, just impressions of a few days in Paris.

    François Hollande’s Socialist Party government has become utterly discredited with the population in general and with the left. No one likes him, no one believes him. Recent polls show that most French people—75%—think that he should resign. And 66% of the people on the left feel the same way.

    Activist movements of environmentalists, labor, and youth aggressively oppose Hollande. And no wonder. The unemployment rate hit a record high last month of 10.4%. This month some 120,000 marched in the streets of Paris against his labor law reform. Now the movement has become nocturnal.

    The Nuit debout protests—we might translate it as “Take a Stand Tonight”—have been taking place nightly in La Place de Republic, a few of them as large as a few thousand but most nights in the hundreds. They have inspired and enthused the left, which hopes that they will spread across France as the Indignados protests spread across Spain or as Occupy Wall Street spread across the United States. 

    I went to the “Nuit debout” protest and offered words of solidarity from activists in the United States. Not surprisingly, when I mentioned the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Bernie Sanders campaign the crowd cheered and applauded enthusiastically.

    Most of the intellectuals with whom I spoke in Paris come out of the Trotskyist tradition, though now they are in mutli-tendency left organizations. The New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) that was created by the merger of the League Communist Revolutionnaire (LCR, of the Fourth International) with environmentalists and other radical left activists, and which was greeted with such a sense of hope just a few years ago, seems now to some of those with whom I spoke to be hopelessly lost.

    One person said that NPA had become a congeries of leftist activists, groups, and tendencies, with no unified leadership, no program, and no sense of direction. Some described NPA as having become ultra-leftist and sectarian. Some of those to whom I spoke remain members, but some have also joined Ensemble, another multi-tendency left group that forms part of Le Front de Gauche led by Jean-Luc Melanchón. Ensemble brings together who have come out of the Socialist, Communist, and Trotskyist parties, together with people new to politics who are working to create a radical and democratic left that can work with both in electoral politics and in extra-parliamentary mass movements. 

    I spoke to Ensemble comrades about the U.S. elections and the Bernie Sanders campaign at their office in the Paris suburb of Bagnolet. Afterwards, of course, we had a glass of wine and talked a little. I found their group to be made up of people of political principles, deep commitment, and an orientation to the central movements and questions of their society. The Ensemble folks seemed to me to represent the kind of political organization that fits the times in France. 

  • Impeachment and Rural Violence: Two Faces of the Same Class Struggle

    The vote on impeachment, which is in a decisive week, makes clear the interests of the ruling classes and their inclination to reverse the losses from the global economic crisis. It is the class struggle carried out in government offices.

    Brazil is experiencing a severe economic, political and social crisis, and, in this scenario, economic power wants to restore their profit rates. But those who hold this power are not going to get out of the crisis by themselves. For this, they need to wipe out all the social gains, take away workers’ rights, privatize the power and oil companies, and implement the neoliberal project.

    This project of the elites is being presented by the PMDB in the form of what would be a future Temer government. So what is at stake is whether we will return to neoliberalism or not. That’s what they need to remove President Dilma. And that is the central element of the class struggle, which is intensifying.

    I believe that society has mobilized and denounced that what is happening is a political process that has spurious motivations that have nothing to do with President Dilma’s behavior and her government. And this awareness is leading people to take to the streets in the struggle for democracy, which is what is at stake at this point.

    According to the assessment of many political analysts that have followed this issue, the government will lose in the Commission but will win on the House floor. This is because the process developers have failed to prove that the president has committed a crime. To use tax “pedaling” is an accounting gimmick that all the presidents of the Republic have done and, among the current governors, 24 of them have already practiced it. So, if this is considered a crime, you should also have impeachment of all of them.

    I think after the vote, there are only two possible scenarios. If there is no coup, President Dilma has been strengthened, but will have the task of reassembling her government from other bases. Reassembling the ministry, now in dialogue with the forces of society, not just the parties, and resume the program that got her elected in October 2014. I hope that Lula can be the coordinator of this process.

    If there is a coup, we will get a government crisis with an unpredictable outcome because 80% of the population will not accept a Temer-Cunha Mendes-government, nor a neoliberal program, which will bring even more problems for the Brazilian people. So if there is a coup, the political crisis will deepen, and there will be no way out in the short term.

    Far from the Palacio do Planalto, the class struggle has been using firearms. In Quedas de Iguaçu (PR), the alliance of oligarchs and local governments killed two farm workers on Thursday April 7 in the same month in which we remember the 20th anniversary of the massacre of Carajás.

    What happened in Paraná was a provocation organized by the secretary of the chief of staff of the state government, which has historical, financial and political ties with the company that fraudulently claims the land that belongs to the Union. He wanted to show his support for his patrons and supported the provocation which led to two deaths.

    This tragedy shows how the elites react when they feel they are immune from punishment. It was in that context that the massacre of Carajás, Corumbiará, happened 20 years ago, not to mention the massacres in the cities, during the FHC government. Because the political and ideological victory of neoliberalism in the elections signaled the most belligerent elites that can now act with impunity.

    For our part, we do not cower, but we will take all possible care not to fall into provocations or pitfalls of violence of the large estates. Our role as the MST is to continue the struggle for agrarian reform. We will continue occupying unproductive estates. We will continue occupying the lands of politicians, companies and farmers who are indebted to the Union by avoiding taxes and do not pay loans in public banks.

    We know there are more than 5 million hectares in these conditions in all states of Brazil, and that more than 130 thousand families could be settled. This is the equivalent of all our people in encampments. And you do not need the government to spend a penny in compensation.

    We will continue our struggle for a people’s agrarian reform, which means in addition to occupying the unproductive estates we will be producing healthy food without pesticides for the entire population.

    And on April 17, we will organize mobilizations throughout the country. After all, it’s the law! Because the Cardoso government, ashamed of the massacre that took place in 1996, decreed April 17 as National Day of Struggle for Agrarian Reform, in one of the last acts of his second term. There will not be a coup! And we will have agrarian reform.

  • The Left's Failure on Syria

    ImageOn February 27th of this year, an article appeared by scholar and journalist Idrees Ahmad titled “Aleppo is our Guernica — and some are cheering on the Luftwaffe,” a timely analogy with the Spanish Civil War. Continuing with that analogy, we can say that we now have the counterpart of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia in Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami’s Burning Country, a work that gives a voice to the Syrian revolutionaries who are the political and moral descendants of the brigades that took up arms against Franco in the name of democracy and social justice. Unfortunately, the type of solidarity that the left offered to Spain’s freedom fighters 80 years ago is sorely missing today, a result of much of the left seeing revolutionary Syrians as jihadist stereotypes refracted through an Orientalist lens rather than as flesh-and-blood human beings.

    Burning Country likely got its title from the graffiti of Baathist counter-revolutionaries that warned “Bashar al-Assad or we burn the country,” a threat they made good on. Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami’s book cannot help but reflect on the tragic outcome of a revolution that was forced to fight on the regime’s terms: a witch’s brew of sectarianism, violence, and reliance on outside powers that had little interest in—even antipathy toward—a successful revolution, whatever stake they had in the geopolitical chess game Syria was forced to play. Ultimately the rebels were squeezed between a regime that had much more in common with Franco than most of the left would be willing to admit and an Islamist opposition that could count on funds and weaponry from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey—states that would have used violence against any movement within their borders that had taken up the goals of the Arab Spring.

    Burning Country makes abundantly clear that the left made a terrible mistake by repudiating the men and women who rose up against Assad. Some of the key figures had long and proud histories in the country’s left, enduring repression and even death to defend the values that supposedly the left is committed to. One of them is Riad al-Turk, who was a leader of the Democratic People’s Party that had split from the Communist Party over its support for the Baathist party. He spent 18 years in prison for his beliefs, suffering torture and solitary confinement. Interviewed by Syria Comment in 2005, al-Turk referred to the economic distress of the average Syrian that would only grow worse under Bashar al-Assad as the country deepened its neoliberal turn:

    The issues that concern people are the issues that affect their daily lives. The average salary, for example, is less than 6,000 lire (about $115) per month. It’s not enough; they need to pay rent and put food on the table and most families have at least five people. At best, it can cover only the most modest expenses like food. With that salary, at least three people in the family have to work, but how often do you find a family with three people who can work?

    Yassin al-Haj Saleh is another revolutionary fighter who refused to bow down to the Assad dynasty. A member of al-Turk’s group, he spent 16 years in prison himself for refusing to toe the Baathist line. He is bitterly eloquent about the people he would have once considered his comrades but who have now turned their back on him and taken the side of Syria’s tyranny:

    I am afraid that it is too late for the leftists in the West to express any solidarity with the Syrians in their extremely hard struggle. What I always found astonishing in this regard is that mainstream Western leftists know almost nothing about Syria, its society, its regime, its people, its political economy, its contemporary history. Rarely have I found a useful piece of information or a genuinely creative idea in their analyses. My impression about this curious situation is that they simply do not see us; it is not about us at all. Syria is only an additional occasion for their old anti-imperialist tirades, never the living subject of the debate.

    Like Idrees Ahmad and the authors of Burning Country, I have struggled to understand why otherwise well-meaning people could attach themselves to a ghoulish family dynasty that has gassed, barrel-bombed, and forced half the country from its homes. In some ways, it is the same political, moral, and intellectual failure that existed in Stalin’s day. There is unfortunately an authoritarian streak in the left that is unleashed when confronted by a genuine revolutionary movement that challenges a state power seated on the opposite side of the geopolitical chessboard from Washington.

    This was driven home to me when I attended a Syrian revolution solidarity rally in Washington in September 2012 as one of a tiny handful of American leftists. While the pro-Assad left would have bet that a keynote speaker might have been someone like John McCain or Hillary Clinton, it was instead a Berkeley professor named Hatem Bazian who was the first Palestinian ever to be elected the head of student government at San Francisco State in the late 1980s. As a student activist, he led fights for affirmative action, against apartheid in South Africa, and to stop American intervention in Central America. It was his efforts on behalf of the BDS movement that made him the target of Daniel Pipes’s Campus Watch.

    The young Syrian-Americans who organized the Washington rally are no different from those who began protesting in March of 2011, people that Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami introduce us to in the chapters “Revolution from Below” and “The Grassroots.” Like the elder statesmen Riad al-Turk and Yassin al-Haj Saleh, the new generation was ready to take great risks to win their freedom. It also took considerable risks for the authors to enter Syria and get their stories. As such, they are the genuine investigative journalists rather than a Robert Fisk who repeated regime falsehoods as a reporter embedded with the Syrian military.

    One of the Syrian revolutionaries was AbdulRahman Jalloud who was arrested in one of the earliest demonstrations against the regime. He was beaten on a daily basis and frequently the victim of electric shocks administered by guards who were hopped up on methamphetamines. After several months of this treatment, he was released. Without skipping a beat, he looked up his comrades and devoted himself to the struggle once again. He told the authors: “We blocked roads with fire and ran. When they shot at us, we decided to resist. We bought 300 slingshots and distributed them to the fastest runners. We spread information to revolutionaries in other areas—how to make and throw Molotovs for example.”

    Jalloud was just one of the many young people who were “shocked, but not awed” as the authors put it. One young Damascene told them that Bashar al-Assad was really the leader of the revolution. “Every time he kills someone, every time he tortures, he creates ten more men to destroy him.”

    Eventually the people protesting in the streets in various towns and cities reached the critical mass that made it possible for them to send the Baathist cops and officials packing. In the early days of the revolution, a grass roots democracy developed that was just as deserving of the left’s respect and solidarity as the Kurdish-controlled Rojova. Jalloud told the authors: “The tanseeqiyat were trust networks. Just five or seven full-time revolutionaries in each neighborhood, working in total secrecy, but linked up to other networks throughout the city.”

    The fruit of such efforts were the LCCs or Local Coordination Committees that were organized horizontally in a fashion that won many anarchists to the cause of the Syrian revolution. Indeed, history will record that the international anarchist movement was far more capable of transcending the Orientalist prejudices that afflicted the self-described Marxist left. The LCCs rejected sectarianism and remained committed to nonviolent resistance. In October 2011 they aligned with the Syrian Non-Violence Movement, Nabd (Pulse), and the Syrian People Know Their Way to establish the Freedom Days collective that called for a “Dignity Strike” that drew the active support of workers, students, and small business owners. The LCCs documented more than 600 striking locations across ten governorates. In Damascus and Aleppo, the universities and suburbs joined in, but big business and government offices in the city center stayed open.

    To give you a sense of the Orientalist tendencies of the left, CounterPunch has published one hundred articles on Syria but there is only one that refers to the LCCs in any detail. In an article titled “Why No Revolution Exists in Syria,” Shamus Cooke disparaged the LCCs as having a “snazzy website” but little else to show for their efforts.

    Notwithstanding Cooke’s shallow reporting, the LCCs called general strikes on a number of occasions just as the trade unions have done in Greece but at much greater risk. In retaliation the regime carried out mass arrests and burned businesses closed in honor of the actions. During one strike a hundred shops were damaged in Deraa alone. In the two months following a strike, Assad closed 187 factories and laid off 85,000 workers, according to official figures. Apparently, many on the left are for working class militancy except when it is directed at a figure opposed to U.S. imperialism and, if allied with the Kremlin, all the better.

