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  • Ending Anti-Black State Violence

    In 1992, the world witnessed African American Rodney King being brutally beaten by Los Angeles policemen. In 1999, Amadou Diallo, an unarmed Black immigrant from Guinea, was shot 19 times by five New York City policemen outside his apartment. Sean Bell was shot to death by NYPD in 2006 on the morning of his wedding. And just in 2014, Officer Darren Wilson murdered Mike Brown in broad daylight in the city of Ferguson, Missouri.

    All these incidents sparked an uptick in activism against police brutality. It was not until the murder of Mike Brown, however, that people actually stayed in the streets. Because of the courage of the people in Ferguson, #BlackLivesMatter emerged as a formidable counter-hegemonic political force.

    AN IDEOLOGICAL INTERVENTION

    However, #BlackLivesMatter began more than a year before the events in Ferguson. The movement started in response to the 2013 murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of his murderer, the white Latino vigilante George Zimmerman. It was in July 2013 that Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and I created #BlackLivesMatter as a political intervention and mobilizing project, making use of social media and taking action on the ground.

    We created #BlackLivesMatter in the midst of a profound sense of love, grief and rage on both the personal level but also communally, knowing fully that the trauma that Black people and allies of conscience in this nation were experiencing could be debilitating or catalyzing. We introduced #BlackLivesMatter into the lexicon not merely as language, but as a much-needed ideological intervention in a society that has systematically disregarded Black bodies and treated them as disposable ever since they were kidnapped from Africa and violently enslaved throughout the Americas.

    It was with this depth of understanding and as trained leftists that the three of us took to creating a project to address structural racism. We are out to expose the fact that police brutality and extrajudicial killings are not outlier activities but part of a systematic attempt to keep Black people subjugated and bound.

    It was as though our entire Black society was attempting to make sense of how, despite a mountain of evidence, a vigilante could stalk and murder Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager, and still be let off. And so we embarked on a grand political project that, with the use of technology, we hoped would be visceral, because undoubtedly millions of people across the world had felt this same grief and outrage.

    Many Black youth-led organizations emerged during this same period. So when approximately a year later, 18-year-old Mike Brown was gunned down by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, representatives from Dream Defenders, Black Youth Project, Millions Hoodies and #BlackLivesMatter were quickly dispatched to support the people and the protests in Ferguson. In particular, we responded to the retaliation that the courageous people of Ferguson were experiencing based on their righteous dissent.

    A FORMIDABLE DECENTRALIZED NETWORK

    It was in this period that #BlackLivesMatter emerged as a national and international rallying cry, as nearly 500 Black people mobilized to Ferguson at the urging of BLM leaders Darnell Moore, Monica Dennis and Patrisse Cullors. As a result of that convergence of Black people, activists returned home and formed dozens of chapters across the nation. In a short period of time, BLM emerged as not only a political platform and ideological intervention, but as a formidable decentralized network of chapters.

    Prior to Ferguson, the human rights organization Malcolm X Grassroots Movement had researched and reported the reality: every 28 hours a Black person is killed by a police officer, security guard or vigilante in the US. To be clear, this is not just happening to Black men in the US, but also to Black women and girls. We saw the video footage of a young Black woman, Tasha McKenna, being beaten, tased and suffocated by several corrections officers. And questions still linger about the death of Sandra Bland, a young Black woman who allegedly committed suicide in jail after a routine traffic stop.

    These tragic stories have enraged millions of people in our nation and illustrated the profound need to shut down a system that relies on the criminalization of Black bodies. They make visible the ways in which Black lives are being brutalized in the material world, on a structural level.

    THE NEO-CONSERVATIVE AGENDA KILLS

    The levels of violence Black people are experiencing the US is a result of a neo-conservative political and economic agenda that is directly connected to efforts to systematically undermine the gains made by previous Black liberation struggles, particular the Civil Rights Movement.

    During the 1980s, a neo-conservative agenda emerged under the leadership of Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Sr. This agenda was not strictly partisan. Other presidents, like Democrat Bill Clinton, further enshrined laws and policies that would systematically devastate Black communities. The War on Drugs, for example, embraced by successive Republican and Democratic presidents and Congresspeople, led to a legalized all-out assault on Black people.

    The Broken Windows Theory was one of the outgrowths of the War on Drugs. It was originated by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in the 1980s and introduced at a time when the neo-conservative agenda was attempting to find its footing. The current NYPD Commissioner William Bratton was the first to implement the Broken Windows Theory in the 1980s in Boston, Massachusetts. Bratton concluded that cracking down on “disorder” or “petty crime” would prevent “violent crime”. And “pre-emptive” measures like racial profiling were a key feature of the implementations of the Broken Windows Theory.

    This theory turns the relationship between poverty and crime on its head. Poverty causes crime; crime does not cause poverty. Broken Window policing continues to result in the criminalization of poverty, while being touted as a landmark of crime reduction. Such policies have led to high rates of disproportionate arrest, fines, incarceration and mistreatment of Black people at the hands of police, such as in the case of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old resident of Baltimore, Maryland who was detained for running from the police and who subsequently died from injuries he sustained at the hands of six police officers.

    Under the guise of improving the “quality of life”, hyper-policing of low-income neighborhoods has become a mainstay, coupled with the criminalization of non-violent acts of “disorder” such as jaywalking, having your feet up on a subway bench, or selling loose cigarettes. Very similar to Jim Crow laws in the US South, these policies identify actions to classify Black people as criminal, using the underlying racist ideology that Black people must be controlled with brute force. Thus, racialization and the criminalization of poverty are inextricably linked.

    Black people, of course, have become the primary targets in every phase of the criminal justice system from arrest to prosecution, sentencing to administration of the death penalty. Only armed with the color of their skin, the murders of Rekiya Boyd, Islan Nettles, Aiyana Stanley Jones and Tamir Rice are consequently justified under the realities of structural anti-Black racism.

    TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY MOVEMENT-BUILDING

    Despite the alarming rates of murder and brutality against Black people, the public outcry, mass mobilizations and extensive advocacy have led to only trivial reforms. Orwellian solutions such as body cameras, addendums to police training, the introduction of “community policing” strategies and the recruitment of more personnel have been the preferred response of lawmakers.

    Sadly, all of these proposals and tactics fail to address the root cause of the violence that social justice advocates are working tirelessly to upend, and often offer so-called solutions that further entrench the ideas that policing and control are the answer to systemic human rights violations.

    Though graphic videos of intense confrontations between riot gear-clad police and uarmed civilians have captured the most attention, police killings are not the only concern of Black organizers and activists. Blacks in the US are acutely aware that we are not a monolith, nor is the movement. And so an expansion of the framing of state violence has been key to understanding the ways in which diverse Black bodies are all vulnerable to oppression and explicit forms of violence from government forces and institutions.

    Creating spaces that embrace diverse Black bodies is key to this movement period. In order to do this, an embodied practice that has emerged in the #BlackLivesMatter network is that of prioritizing the needs of those most marginalized. For example, the #BlackLivesMatter network has made the prioritization of Black trans- and cis-gendered women central to their political ideology and programmatic work, as these communities are often targeted by the state and experience interpersonal violence that must be stopped.

    Other Black-led formations like the Black Alliance for Just Immigration and Black Immigration Network have been engaged in protecting Black undocumented immigrants from deportations, which happen in disproportionately high numbers due to racial and religious profiling. These vulnerable and marginalized populations are often not seen as the typical Black persons targeted for violence, however, they are – and they arguably have always been.

    BEYOND THE POLITICS OF “RESPECTABILITY”

    The emerging movement is characterized by its disavowal of respectability politics that frames “Black issues” in a narrow, patriarchal frame centering on the aspiration to assimilate and obtain full citizenship for African-Americans. With great acknowledgement of the dramatic progress and gains made by the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement, many unrecognized struggles were pushed by the wayside. A new politics is emerging among strategists that makes these marginalized people within Black communities and their issues of main importance in order to achieve improvements that will work for all.

    As for its predecessors, taking non-violent direct action is a must for the current movement. Communities are tired of the status quo and know that in order to make visible the grievances of Black community members, these tactics are a necessity. From the shutting down of highways, train stations and sites of commerce, to rallies and actions in strategic places, multiracial, intergenerational people have been convening to interrupt the system and declare that there will be no business as usual until Black lives matter.

    What is needed is not merely reform, but the fundamental transformation of culture, policy and institutions to address the root causes of structural racism. Campaigns such as Reparations for Torture Victim survivors in Chicago and Safety Beyond Policing in New York are examples of visionary initiatives that make demands that would lead to the reconstituting of the public safety net.

    There must be a divestment from the oppressive, punitive systems of policing and incarceration and an investment of resources to benefit those who need it most, those who have been systematically disenfranchised. Also important is establishing reparatory justice for those who are victims of brutality and the surviving family members of those who have been murdered.

    Linking these efforts to campaigns that are pushing back against international trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership are the new ways that Black communities are grasping at the root, like dear sister former-Black Panther Assata Shakur admonished members of our movements to do. And in focusing on root causes, the movement is necessarily raising real questions about the nature global capitalism and the displacement and criminalization that are key features of it.

    TRANSNATIONAL COMMITMENTS TO UPEND GLOBAL CAPITALISM

    Connecting to the international community is key to US-based Blacks winning some semblance of justice in the face of structural racism. However, any gains in this field will be short-lived if there is only one-sided solidarity. The reality is that Black communities across the globe have always connected for mutual support, and the beginnings of a similar practice are emerging today.

    Communities from Kenya, Venezuela, Germany, South Africa, Brazil, Israel, Palestine and other countries have been demonstrating solidarity, and US-based activists have reciprocated. Building Black power across continents and nations is critical. Formations such as the Pan African Network in Defense of Migrant Rights, an Africa-wide network based in Kenya, #BlackLivesMatter and its chapters founded outside of the US, the European Network for People of African Descent and others, help materialize the possibility of a global movement to challenge neoliberalism and global financial institutions.

    Black people in other regions like Europe and the Caribbean experience the systematic devaluation of Black life as well. Remnants of colonialism reinforce modern discriminatory practices, often coupled with practices exported from the US. From mass deportations to mass deaths in the Mediterranean Sea caused by Western nations that continue to prey on African countries and other economically depressed nations, forcing them into oppressive trade policies that cause families to make difficult decisions to migrate, it is imperative that our movements continue to take a visible stand against the injustice and decry abuse whenever governments put the blame on refugee and migrant populations.

    Key flashpoints in history have often led to a reinvigoration of social movements, but the very nature of social movements is that the scope of work is beyond that of a singular issue. As Caribbean-American poet Audre Lorde aptly stated, “there is no such thing as a single issue struggle, as we do not live single issue lives.”

    The hallmark of this movement is that there is not one issue. The movement is for racial justice that goes beyond one geographic community and one particular Black person. The struggle will always be for democratic societies that work for all of us. Truly, Black people and other marginalized communities have always struggled for transformational justice believing that another world is possible. But it is clear we will not get there until all Black lives matter.

    From ROAR mag:
    https://roarmag.org/magazine/opal-tometi-black-lives-matter/

  • Ellen Meiksins Wood: A Marxist who put Class at the Center of Her Analysis

    Image

    Ellen Meiksins Wood, the wife of former Canadian New Democratic Party leader Ed Broadbent, has died of cancer at the couple’s Ottawa home at the age of 73.

    She was a noted intellectual figure on the international Left, whose studies of class, politics and political ideas influenced several generations of thinkers and activists.

    Wood’s writings were thought-provoking and luminous.

    She first came to a wide Left audience with The Retreat from Class: A New ‘True’ Socialism (1986). This was a collection of her intervention in debates, conducted through the pages of New Left Review and the Socialist Register, that took place in the wake of Eric Hobsbawm’s famous polemic, The Forward March of Labour Halted? (in Marxism Today, 1978 – expanded in book form with replies from supporters and critics in 1981).

    Many Left intellectuals not only backed Hobsbawm’s view that the material importance of class institutions in shaping politics was declining with the drop in numbers in the industrial working class, but extended this to question the relationship between class and politics itself.

    Post-Marxists began to argue that a plurality of ‘democratic struggles’ and social movements would replace the central place of the labour movement in politics. Some contrasted  ‘civil society’ a more complex and open site of democratic assembly to the alleged ‘monolithic’ vision of politics embodied in the traditional labour movement. In a diffuse way this was associated with the once fashionable idea that “a “post-modern” society dissolved reality in ‘simulacra’. Others claimed it  meant the end of “grand narratives” – or more bluntly, that the ideas of socialism and the Left was splintering so quickly that only a fragmented series of ‘critical’ responses were possible against neo-liberal regimes of ‘governance’.

    Wood argued for the importance of class in shaping not just political interests but the potential constituency of  radical socialist politics. Fights over power were at the centre of Marxism and these were part and parcel with disputes over exploitation and the appropriation of the social surplus. The ‘new social movements’, the women’s movement, the rising ecological movement, campaigns for racial and sexual equality, were interlaced with class conflicts. Democracy could not be abstracted from these relations. To appeal, as writers such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe did, to the formation of a new hegemonic strategy based on  relations of “equivalence” between various democratic demands ignored the basic facts about class and power. Like her comrade Ralph Miliband, Wood saw socialism as an effort to bring together people around the central issues of exploitation and oppression in democratic organisations that could shape politics. This had historically been the result of conscious action, and this kind of collective work was needed more than even against a very real and growing grand narrative – the reality of neo-liberal economics and government assaults on working people, and the unemployed – in building a new regime of capitalist accumulation.

    In academic as well as left-wing activist circles Wood became known for her “political Marxist” approach to history. This focused on the issue of the transition from feudalism to capitalism and social property relations. The Pristine Culture of Capitalism (1991) was a summary of this approach. It was also directed against the views of Perry Anderson (editor of New Left Review) and Tom Nairn (today best known for his Scottish nationalism). In the early days of the Second New Left they had asserted  that the so-called ‘archaic’ British state was a reflection of a an equally ‘pre-modern’ capitalism. They also claimed that the ‘supine’ bourgeoisie – who abdicated political rule to the ‘aristocracy’ (which they claimed continued to dominate UK politics in the early modern period) – had been mimicked by a supine working class. In later writings Anderson talked of the need for a new wave of democratic modernisation to bring the country into line with the ‘second’ bourgeois revolution of modernity.

    Wood, by contrast, pointed out that the UK had a developed capitalism, indeed it was the most ‘modern’ form of capitalism. Its state form was related to its early advance, and its allegedly old-fashioned trappings – from the monarchy downwards – had not thwarted capitalist expansion but arisen in relation to needs of its own bourgeoisie. The labour movement had developed in struggle with these forces, not in deference to them.

    On all the essential points present-day Britain was no more, no less, ‘modern’ than anywhere else in Europe or in any contemporary capitalist state. Indeed it was for long a template for bourgeois democracy. In particular Wood attacked the claims of Tom Nairn that in some fashion Ukania (his ‘funny’ word for the United Kingdom, modelled on the novelist (1880 – 1942) Robert Musil’s term for the Austro-Hungrian empire, Kakania – shit land) owed its economic difficulties to its constitution.  Economic problems  arose at root from the general contradictions of capitalist accumulation, in a specific form. The problems of British democracy were due to its capitalist character – it is hardly alone in having a monarchy to begin with – not to the issues Nairn-Anderson dreamt up about its sonderweg.

    More widely Wood is known as an advocate of a version of the ‘Brenner thesis’ (after Robert Brenner’s article “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” 1978). The creation of market relations in British agriculture were considered to be the foundation of modern capitalism. The essential condition was separation from non-market access to the means of subsistence, the means of self-reproduction. Wood argued that it was the capitalist transformation of agriculture, followed by the rise of merchant class expanding these forms through international trade, created the ground of Western capitalism.  It was also responsible for the distinctive state forms that emerged in Britain.

    In “The Agrarian Origins of Capitalism” (1998) Wood summarised her views:

    The distinctive political centralization of the English state had material foundations and corollaries. First, already in the 16th century, England had an impressive network of roads and water transport that unified the nation to a degree unusual for the period. London, becoming disproportionately large in relation to other English towns and to the total population of England (and eventually the largest city in Europe), was also becoming the hub of a developing national market.

    The material foundation on which this emerging national economy rested was English agriculture, which was unique in several ways. The English ruling class was distinctive in two major and related respects: on the one hand, as part of an increasingly centralized state, in alliance with a centralizing monarchy, they did not possess to the same degree as their Continental counterparts the more or less autonomous “extra-economic” powers on which other ruling classes could rely to extract surplus labor from direct producers. On the other hand, land in England had for a long time been unusually concentrated, with big landlords holding an unusually large proportion of land. This concentrated landownership meant that English landlords were able to use their property in new and distinctive ways. What they lacked in “extra-economic” powers of surplus extraction they more than made up for by their increasing “economic” powers.

    Wood’s political stand was firmly within the Marxist ambit. In 1999 she stated (in “The Politics of Capitalism“):

    …all oppositional struggles—both day-to-day struggles to improve the conditions of life and work, and struggles for real social change—should be informed by one basic perception: that class struggle can’t, either by its presence or by its absence, eliminate the contradictions in the capitalist system, even though it can ultimately eliminate the system itself. This means struggling for every possible gain within capitalism, without falling into the hopeless trap of believing that the left can do a better job of managing capitalism. Managing capitalism is not the job of socialists, but, more particularly, it’s not a job that can be done at all.

    This broader focus on the links between capitalism and state forms continued in her study Empire of Capital (2003). This analysed how the “empire of capital” (rather than the vague ‘globalisation’ or the ‘rhizome’ of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire) shapes the modern world through“accumulation, commodification, profit maximization, and competition”.