    While most rebels raised demands limited to human rights and democracy, there were some who went even further toward a radical analysis that once again was never reported in the online and print magazines that relied on Cold War paradigms for their tilt toward Assad. One exception was Open Democracy that published an article by Budour Hassan, a Palestinian blogger and law graduate based in occupied Jerusalem, who is cited by Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami. She told the story of the Syrian Revolutionary Youth (SRY) that promoted a program of social justice, free education, free health care, gender equality, and liberation of the occupied Golan Heights and Palestine. Because they represented true anti-imperialism and—more importantly—anti-capitalism, it was necessary for the Baathists to strangle the group in its infancy. By the end of 2013, most of the members of SRY had been imprisoned or forced into exile. At least six were tortured to death.

    Based on the historical evidence, it is tempting to conclude that revolutionary struggles are Quixotic ventures doomed to fail. As a Vietnam era antiwar activist, I never would have imagined in 1975 that a reunited country under a Communist government would be presiding over an economy virtually identical to the one American imperialism tried to impose on the country. The same thing goes for Nicaragua, which under former FSLN guerrilla Daniel Ortega pins its hopes on a Chinese-funded canal that environmentalists consider a looming catastrophe for wildlife and peasants. In the late 1980s, a radical Argentine sociologist named Carlos Vilas spoke to a Brecht Forum audience in New York City about the problems that would eventually lead to Ortega being voted out of office, and that anticipated his return to power in subservience to foreign capital. He likened the revolution in Nicaragua to doctors trying to help a woman deliver a baby in a hospital operating room without electricity during a hurricane.

    When new life is bursting at the seams of a womb, there is no point telling a mother to wait until conditions at a hospital become more favorable. That is also true of an embryonic new society. Syrians did not have a crystal ball in March 2011. Furthermore, once they tasted a bit of freedom as cities and towns ousted the Baathist officials and cops, there was no turning back.

    Ra'ed Fares, the man who led the citizens of Kafranbel in their witty English-language slogans at weekly demonstrations, was honest enough to admit that if he had such a crystal ball, he would have chosen another path. In a 2013 visit to Kafranbel, Yassin-Kassab asked him: "If you'd known what would happen, would you have still joined the revolution?" Fares replied: “No, the price was too high. Just in Kafranbel we've had 150 martyrs. As many as that are missing; they're probably dead too."

    But the revolution continues despite all attempts to kill it. When a ceasefire was called on February 29th of this year, protests broke out all across Syria, including Kafranbel where its courageous citizens held aloft a banner with these words: “Ceasefire is a ceasefire, peaceful revolution is still in progress until toppling Assad and imposing justice all over Syria.”

    Burning Country is a book that the pro-Assad left will likely ignore since it is an obvious threat to their most cherished fact-free beliefs. As an indication of its mastery of facts and analysis, it garnered a favorable review from CounterPunch contributor Ron Jacobs who describes it as “great journalism” and—like me—compares it to Orwell in an article titled “Homage to Aleppo.” Since Jacobs’s main interest in Syria in the past was its role in the geopolitical chess game, it is a sign of some momentum toward solidarity with people who clearly deserve it.

    As another indication that the tide might be turning, Patrick Cockburn admitted to Independent readers  that despite Assad’s opposition to jihadists, there’s no good reason to support him:

    In Syria since the turn of the century, for instance, the rural population and the urban poor no longer enjoyed the limited benefits they had previously received under an equally harsh but more egalitarian regime. By 2011, President Bashar al-Assad’s first cousin Rami Makhlouf was reported to be a dominant player in 60 per cent of the Syrian economy and to have a personal worth of $5 billion.

    Cockburn’s article was prompted by the Panama Papers revelation that Mossack Fonseca and HSBC helped Makhlouf avoid paying the taxes that might have allowed the government to assist the jobless and hungry rural poor, thereby avoiding the terrible bloodshed of the past five years.  Juan Cole, another high profile commentator on Syria who has overemphasized the jihadist presence, addressed the Mossack Fonseca connection in an article on the Syrian political economy that he never published before—perhaps because it would have undermined his jihadist-threat narrative. He writes:

    By 2004, Syria’s per capita gross domestic product was, in nominal terms, only $1,190 a year—half that of neighboring Jordan, a fourth that of Turkey, and a fifth that of Lebanon. Six years later, in 2010—on the eve of the outbreak of massive protests, the per capita GDP was still less than $3000 a year (124th out of 183 countries ranked), whereas neighboring Turkey’s was nearly $11,000 (61st), according to the International Monetary Fund. That is, in 2010 Syria was similar in this regard to Honduras and the Congo, whereas Turkey was more in the neighborhood of emergent economies such as Malaysia and Brazil. By the outbreak of protests in 2011, the poverty rate in Syria had climbed to something between 11 and 30 percent, depending on how it was measured.

    This was the sort of analysis that the left should have been identified with ever since March 2011. It was economic misery, not Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or Turkey, that drove people to protest and eventually take up arms.

    In the early 1980s, I had long discussions with Peter Camejo, a former leader of the Socialist Workers Party, over new directions for the left. He warned about turning international questions into a litmus test, a tendency that had fractured the Trotskyist movement for its entire history. It was also a problem for the Maoists whose quarrels over which side to support in Angola kept them from uniting over American political tasks.

    Despite this having made sense to me over the decades, I find myself close to abandoning that outlook because of Syria. To some degree, it flows from my concerns over the affinity that the ultraright has with the Baathist dictatorship. As Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami point out, Nick Griffin of the far-right British National Party has visited Damascus in solidarity with Assad while members of the Greek fascist group Black Lily have fought alongside the Syrian military.

    In making up my mind on the basis for left unity, I also remember another point that Camejo made. He said that the left has tended to underestimate the importance of democracy. When you take the side of a dictatorship against its own people because the USA is opposed to it, you lose track of the fundamental goal of socialism, which is to break the chains of oppression whoever is wielding them.

    This is an especially complicated question when it comes to Syria since a good part of the rebel forces are opposed to the values the left has traditionally espoused. In a perfect world, the Syrian people would have lined up properly under the banner of socialism or at least democratic values.

    Since this is the hundredth anniversary of the Easter Rebellion in Ireland, another Quixotic attempt to break the chains of oppression that failed to realize its goals, it is useful to remember what Lenin argued in a debate with members of the socialist left who were just as dismissive of a revolt that was susceptible to Catholic extremism just as some Syrian rebels are to Islamism:

    To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie without all its prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the landowners, the church, and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc.—to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution. So one army lines up in one place and says, "We are for socialism," and another, somewhere else and says, "We are for imperialism," and that will be a social revolution! Only those who hold such a ridiculously pedantic view would vilify the Irish rebellion by calling it a "putsch."

     

    Louis Proyect is a long-time socialist activist who blogs at louisproyect.org and the moderator of the Marxism mailing list.

  • Privatization in education globally: a "non-conference" with real attendees

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    A "non-conference" organized by two education faculty at NYU on April 12-14 brings together researchers and activists in what I hope will be (as they say in diplomatic circles) a "frank exchange of ideas" about privatization in education, globally. The idea is to get away from typical conference formats of paper presentations so as to encourage participants to really learn from and with one another. The panels on April 12 and 13, from 6:30-8:30pm will be open to the public. Both presidents of the national teachers unions in the US, AFT and NEA, will be responding to remarks on the panel in which we'll discuss "Teachers on the front lines: The global response." Should be fun!

          The panel April 12, also 6:30-8:30 is worth attending as well. More information is on the "non-conference" website, including location: http://wp.nyu.edu/politicsofprivatization/
    The Facebook page is https://www.facebook.com/PoliticsofPrivatizationinEd/

  • The Tightening Vise in Turkey

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    On March 11, 2016, a Turkish prosecutor dropped a complaint against officials for failing to take adequate security measures both before and after the bombing of a peace rally in Ankara that killed more than 100 on October 10, 2015. Two days later, suicide bombers struck in Turkey’s capital city for the third time in five months. A car bomb was exploded in the downtown neighborhood of Kızılay, killing 36 and injuring many more. As with other recent attacks, the government of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) quickly suggested the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) was responsible for the attack.

    The Turkish military immediately sent warplanes to bomb PKK targets in northern Iraq, while large-scale police operations were launched and curfews were imposed in cities throughout the predominantly Kurdish southeast. Shortly thereafter President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan directed his wrath against political opponents, stating the definition of “terrorist” needed to be expanded to include those who support terrorism. “Their titles as an MP, an academic, an author, a journalist do not change the fact that they are actually terrorists.” “Some circles,” Erdoğan continued in a reference to domestic critics as well as to Turkey’s NATO allies, are at a crossroads. “They will either side with us, or with terrorists. There is no middle way.”

    Thus collective punishment and serious human rights violations in the southeast find their counterparts in the elimination of dissent in northern and western population centers like Ankara and Istanbul. As the repressive apparatus expands, the Kurdish rights movement has been pushed back years, perhaps decades, and the renewal of war increasingly resembles the 1980s and 1990s, when more than 40,000 were killed and millions of Kurds were forced from their homes. Many in Turkey can be forgiven for believing the state is allowing (or provoking) the escalation of violence in order to eliminate challenges to its hegemony by militarizing society, rewriting the constitution, and destroying the threat of Kurdish autonomy.

    * * *

    Though negotiations for resolving the decades-long conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK stalled almost as soon as it had begun in 2013, the current large-scale violence began in 2015. In June of that year a rally of the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), a pro-Kurdish leftist party, was bombed two days before a general election, likely by the Islamic State. The following month 33 youth activists were killed by ISIL suicide bombers in Suruç, a Turkish town across the border from Kobani—the city in Rojava (northern Syria) taken from ISIL by Kurdish forces in January. Many found it difficult to believe suicide bombers could have entered a city on the Syrian-Turkish border at a time of civil war in Syria without the knowledge of Turkish intelligence. The immediate appearance of the police after the bombing, together with their unusual absence in the hours before the leftist demonstration, fueled speculation of government knowledge of the attack.

    After the PKK claimed responsibility for the killing of two policemen in retaliation for Suruç, the state began what was ostensibly a dual offensive against ISIL and the PKK. However, while a number of ISIL suspects were detained, the vast majority of the state’s campaigns were waged against the PKK, while curfews and police operations have become ubiquitous in the southeast.

    Amnesty International reported in January that the Turkish state was engaging in collective punishment in the southeast, with approximately 200,000 people at risk. Numerous reports claimed security forces prevented ambulances from reaching areas under curfew and providing treatment to the sick. In some places people were unable to leave their homes for more than a month, and cuts to water and electrical supplies combined with difficulties accessing food and medical care have had brutal effects. In addition to denouncing police and military operations in residential areas that use heavy weaponry and snipers, AI condemned a January 13 PKK car bomb attack that killed one police officers and five civilians, including two young children.

    According to a more recent report from the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey, numerous rights violations occurred in majority Kurdish areas between the summer of 2015 and March of 2016. Since August, 63 officially confirmed round-the-clock curfews in 22 districts and 7 cities have impacted a population of more than 1.6 million. The Foundation reports that at least 310 civilians have been killed since August 16, and more than 350,000 have been forced to leave their homes. Erdoğan has proudly claimed that the Turkish military has killed more than 5,000 alleged militants since July of 2015.

    While access to accurate information is crucial for any understanding of what’s happening in the Kurdish-majority provinces, it is difficult to obtain as journalists are often unable to reach impacted areas. Limiting the availability of information in the southeast forms one part of a larger assault on independent media. This includes most recently the prosecution of editors Can Dündar and Erdem Gül, whose Cumhuriyet newspaper reported in May of 2015 on the government’s illegal shipment of weapons to Islamist rebels in Syria, as well the takeover of opposition media outlets.

    Erdoğan’s hostility to university professors was triggered by a petition created by Academics for Peace and signed by more than a thousand scholars called “We Will not be a Party to this Crime.” The petition condemned curfews which left large populations without food and basic services for extended periods of time, emphasizing the operations violated the Turkish constitution as well as international law. Signers demanded an end to state-led massacres and deportations, called for independent national and international observers to make reports on human rights violations in the region, and demanded a negotiated political settlement to the Kurdish movement.

    The government, with the aid of pro-regime university administrators, responded by purging large numbers of signatories from the academy; investigations have been launched into 158 academics. On March 15 Muzaffer Kaya, Kıvanç Ersoy, and Esra Mungan were arrested on charges of “propagandizing for terror” after publicly reading the declaration, suggesting the extent to which the state will deploy the vague signifier “terror” to muzzle any criticism.

    Most threatening to the AKP however is the HDP, which stands as the major obstacle to ruling-party desires to change the government system. A crucial success of the HDP prior to the ongoing crackdown was its ability to link the Kurdish movement with other left and liberal organizations in western Turkey in the aftermath of the Gezi uprisings in 2013. Hence Erdoğan’s “with us or against us” rhetoric seeks to divide anti-government forces, and the strategy of characterizing HDP as the political wing of the PKK appears to be working. While HDP support in the west is almost certainly plummeting (despite the party’s consistent condemnation of acts of violence), it is possible the party will simply be shut down, as has occurred frequently to pro-Kurdish parties in the past. This will likely be achieved through the removal of parliamentary immunity of HDP members accused of “provoking the people” and “being a member of an armed organization.”

    * * *

    Since its abandonment of Marxist-Leninism—which included, among other things, the elimination of any challenge to its dominant position in the Kurdish movement—and an attendant shift to a strategy of Democratic Autonomy (or Democratic Confederalism) in the twenty-first century, the PKK has become something of a cause célèbre among much of the international left. PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan, inspired by Murray Bookchin and other theorists of radical democracy, articulated a vision of an anti-state movement based on democratic, ecological, and gender-liberationist ideas in the early 2000s. Utilizing a system of democratic councils that in some cases originates at the street level and has a 40 percent quota for women, the movement seeks to create non-state democratic structures through communal organization.