    Wood’s later works, Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (2008) and Liberty & Property: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Renaissance to Enlightenment (2012) were ambitious attempts to narrate and analyse Western political thought in the light of class categories.

    Wood had a profound influence on countless people.

    She was a democratic Marxist, a feminist, a perceptive writer and a force for good.

    Homage to her memory.

    Reblogged from Shiraz Socialist.

  • What’s At Issue in the Siege of Madaya: Mass Starvation, or a Few Fake Pics?

    ImageThroughout the world, people have been shocked by the scenes of starving people in the Madaya concentration camp in southern Syria, besieged by the Assad regime and its allied death-squad Hezbollah (which has invaded Syria from Lebanon). Some 40,000 people are trapped, besieged and starved as a weapon of war by the dictatorship which has used every conceivable means to maintain its power over the last five years; people are reported to be eating grass, insects and cats and dogs.

    Yet it appears that the main task confronting leftists – i.e., opponents of exploitation, oppression and injustice, advocates of a “another world is possible” – is once again to find whatever excuses, whatever obfuscation, whatever mitigation they can on behalf of the tyrannical fascist regime responsible.

    Perhaps not unexpectedly, though, they are often as incompetent as they are mendacious. I am referring to a number of allegations about several false images that have published in some media. As examples, I will just use three links that were sent to a list-serve I am involved with, the GreenLeft Discussion Group:

    1. From the Baathist organ El Akhbar: ‘Fake Images of Starvation in Madaya Surfing the Web’ http://el-akhbar.com/en/Fake-Images-Starvation-Madaya-53082/(while obviously media connected to a fascist state is not leftist media, it is being spread by leftists)
    1. ‘Madaya: BBC caught recycling footage from Yarmouk’ https://thewallwillfall.wordpress.com/2016/01/11/madaya-bbc-caught-recycling-footage-from-yarmouk/, and
    1. ‘West Media Starves Truth in Syria’, by the indefatigable defender of the Assad regime, Finian Cunningham, on the oddball conspiracist site ‘Information Clearing House’ http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43915.htm

    Before looking at the charges, we need to underline a couple of important points.

    Starvation siege is real

    First, the starvation siege is real (like a host of other medieval sieges, accompanied by massive aerial bombing, throughout Syria). Reports from Doctors Without Borders (MSF: https://www.msf.org.au/media-room/press-releases/press-release/article/syria-siege-and-starvation-in-madaya.html), Amnesty International (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/01/harrowing-accounts-of-life-under-siege-in-syria/), the Red Cross (http://eaworldview.com/2016/01/syria-1st-hand-from-madaya-first-impression-really-heartbreaking/), the United Nations, the Syrian-American Medical Society (https://www.sams-usa.net/foundation/index.php/componentarticle/2-uncategorised/245-madaya-siege-report), among countless others, testify to this.

    The UN humanitarian chief, Stephen O’Brien, said about 400 “are in grave peril of losing their lives” if not evacuated immediately (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/madaya-un-plan-to-evacuated-400-starving-people-from-village-after-being-trapped-by-assad-regime-a6807006.html), and MSF has reported that 23 patients in the health centre it supports have died of starvation since the beginning of December. MSF Director of Operations, Brice de le Vingne, claiming this “is a clear example of the consequences of using siege as a military strategy,” laid the blame squarely on the Syrian regime:

    “Madaya is now effectively an open air prison for an estimated 20,000 people, including infants, children and elderly. There is no way in or out, leaving the people to die. The medics we support report injuries and death by bullet and landmine wounds from people that tried to leave Madaya” (http://www.msf.org/article/syria-siege-and-starvation-madaya-immediate-medical-evacuations-and-medical-resupply).

    Thus, even if every image published were fake – which would be a problem, certainly, and call into question motivations etc – it wouldn’t alter the facts of what is going on.

    The issue of false images

    Second, the overwhelming majority of images would appear to be genuine. According to chief official of the UN representative for the Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Yacoub El Hillo, “It was at times difficult to determine whether what we were seeing was actually fabricated or exaggerated,” but after stepping foot in Madaya, he confirmed, “It is not. It is not. I am sad to say it is not. These are true stories coming out of Madaya” (http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-12/united-nations-confirm-images-of-starving-children/7084492).

    However, it is true that some images have been published which are not from Madaya, whether intentionally or otherwise. Given that the numbers of images coming out of this terrible war are probably in the millions, it is hardly surprising that fake images abound on all sides. The absolute experts on it are the regime and its armies of propaganda outlets, spin doctors, death squad allies and the Russian and Iranian Fox News equivalents. The difference is that, whereas in the case of Madaya, it appears a few fake images have slipped into the story of a genuine tragedy, the regime’s propagandists sometimes create “events” that are backed in their entirety by nothing other than fake images.

    One good example was the ‘Adra massacre’ of late 2013. According to the Putinist spin machine RT, the militia Jaysh Islam, based in the bombed out, besieged, Gaza-Plus ghetto of East Ghoutta, invaded Adra, another Damascus suburb held by the regime, and carried out a particularly gruesome massacre of some 80 people of the largely minority (Christian and Alawite) population. The problem is that the entire “evidence” produced for this “massacre” was a bunch of images all of which were fake (see: http://lopforum.tumblr.com/post/70411153632/alleged-adra-massacre-collated-media).

    In comparison with this level of dedication to manufacturing “facts” out of air, the relative handful of fake images produced about Madaya, a crisis that cannot be denied, simply does not compare (although such unprofessionalism and sloppiness is not alright – especially because it gives the tyrant-lovers an opening to divert attention from the real issue of mass starvation to their conspiracies and irrelevancies).

    But now let’s look at the three stories by Assad-lovers who believe finding fault with the oppressed and terrorised is more important than condemning the oppressors and terrorisers.

    The article ‘Madaya: BBC caught recycling footage from Yarmouk’ (https://thewallwillfall.wordpress.com/2016/01/11/madaya-bbc-caught-recycling-footage-from-yarmouk/) shows that the BBC used footage from the Yarmouk Palestinian camp in southern Damascus in June 2014 in a video about Madaya. Yes, clearly a mistake was made. The article shows both youtubes with the image of a young man shouting about the situation. However, on the Madaya video, this scene from Yarmouk lasts a total of two seconds. The rest would appear to be Madaya.

    Why would the BBC deliberately fake one image for a mere two seconds, “to build the climate for war on Syria” as the Assadists would have us believe, when they have plenty of genuine footage, especially given that the genuine footage is so much more harrowing than a healthy-looking young man shouting? Surely this is just minor incompetence?

    The Baathist el-Akhbar source (‘Fake Images of Starvation in Madaya Surfing the Web’ http://el-akhbar.com/en/Fake-Images-Starvation-Madaya-53082/) provides several images which were taken at other times. It begins with one about a smiling young girl which Al-Arabiya news has claimed is a Madaya resident:

    “This photo that has gone viral on the web to win the world sympathy and turn it into a global condemnation of the Damascus government has been taken in Amman, the Jordanian capital, and belongs to a Syrian refugee covered in an al-Arabiya news channel report in January 2014, where she was called Syria’s Mona Liza.”

    This is true. Here is a story about the original photo: http://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2014/01/118759/picture-of-a-syrian-mona-lisa-selling-gum-in-ammans-streets-goes-viral/

    It is certainly incompetent of Al-Arabiya to post its own photo and claim it is something else. But although Akhbar claims the photo has “gone viral,” I must say that I had not seen it until now on countless pages about the Madaya crisis. There have been a number of photos of starving people, including children, that have gone viral, but none of them that I’ve seen a lot of are among these handful of fakes.

    One interesting thing here is that Akhbar shows that this one is from Jordan’s massive Zaatari refugee camp, which houses 100,000 who have fled Assad’s terror; the starving boy she is being compared to is actually from East Ghoutta; another image of a starving man is from East Ghoutta; and a starving baby is also from Yarmouk. Incompetent, even deliberately, perhaps; but what these Baathist mouthpieces try to skip over is that the reason photos of starving children and adults can be found in Yarmouk and East Ghoutta is the same that abundant images are available from Madaya: yes, the Assad regime also bombs, besieges and starves East Ghoutta, Yarmouk, Moademiyah, Daraya and countless other poverty-stricken southern communities which resist its rule.

    For the apologists, mixing up which children are being starved to death by Assad is a much bigger crime than starving all of them to death. For East Ghoutta, it claims the man “died of cold, malnutrition and disease,” but of course it does not tell us why. With the baby in Yarmouk, it says “Palestinians have long been taken hostage by the ISIL and al-Nusra Front terrorists. ” However, the photo was taken on March 31, 2014, according to Akhbar, yet ISIS did not invade the camp until April 2015! The starvation, as is well-known, was due to the long-term Assad-regime starvation siege on Yarmouk, nothing to with ISIS. Baathist organs are thus just as incompetent as Al-Arabiya, and in this instance, far more malicious. Nevertheless, this Akhbar article at least has some real exposure, unlike 2 seconds of a 2 minute video, as in the first source.

    The third source, Cunningham’s article (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43915.htm), is mostly just his wild Baathist propaganda, but it does touch on the question of images, and gets it all wrong. Cunningham begins:

    “Take the image of the malnourished little girl whom the BBC and the British Independent newspaper claimed was from the Syrian town of Madaya. Turns out the girl is from south Lebanon. Her name is Marianna Mazeh. The photo published widely this week byWestern media is from three years ago … Turns out too that Marianna’s family are infuriated that her forlorn image is being circulated for propaganda purposes. “I live in Tayr Filsey [south Lebanon], not Madaya, and I am fine,” the little girl told Al Manar news agency.” [Go to Cunningham’s article for embedded links.]

    Trouble is, the image that Cunningham shows at the BBC and Independent links – a baby in a hood that has indeed “gone viral” and is seen on a great many Madaya solidarity pages – is not the same image as the one that “Marianna” claims to be in his other link. “Marianna” in Lebanon claims to be the same smiling young girl that Akhbar claims is a Syrian refugee in Jordan – so while Cunnningham gets his images wrong, Cunningham and Akhbar make rival claims about who the smiling girl is.

    Cunningham assures us that “she is now aged seven and apparently has made a full recovery from her earlier emaciated condition,” noting “the reason for her previous illness is not clear.” Of course, the smiling girl photo was not of an emaciated girl with an illness.

    Regarding the claim that “Syria’s Mona Liza” is actually “Marianna” from Lebanon, the link in question is a video of Marianna and her father speaking. Is it the same girl several years later? While not impossible for a face to change shape, it is unusual for eye colour to change from green to dark. At no time in the video does Marianna or her family show a photo of Marianna several years earlier, except a blurry one within a family photo, still less a copy of the actual photo which they claim to have taken.

    Like much else on the Internet, therefore, the Baathist exercise in disproving either propaganda or incompetence turns out to be propaganda and incompetence. Meanwhile, Assad’s war against the southern communities goes on.

    The Political Context

    Around a million communities throughout Syria are currently under siege, and of 52 active sieges, 49 are imposed by the regime, 2 by rebels in Idlib (of the Shiite villages Foua and Kefraya) and one – Deir Ezzor – by both ISIS and the regime (https://breakthesieges.org/en).

    The context of Assad’s starvation siege of Madaya is his stepped up war against the working-class communities around Damascus which have been in revolt against the regime since the outset, and stepped up Russian bombing all over the south (where, needless to say, Russia engages in its “war on ISIS” in a region where ISIS does not exist, like elsewhere). In the context of the current flurry of imperialist-driven “peace” discussions, the regime is going out of its way to consolidate its position with an all-out carpet-bombing and starve-till-you-submit campaign.

    It is deeply ironic that the pro-Baathist propaganda machines claim the “propaganda” around Madaya is, yet again, you guessed it, part of some imaginary imperialist war-drive against the nice “elected, secular government” of Assad (a particularly egregious example of this pro-Baathist propaganda, oblivious to facts is this shitty piece: (http://blackagendareport.com/madaya_victim_of_war_against_syria). These people, who presumably still haven’t noticed some 16 months of actual U.S. bombing of Syria – bombing everyone except Assad – have reality turned on its head.

    The imperialist and Russian Vienna “peace process” aims to get the regime and selected opposition representatives to form a “transitional” authority, which would keep Assad in power till at least March 2017, after which “elections” would allegedly take place. The U.S. has now explicitly accepted this timetable for Assad to remain in power another 14 months (http://news.yahoo.com/apnewsbreak-us-sees-assad-staying-syria-until-march-081207181–politics.html).

    In the meantime, this “transitional” regime, and Russia, the U.S. and various other countries currently bombing Syria, would together launch an all-out war against ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, and any other opposition militias deemed to be “terrorists” by these countries. An initial list drawn up by the Jordanian monarchy included the names of 160 rebel groups (http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/jordan-presents-list-160-terrorist-groups-syria-international-council-2106399989)!

    In the initial discussions, the U.S. and other western governments pushed for a 6-month “transition” period in which Assad would remain in power (note that even this 6 months, or even one day, was rejected out of hand by every wing of the opposition, who agreed to negotiate with Assad only on the basis that he resign at the beginning, not end, of the transitional regime).

    However, as analyst Scott Lucas explains, these earlier goals to get the process moving earlier (and finished earlier) were “ unlikely to be met amid disputes over which opposition and rebel groups are acceptable, continued Russian and regime bombing of opposition areas and assassination of rebel commanders, and Assad’s rejection of discussions until “terrorists” have been defeated” (http://eaworldview.com/2016/01/syria-daily-us-plan-assad-stays-until-march-2017-in-political-transition/).

    Put another way, once the regime and Russia responded to these meekly put western proposals by continuing this bombing, assassinating, rejecting and so on, the U.S. and the West decided, OK, let’s give Assad an extra year to finish bombing the opposition to bits, assassinating more leaders, starving more communities to death, torturing to death thousands more, and hence properly defeating all the troublesome “terrorists” (i.e., everyone fighting Assad), who, after all, are no more loved by the US than they are by Assad and Russia.

    In particular, given that the opposition rejects the imperialist blueprint for Assad to remain in power throughout the alleged “transition” period, it seems most likely that imperialist rulers have decided to look the other way while Assad bombs and starves their support base into submission; and so given this extra year or more by the “international community” to continue bombing all these “terrorists” (aged from under one to 100 or more), Assad is now going for broke to fulfil this international expectation.

    Commenting on the delays by the UN and other international organisations, Ahmed Moadamaini, representative of the Coordination Committees of Moadamiyeh, another southern town under siege, claimed “quite frankly, today the street no longer trusts the United Nations and considers them partners in these crimes.” In reference to the international plan to keep Assad in power till 2017, Ahmed further noted that:

    “After all this misery, we are sure that the UN, in one way or another, doesn’t want Assad to leave… so they do not make a move to stop this disaster taking place and to try him for war crimes.”

    UN special envoy Staffan de Mistura claims this alleged “political solution” will be facilitated by “local ceasefires” in bombarded and besieged areas, but, according to reporter Imogen Lambert, “Syrians say that this forces them out of their homes and cities, and allows Assad to gain further ground in opposition-held regions,” giving as an example the Assad regime “issuing strongly worded threats to Moadamiyeh that the city will be annihilated if locals do not immediately evacuate, with sieges intended to put more pressure on locals to accept deals.”

    However, “we would rather die honest and free than live in humiliation and slavery,” according to Ahmed (http://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/indepth/2016/1/8/starved-into-accepting-a-political-solution-in-syria).

    Drop Food, Not Bombs

    For those less concerned with whitewashing fascist regimes and being apologists of the use of starvation as a war tactic, the slogan “drop food, not bombs” became a rallying cry:

    “The UK has shown it can drop bombs in Syria: they are no help to the starving. Now it is time to show what good the UK and its armed forces can do for people inside Syria. Protect civilians: Begin RAF food aid drops to Madaya now” (http://leftfootforward.org/2016/01/syrians-call-for-raf-food-drops-on-madaya-where-people-are-starving-to-death/; also http://www.thestruggle.org/air%20drop%20food%20to%20towns%20under%20siege%20in%20syria.htm, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2016/01/12/snp-mp-calls-for-uk-to-dr_n_8961776.html).

    Meanwhile, the international campaign over the starvation in Madaya did score an important success, in forcing the regime to allow the UN to bring in food, thus temporarily breaking the starvation siege. For all the nonsense talk about a “propaganda” campaign uses fake images to beat the war drums, the reality is that the campaign brought food to children’s stomachs.

    Importantly, solidarity came from the region as well. Palestinians in Yarmouk refugee camp, similarly besieged and starved by the regime, sent their solidarity on a number of occasions (https://syriafreedomforever.wordpress.com/2016/01/04/messages-of-solidarity-with-besieged-madaya). Palestinian children in Yarmouk sent a message to Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah: “O Hassan the Trumpet [a derogatory name for the ‘resistance’ leader]: The road to Jerusalem does not pass through Madaya or Yarmouk. Try another one” (https://www.facebook.com/RadioFreeSyria/photos/a.382885705129976.91927.363889943696219/959717220780152/?type=3&theater). Likewise, hundreds of Lebanese demonstrators blocked the Beirut to Damascus highway to protest Hezbollah’s involvement and show solidarity with Madaya (http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Lebanon-News/2016/Jan-09/330983-protesters-block-masnaa-crossing-over-madaya-siege.ashx#).