    Criticisms of Öcalan’s theory and the policies of the Democratic Union Party (PYD)—the Kurdish party that controls large sections of Rojava and that constitutes a main source of contention between Turkey and the U.S.—have recently emerged, however. Alex de Jong has examined the essentialisms of Öcalan’s representations of Kurdishness and women, for example, noting the theory’s trans-historical and self-orientalizing characterization of a “Kurdish mentality” and the equation of women with nature, nonviolence, and empathy. De Jong also sees the economic proposals of the PYD for Rojava as basically social democratic, putting into question the supposedly anti-capitalist orientation of the party.

    In addition, questions have arisen over the revolutionary claims of the PYD in Syria. According to Robin Yassin-Kassab, the “current tendency to romanticise the PYD also ignores the rapidly expanding gap between the party’s rhetoric and the reality on the ground,” as dissent is repressed and many view the PYD as collaborating with the Syrian regime. Elsewhere Yassin-Kassab points out that while the PYD has initiated positive changes in Kurdish majority areas, in a number of Arab majority regions the party has abandoned Democratic Confederalism in order to create a territorially contiguous area—in other words a state.

    However problematic radical democratic theory (and Öcalan’s version of it) and the practices of the PYD may be, the regime in Turkey appears set on destroying a radical social movement that has made important inroads in a traditionally conservative, patriarchal society. Democratic autonomy may be another casualty of the war, as government plans to expropriate affected areas portends wholesale reconstruction and gentrification of towns and regions.

    Though analysts disagree over the probability of the PKK’s involvement in recent Ankara attacks that were claimed by the militant Freedom Fighters of Kurdistan (TAK), the killing of civilians in the center of the capital city contributes to a mainstream view of the Kurdish movement as separatist and terrorist. At the same time, many Kurdish youth, who have grown up with family members’ stories of disappearances and torture at the hands of authorities, see the PKK as defending their communities and dream of becoming guerilla fighters themselves.

    It is difficult to predict what will happen in the coming weeks and months, but at present there is little reason for hope. For the left the current conjuncture is a dramatic reversal from the optimism of a year ago, when it appeared broad opposition to the AKP regime could potentially coalesce around a radical alternative. Though resistance in Turkey is not dead, for the moment it seems violence and authoritarian repression, rather than liberation, are on the immediate agenda. 

  • Q & A with Angela Walker, Socialist Party USA candidate for Vice-President

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    TNS: First question, why were you chosen to be Mimi Soltysik’s running mate?

    Mimi reached out to me about the campaign following my run for County Sheriff in Milwaukee. He said that he’d followed my campaign and really liked the fact that we took a very grassroots, people-centered approach. He felt that I would make a good running mate based on work I was involved in in Milwaukee, and the fact that I ran for sheriff unapologetically as a socialist.

    TNS: Which public offices have you previously run for?

    I ran for Milwaukee County Sheriff in 2014.

    TNS: What did you accomplish by running?

    I like to think that we reopened the discussion in Milwaukee about socialism, and how placing the needs of people at the center of the issues needed to be done, and could be done. We can demand, in very clear terms, the changes we want and agitate for those changes. People just need to be reminded of their power.

    TNS: What would you like to accomplish with this current campaign?

    I think we’d like to accomplish something similar with the presidential campaign. We want to remind people that they have power, and that worker ownership of their workplaces and communities makes as much sense now as it ever has. At a time when so many people have been victimized by deindustrialization, gentrification and institutional racism, we want people to be reminded that there really is another way to live. It’s not supposed to be this way, and people need to know that.

    TNS: What is the difference between the Soltysik/Walker campaign and the presidential campaigns of other socialists?

    I think the difference between our campaign and the campaign of other socialist candidates is the fact that we really do center the voices and faces and needs of people in what we are doing. Both Mimi and I agree that showing up and telling folks what they need and what we’ll do for them is insulting and pretentious. By honoring the ideas and input of the people who are involved with the Party, and involved in activist work, and involved with the campaign, we keep ourselves grounded where we need to be. We are focused on building and maintaining relationships between people that will endure beyond November 2016. This work will continue.

    TNS: Why didn’t the SPUSA just support one of the other socialist campaigns, be it Mary Scully’, Gloria La Riva, Monica Moorehead, or some other socialist?

    I believe we decided to do our own thing with this campaign and run our own candidates because we are in a position to speak unapologetically about what it means to be socialist, and to make the connections between the Party platform and Black Lives Matter, the movements for immigrant rights, the fight for LGBTQ rights, the struggle for the end of the exploitation of the environment, an end to public school privatization, and so many other issues. We can speak to all of those things because our approach is an intersectional one.”

    TNS: Why not support Bernie Sanders?

    We need Bernie Sanders to be brave enough to talk explicitly about the need for workers to own their workplaces and what is produced. We are not interested in reforming capitalism, we are interested in destroying it. We understand why Sanders is not discussing that, but Mimi and I are not here for slapping a Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound. Call out capitalism for what it has done to the people in this country and abroad. Mainstream candidates will not do that. We can do that.

    “TNS: What is your honest opinion of the Sanders campaign?

    My honest opinion of the Sanders campaign is that he is doing what is in bounds for a Democrat candidate to do, and saying what it is permissible for them to say. He’s playing the game, it’s politically expedient to do that.

    TNS: Is the Soltysik/Walker campaign expecting to get ballot access anywhere?

    The Soltysik/Walker campaign may get ballot access in some states, while in others it would be an uphill battle. Ballot access has not been our main focus, we want to make the connections with the people doing the work of uplifting their communities, and that is more important to us. The push for ballot access has not been our priority. We’ll get it where we can, and still move our message everywhere else.

    TNS: What has the fight for ballot access been like so far?

    The current two-party system operates in its own best interest. This country runs on this illusion of choice, and there are entities who are very deeply invested in making sure that nothing changes or threatens the status quo. If the people of this country truly desire change and would be willing to look past the smoke and mirrors of the current system, things would get interesting.

    TNS: Why do you think the current electoral system makes it so hard for independents and third party candidates?

    As the Vice Presidential candidate for the SPUSA, I believe that dismantling institutional racism and U.S. imperialism, honoring the planet we live on by ending our dependency on fossil fuels and aggressively adopting measures that are environmentally responsible and creating environmentally responsible jobs that rebuild the infrastructure of this country and are owned by the people who live here are the most pressing issues for me. Those, and immediately creating a high-quality single-payer national health system.”

    TNS: As the VP candidate on the ticket what are the 3 most important issues, in your opinion, facing this nation?

    Ending the system of mass incarceration, detaining and deportation would go a long way towards addressing the damage institutional racism has caused in this country. The legalization and decriminalization of marijuana, with a rider attached that immediately frees all people currently incarcerated for nonviolent marijuana offenses is another way. Creating a revenue stream with priority given to people from the communities most harmed by drug policies- Black and Brown marijuana growers and suppliers- is yet another way. Cutting military spending and removing US presence from countries that have been exploited for their resources is something we would address. If we divested from making war on other countries, we could reinvest that revenue in strengthening our public schools through the community schools model, rebuilding our bridges, roadways, and all public transportation systems, and promote affordable alternatives to fossil fuels, using cooperative models for all of these things.

    TNS: How would the Soltysik/Walker administration resolve these issues? If you comrades actually won, what would be the hallmarks of your administration, hypothetically of course?

    If we actually won the election, Mimi and I have no illusions about the way we would be treated by Congress. We’d be blocked every step of the way. But the hallmarks of our administration would be the things I mentioned, and a sense of possibility that we believe people aren’t feeling now.

    TNS: The American Left is fractured and bogged with sectarianism, how could this be overcome going forward?

    The sectarianism of the Left in the United States is problematic, but can definitely be addressed and worked on. Essentially, we are fighting for the same things. Take the egos out of the equation, be willing to be humble and to work cooperatively with other groups, and adopt an intersectional approach so that ALL segments of the population can engage. We can do this.

    TNS: Are there any current issues that the various left/socialist groups could build a united front around?

    I think there are plenty of issues that socialist groups can unite around. Black Lives Matter, the fight for womyn’s reproductive rights, the struggle for the environment, the fight for a living wage for all people, immigrant justice and the end of borders…so many things. I can’t stress the need for intersectionality enough. If you are about liberation for all people, then you’ll connect your freedom with the right of Indigenous sisters to live without being assaulted and disappeared. You’ll fight against the terrorizing of Muslim sisters and brothers. You’ll see yourself in the children of Flint, Michigan, and you’ll know that the folks who denied clean water to them deserve nothing less than prison time and reparation paying. You’ll know that dropping bombs on people in Syria, that undermining democratic governments in Honduras, poisoning people in the Amazon…you’ll know that those things cannot be allowed to happen. That they’re unacceptable, because your freedom is connected to so many others’ liberation.”

    TNS: How do we build a broad left/mass left party, or coalition of parties in the USA?

    It’s exhausting, and it’s painful. It forces your heart to be bigger than you ever thought it could. But if we are about liberation, then we have to be about liberation for all people, everywhere. Unity and intersectionality are essential. Unite around the issues. That’s how we build coalitions and a mass Left movement. Leave out the ego.

    TNS: Any lessons that you think the America Left could learn from Podemos or Syriza?

    I think the Left here could learn a lot about perseverance and flexibility from Podemos and Syriza, and definitely about taking real political power and using it to move our agenda forward instead of having to stay on the fringes.

    TNS: Are there any issues that the radical Left and Right could work on with each other?

    With the polarization of politics and issues in the United States now, I honestly don’t see where there could be honest and respectful collaboration between the radical Left and Right, especially not with the hideousness that is the rise of Donald Trump. No.

    TNS: How do third parties, socialist parties in particular, break the stranglehold that the Democratic Party has over the Black community?

    I think the best way for third parties to loosen the hold the Democratic Party has on the Black community in the United States is to let folks know they exist, and that their platforms address the particular needs of that community. We need to be much more intentional about getting information about third parties into communities where folks aren’t hearing about them.

    TNS: Why don’t we see more Blacks gravitating towards socialism and anarchism these days?

    I would argue that we are indeed seeing more Black folks, particularly young Black folks, moving towards socialism and anarchism (to a lesser degree). The Black Panthers and Young Lords were socialist, and those movements resonate with young people, especially those involved in the Movement for Black Lives. People are aware that capitalism is at the bottom of the oppressions our people face, and they are making the connections between Black Liberation and the elimination of the capitalist system.

    TNS: What has happened to independent Black political action in the 21st century?

    I see independent Black political action coming out of Black Lives Matter. The people on the ground are creating the agendas, deciding on action (or inaction in some cases), and acknowledging the fact that in many places, the current two-party system has not served our people well and has actually failed us, and that it’s time to talk about alternatives. Those discussions and decisions are happening. The fact that the Movement as a whole is refusing to endorse any candidate in the upcoming elections is big. The fact that young activists are centering the needs of the Black community using candidate debates as a platform is big. I would say independent Black political action in the 21st Century is in the hands of young people, who are very smart and very intentional about direct action and social media and other methods of getting the messages out.

    TNS: What are your thoughts on the Black Lives Matter and prison reform movements?

    Black Lives Matter is an essential continuation of the struggle that started for Black people in the United States in 1619. It’s an intersectional movement that understands that there is no room for kyriarchy or ageism. It’s a movement that is diverse, nimble on its feet, very exciting and engaging, and unafraid of calling out institutional racism, sexism, ableism, heterosexism, white supremacy, classism, imperialism and the capitalism that upholds all of that. The fight against mass incarceration is a part of the work Black Lives Matter does, and it’s necessary work. The ending of state-sponsored violence against Black people must happen. The fight to end the abuses of the prison system and this entire system of “justice” is happening, and it’s needed.

    TNS: How will we keep the next movement created by a community of color from being co-opted by the Dems?

    I think, with a couple of exceptions, that movements like Black Lives Matter have been very vocal about making sure the Democrats know that they’re not here to be subsumed into the Democratic Party or the interests of the mainstream. I believe that grassroots, people-centered and people-led movements have got to be vigilant and vocal about keeping mainstream interests at bay because co-optation is always a real danger. A perfect example of this co-optation was the Wisconsin Uprising in 2011. All of that raw energy that came from the people themselves was co-opted and funneled into a recall effort that left people feeling powerless and depressed. This is unacceptable. So I am excited and happy when I see Black Lives Matter activists being very specific about keeping the Democrats away.

    TNS: Do you see mass incarceration as the New Jim Crow? If so, why?

    Mass incarceration is absolutely the New Jim Crow. It’s a system of control that impacts the way Black people move and interact in this country. It’s the constant knowledge that as a Black person, your life is worth nothing in this country, unless you are providing the labor that makes the system work. It’s an understanding that you really don’t have any rights under law, and that because of the color of your skin, you are subject to discrimination everywhere and by anyone. It’s the stigma attached with being labeled a felon and not being able to house or support yourself, and ending up back in the system that labeled you. The privatization of public schools, the restriction of access to public resources such as transportation and food stamps and housing, all of these things are linked to the New Jim Crow. The issue of protection and safety, and who deserves those things, that’s also related. Mass incarceration is a system that is pervasive and extends far beyond prison walls.