    Meanwhile, a group of Lebanese Shiites published a document rejecting the siege and Hezbollah’s role in the war in Syria, rightly comparing the “siege logic” to tactics used by Israelis against Arabs and Palestinians for decades, and they condemned the sectarian displacement of population in Syria, declaring full solidarity with the Syrians demanding freedom. They reject Hezbollah’s claim to be acting on behalf of the Shia (https://twitter.com/mustafafahs/status/685527418040270848)

    Madaya, and the rebel-besieged towns in Idlib

    While a small victory has been won, it must be noted that this aid had been held up despite the UN knowing for some time how desperate the situation was. As the ‘Break the Sieges’ site (https://breakthesieges.org/en) explains:

    “The UN is choosing not to deliver aid to the besieged areas in Syria without the Assad regime’s permission. This is permission the UN does not even need, since Security Council resolutions 2165, 2191 and 2258 authorise it to deliver aid without the regime’s consent. Unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles are being created as people starve, in some cases just a few minutes away from stockpiled aid.”

    It seems that one reason for this was to appear so-called “even-handed,” by delaying aid to Madaya until its arrival could be synchronised with aid arriving in the besieged Shiite towns Foua and Kefraya in Idlib. While this may sound very fair, the reality was that people were starving to death in Madaya by the day, as delays continued, while this was not the case in Foua and Kefraya.

    And here may be the place to say a few words about these sieges. The Baathist cheer squad has made much of these two sieges, claiming they allegedly don’t get the same coverage as the 49 sieges the regime is imposing on opposition communities.

    Foua and Kefraya are not simply “Shiite villages”; they are armed regime outposts in opposition-controlled Idlib province. Surrounded by rebel-held territory, it is hardly surprising that the rebels launch offensives against regime-held territory. Irresponsible claims that they are targeted “because they are Shiite,” and the rebels of course “hate the Shia,” ignoring the fact that they are regime camps, are irresponsible. Moreover, one reason the rebels haven’t prioritised taking these towns, despite being vulnerable and completely surrounded, and instead have pushed south into (mostly Sunni) south Idlib and Hama province, is precisely because of opposition to the rebels within these towns.

    However, what this has meant is that the rebels have tended to increase or reduce the pressure on these towns in response to greater or lesser regime pressure on besieged towns in the south, such as Zabadani and Madaya. By thus using them as bargaining chips, however, the rebel leadership is effectively locking in the sectarian logic pushed by the regime. A rebel leadership with a less sectarian outlook than some of the actors in Idlib (especially Nusra) would make genuine anti-sectarian overtures to the Shia communities in these two towns, like the deals they have done with small Alawite communities in neighbouring Hama (http://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/even-assads-supporters-are-baulking-now#full – notably, Nusra is less prominent in the Hama front, which is dominated by Ahrar al-Sham and the Free Syrian Army).

    Actually, there is some evidence that non-Nusra rebels, even Ahrar al-Sham, have tried to resist the sectarian logic driven by the regime and its Iranian backers. Notably, during the negotiations to end the regime-Hezbollah siege of Zabadani (a town nearby Madaya) several months back, where Ahrar al-Sham negotiated on behalf of the Zabadani population directly with Iran, the Iranian-Hezbollah demand was for a complete population swap between Zabdani and Foua/Kefraya. Ahrar, backed by other rebel groups, rejected this plan for mutual sectarian cleansing.

    In any case, however, there is a difference between legitimate military offensives and actual siege. The difference is that in a siege, civilians are not allowed in and out to obtain food and so on, under threat of violence. If the Idlib rebels are imposing actual siege on Foua and Kefraya, then this must be condemned like all sieges (and of course, it is condemned by every international declaration on Syria; see Amnesty’s even-handed condemnation of both sides: https://t.co/eune0Fd7I8).

    An important difference exists, however, related to the question of power in Syria. Only the Syrian regime has an airforce. Apart from using it to bomb the country back to the Stone Age, it also uses it to drop food – and arms – to the besieged communities in Idlib. This is one reason people are not starving in these two towns, though the situation is reportedly grim. In addition, the Syrian Red Cross entered Foua and Kefraya in December, with the rebels’ authorisation, and evacuated 450 wounded pro-Assad fighters and civilians as part of the final Zabadani deal (http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-evacuation-idUSKBN0UB0DE20151228).

    In contrast, it is not only in Madaya, but also in other towns besieged by Assad – towns that haven’t got a mention during the Madaya crisis, such as Moademiyah – that people are dying of starvation. Thus the mantra of being “even-handedly” giving focus to rebel-besieged towns where no one is starving had the effect of keeping the focus away from other towns where they are.

    All sieges must end. But when people are being deliberately starved to death, anyone claiming to believe in justice and to oppose oppression knows what the priorities are. ‘Drop food, not bombs’ to break the siege was the slogan that arose from genuine solidarity.

    This post originally appeared here.

  • The End of Progressive Hegemony and the Regressive Turn in Latin America: The End of a Cycle?

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    We offer the following translation in the wake of the legislative elections in Venezuela on December 6, 2015 which saw the right-wing Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (Democratic Unity Roundtable, MUD) decisively seize control of the National Assembly from the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (United Socialist Party of Venezuela, PSUV), and the recent election to the Argentine presidency of conservative candidate Mauricio Macri, formerly the neoliberal mayor of Buenos Aires, who defeated the Kirchnerist candidate Daniel Scioli, a figure himself on the Right of Peronism. The present essay by Massimo Modonesi was written prior to those events, but it grapples with a question that has only become more pressing in their aftermath: Whither Latin America?

    ***

    The experience of the so-called progressive governments in Latin America (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Uruguay and Venezuela) seem two have entered a critical phase which some authors have called the end of a cycle, opening up a debate on the character of the regional conjuncture with important strategic implications for the immediate future.1 I will defend, in a synthetic way, the idea that, in a strict sense, the cycle has not ended, nor is it nearing its end in the short term, understanding by cycle the period of the exercise of government of progressive forces; at the same time, however, we can and must identify and analyze the close of the hegemonic phase of this cycle, with the consequences that this implies for the medium term.

    To do this we begin with the characterization of the progressive Latin American cycle as a totality of different versions of passive revolution – that is, following the intuition of Gramsci, a series of processes of significant but limited structural transformations, with a conservative undertone, pushed forward from above and through demobilizing and subordinating political practices.2 These are expressed principally through the devices of caesarism and transformism as modalities of emptying out, from top to bottom, channels of popular organization, participation and protagonism.3 Passive revolution is a formula that seeks and achieves a hegemonic exit to a situation of an equilibrium of forces, or a “catastrophic equilibrium” – a formula reflected in the experience of Latin American progressivism in the decade of the 2000s. We can analyze the current moment through this lens in order to problematize and deepen our understanding of the hypothesis of the end of the cycle, by highlighting a central and determining feature of the conjuncture: the relative loss of hegemony, which is to say the growing incapacity to build and sustain a broad cross-class consensus, and strong popular roots, both of which characterized the earlier stage of consolidation of these governments.

    In effect, the phase of hegemonic consolidation, which was repeatedly expressed in the results of elections and plebiscites, appears to have ended. That phase was forged fundamentally through the effective exercise of a series of state- and party- mediations, displacing the right from strategic institutional lymph nodes and ideological apparatuses of the state, and installing in their place a series of idea-forces, slogans, and political values of a national-popular character, such as sovereignty, nationalism, progress, development, social justice, redistribution, and plebeian dignity, among others. In some countries, this phase was accompanied by a direct confrontation with attempts at conservative restoration, either through coup attempts or other extra-institutional forms – as in the cases of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, but also in Argentina during the recent agrarian conflict. The outcomes of these attempts left the right-wing of these countries deeply weakened and, as a consequence, opened up a path toward a more profound and far-reaching hegemonic practice of the progressive governments, including the reformulation of constitutional frameworks and in so doing the generation of the scenario for the so-called “epoch of change.”4

    This phase seems to have definitively ended. At least since 2013, a point of inflection is perceptible, with certain temporal and formal variations across different countries, a shift from a more progressive profile to one tendentially more regressive.5 This turn is particularly evident in the most recent period in the budgetary responses to the economic crisis that is plaguing the region, which privilege capital at the cost of labor and the environment. It is also evident in the attitude assumed by these governments in relation to social movements situated to their left. The regressive turn has tended to harden discursively and materially with time, as in the case of repressive measures adopted against recent mobilizations in Ecuador.

    Gramsci maintained that one can and must distinguish between progressive and regressive caesarisms. I would add that this antinomy is also an interpretive key which can be applied to the analysis of diverse forms and distinct phases of passive revolutions, since it allows us to recognize diverse combinations and progressive and regressive features, and the predominance of either one of these in successive moments of the historical process.6

    From the beginning, diverse tendencies have coexisted inside of the blocs and social and political alliances that have supported progressive Latin American governments. If in the initial phase the progressive features dominated, contributing to their denomination as progressive, one can identify a later tendential conservative turn which operates in a regressive sense with respect to the earlier progressive features of the hegemonic phase in the exercise of power by the progressive governments. This change in direction manifests itself organically in the heart of the blocs and alliances which sustain these governments, and expresses itself further in the orientation of public policies, justifying itself, from the optic of the defense of positions of power, due to the necessity to compensate for the loss of transversal hegemony through a movement toward the Centre.

    This centrism, incidentally, would seem to contrast with the logic of Left-Right and people-oligarchy polarizations which characterized the emergence of these governments, supported by the eruption of strong anti-neoliberal movements and the later confrontations with the conservative restoration attempts by the Right that opened up doors for hegemonic consolidation. At the same time, if we follow the hypothesis of Maristella Svampa of a return of populist devices, a real, organic and political movement toward the Centre does not exclude the use of confrontational rhetoric, typical of the populist format; although, tendentially, this would have to, and probably will, be moderated in the interests of greater coherence between form and content.7

    In any case, we are witnessing a fundamental, historical, and structural turn in the political composition of these governments, and, therefore, of a significant period in the political history of contemporary Latin America.

    The slide towards a regressive profile is more noticeable in some countries (Argentina, Brazil, and Ecuador) than in others (Venezuela, Bolivia, and Uruguay), since in the latter cases the social and political blocs of progressive power has remained relatively intact; strong cleavages have not opened up to the Left, and the Right remains relatively weak (except in the uncertain Venezuelan scenario where this assessment is debatable). Although the molecular displacements at the level of social and political alliances, the influences of classes and class fractions and social and political groups, and their counterpart in the reorientation of public policy, are the foundational phenomena of the period, we will mention here, as an example – for reasons of space and because of the objective difficulty in realizing such a complicated analysis in all of these areas at the scale of Latin America – only some of the most visible reflections in the sphere of political parties and leaderships.

    In Argentina, the conservative turn is quite evident in the candidacy of Daniel Scioli in the Frente para la Victoria (Front for Victory, FpV), someone who is not, to use an Argentine expression, a Kirchnerist in his kidneys (del riñon kirchnerista), in contrast with the Vice presidential candidate Carlos Zannini, who had sanctioned an adjustment of the Peronist “miniature political system” (using an expression of historian Juan Carlos Torre) toward the Centre-Right which was set in motion in the final years of the gradual weakening of Kirchnerism.8

    In Brazil, it has been some time since various authors began to signal a genetic mutation, aside from the scandals of corruption, in the interior of the Workers Party (PT). The sociologist Francisco “Chico” de Oliveira identified it in the emergence of the ornitorrinco, a hybrid figure, part trade unionist, part financial speculator, installed in the management of immense pension funds which navigate the financial markets.9 In this sense, the possible return of Lula would not substantially modify the political orientation assumed by Dilma, in the same way that no change of orientation occurred when she replaced him; the turn toward the Centre has manifested itself in the conjuncture above all through the diminution of social spending in comparison to the persistent direct and indirect support to the process of capital accumulation.

    The same tendency has appeared in the Ecuadorian case since the displacement of sectors of the Left internal to the Alianza País (Country Alliance, AP) party and the selection of Jorge Glas, clearly identified with the private sector, as the vice presidential candidate to run alongside Correa in the 2013 elections.10

    In Uruguay, the regression is evident at the ideological level in the change of leadership from Pepe Mujica to Tabaré Vázquez, who reflects the internal and external equilibriums of the Frente Amplia (Broad Front, FA), which are moving toward the Right, although with a certain continuity of a stable political force and a defined project. At the same time, this movement has only very recently begun to reflect on events and concrete situations that seem to point in the direction of a loss of hegemony and the awakening of social and political oppositions.11

    In relation to the Andean cases – Bolivia and Ecuador – Maristella Svampa points out a rupture with previous commitments which could sanction “the loss of the emancipatory dimension of politics and the evolution toward models of domination of a traditional kind, based in the cult of leadership and identification with the state.”12

    In the case of Bolivia, in spite of the emergence of an “Aymara bourgeoisie” and the bureaucratization and institutionalization of broad sectors of the leaderships of the social movements that led the anti-neoliberal struggles, the shift toward the Centre is less visible in terms of the political composition of the power bloc. At the same time, the theme of the re-election of Evo and a possible referendum on this, opens up a delicate scenario, in spite of the fact that solid electoral alternatives from the Right have not been consolidated. The Right, apart from some local results, still has not reared its head, and the Movimiento Sin Miedo (Movement Without Fear, MSM) has not been able to expand on its solid rootedness in the capital city of La Paz (the MSM achieved less than 3% in the 2014 national elections).13

    These regressive tendencies are still less evident in Venezuela, the only country where the generalized participation of the subaltern classes has been pushed forward through the configuration of the communes since 2009, in spite of the fact that this decentralizing development was balanced with the almost simultaneous creation of the Partido Socialista Unificado de Venezuela (United Socialist Party of Venezuela, PSUV), as an organ of centralization, and as the political arm of Chavismo. On the other hand, the exacerbated polarization by the Right has tended to compress the popular camp behind leadership groups of the Bolivarian Revolution, in spite of particularly fragile economic circumstances that do not allow a deepening of the process, generate internal tensions, and eventually could strengthen the most conservative tendency within Chavismo.14

    Reflected in these national differences is the greater or lesser influence of a reactivation of a social, and/or political, opposition of the Left. In effect, it is important to note how in the majority of these countries, in addition to the relative recovery of right wing forces, we have been witnessing over the last few years a rebound of protest on the part of popular actors, organizations, and movements, which highlights the return of an antagonistic and autonomous profile of these movements as a counterweight to their earlier subordination within the passive revolutions. Regrettably, however, due to their newness, and the absence of organizational consistency and political articulation, there does not appear to be a scenario in which Latin American politics could shift to the Left in the immediate horizon. Indeed, in spite of a slow recovery of autonomy and capacity for struggle, we have not seen widespread and important processes of the political accumulation of forces over the last few years, since the loss of hegemony of progressivism, except possibly in the case of the Frente de Izquierda y de los Trabajadores (Workers’ Left Front, FIT) in Argentina, whose perspectives and potential expansion are also not guaranteed.15 The explosion of protests in Ecuador over the last several months have put forward several demands of distinct sectors, but in spite of the accumulated discontent of popular sectors, and in particular of indigenous movements and organized workers, this does not guarantee the strengthening of an alternative political pole of attraction.16

    This difficulty is partially due to the ebb that followed the ascendant wave of anti-neoliberal struggles, as popular sectors adapted to a political culture of clientelism; on the other hand, and more importantly, this ebb was a product of the initiatives, or lack of initiatives, of progressive governments that were more interested in building electoral support, and to guarantee governability without social conflicts, than in pushing forward, or simply respecting, the antagonistic and autonomous dynamics of popular organization, and the construction of channels and forms of participation and self-determination. These would have been necessary in order to deeply transform the life conditions, and not only the capacity of consumption, of the subaltern classes.

    This weakness, or absence of empowerment, suggests that the pacifying intention which operated as a counterpart to the structural transformations and redistributive policies (without considering here the problematic extractivist and primary-export continuity in the economies) provoked a decade of loss in terms of the accumulation of political force from below, seen from the vantage point of the autonomous capacity of popular sectors, in contradistinction to their ascendancy that marked the nineties and that broke neoliberal hegemony, opening up the current historical scenario.

    This negative balance is what impedes, for the moment, the ability to deal with the double movement to the Right – that is, the relative strengthening of the political Right and the internal conservative and regressive turn which has modified the equilibriums and political orientations of the power blocs which sustain the progressive Latin American governments.

    At the same time, the end of progressive hegemony does not appear to imply an immediate risk of the restoration of the Latin American Right, as sometimes is predicted as a means of blackmailing the Left. The various Rights are just beginning to recuperate from their major losses in the 2000s, and as an indication of the impact of progressive hegemony, they are incorporating ideas and principles that do not correspond to the neoliberal ideal.17 This is a demonstration of the fact that the cycle of anti-neoliberal struggles of the nineties and the governments that declared themselves post-neoliberal, have displaced certain pillars of common sense and have indeed provoked a relative change of epoch in terms of the political and cultural agenda and debate.

    In conclusion, in these convulsive times, the course of the Latin American passive revolutions continue, surrounded by a growing opposition on the Right and Left, and characterized internally by their own conservative and regressive turn; they are sliding dangerously down a slope in which they are losing their hegemonic luster, demonstrating the possible beginning to an extended end of the cycle, a process of ending with variable and indeterminate duration.