    TNS: As a Black woman, how do you view feminism in relation to the Black female experience?

    I believe that mainstream feminism is for White womyn and always has been. Black, Latina, Native and Asian womyn have always had to create their own way of relating to the world and demanding culturally-specific ways of honoring womyn’s experience, because the mainstream movement doesn’t include us. It doesn’t speak to our intersections of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, age, ability, and other issues.  Mainstream feminism takes the experiences of White womyn as the only experience to be honored, and that’s exclusive. The lived experiences and needs of womyn of color can only be discussed by womyn of color.

    TNS: Do Black Girls Rock? What does that actually mean?

    Black Girls Rock simply is that. It’s the assertion that Black womyn are not less than anyone else, that we deserve the same love and care and mobility and respect as anyone else. We have to lift one another up, and constantly affirm our brilliance, beauty and versatility and diversity in a society that consistently devalues us. And so we do it. Black Girls definitely Rock.”

    TNS: Ms. Walker, what is socialism to you?

    Socialism, to me, is worker and community ownership of the means of production. If that is a farming community, the folks who live and work in that area own the farm and the tools needed to work it. They decide what is produced. In an urban setting like Milwaukee, that would be the workers at a factory owning that factory and all that it produces, and making democratic decisions about what is produced and how it is distributed. Whatever would be produced is something of use to the workers and the community, and is available to all without profit motive. As a worker, I know that I would be more invested and interested in my workplace if I were a part owner who made valued decisions in that workplace.

    TNS: What will the revolution look like in the USA?

    My advice to young people interested in socialism is to read about it from diverse sources, and look at socialism from many different perspectives. The forms that socialism takes in Africa and Central and South America are vastly different than the forms socialism takes in the United States. I would want them to understand that socialism must be intersectional, taking into account all of the differences people bring to the work with them, and understanding that those differences are never weaknesses.  I would want them to know that there is joy possible in this work, and that that joy is something that must be incorporated into what they’re doing. It’s a form of self-care.

    TNS: Any advice for young people just entering the socialist movement?

    I have a hard time picturing what revolution will look like in the United States. People here are very diverse, with diverse needs and viewpoints and life experiences. In my own life, I have no national identity that moves me. For me, revolution is necessary for the liberation of my own people, and others who are oppressed by those forces that hurt and humiliate Black people. I believe that any revolution in this country would be bloody and painful, because there are so many institutions deeply rooted in the domination and exploitation that is the capitalist system. They won’t want that power taken from them, and have proven around the world what they are capable of when their interests are threatened. I don’t have any illusions whatsoever that they won’t come against revolutionaries in this country full force. They have before. I believe revolution is possible, but I don’t know exactly what it will look like.”

    TNS: Anything you would like to add?

    The only thing I want to add is the reminder that people are powerful, more powerful than they know. I hope folks in the neighborhoods embrace their power, step into it, and use it to build the world they believe in and want, even if that is only in their own small areas. Because they can, and it desperately needs to happen. It’s the only change that we’ll get, and the only change that matters.

    TNS: Thank you Angela, for your time and good luck with the campaign.

    Originally posted at http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=12512.

  • Mexico – Plunder and Violence in the New Belle Epoque

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    This is the third and last of three book reviews that look at what Mexican intellectuals on the left have written in an attempt to understand Ayotzinapa and what it symbolizes and signifies for their country and its future. The first review appeared here and the second here.

    Adolfo Gilly and Rhina Roux. El tiempo del despojo: Siete ensayos sobre un cambio de época. Mexico: Editoria Ithaca, 2015. 191pp. Bibliography. Available only in Spanish.

    Time of Plunder: Seven Essays about an Epoch-Making Change (as I translate the title) must have been written and already in production when the Night of Iguala occurred, though both of its authors have since spoken out strongly on the September 26, 2014 murder of six and kidnapping of 43 students at the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College, placing blame on the capitalist system and on Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. While Iguala and Ayotzinapa aren’t mentioned in Time of Plunder, which is focused on the violence and plunder of the contemporary era, still it represents a profound analysis of the forces that have created the system that generated those events and that has taken the lives of at least 160,000 Mexicans an disappeared some 25,000 since President Felipe Calderón launched the drug was in 2006.

    Some of the seven essays in this collection were written by Gilly, some by Roux, and some by the two together, though the intellectual, political, and even stylistic coherence of the book is such that one would hardly know who wrote which. These are two authors who have come to think and write as one and the result is impressive. I will not, therefore, pause to describe each author and essay, but treat them as a team, simply referring to the book’s arguments.

    The book they have produced is highly theoretical, analyzing the nature of the current, turbulent period in which we live, its economy and its politics. They characterize our contemporary era as a second Belle Epoque. The first Belle Epoque, referring to the period between the Franco-Prussian War (and the Paris Commune) and the outbreak of World War I, was an era in which the European (and for that matter the American) bourgeoisie flourished—an extraordinary period of scientific and cultural achievement—based on the oppressive exploitation of their own working classes and on the savagely violent pillage of their colonies in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

    The Belle Epoque gave rise to imperialism and led, of course, to the First and Second World Wars, together with the Jewish Holocaust. But when it ended a new period ensued, a result of the earlier struggles of the European labor movement, including the Russian Revolution of 1917. The end of the Second World War, the war-time resistance movements and the class struggles that accompanied and followed the struggle for liberation from the Nazis, led to a new social compromise in Europe, in the United States, and also in some developing countries such as Mexico where the new pact resulted from the Mexican Revolution. The British Labor, European Socialist, American Democratic Party and Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party entered into a new social pact with the unions and established welfare states that to varying degrees provided pensions, health coverage, unemployment insurance, and workers’ compensation to the working people in their countries.

    The famous “Thirty Golden Years” from 1938 to 1968—a period of expansion for the leading capitalist countries and a kind of “Bronze Age” some developing countries made this possible. The capitalist system’s uncharacteristic stability throughout the period depended not only on prosperity, but also on the corporate character of relations between the ruling party and the labor unions. Labor militancy was attenuated by the unions’stake in the system that gave them rising wages and benefits, even if working conditions often declined, and their votes kept social reform parties in power.

    Gilly and Roux, frequently referring to Marx’s writings, describe the history I have summarized here, then go on to argue that beginning in the early 1970s and accelerating in the twenty-first century we entered a new period now characterized by the privatization of the common and social property, driven by technological change, organized by finance capital, and heading toward environmental catastrophe. We live, they write, in an era of transition, restructuring relations between nations and capitalist enterprises, a life and death struggle of capital at the global level and in every region of the world.

    Turning to Mexico, and influenced by Antonio Gramsci and particularly by Cornelius Castoriadis and his view of the state as not only an organization commanding resources but also as an idea (an “imaginary”) constructed out of past social conflicts and the resulting social pacts, they examine modern Mexico’s history. Here Adolfo Gilly’s earlier writings, particularly La revolución interrumpida (published in English under the title The Mexican Revolution), form the basis of their interpretation. The authors go on to trace the breakdown of Mexico’s social pact from the crises of the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968, through President Carlos Salinas’ violente assault on the corporate unions (the bazukazo), to the Chiapas uprising led by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), to the murder of presidential candidate Donaldo Colosion, the negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the mass migration of Mexicans to the United States.

    Avoiding facile arguments that U.S. imperialism controls Mexican politics, they write:

    The tendency of Mexico to be dragged toward the north, however, does not mean the conversion of Mexico into a protectorate. The governing Mexican elite is not an administrator or manager of U.S. interests. It represents the existence of an internal political leadership that is attempting to round its relationship with its northern neighbor on the existence of a complex local business class and on its own domestic legitimacy. The absence of this legitimacy, or this precarious legitimacy, means the national leadership becomes every more fragile as it confronts the external limits.

    The history of the Mexican ruling class since the loss of Texas in 1836 and U.S.-Mexican War of 1846-48 (finalized with the Gadsden Purchase of 1854) has meant, I would add, that the Mexican ruling class has forever been renegotiating the terms of its subordination to and dependency on the United States.

    Having discussed Mexico, they reinsert it into the world economic and political situation, describing the four dominant characteristics of the period: 1) a new special division of labor; 2) new information and communication technologies; 3) the expansion of the means of transportation; 4) the growth of mass migrations. All of this accompanied by the violent dispossession of ordinary people.

    In a final essay, they take up the issue of race, in particular the idea of whiteness, based on Bolívar Echeverría’s argument that whiteness is a constitutive element of modern capitalism. The book ends with the warning of Aimé Césaire, the great poet, that we are in an era—he was writing of the Nazi era—of barbarous civilizations. Though Césaire wrote of the Nazi era of the 1930s, his warning seems to apply to our era, around the world, and in Mexico.

    How could we not then see this book as a profound discussion of the origins of the system that produced the terrible Night of Iguala, of the massacre of the poor, indigenous, peasant students of the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college. As already mentioned, Gilly and Roux have both spoken out strongly against the system and the state that produced that atrocity.

  • The Case of Kumar Gunaratnam: Democracy is at Stake

     

    ImageThe case of Kumar Gunaratnam (KG) is a typical example of justice turning into its opposite. The Kegalle magistrate gave his verdict on March 31 imposing one year imprisonment and Rs. 50,000 fine on Kumar Gunaratnam for violation of immigration law, i.e., overstaying visa.

    It appears to be a simple technical issue. Mr. Noel Mudalige, an Australian citizen, was granted visitor visa to enter Sri Lanka. After a month, he refused to go back and expressed his willingness to stay in Sri Lanka even requesting dual visa status as a first step. He was arrested and the police filed a case against him for defying immigration law of Sri Lanka. Hence, one may argue that the verdict given by the Magistrate is absolutely valid and legal. However, the real story behind this case has revealed time and again the true nature of the Sri Lankan democracy in its neoliberal phase.

    Often times, a situation arises that revolutionaries have to leave their country when the respective states pose a threat for their lives. Russian revolutionaries including Lenin and Trotsky were forced by the Tsarist regime to leave Russia and to continue their political work in exile. In doing so they had to use forged passports, pseudonyms and names of dead people. It is a well- known story that Lev Bronstein had to escape from Tsarist prison and go abroad. In the process, he became Leon Trotsky.    

    Kumar Gunaratnam is a prominent leader and a member of the political bureau of Janata Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), a radical leftist formation. JVP that was formed in the mid 1960s emulating the Cuban revolutionaries, organized a rebellion in 1971 and again in 1987-88 in Southern part of Sri Lanka. In the post 1987, it became Sinhala nationalist and stood for the defeat of Tamil militants led struggle against the Sri Lankan government. JVP led a second rebellion, but was crushed by the Sri Lankan government killing at least 40,000 youth and almost all of its central leadership.

    The brother of Kumar Gunaratnam, Rajitham Gunaratnam, a JVP student leader, was also killed. Kumar was arrested but somehow managed to escape. He played a leading role organizing the JVP after 1987-89 debacle and became one of its central leaders. In 2005, JVP joined with the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), a bourgeois party, to form a coalition government. A group led by Kumar Gunaratnam fought against the class collaborationist and racist politics of the JVP, and as a result, the group within the JVP conspired against him putting his life in danger, especially in an intensified war against Tamil militants. KG is Tamil in ethnicity. Those who were with KG advised him to leave the country.

    Under the name of Noel Mudalige, KG left the island. He led his group from exile. When non-racist forces that fought against class collaborationist politics of the JVP had finally decided to break away and formed a separate party following Marxist principles, KG returned to Sri Lanka in 2011 using his Australian passport under the name Noel Mudalige. In 2012, he was abducted with another member of the political Bureau by the police and held unlawfully until the Australian government, on the requests made by the Sri Lankan civil society, intervened and acted to save his life. He was sent back to Australia. Just before the presidential election in 2015, KG was allowed to come back to support the candidate of the newly formed Frontline Socialist Party (FSP) in which KG is a member of the political bureau. As the new government asked all exiled political activists to return home, KG asked for the Sri Lankan citizenship that he never gave up. However, the new government, in spite of its democratic rhetoric refused KG’s request and ordered his arrest.

    The above story reveals that the issue is not a technical one of overstaying one's visa. It is not a case against Noel Mudalige. The issue is over the right of KG to stay in Sri Lanka and to do politics he believes correct. He was born in Sri Lanka. He had been in Sri Lanka until he was forced to leave in 2011. He has never given up his Sri Lankan citizenship. There is no legal document that a person called Kumar Gunaratnam left the island.

    Free KG!

    Ensure his right to do politics in Sri lanka!!

    Free all political prisoners!!!

     

     

  • Labor for Bernie and Beyond Plans for the Primaries and the Future

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    “We’re going all the way to the convention,” said Larry Cohen, former President of the Communications Workers of America and Senior Advisor to the Sanders campaign. “We’re working to see that Sanders wins the Democratic Party nomination, but that’s not all we’re doing. We’re going beyond to build a democracy movement in this country.”

    Cohen was speaking, just before the opening of the Labor Notes Conference, to some 125 union activists and local leaders who gathered for four hours at the Hilton Hotel in Chicago on Friday, April 1 at the Labor for Bernie and Beyond meeting. They met to discuss the next stages and of the Sanders campaign as well as the future prospects for the movement of union activists who support him. The meeting was convened by Cohen and 23 other national or local union offices.

    The Labor for Bernie movement has become a national phenomenon with more than 12,000 supporters, a Facebook page with 27,000 likes and traffic of almost 400,000 hits per week. Five national unions and some 90 plus local unions—often defying their international officers’ endorsements—have endorsed Sanders in the Democratic presidential primary. Labor for Bernie claims that Sanders is now predicted to win 60 percent of the labor vote in upcoming primaries.

    Labor for Bernie claims some credit for Sanders’ overwhelming victory in Washington State where he won every single county. Katie Nelson told the group that though the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) national leadership had endorsed Sanders, the Washington AFSCME Council 28 executive board, of which she is a member, voted to endorse Sanders because they had to respect their members’ wishes.

    A dozen other union activists from a variety of unions around the country—from National Nurses United (NNU) and the Inland Boatmen’s Union, to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the United Auto Workers—described their successes in either winning endorsements for Sanders or in holding off nominations for Hillary Clinton.   

    Pledging for Bernie

    As Sanders heads into two crucial primary elections—Wisconsin on April 5 and New York on April 15—Labor for Bernie will be concentrating on workplace organizing and using new tools to increase Sanders vote in those primaries and in other upcoming primary elections. Union members will be distributing a Bernie for President pledge card to be signed by their coworkers, collected, and used to get out the vote.

    Cohen described what he called an inside-outside strategy for the Democratic Party Convention in July; that is, the Labor for Bernie and other Bernie activists plan to have as many people as possible as delegates on the inside and as many other supporters as possible on the outside of the convention. Inside, said Cohen, the group will fight for Sanders and his policies in all of the possible arenas: the credentials committee, the rules committee, the platform committee, and for the actual nomination.

    And Beyond

    Labor for Bernie, like other Sanders supporters, believes their candidate can still defeat Hillary Clinton for the nomination. But in a system where Clinton has hundreds of unelected super-delegates pledged to vote for her, and several corporate super-PACS putting large amounts into her campaign, Sanders supporters know that their candidate—even if he wins big in several more states—could have victory wrested from him at the convention. So, whatever happens at the convention, several speakers offered suggestions for the future of the progressive labor activists who are backing Bernie.

    Michael Lighty of NNU told the group, “We are not in this for ‘Bernie or Bust.’ This movement will not back off.” His union, he said has already begun to organize for a June 17 People’s Assembly in Chicago, working with National Peoples Action, a housing organization, and with United Students Against Sweatshops.

    Cedric Johnson, a professor of African American studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, suggested that Bernie’s supporters needed to rethink their relationship to the black movement. “The movement may not include all Blacks,” he said, because Blacks are divided into different classes with different interests.” His colleague, Dean E. Robinson, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told the group, “Civil rights activists in the 1950s and 60s pressed the limits of the movement. Black politicians today tell us the limits should not be pushed—which is just the opposite. We have an opportunity to contest Black politicians.”

    Seattle’s socialist City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant suggested that, “If we really want to fight the right and Trump, we must break from the Democratic Party, we begin now to create a movement for an independent candidate and consider building an independent party.” Sawant’s supporters in #Movement4Bernie are circulating a petition calling upon Sanders to “Run Through November.” It reads, “….we urge you to continue the political revolution by running independently of the Democratic Party rather than endorsing Hillary Clinton.”

    Finally, Peter Olney, a retired ILWU organizer, called for the creation of a “new force for a democratic economy.” He said this force made up of unions, community groups, workers centers, immigrants groups and people advocating for people of color, LGBT rights should be organized around five key principles:

    • Fighting economic inequality.
    • Addressing discrimination based on race, gender, and sexual orientation.
    • Opposition to the permanent war economy and militarized foreign policy.
    • Tackling global climate change.
    • Defense of the right to organize with the labor movement playing a leading role to promote working class interests

    This first conversation about the future among Labor for Bernie activists represented an important first step, but the group adopted no strategy for the future at this time. Rand Wilson, who volunteers as a coordinator for the group, said he would provide a report back to all of the national and local endorsing unions.   

    Many of those attending the Labor for Bernie meeting were then off to the Labor Notes conference where they would working with others to build stronger and more democratic unions, while also advocating for stepped-up involvement in the Sanders campaign.

  • Chicago teachers (again) rewrite a playbook stacked against labor

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    The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) strike April 1 is not primarily about increased school funding, standardized testing, pensions for teachers, or even just corporate taxation, though the union is fighting for all of these. The strike is about democracy, especially who owns our society’s resources and how decisions about those resources are made.

    CTU has shown us – again – what real democracy looks like. Under an Illinois law designed to undercut teachers’ rights as workers to withhold their labor, 75 percent of the union’s active members must authorize a strike. CTU met and surpassed that bar with 92% of CTU members voting on the issue and 96.5% of those voting endorsing strike action. Its representative body, the House of Delegates, voted by a margin of 4-1 to call the strike April 1.

    Is it democratic that the union demands that all members respect the decision of the vast majority of members to strike? Insisting on solidarity in action after a democratic vote is unusual in our society. In contrast to the cut-throat competition and dog-eat-dog individualism that capitalism cherishes, unions are based on the idea that one’s own well-being is bound up with the fate of others. Collective action depends on trust and a strong sense of shared interest, ideals that underlie democracy.

    The CTU has asked its members to take an action that its opponents describe as illegal. In doing so, the union has made interpretation of its contract a political struggle rather than one that is fought only in the courts. Labor unions have been seriously weakened by acceding to the rules in a political game rigged by wealthy, powerful elites who own most politicians.  In this one-day job action the CTU reminds labor that winning collective bargaining, the 40 hour week, overtime, and social security required direct action. Unions had to engage in activities that were defined as illegal and cast as immoral by those who controlled business, government, and often religious institutions.

    Budget cuts have hurt so many children, especially those most in need of the best services, exposing as crocodile tears the laments of officials who fault Chicago teachers for denying poor, vulnerable children a day of instruction.  Although the media hope parents will be turned against teachers by a walkout that targets school funding, it’s unlikely parents whose communities have been devastated by school closings and whose kids have lost weeks of learning to testing will agree. Here too the CTU has shown what democracy looks like by developing strong collaborations with other unions and social justice groups, from low-wage fast food workers to Black Lives Matter.

    The Chicago Tribune's editorial dismissal of the CTU’s strike as a “tantrum” is a telling indication of the frustration the city’s most powerful business interests and Mayor, Rahm Emanuel experience in dealing with a union that won’t play the usual game of living with cuts and defeats while waiting for friendly politicians to be elected  Although Emanuel and his backers have won victories, primarily school closings, the CTU has with each defeat developed new relationships with parents and community.  Because the union has built strong support at the building level, teachers (mostly women) are not so easily cowed by threats. And few parents from communities of color buy the rationale for tax giveaways that rob the schools of needed revenue, again because the union has worked so diligently in making the political case for fair taxation that pays for school expenditures.

    Chicago’s teachers are not alone in redefining the rules of engagement with governments over school funding and ownership of public education. UK teachers will shortly engage in a national one-day strike, followed by local strikes throughout the summer. From South Africa to Hungary, Kenya to India, teachers, parents and students are resisting dismantling of public education, the process of dispossession.  What makes the CTU strike singular is that it occurs in the U.S. and so implicitly challenges the rest of U.S. labor to break the old rules, working with those most disempowered and most affected by brutal cuts and injustice to fight back as allies.  

    CTU’s one-day walkout is an April Fool's Day present to US capitalism. Surprise! We’re fighting back!

     

    Lois Weiner is a professor of education at New Jersey City University, where she directs the Urban Education and Teacher Unionism Policy Project. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook and read her blog at New Politics.

    A version of this article appears at Jacobin.

  • Why Chicago teachers should support the April 1 walkout

    A new Jacobin piece by Micah Uetricht and Sarah Chambers is a must-read to understand  what's at stake in the April 1 walkout of Chicago teachers. (My own thoughts about the political implications of the strike are in a piece in press.) But for now I want to explain to teachers who may be considering crossing the union's picket lines tomorrow why that would be a very big mistake for them personally. Frankly, I've been surprised by feedback from a self-identified progressive active in opt-out struggles that the CTU's "hard line" about expelling srike breakers is "garbage."   The Chicago media have been encouraging "revolt" by teachers by promoting letters from individual teachers about why they find the strike unnecessary or even immoral.       

    Here's advice from a teacher educator who has also been on strike as a teacher. The way your colleagues will see your teaching when they are respecting the majority vote to strike is that you are collecting your wages (and avoiding fines or legal penalties) while they are forfeiting wages and risking penalties for the common good. Most of your colleagues, on whom you must rely for help and companionship, will regard your crossing the picket line a betrayal of  trust, a refusal to join in a needed struggle to defend educational ideals that the school (system) does not support. 

    Regardless of your reasoning,  your colleagues will NEVER forget. Even if you change schools, your reputation as a strikebreaker will follow you. Forever.  Even if you become an administrator, the people you supervise (and perhaps your peers) will recall this act. Don't cross the line.

  • The Dark Night and the Coming Dawn in Mexico

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    This is the second of three book reviews that will look at what Mexican intellectuals on the left have written in an attempt to understand Ayotzinapa and what it symbolizes and signifies for their country and its future. The first review appeared here. – DL

    Manuel Aguilar Mora and Claudio Albertani, eds., La noche de Iguala y el despertar de México. Mexico: Juan Pablos Editor, 2015. Pp. 382. Photographs. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. (Available only in Spanish at this time.)

    The Night of Iguala and the Awakening of Mexico (as we translate the title of this book), like Sergio Aguayo’s From Tlatelolco to Ayotzinapa, deals with the horrifying killing of six people and forced disappearance of 43 students of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College in the town of Iguala, Guerrero on September 26, 2014.

    How and why did this massacre occur? What interests does it serve? Who does it benefit? And what will be its impact on the Mexican people and movements for political change? Those questions are the subject of this tremendously informative, interesting, and important book edited by two Mexican leftists and with contributions by more than a dozen others who attempt to understand both the historical context for these terrible events and how those events have changed Mexican society and politics.

    The book is also an interesting experiment in political collaboration between the editors, both university professors: Manuel Aguilar Mora, a long-time Trotskyist intellectual and political activist in Mexico, and Claudio Albertani, an anarchist teacher, writer, and activist.[1] The authors introduce the book from their shared revolutionary opposition to Mexico’s violent authoritarian political and economic system. In their introduction they argue, as others will in several essays in this collection, that while Mexico has a long history of extreme violence, the current explosion of tens of thousands of murders, can be correlated to the investments of the great multinational corporations, particularly those involved in the extractive industries, above all mining, and is not simply due to the drug cartels. (This is an argument similar to that of Dawn Paley’s Drug War Capitalism.)

    Aguilar Mora and Albertani adopt Raúl Zibechi’s argument that “the massacre is a form of domination” and a way to expropriate social wealth while crushing all resistance. The also argue that the night of Iguala represents a turning point in Mexican history, having lead to the “radicalization of broad sectors of society” and destroyed any further illusions in the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the party that governed both the State of Guerrero and the city of Iguala at the time of the massacre. They recognize that the protests movements that arose afterwards, having failed to unify, remained dispersed, and that the Mexican left will be challenged to unify both rural and urban protests into a radical movement for social change.

    The book poses several important political questions about the movement as it has existed so far and about its future. But let’s take those up after describing the components of this very valuable book.

    The Night of Iguala is divided into three sections: the first deals with the crime, the second with the context, and the third with the movement. In the first section we find:

    ·      Carlos Fazio’s essay “About the Facts of Ayotzinapa/Iguala” provides a thorough and detailed account of the events of the night of the murders and forced disappearances, making the case that this was a state crime.

    ·      Professor Román Munguía Huato’s contribution, “The Disappeared: Violence, Impunity, and State Terror,” discusses the significance of disappearance as a form of repression and traces the history of disappearances in Mexico from the first—the teacher Epifanio Avilés Rojas who was disappeared in 1969—to the tens of thousand that have taken place in recent years.

    ·      Journalist Luis Hernández Navarro, contributes two stories he wrote, one that suggests the involvement of the Mexican Army in the Iguala events and another from the point of view of the parents whose children were disappeared as they deal with the government officials and their explanations.

    In the second section dealing with the context we have:

    ·      Investigative journalist Flor Goche provides an account of the history of Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Normal School of Aytozinpa (the teachers college where the disappeared students had all studied) from its founding in the post-revolutionary era in 1926 to today, discussing various government’s attempts to starve the school to death.

    ·      Ramón Espinosa Contreras, a graduate of Ayotzinapa and with a doctorate in Social and Political Sciences at the Ibero-American University in Guerrero, and now a researcher at the Autonomous University of Guerrero, writes a fascinating essay, “My Life in Ayotzinapa,” that discusses the history of the school, his early life as a child of a poor family, his entrance into Ayotzinapa in 1960, and his association with future guerrilla leader Lucio Cabañas, and involvement with social movements.

    ·      Ramón Espinosa Contreras also writes an essay, “Guerrero Between Violence and Poverty,” that provides a statistical account of the state’s poverty and deals with issues from forced sterilization to other occasions of mass murder such as Aguas Blancas in 1995 when 17 peasants were massacred.

    ·      Falviano Bianchini’s essay on “Mining and Violence” explores the role of the drug cartels in mining districts in several states.

    Part three dealing with the movement contains:

    ·      Manuel Aguilar Mora’s essay “The Collapse of a Certain ‘Left’” dealing with the devastating impact of the Night of Iguala on the Party of the Democratic Revolution, placing the Mexican political situation in the broader context of the current state of the left in Latin America. (We return to say more about this essay below.)