    – Translated by Jeffery R. Webber

    1. I do not include Honduras and Paraguay, which, under the governments of Zelaya and Lugo, for a short period before the so-called “white coups,” were part of the “cycle,” nor Peru, because the government of Ollanta Humala did not exhibit a sufficiently clear or sustained progressive moment. I also do not include Chile because of the neoliberal profile of the governments of the previous Concertación and, more recently, of the New Majority led by Bachelet. Apart from their characterization, these governments are chronologically out of step with the processual temporality and resurgence of the conjunctural cycle. For a measured assessment see Franck Gaudichaud, “¿Fin de ciclo en América del Sur? Los movimientos populares, la crisis de los ‘progresismos’ gubernamentales y las alternativas ecosocialistas,” in América Latina. Emancipaciones en construcción(Santiago: Tiempo Robado Editoras/América en movimiento, 2015). It is important to highlight that the notion of “the end of the cycle” is exacerbating an already polarized debate. Some organic intellectuals of Latin American progressivism reacted by unconditionally defending the achievements of the governments and vehemently denouncing the hypothesis for being, according to them, the work of a marginal ultra-Left. For example, Emir Sader,” ¿El final de un cicle (que no existió)?” Página 12, Buenos Aires, September 17, 2015. This position, which simplifies and polarizes the criticisms as ultra-Leftist is also advanced by the Bolivian Vice President Álvaro García Linera, combining it with the environmental question, beginning with the TIPNIS conflict in Bolivia that began in 2010 and extending it to the recent period by accusing NGOs of being “Green Trotskyists,” acting in collusion with foreign interests. ↩
    2. Massimo Modonesi, “Revoluciones pasivas en América Latina. Una aproximación gramsciana a la caracterización de los gobiernos progresistas de inicio de siglo,” in Horizontes Gramscianos. Estudios en torno al pensamiento de Antonio Gramsci (Mexico: FCPyS-UNAM, 2013). ↩
    3. See Massimo Modonesi, “Revoluciones pasivas en América Latina. Una aproximación gramsciana a la caracterización de los gobiernos progresistas de inicio de siglo” in El Estado en América Latina: continuidades y rupturas, ed. Mabel Thwaites Rey (Santiago de Chile: CLACSO-ARCIS, 2012). ↩
    4. The Vice President of Bolivia, Álvaro García Linera, spoke of the “point of bifurcation” in order to capture this strategic phase in the correlation of forces which opened up the possibility for hegemonic rule. See Álvaro García Linera, “Empate catastrófico y punto de bifurcación,” Crítica y emancipación, núm. 1, CLACSO, Buenos Aires, June 2008. The notion of a change of epoch emerged from an expression of the Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa who in 2007 argued that what was happening was not “an epoch of changes, but rather a change of epoch.” This idea was taken up in the title of ALAS Congress in Guadalajara that year, where I presented a text accepting and developing the theme. It was later published as Massimo Modonesi, “Crisis hegemónica y movimientos antagonistas en América Latina. Una lectura gramsciana del cambio de época,” A Contracorriente 5, no. 2, 2008. Simultaneously, Maristella Svampa – with whom I developed a fruitful dialogue at this conference – published a book whose title contributed to the wider diffusion of this notion within the sphere of academic debate. Maristella Svampa, Cambio de época. Movimientos sociales y poder politico (Buenos Aires: CLASCO-Siglo XXI, 2008). ↩
    5. As suggested in Massimo Modonesi, “Conflictividad socio-política e inicio del fin de la hegemonía progresista en América Latina,” in Anuario del conflicto social 2013, eds. Jaime Pastor and Nicolás Rojas Pedemonte (Barcelona: Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, 2014). ↩
    6. See Massimo Modonesi, “Pasividad y subalternidad. Sobre el concepto derevolución pasiva de Antonio Gramsci,” in Gramsciana. Rivista Internazionale de Studi su Antonio Gramsci, no.1, Turin, 2015. ↩
    7. Maristella Svampa, “América Latina: de nuevas izquierdas a populismos de alta intensidad,” Memoria, no. 256, November 2015. ↩
    8. Mabel Thwaites, “Argentina fin de ciclo,” in Memoria, no. 254, May 2015. ↩
    9. Massimo Modonesi, Entrevista a Francisco De Oliveira, “Brasil: una hegemonía al revés,” OSAL, no. 30, November 2011. ↩
    10. Francisco Muñoz Jaramillo, ed., Balance crítico del correísmo, Quito: Universidad Central del Ecuador, 2014. ↩
    11. Raúl Zibechi has pointed out very concrete and tangible expressions of this in recent mobilizations against the free trade and services agreement, TISA. Raúl Zibechi, “Diez días que sacudieron a Uruguay,” La Jornada, September 18, 2015. ↩
    12. Maristella Svampa, “Termina la era de las promesas andinas,” Revista Ñ, Clarín, August 25, 2015. ↩
    13. Pablo Stefanoni, “¿Perdió Evo Morales?” Revista Panamá, April 9, 2015. ↩
    14. Edgardo Lander, “Venezuela: ¿crisis terminal del modelo petrolero rentista?”Aporrea.org, October 30, 2014. ↩
    15. Pablo Stefanoni, “El voto trotsko explicado a un finlandés,” Revista Panamá, July 24, 2015. ↩
    16. Massimo Modonesi, “Entrevista a Alberto Acosta, ¿Fin de ciclo de los gobiernos progresistas en América Latina? Límites y crisis del correísmo en Ecuador”Memoria, no. 256, November, 2015; Jeffery R. Webber, “Ecuador: en el impasse político” Viento Sur, September 20, 2015. ↩
    17. See the symposium in the journal Nueva Sociedad, no. 254, on “Los rostros de la derecha en América Latina,” November-December, 2014, and in particular the articles by Fernando Molina on Bolivia and Franklin Ramírez and Valeria Coronel on Ecuador. ↩

    Originally published at Viewpoint.

  • U.S. Workers & Puerto Rico's Crisis

    PUERTO RICO HAS been in the news lately, particularly the financial news. The possibility that its government may default on part of its $73 billion public debt has drawn the attention of Wall Street analysts. The New York Times has deemed the situation worthy of several editorials.

    More often than not, the island is offered as a yet another lesson on the consequences of “big government” and of too generous social provisions. Other factors are rarely mentioned — such as the tax privileges of U.S. corporations, or the potential consequences for working people of the austerity measures under consideration.

    Working people in the United States need their own analysis of Puerto Rico’s crisis, not the least because the austerity measures under discussion here are similar to those ruling sectors would like to impose there. Our fight in Puerto Rico and the United States should be a joint struggle.

    Here we will consider four elements: structure, policy, conjuncture and alternatives.
    By structure we refer to long standing features of Puerto Rico’s economy, which are often ignored in discussions about the present crisis.
    Policy refers to the measures that the Puerto Rican government has adopted in recent decades to promote economic growth, above all the policy of tax exemption.

    Conjuncture refers to the present situation, which combines economic stagnation and debt crisis.
    Alternatives refer to the different proposals put forth by creditors, the Puerto Rican government and Puerto Rico’s progressive organizations.

    Structure: Colonial Domination

    Through the different epochs into which we may divide Puerto Rico’s development since the onset of U.S. rule in 1898 some features have remained constant.

    First, since 1900 Puerto Rico’s economy has been shaped by the priorities and preferences of U.S. capital. Such was the case before WWII, when sugar production was the main industry, during the expansion of light-manufacturing from the 1940s to the 1970s, and during the following period, characterized by capital intensive manufacturing (pharmaceuticals, for example).

    While specializing in the production for export, largely controlled by U.S. capital, the island has imported most of the consumer goods needed for its reproduction. This one-sidedness is the distinctive second feature of Puerto Rico’s colonial economy. An example of this is the destruction of Puerto Rico’s agriculture, to the point that we now import more than 85% of our food.

    Third, an additional consequence of the domination of Puerto Rico’s economy by U.S. capital has been the constant outflow of a significant portion of the income generated in Puerto Rico. At present, around $35 billion leave every year, in the form of payments to external investors. This is around 35% of Puerto Rico’s Gross Domestic Product.

    Needless to say, this capital is not reinvested in Puerto Rico, leading to a fourth feature of its economy since 1898: Puerto Rico’s dependent economy has never been able to provide sufficient employment for its workforce.
    At present, Puerto Rico has a 40% labor participation rate. The official unemployment rate is 14%. Even between 1950 and 1964, i.e. during the period of rapid postwar growth, the number of jobs fell. Manufacturing was not able to compensate for the jobs lost in agriculture.

    Yet the unemployment rate remained fairly constant due to a fifth feature of Puerto Rico’s evolution: given the lack of employment, mass migration has been a feature of Puerto Rican life since the early 20th century. This was the case in the 1910s and 1920s, when the first Puerto Rican colonia took shape in New York, as well as in the mass migration of the 1950s and during the last decade.

    Mass unemployment also conspires against higher wages, which deepens economic inequality and insures high levels of poverty. This helps explain the sixth feature: the persistence of the wide gap in living standards between Puerto Rico and the U.S. mainland.

    Puerto Rico’s per capita income is a third of the U.S. figure. It is half the per capita income of the poorest state. Around 45% of the people in Puerto Rico live under the poverty level. The corresponding figure in the mainland is 15%.
    The present crisis has intensified these problems, but it did not create them. It should be the occasion for addressing the problems as such, not only their intensification.