    ·      Claudio Albertanti’s piece “In Defense of the Anarchists” presents a panorama of anarchism from its origins in the nineteenth century to the Battle of Seattle, the black bloc, and contemporary protests.

    ·      Journalist Luis Hernández Navarro writes in this section an essay on “Anarchism, Provocation, and Protest,” dealing with the anarchist protestors in Mexico, as well as police infiltration and provocation.

    ·      Enrique González Rojo Arthur, teacher, writer, and activist, contributes essays entitled “Capsules to Get Out of the Labyrinth,” a series of short essays with a political program calling for combining election boycott, with a general strike, and the calling of a constituent assembly.

    ·      Finally, Rafael Miranda Redondo, a doctor of philosophy at the Cumplutense University in Madrid, in her “Ayotzinapa and the Society We Want,” provides a long essay of situationist inspiration, with elements of Cornelius Castoriadis and Antoinio Negri among many others, that looks back to 1968 as a way out for the left today.

    The essays are followed by three very useful chronologies put together by Albertani, one on the return of the dirty war to Mexico; one dealing with the history of the normal schools, and one dealing with the events of September 26, 2014 to March 26, 2015. In addition to the many essays, there are also the photos of Mario Marlo, photojournalist and director of Somos el Medio, drawings by Omar Reséndiz (Chirín) and muralist Norberto Hernández, and poems by David Huerta and Rojo Arthur. (A drawing by Norberto Hernández, "I think, then they disappear me," accompanies this review.)

    The book ends with an Afterward by the editors in which they suggest that the election boycott of June 2015 represented a key turning point. They ask, paraphrasing, is this the awakening we were waiting for? They answer, “Yes and no.” As a result of the many protests and the boycott, they argue, “In the Federal District, Guerrero, Oaxaca, and in some other parts of the country there now exists a mass base with a clear consciousness of what is meant by a truly revolutionary struggle.” Yet at the same time they recognize that the radicalization of some sectors of society principally in the south of Mexico is not sufficient to create a new revolutionary movement.

    While this is without a doubt an extremely useful, interesting, and engaging book, still it has some weaknesses. The book’s introduction argues that capital investment, especially mining, is at the center of the upsurge in violence we have witnessed in Mexico, and yet the short chapter on “Mining and Violence” does not provide much information about mining in Mexico and is not convincing. Bianchini argues that Canadian and U.S. mining companies end up working with national drug cartels at the local level and in rural areas where it is possible to pressure governments and communities to accept their deals. Yet, while several mining states are mentioned, it is really only in Guerrero and Michoacán that we have seen the most extreme violence. The drug cartels seem more important than the mining interests. 

    Aguilar Mora and Albertani point out that many disappointed PRD intellectuals and activists have turned to the new political party, the Movement for National Regeneration (MORENA). The authors warn us, quite correctly it seems to me, that, based as it is largely on the charisma of López Obrador, MORENA is likely to repeat the unfortunate experience of the PRD, rounding up working class and middle class people who want a more democratic and egalitarian society and corraling them in a party with a reformist rhetoric and even some reformist intentions, but that is fundamentally committed to capitalism and in reality the existing political order.

    The authors’ case for a new awakening in Mexico rests largely on the boycott. Aguilar Mora and Albertani argue that the election boycott was a turning point for the movement, but that was true only in Guerrero and Oaxaca, or perhaps one might include Michoacan and Chiapas at most. But in Guerrero and Oaxaca, when the Ayotzinapa protestors and the teachers union movement failed to convince their fellow citizens to boycott the election, they decided to peremptorily impose the boycott on other citizens, closing polling places, burning ballot boxes, sometimes alienating local communities. The oganizers never succeeded in taking the boycott movement to a national level and it remained isoalted in just a few states. In retrospect it seems that the boycott may have served not to create a vanguard that could lead a movement, but to isolate the vanguard and separate it from any potential national movement.

    Certainly we can agree with the closing lines of the book, that we still await the rise of a new Mexican workers movement to throw itself into the balance and begin to halt the many injustices—economic, legal, and political—and create a new Mexico.

    Editors Aguilar Mora and Claudio Albertani have produced a book that should be in every university library, in every major public library, and in the hands of those who are concerned about human rights in Mexico.

    [1] I should mention that I am friendly with one of the editors, Manuel Aguilar Mora, and with one of the contributors, Román Munguía Huato, though we also have our political differences.

     

  • Questions to Oklahoma Green Party about Its Endorsement of Bernie Sanders

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    Interview by Jim Brash of North Star Editorial Board, February 26, 2016

    Questions posed to Rachel Jackson, State Facilitator, Green Party Oklahoma Cooperative Council about their endorsement of Bernie Sanders

    1.     Is the endorsement of Bernie a tactical move?

    Our endorsement of Bernie Sanders in the Oklahoma Democratic Primary accomplishes two goals: 1.) to find a way to participate electorally given our state’s repressive ballot access laws, and 2.) to build a base to strengthen our efforts to reform those ballot access laws.

    2.     Why endorse him now?

    The Oklahoma Democratic Party recently decided to allow Independent voters to participate in their primaries. Because we cannot register to vote as Green Party members, many are registered as Independents. We want to encourage them to use their electoral power in the Democratic primary to support the candidate that aligns most with Green Party values. We believe Bernie Sanders represents the best chance for Oklahoma Greens to do that, given the current lack of ballot access.

    3.     How will this endorsement help the Green Party of Oklahoma?

    We hope it will bring attention to our ballot access situation among progressive and leftist voters in Oklahoma. Because of it’s relative obscurity compared to other social justice issues, ballot access is a difficult issue around which to mobilize. We are hoping that we can sustain the support we gain from Sanders supporters in our state and fold it into our ballot access reform efforts.

    4.     Will you be endorsing Bernie in November?

    At this moment, the Green Party of Oklahoma does not intend to endorse Sanders should he win the Democratic nomination.

    5.     What has been the feedback from the Green Party national office?

    We have not received a response from the GPUS national office, though many Greens around the country have responded via social media. Those responses have been divided. Many of them express support for our endorsement given our lack of options for electoral participation in Oklahoma. There have also been a few strongly negative responses from Greens who believe (for various reasons) that our endorsement is problematic. You can likely identify their comments on our Facebook page. The Green Party values local control, and we believe we made the best decision for Oklahoma.

    6.     What has been the feedback from greens in general, about the endorsement?

    From members of the Green Party of Oklahoma, the response has been divided as well, but the majority of the response has been positive. Those who have responded negatively believe we should not endorse any candidate of the two major parties, or believe that his stance on issues such as Israel and the Middle East disqualify him from a Green endorsement. Those who have responded positively see the potential in local coalition building with the progressive Oklahomans the Sanders campaign has attracted.

    7.     Have the Green Party of Oklahoma made endorsements of Democrats, independents, and other non-greens previously?

    We have endorsed Independent candidates in state legislative and city council elections.

    8.     What were the results of those endorsements?

    We currently have a Oklahoma City Councilman, Ed Shadid, who we endorsed and who has successfully represented Green values while in office.

    9.     Why is it so hard to gain ballot status in Oklahoma?

    Oklahoma Greens hold varied opinions on this. I explain it this way. The current ballot access laws create a double bind for the Green Party of Oklahoma, and any other third party seeking access to the ballot here. In Oklahoma, people effectively join political parties by registering to vote. Currently, people cannot register as Greens in Oklahoma because registration is tied to ballot access. This creates a disconnect that makes it difficult to amass the number of Green Party members we need to help us meet the ballot access requirements. In this election cycle, for instance, we would have needed to collect approximately 24,745 signatures, or 3% of the total votes cast in the last gubernatorial election. The numbers of petitioners we would need to collect these signatures exceeds our current membership numbers by quite a bit. There’s the double bind. In order to increase our party membership to attract both volunteer petitioners and funding for paid petitioning, we need ballot access so people can register as Greens so we can increase our party membership.

    I might also add that beyond volunteers, most successful petitioning campaigns pay signature collectors. For instance, the Libertarian Party of Oklahoma was successful in collecting enough signatures (approximately 42,000) to get their presidential candidate on the ballot this November. However, and without citing specific numbers, their national party spent twice the amount of the total national Green Party budget paying petitioners to collect these signatures in Oklahoma. We simply do not have the local or the national financial resources to field such an effort. We have to rely on volunteers. Thus, building our base for future ballot access efforts is our best strategy.

    10.  Do you think the Green Party should endorse Bernie during the entire primary season on a national basis?

    No. The GPOK does not hold this position either. We would much prefer to have the GPUS presidential candidate on our state ballot, and we urge Greens elsewhere who can vote for the Green presidential candidate to do so.

    11.  How does the Bernie Sanders campaign help independent political activism in Oklahoma?

    I think the Bernie Sanders campaign has mobilized independent political activists, making them more visible as a voting block as well. Stereotypical constructions of Oklahoma as a “red state” erase the political progressivism and leftist activism the Sanders campaign has managed to harness. My hope is that regardless of whether or not Sanders wins, independent Oklahomans continue to build and grow the coalitions his campaign has enabled.

    12.  Does a Bernie Sanders nomination, help or hurt the Green Party?

    With ballot access in a limited number of states, it’s hard to imagine a Green Party presidential candidate winning a national election regardless of who wins the Democratic Party nomination. However, I do think the Sanders campaign has brought attention to Green Party values and their increasing appeal to American voters. Politically, I think this is a gain for the Green Party, regardless of who articulates those values and what party he or she represents.

    13.      How do you think his potential presidency would affect the Green Party, going forward?

    I am not sure if it would, particularly as long as Sanders is affiliated with the Democratic Party. I think the bigger barrier for Green reform is the current Congress, even with Sanders as President.

    14.      Are there any other gains, from your perspective, for the Green Party of Oklahoma making this endorsement?

    Other than electoral participation, greater local visibility for our party, and coalition-building for ballot access, none come to mind.

    15.     What would you like to say to greens around the country that don’t agree with this endorsement?

    A couple of things:

    a.) Honor local decision-making and trust those of us on the ground.

    b.) Urge the GPUS to invest more in achieving and retaining ballot access nationwide.

    16.     Where does the Green Party of Oklahoma, sees itself heading & accomplishing post 2016 ?

    We will continue to work with other third parties in Oklahoma to reform the state’s ballot access laws. There are currently several bills under consideration in our legislature (particularly HB 1813 and SB 2181) that reduce the signature requirements for ballot access and forming a new political party. We plan to organize a strong citizens’ lobbying effort around this legislation. We would also like to field candidates in city council elections and possibly the 2018 gubernatorial election as well.

    Originally posted at http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=12463.

     

  • State Terror from Tlatelolco to Ayotzinapa – First of Three Book Reviews

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    This is the first of three book reviews that will look at what Mexican intellectuals on the left have written in an attempt to understand Ayotzinapa and what it symbolizes and signifies for their country and its future. – DL

    Sergio Aguayo. De Tlatelolco a Ayotzinapa: Las violencias del Estado. Editorial Ink, 2015. (This book in Spanish is available in several formats including Kindle, which is how the reviewer read it.)

    The horrifying killing of six people and forced disappearance of 43 students of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College in the town of Iguala, Guerrero on September 26, 2014 had a dramatic impact on Mexico.

    The disappearance and very probably the murder of so many young men, apparently with the collusion of a criminal gang and the police—and some believe the army—suddenly put faces on the terrible violence that had been taking place in Mexico since 2006. To date the Ayotzinapa killings have yet to be solved. The killers have not yet been identified and indicted. This is Mexico.

    The violence in Mexico is really incomprehensible. Neither our reason nor our imaginations can hold before us in our minds the more than 164,000 killed, the 27,600 who have been disappeared, the countless numbers who have been injured, not to mention the hundreds of thousands who have been displaced. Then too there is the femicide, the targeting and murder of women that has become a pandemic in Mexico. All of this is accompanied by the impunity of the murderers and kidnappers, the government’s failed investigations, and the politicians’ evasion and deceit.

    The violence continues to take place in a society where half the people live in poverty, where a fabulously wealthy oligarchy controls the government, and where American, European, and Asian corporations continue to make billions dollars in foreign direct investment, attracted by the low wages and state control over the labor force. All of the political parties are corrupt. The politicians are venal. The outlook is dim.

    Sergio Aguayo – Tlatelolco and Ayotzinapa

    Sergio Aguayo, a professor at El Colegio de México and Harvard Univesity has written a number of books dealing with the issues of human rights, nationalism, politics, and the intelligence services in Mexico. He was in the 1990s a leading figure in the civil society movement working with other groups to win free and fair elections and he continues to speak out on human rights, as he has in this book. If he were an American, Aguayo would be described as a liberal—though that category that doesn’t really exist in Mexico—a man who would reform institutions.

    He writes in the introduction that the Mexican state has to be held primarily responsible for the continuing violence in his country, that the Ayotzinapa kidnappings demonstrate organized crime has created a parallel state, and that the Mexican people will have to organize themselves to take back their government and insure legality.

    While Ayotzinapa appears in the title and is discussed in the last chapter, this seems  to be a book principally about the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968 that Aguayo had been working on for some time and apparently decided to publish last year because of the Ayotzinapa events. So some readers may be disappointed, and justifiably, for though they will find a meticulously researched and annotated account of the Tlatelolco, they will be unsatisfied by a very thin and weak account of the period from 1968 to today, and virtually nothing of interest on the Ayotzinapa disappearances.

    The Democracy Movement of 1968

    Aguayo’s account of Tlatelolco provides an impressive description of the breadth of the pro-democracy movement of 1968 that had sprung up not only among students, but also among working class and middle class people, and not just in Mexico City but throughout the country. Many students were influenced by Pablo González whose book Democracy in Mexico (1965) who criticized the Mexican state but argued against violence.[1] Though most activists were committed to militant but peaceful protest, a small fringe contemplated violence. Carlos Fuentes’ Paris: The May Revolution (1968), about the massive May-June strikes in France, suggested that an initially peaceful movement might take to the barricades described and pictured in his book.

    The Cuban Revolution of 1959 influenced some Mexican youth, though they failed to appreciate the actual relationship between the Cuban and Mexican governments. As Aguayo writes:

    We knew that the United States supported the Institutional Revolutionary Party regime unconditionally; the terrible mistake was the inability—authentic in some, simulated by others—to recognize that the government of the Soviet Union and Cuba formed part of the foreign legion, of the Praetorian Guard, dedicated to protecting the government of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz. Our heroes were the partners of our oppressors. [My translation – DL.]

    The government, working closely with the news media that it controlled, had to “fabricate an enemy,” as Aguayo puts it. So the claims were made that the students and others involved were privileged ingrates, that they were ingenuous idealists, that they were dupes of the Communists—Russian, Cuban, or Chinese—or that they were tools of the United States. They were called anti-Patriotic, traitors. In his memoir the president called them “bloodsucking parasites.”

    The Government Against the People

    The Mexican government carried out what Aguayo calls a “general offensive” aimed at separating the students and other movement activists from other sectors of society, but particularly from the working class. Aguayo writes,

    They vaccinated union workers with “hundreds of meetings” in which they presented “the government version of the facts” and in the factories they created “permanent groups to prevent student incursions.” (My trans. DL)

    The author argues that various branches of the Mexican state—President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz; Luis Echeverría, the Minister of the Interior; Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios, head of the secret police; and the generals Luis Gutiérrez Oropez and Mareclino García Barragán—each had different understandings, misunderstandings, and conflicting objectives in attacking the movement, none of which excuse them, since they all intended to violently suppress it. The president wanted the movement crushed before the Olympic Games being held in Mexico City within a week. Minister of the Interior and future president Echeverría had promised the U.S. Embassy that they would end the student agitation before the games.

    President Díaz Ordaz told Javier Barros Sierra, rector of the University that he would end the conflict between the democratic movement and the government peacefully. But that was just a political maneuver, as cover for the unleashing of the military on October 2, 1968. The last demonstration by the democratic student and civic movement numbered about 8,000 people who believed that the government was finally going to sit down and negotiate with them—but the government sent between 5,000 and 10,000 soldiers to crush them. Hundreds were killed in the confusing assault—most today believe around 300. The leaders of the movement were taken to Military Camp #1, the cadavers removed, the wounded taken away. The sidewalks scrubbed to wasy away the blood.

    Aguayo holds Díaz Ordaz to be absolutely responsible for the Tlatelolco Massacre, which, Aguayo argues was similar to another that the president had ordered in San Luis Potosí in 1961 when he was the Minister of the Interior in the administration of Adolfo López Mateos.[2]

    While the magazine Por Que? brought out a special addition with photos of wounded and dead students, most of the press and the other media gave out the government’s story that sharpshooters had fired at the Mexican Army. In fact, there were sharpshooters, but they were also part of the Mexican Army. The government asserted that only seven people had been killed, a preposterous claim given the photos that had been published abroad. The United States and England, the Soviet Union and Cuba all cooperated with Mexico, working to suppress any actual account of the events. Yet the government and its media failed to put forward a very convincing story, because, as Aguayo writes, it didn’t understand that in history the account is as important as the bullets.

    Where there was a free press the foreign media told the truth: The New York Times wrote that “federal troops fired rifles and machine guns at a peaceful student demonstration.” Le Monde likewise reported that “the army and police opened fire without warnng,” saying as well, “it was a massacre: there exists no other word to describe what has happened in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas.” The Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, was wounded by a bullet and robbed of her money and watch by a cop, wrote vivid, veridical accounts of the massacre, making her a hated enemy of the Mexican government.

    Still governmental officials and most of the country’s major intellectuals defended the government’s version of events, the cowardly attack on the soldiers by the dupes of foreign powers. Even the beloved and esteemed former president Lázaro Cárdenas rallied to the ruling party he had helped to create and affirmed the government’s official story, helping to win over the national and international left.

    Anywhere in the country that the democratic movement raised its head, a demonstration or a march, the police and the army moved in. Hundreds were arrested. Everywhere in the world, the Mexican government attempted to quash its critics. Virtually no Mexican official spoke out. The exception was the writer and poet Octavio Paz, at the time Mexican Ambassador to India. Paz resigned his position in India, calling Tlatelolco “an act of State terrorism pure and simple.”

    Beginning in 1969 a number of intellectuals began to tell the story of what actually happened: Julio Scherer García, director of Excelsior; Ramón Ramírez in El movimiento estudiantil de Mexico, Octavio Paz in Posdata; writesr Carlos Monsiváis, Carlos Fuentes, y Elena Poniatowska, Jacinto Rodríguez Mungía, Kate Doyle and Susana Zavala.

    Tlatelolco to Ayotzinapa

    Aguayo devotes the last chapter of his book to the path from Tlatelolco to Ayotzinapa.  He creates a periodization of repression in Mexico. The first period lasts from November 1969 to August 1985. During this period President Luis Echeverría Álvarez both create a political democratic opening while also continuing to engage in the violent repression of government opponents. Aguayo mentions but does not explain or detail the “dirty war” of the 1970s during which the government disappeared some 500 left activists, many of them from armed leftist guerrilla groups.

    Aguayo’s second period goes form 1981 – 2000 (the second set of dates don’t line up with the first), during which he argues that the Mexican Army refused to continue to be used for repression of the civilian population without express conditions. The Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado government closed down the Federal Security Administration (LaDFS), an organization that operated with impunity while its agents enriched themselves, says Aguayo. This came as the result of the agency having kidnapped and murdered a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency agent in February of 1985. LaDFS was shut down, but its corrupt agents were not prosecuted and many went off taking their talents to the country’s criminal organizations.

    The financial crises of the 1980s and 1990s debilitated the state, and at the same time the presidentialist system began to weaken partly as a result of political reform. The North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994 led to the Chiapas Rebellion led by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), another indication that the state as the only legitimate source of violence was weakening. Aguayo suggests that the drug deals followed the EZLN’s example or at least acted similarly, establishing regional redoubts beyond government control. This led in the end to what he sees as the development of two states: one headed by President Enrique Peña Nieto and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the other headed by organized crime.

    Aguayo says that both President Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón missed opportunities to right the ship of state. Fox promised a “Truth Commission” to look into past abuses, but then gave up the idea. Calderón, writes Aguayo, “…had the courage and the wisdom to throw himself against organized crime. But he lacked will, information, temperament, and compassion with the victims.” And, “he was indifferent to the cost in human lives.”

    Peña Nieto, says Aguayo, began by professionalizing the security forces, improving coordination between them, and putting emphasis on prevention. But then came the typical weaknesses of the government. “His government has not recognized the magnitude of the challenge lacks a coherent national and regional policy that attacks the root of the problem, and shows great indifference to the cost in human lives.” Aguayo then spends a few pages on Ayotzinapa, offering nothing of significance.

    Aguayo’s account of the period from 1968 to 2015, really more an outline than a narrative or analysis, is extremely disappointing, and not only because it is so thin. It is also clear that Aguayo, despite write that the Mexican people will have to create a just society, really looks to the state to reform itself. This is clear from his comments about Fox, Calderón, and Peña Nieto, in each of whom he at first saw some hope of change. Aguayo’s liberal outlook looking for change through the system, rather than changing the system is the fundamental weakness of this book.

    [1] I have to admit that took the title of Pablo González’s book for my own, Democracy in Mexico (1995). Under international law titles cannot be copyrighted. I only wish my book had had the success of González’s.

    [2] Aguayo had made this argument earlier in his book La Charola: Una historia de los servicios de inteligencia en México (Mexico: Grijalbo, 2001), pp. 135-36.

     

  • Should Cuba Remain a One-Party State?

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    The one-party state is a very controversial question that few of the left-wing critics of the Cuban regime have been willing to address. What follows is an attempt to explore, from the left, some of the issues around this topic.

    In the first place, the abolition of the Cuban one-party state is one thing, separate and apart from the political system that would replace it, whether without or with many political parties. In reality the Cuban Communist Party (PCC, its Spanish acronym) is not a party – which would imply the existence of other parties – but the organ that monopolizes the political, social and economic life of Cuban society. This monopoly – explicitly sanctioned by the Cuban Constitution – is based, among other authoritarian mechanisms, on the control of Cuban society through the so-called mass organizations that function as transmission belts for the decisions taken by the PCC. For example, the CTC, the official trade union central, is the transmission belt that allows the Cuban state to maintain its monopoly of the organization of Cuban workers. Many left critics of the Cuban regime will agree that workers (and all other Cubans) should have the right to organize themselves independently of the PCC to struggle for their own interests. Taking this notion to its logical conclusion would imply the abolition of the one-party state system, including its control of the mass organizations that function as the transmission belts for the Cuban Communist Party.

    Cuba’s dominant system is going through a transformation – likely to accelerate after the historic leaders of the revolution pass away – towards the Sino-Vietnamese model of state capitalism under the direction of the PCC, which means that the need to abolish the one party state system with its transmission belts will remain in effect.

    The function of political parties

    The modern political parties came into being in the nineteenth century as suffrage expanded. As sections of the ruling class felt increasingly threatened, they organized themselves politically to defend their class interests, typically in conservative, liberal and, sometimes, Christian parties. There have been times when a ruling party represented one whole social class, as was the case of the Tory party in the U.K. in various historical periods. More frequently, however, different parties have represented different sectors of the ruling class. Liberals and conservatives not only represented material conflicts within the ruling classes, as for example the interests of the great landlords against those of the new industrial capitalists, but also ideological conflicts of pre-capitalist origin concerning the power and role of the Catholic Church in society.

    Aside from representing different sectors of the ruling classes, these parties also incorporated intermediate sectors of society, such as independent professionals and small businesspeople, and tried to coopt popular expectations and struggles in a manner that would not threaten the fundamental interests of the powerful. In many occasions, the so called middle classes and strata also organized their own political parties especially in parliamentary systems with proportional representation (which historically propitiated the creation of numerous parties.) In Cuban political history, we have the case of the Ortodoxo Party founded by Eduardo Chibás, a party principally based on the middle classes but with a growing multi class support. But the fact that this party implicitly or explicitly accepted Cuban capitalism does not mean that it was an expression or had an organic relationship with the ruling classes.

    That means that, historically speaking, the relationship between class and party has not been unequivocal: the ruling class has usually not been a monolith and has generally not been represented by a single party. This has also been certainly the case with the working class, the representation of which has been assumed by such diverse parties as social democrats, communists and social Christians. In the case of the classical social democracy that represented the working class through its close links with the unions, its growing conservative tendencies were not merely ideological but also represented the growth of a union bureaucracy, which based on the power that the unions had acquired, had the possibility of extracting sometimes significant concessions from the ruling classes. These concessions helped to demobilize the workers and solidified a bureaucracy more concerned with protecting its huge investments in the union infrastructure than in risking everything in pursuit of a revolutionary break (like in the Europe of the first postwar period) or in resisting imperialist war making (1914). This was the history of the very powerful and supposedly revolutionary Marxist German Social Democracy, whose bureaucratic-oligarchic model was portrayed by the Italian-German sociologist Roberto Michels in his classic Political Parties.

    With respect to the Russian Bolshevik party: although Stalinists as well as Cold War apologists in the Western world held on to the myth that there was no difference between the Bolshevik and Stalinist parties, numerous historians (Stephen Cohen, Alexander Rabinowitch and William Rosenberg among others) have demonstrated that before undergoing the process of bureaucratic degeneration that began with the Civil War that took place from 1918 to 1920, this revolutionary party was in reality quite pluralist and democratic. Among many examples, I can cite the fact that although Bolshevik leaders such as Kamenev and Zinoviev opposed the October Revolution, they continued to be important party leaders after the revolution, and that although Bukharin publicly adopted and agitated for a political line radically opposed to Lenin’s regarding the peace of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, he remained as party leader for many years afterwards. Far from the “monolithic unity” defended by the Castro brothers, the Bolsheviks were characterized not only for the plurality of political positions, but also for a chronic tendency to factionalism that generally did not become an obstacle to “unity in action.” It is for all these reasons that almost 80 years ago Leon Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed harshly criticized the Stalinist theory about political parties and social classes that tried to justify the one-party state:

    In reality classes are heterogeneous; they are torn by inner antagonisms, and arrive at the solution of common problems no otherwise than through an inner struggle of tendencies, groups, and parties. It is possible, with certain qualifications, to concede that “a party is part of a class.” But since a class has many “parts” – some look forward and some back – one and the same class may create several parties. For the same reason one party may rest upon parts of different classes. An example of only party corresponding to one class is not to be found on the whole course of political history – provided, of course, you do not take the police appearance for the reality.

    With respect to the multi-party systems of capitalist societies: there is no doubt that political democracy has seriously deteriorated throughout the world. Political parties are increasingly devoid of content and subject to the demands of the shallowest kinds of political marketing, a process that has been aggravated by the huge costs of political media campaigns, particularly in the U.S., which in turn has closed the access to the big media for nascent movements and candidates who oppose the existing system. Also, parliamentary bodies have been declining, and many of their powers have been taken over by the executive branches, which unscrupulously use the doctrine of state secrets to protect their newly assumed prerogatives. As a result, political apathy, ignorance, and abstention have become prominent features of capitalist democracy. While this is fatal to any notion of democracy built on the participation and control of an active and informed citizenry, is has certainly been convenient and highly functional to a capitalist system that structurally privileges private and corporate economic power at the expense of public regulation and democratic control from below.

    After the One-Party State

    But let’s suppose that Cuba’s one-party state will be abolished. Whether we want it or not, new parties will develop once repression and the legal and constitutional obstacles against independent party organizations have ceased to exist. Shall we demand then that those new parties are suppressed, or instead of that, shall we engage wholeheartedly in the propaganda and political and ideological agitation against the inevitable neoliberal and reactionary wave that generally has succeeded bureaucratic Communism throughout the world? Those are the circumstances, when we could struggle, for example, for a new Constitutional Convention to publicly debate the critical question of the kind of society that should replace bureaucratic Communism, debates that should include, of course, our arguments in favor of the construction of a socialism based on democracy and liberty. This debate would also be a strategy to prevent the immediate recourse to electoral campaigns and their marketing focused not on political programs but on individuals, many of who are going to be financed, among others, by the rich Cuban-Americans in Miami. To confront this plutocratic possibility, we could, for example, campaign for the exclusively public financing of all electoral activity, including free access to the mass media and distribution of public funds according to the popular backing for each political group.

     

    But let us assume the optimal case – unfortunately very unlikely under the current circumstances – of a broad mass movement replacing the bureaucratic one-party system with a revolutionary and democratic socialism based on the fullest liberties and on worker, peasant and popular self-management. In that case, what would be the meaning of the unity that many Cubans have wished for? To the extent that there are common interests – material as well as ideological and political – we should aim for a unity based on joint political activities and negotiations to form alliances based on shared political interests and principles. But this need not be the “monolithic unity” propagated by Raul Castro and other revolutionary leaders, which has meant censorship and the suppression of different point of view even within the ranks of the revolutionary government. As Rosa Luxemburg put it, freedom is for those who think differently. It is mistaken and dangerous to assume that there will not be important conflict of interests as well as of points of view among the popular classes under a revolutionary and democratic socialism.

    There is no reason to think that class conflict exhausts all possible social conflicts, including those based on strictly material questions. For example, one fundamental questions for any society, be it socialist or capitalist, is the rate of accumulation, or in other words, what part of economic production is to be immediately consumed and what part is to be saved to insure the reproduction of society and the improvement of the standard of living. In capitalism this is decided through the decisions of the ruling class within the framework of the market economy that favors and consolidates its power. Under socialism, this decision would affect every social group because it would determine the resources to be available resources for each work and community center. It is to be expected that differences over this question will develop between, for example, those who want to enjoy a better standard of living today and those who are more concerned with the standard of living of future generations. In that case, how would those differences and conflicts be organized into coherent and systematic alternatives so they are decided democratically? That would be the critical function of parties under socialism, educating and agitating in favor of alternative visions of the road that society can or should take.

    It is well known that political parties, like many other types of organizations, have shown pronounced bureaucratic and oligarchic tendencies. But there are measures that can be adopted to compensate and fight those tendencies, such as combating the apathy and abstention among the rank and file through democratic debate and the continual practice of real power. An active, informed and involved membership in the affairs of their parties and society is the best guarantee against bureaucratization. There are also organizational measures that can reinforce that participation and control from below, such as mechanisms that assure its local and national democratic control of union and party functionaries, and the maximum transparency with respect to party policies and its internal functioning, aside from its right to remove any leader through party and union referenda. (There are people who have advocated a ban on reelection for union and party leaders. Although this proposal is worth discussing, I believe that it would be counterproductive and possibly undemocratic and in any case would not prevent manipulation on the part of the leaders that have been officially removed.)

    I hope that this discussion on the one-party state continues. The topic is too important to ignore it; it is one of the kernels of the thoroughly undemocratic system ruling in Cuba.
    —–

    *Samuel Farber was born and raised in Cuba and immigrated to the United States before the 1959 Cuban Revolution. He has written many books and articles about Cuba including Cuba Since the Revolution of 1959: A Critical Assessment, published by Haymarket Books in 2011.

    An earlier version of this article appeared in Spanish in ObservatorioCriticoCuba.org on May 27, 2015.

    Reposted from http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=111764

    Copyright © 2008 Havana Times. All rights reserved.

     

  • Getting From Here to There: A Response to Barry Finger

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    I must admit that I’m somewhat reluctant to write a response to my friend Barry Finger’s response to my article in the Winter 2016 issue of New Politics on Bernie Sanders while the Democratic presidential candidate race between Hillary Clinton and Sanders is still going on. Nevertheless, I will do so.

    First, it should now be clear, in the wake of Sanders’ victories in yesterday’s Democratic caucuses, that Barry’s assertion that “the Sanders challenge within the Democratic Party has come to its natural conclusion” is not justified. Let’s not make grand pronouncements of this sort until we’re far closer to the Democratic National Convention.

    Second, it’s certainly my contention that “American democracy is more reactionary and less responsive to the will of the masses than most all other democratic capitalist societies.” I’ve been saying this for years. One should note that the Constitutional Framers never intended for the United States to have political parties in the first place. (Think back to James Madison’s obsessive fear of “faction” as expressed in the Federalist Papers.)

    I do wish, however, that Barry had noted that if you have to win governorships, mayoralities, county executives, and the presidency to fend off the veto possibility by the executive branch, you “naturally” get two very broad parties competing for office. Such is the nature of the U.S. political system. This should be challenged, of course, by changing electoral laws – which probably requires electing officials who want to change said laws – but one has to first acknowledge the problem.

    I have already discussed much of what Barry brings up. I did make it clear that I think it is highly unlikely that the whole of the Democratic Party could ever be taken over by the left in the way that Max Shachtman and then Michael Harrington came to believe. I discussed the DP superdelegates, and I noted that People for Bernie and other Sanders supporters are well aware of the problem of the superdelegates. I even argued that the Sanders campaign should, I hope, come to be the foundation of an independent left-wing (not merely “liberal,” even in the American sense) party democratically controlled by its members.

    And regarding the superdelegates: they were established when the DP became more neoliberal as a whole in the early 1980s. The DP had become more democratic internally in 1965-78 because left-wing forces (left labor activists, civil rights activists, feminists) forced them to do. With the end of the post-World War II economic boom, the rise of the New Right and the New Democrats (the Democratic Leadership Council, etc.) – only then did the superdelegates come into existence. But every left-liberal and radical doing “DP work” is certainly aware of the problem.

    So what are we arguing about then? I suppose we’re arguing about whether or not it’s ever permissible to support Democratic Party candidates. I say yes. Barry, it seems, still says no. Which means that, for example, he won’t be supporting Debbie Medina’s run for State Senate in New York’s 18th District, despite the fact that Medina is an open socialist inspired by both Sanders and Kshama Sawant. Forgive me, Barry, but I can’t join you there. I would feel hopelessly sectarian if I didn’t support Medina.

    In regards to how Dennis Kucinich was ultimately replaced by Marcy Kaptur – who is supporting Sanders, I should note – I must ask: if Kucinich had been an independent, or a Green, how would his fate have been any different? He still could have been redistricted out of existence. I never argued that the DP wasn’t dominated (not 100% controlled, contrary to what Barry says, but certainly dominated) by forces that are hostile to labor and leftists. Barry also should have checked on this matter, as it appears that redistricting Kucinich out of office was more a Republican plot than a Democratic one. See here. This only makes sense, as Republicans have dominated the Ohio legislature for some years now.

    I am as aghast at the behavior of the Congressional Black Caucus (most of whom never had anything resembling a pro-worker class-struggle perspective) and most of the Congressional Progressive Caucus as is Barry. But my analysis of the reasons for the behavior of many CBC and CPC members differs from his. As I stated, the U.S. has a particularly horrible campaign finance system and therefore many CPC members end up taking at least some corporate campaign cash. If they endorsed Sanders, that cash flow would dry up. (Example: Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren have voted perfectly on financial regulation issues – and Brown explicitly supports a Robin Hood Tax – yet some in finance still give them money. If they supported Sanders over Clinton, I suspect that would change.) If these elected officials became independents, the campaign finance problem would not suddenly go away. Being an elected non-Democrat (or non-Republican) doesn’t mean you just can do whatever you want very easily. It doesn’t solve the “committee problem” unless you have a new party that can very, very quickly sweep away the Democrats. And only do we not currently have a party, but even if we had the numbers to form one, it would not just immediately sweep away the Democrats everywhere – not even if all Sanders supporters joined it. It will most likely take some time for the DP to be displaced even if the Sanders campaign leads to a new mass party.

    I have made it clear that I think that an independent labor party should have been formed decades ago. It did not form. The most progressive wing of what remains of U.S. organized labor doesn’t have the power to form an labor party that could win very many elections all by itself. I wish this was not the case. But given this reality I do not blame democratic, left-wing unions like National Nurses United (NNU) for supporting Sanders or supporting left Democrats in general. What choice do they have? Ignore electoral politics? That isn’t an option. Are NNU really sellouts, Barry, as you imply? One should not so offhandedly condemn movements that strive for legislative victories and the organizers who work for those campaigns, even if those campaigns are left DP campaigns. Such campaigns are vital organizing tools for building a mass left, not inevitably stepping stones to selling out.

    Barry still seems to be saying that socialists, and the labor movement, must stand outside the DP at all times and that an independent and successful left/labor party could have been formed at some point in the past half century if only left-liberals and socialists had mustered sufficient willpower. But every attempt at building such a party has failed because the constituencies that socialists must reach have had no interest in the various “third parties” of the last 50 years. One must ask: if the social forces in and around the left wing of the DP (left-wing feminists, labor unionists, Blacks, Latinos, and environmentalists) were too feeble to even weaken the neoliberal hold on most of the Democratic “Party,” weren’t those forces also far too weak to build a credible third party? The creation of a party cannot be put ahead of the movements that would be the basis for that party. I thought Barry understood this.

    Now, it seems that times are finally changing. I hope that Sanders’ seriousness about a “political revolution” that lasts beyond his campaign does lead to a real movement of the left and not a repeat of the Jesse Jackson experience of 1988 (i.e., Jackson shutting down the Rainbow Coalition) even if that movement initially mostly takes the form of “Sanders Democrats” getting elected. We can’t yet be sure what will happen. But note, Barry: every European social democratic party privileges its “electeds” at its convention, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the DP superdelegates. Would a labor party, or an ideologically leftist party, in the U.S., automatically be any different? Would electeds would even abide by convention decisions if they didn’t have to? There’s nothing holy, so to speak, about workers’ parties, unless they’re revolutionary workers’ parties – and mass revolutionary workers’ parties currently exist almost nowhere in the world. Absent a commitment to workers’ democracy, radical class-struggle politics, and structures guaranteeing one member, one vote at conventions and in party referenda, any structure can turn in on itself.

    As to Sanders’ “acquiescence” to the DP leadership – I’ve already commented on how little it really means. No, he won’t run as an independent if he loses the DP primary (unless perhaps if there’s a split in the Republican Party – which I certainly hope for, as does Barry). Yes, he’ll most likely say “vote Clinton to beat Trump.” (As many of his voters will do anyway, no doubt, out of understandable fears of a Trump presidency – not that Clinton’s foreign policy would be to the left of Trump’s in any way.) And that, I believe, will be it. The sheer nastiness of the Clinton/Sanders contest tells me that nothing more “non-defiant” than that is coming – I highly doubt that Sanders will be actively working for Clinton, appearing at her general-election events, at the Democratic National Convention, etc. It would be too embarrassing for him, if nothing else. It would make many of his supporters feel betrayed. One should also note that Sanders, in an interview on MSNBC, made it clear that he’s running for president as a Democrat because it was the only way he could get mainstream media coverage. This is absolutely true. Does this sound like “loyalty” to the Democratic Party? Establishment Democrats who’ve thrown hissy fits on television – Donna Brazile in particular – certainly don’t see it that way.

    It is not likely that anything that happens in the near future, regardless if Sanders wins or loses the Democratic presidential party, will make it impossible to work towards creating the independent democratically-run mass leftist party that we need. Nor will waging electoral class war inside DP primaries (“Sanders Democrats” vs. Establishment Democrats), particularly given the hatred that the two sides now feel for each other (or have you not been following social media, Barry?), make that impossible. If anything, that class war inside the DP will finally make a split in the party possible. There is historical precedent for this in Vermont: Jesse Jackson’s run for president in 1988 led to the creation of the Progressive Party, the most successful statewide left-wing “third party” in the U.S. For details, see this link. Jackson may not have planned for anything like the VPP to appear, but appear it did.

    My original point was simply that if Marxists abstain from the Sanders campaign then we will be utterly ignored by millions of working-class people whom we now finally – finally!! – have a chance of reaching. I refuse to let this chance slip through our fingers just because the DP is dominated by ruling-class politicians. Again, if the only choice for U.S. socialists is dirty hands or no hands, we should damn well make sure that we have hands.