    Policy: Corporations Benefit

    The attraction of U.S. investors has been the main feature of the official economic policy in Puerto Rico. In turn, since 1947 tax exemption has been one of the main instruments for attracting foreign investors.

    Exemption from both federal and Puerto Rico taxes was indeed an attractive proposition for many U.S. corporations. Yet one leg of this two-legged policy disappeared as of 2006: exemption from federal taxation has been phased out. This fact, combined with the global economic recession, has led to a shrinkage of Puerto Rico’s manufacturing sector, where jobs have fallen by half in the last 20 years (from close to 170,000 to less than 80,000).

    We are thus faced with a paradox: a stagnant economy that nevertheless generates considerable profits for U.S. corporations. As indicated, on the average about $35 billion leave the island every year as earnings of U.S. multinationals. This massive outflow lies at the root of both the present stagnation and the growing debt.

    In other words, the Puerto Rican government’s unwillingness to reconsider the tax privileges of U.S. corporations has been the key factor perpetuating the present recession and pushing toward increased and ultimately unsustainable borrowing.

    Conjuncture: Debt and Austerity

    As government revenues fell, successive administrations applied austerity measures such as new sales taxes (IVU) in 2006, mass firing of public employees (law 7) in 2009, attack on pensions and public sector workers (law 66), plus further sales taxes (gasoline) in 2014 and increased IVU in 2015.

    This was combined with increased public debt. Puerto Rico’s total public debt (including the central government and public corporations) grew 64% between 2006 and 2014, from $43 to $73 billion. Servicing the growing debt demands an increasing portion of the public budget.
    On June 29, 2015 the Governor of Puerto Rico admitted that Puerto Rico’s debt is “unpayable,” as he put it. In other words, paying it in the terms it was originally contracted would impose unacceptable human sacrifices and prevent the government from financing initiatives needed to revive the economy.

    This admission is, in itself, a step forward: the Partido del Pueblo Trabajador (PPT, Working Peoples Party) has been arguing as much since February 2014. Yet the Governor’s new position on the need for debt restructuring has not led to he determined campaign required to confront the predictable resistance of creditors and Wall Street interests. Worse: trying to placate the latter, the government seeks to combine debt restructuring with harsher austerity measures, contained in its Fiscal Adjustment Plan, made public on September 9.

    Alternatives: Creditors vs. Reconstruction

    The perspective of Puerto Rico’s creditors has been expressed most openly in “For Puerto Rico There is a Better Way,” a report commissioned by the Ad Hoc group, which includes close to 40 investment funds that hold part of Puerto Rico’s debt.

    The document argues that Puerto Rico’s public debt should not be renegotiated. It should be paid in full. To enable such payments it proposes closing schools, reducing public employment, lowering salaries and pension benefits of government employees, privatizing government agencies, selling off state properties, and limiting public health insurance coverage, among other measures.
    Such austerity programs have been enacted in many countries, as part of the neoliberal policies dominant since the 1980s. Their results have been so disastrous, both socially and in terms of generating economic growth, that even enlightened sectors of the established economic profession have come out against them.

    Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner and former chief economist at the World Bank has denounced the myopic approach of the creditors. He warns:

    “Creditors, focusing narrowly and short-sightedly on repayment, force a cutback in government expenditures (austerity), and the combination of financial constraints and decreases in private and public demand bring on a major recession or depression. They wrongly reason that if the country is spending less on itself it has more to spend on others — to repay its debts. But they forget the large multipliers that prevail at such times: the cutbacks in expenditure decrease GDP and tax revenues. The underutilization of the country’s resources makes it more difficult for it to fulfill its debt obligation — the austerity policies are normally counterproductive even from the creditors’ perspective.”

    Unfortunately, creditors have more often than not imposed their narrow policies, with dire consequences. They do so through the threat of both market and legal retaliation (denial of further credits and litigation to collect owed payments).
    But according to Stiglitz, the capacity of creditors to impose their terms does not only block the efficient resolution of debt crises when they arise — it promotes their emergence to begin with. Creditors, confident that they will recuperate their investment (through litigation if necessary), lend when they should be more cautious.

    Such was the case with the $3.5 billion Puerto Rico bond issue in March 2014, just after the government’s credit rating had been degraded to speculative or junk level. Governments, conscious of the difficulties and the political cost of seeking debt restructuration, prefer to borrow more and pass the problem to a future administration. This is what successive administrations did in Puerto Rico.

    In order to do so, argues Stiglitz, governments agree to ever higher interest payments and further concessions, such as the litigation of any disputes in U.S. courts. This is what happened in Puerto Rico.

    Finally, the foreseeable success of creditors in the courts invites the intervention of vulture funds. They buy distressed bonds at a discount price and seek payment at their nominal value; their business depends on debt renegotiation failing or being insufficient. This is also the situation in Puerto Rico where at least 25%, and perhaps as much as 50% of the debt has been acquired by hedge and vulture funds.

    In Puerto Rico, this debt-promoting machine had an additional lever: the exemption of its bonds anywhere in the United States from local, state and federal taxes.

    Such are the guilty parties in our drama: a government unwilling to reconsider a failed tax exemption policy, investors eager to acquire triply tax-exempt bonds, intermediaries happy to collect the fees for issuing them, and a creditor-friendly framework that promotes over indebtedness.

    Escaping Disaster: A Road Forward

    According to Stiglitz, overly indebted countries do not need short-term temporary relief, nor regressive austerity measures, but rather measures that allow them to reconstruct their economies. Economies should not be subordinated to the debt; on the contrary, debt payments should be subordinated to the needs of economic rehabilitation.

    In Puerto Rico this must include a reconsideration of the tax exemption policy mentioned above, which allows around $35 billion in profits to leave the island every year while not generating economic growth. Yet the government insists in combining its plea for debt restructuring with both unjust and regressive austerity measures and a return to the pre-1996 combined local and federal tax exemption policy. In other words, instead of revising its reliance on tax exemption it seeks to revive it.

    The proposed labor “reforms” include redefining overtime in order to reduce compensations for it, weakening seniority rights, making firings easier and reducing severance pay, excluding young workers (under age 25) from increases in the federal minimum wage, eroding the right to an end-of-the-year bonus and eliminating it for young workers, and extending probation periods from 90 days to one year.

    Through attrition, the plan also seeks to reduce government employment by 2% every year and extends to 2020 the suspension of labor rights and many contract dispositions, decreed in 2014 through Law 66. The plan also includes the operation of more government services as Public Private Partnerships as well as the privatization of the generation of electricity.

    The mix of limited debt relief, extended corporate tax exemptions and/or reductions and austerity measures can only result in extended recession and perpetuation of the present economic structure characterized by the extraction of profits, high unemployment and lack of development funds.

    Even debt renegotiation is uncertain. The government is seeking a voluntary agreement with bondholders, which is not likely. It also hopes that Congress will approve legislation extending Chapter 9 of the U.S. bankruptcy code to Puerto Rico, thus allowing its public corporations to file for bankruptcy under federal legislation (as Detroit has done).

    So far the bills pending in Congress show little promise. What will the government do if bondholders fail to negotiate or if Congress does not act? Nobody knows.
    There seems to be no Plan B.

    If Congress does act, Puerto Rico’s situation would be in the hands of a federal judge. In that case, how will the government act to insure that the judge’s decisions are beneficial to Puerto Rico? This is also unknown.

    The PPT has put forward a five-point program for escaping the disaster, including:

    • revision of the tax exemption policy, as an emergency revenue measure and as part of a larger shift in economic strategy

    • true renegotiation of the debt to prioritize fairness and economic efficiency, a process that must include, first, a citizens’ audit of the debt in order to determine which parts of it are illegal or illegitimate and to determine who exactly owns it and under what conditions it was acquired, as well as secondly, a willingness to unilaterally suspend payments when appropriate.

    • democratic and participatory public sector reform that transforms how services are provided and resources are used (ending both corruption and mismanagement).

    • a program of economic reconstruction that should emphasize internal initiatives (public, cooperative, private) that enhance workers’ rights and participation, distribute wealth more equally, and reinvest in the island the surpluses or profits generated.

    • federal support and financing for such a project, which would also be funded through tax and debt measures mentioned above.

    Fifteen years ago, mass mobilizations and activism in the island and the United States forced the U.S. Navy out of Vieques (an island the U.S. military used as a base for target practice). With or without Chapter 9, similar actions are needed if bondholders, the courts, Congress and the White House are going to respect Puerto Rico’s needs. Yet Puerto Rico’s government is intent on attacking, not mobilizing Puerto Rico’s working people.

    Such a project demands an expansion of the public sector, eonomic planning at the expense of the destructive imperatives of capitalist competition, and placing social well-being over private profits, that is to say, the very opposite of the neoliberal policies dominant since the 1980s.

    This is not a local agenda. Broadly speaking, this must also be the agenda of working people in the United States, who are suffering the consequences of several decades of pro-business policies promoted by both dominant political parties. All the more reason, then, to combine the agendas of progressive movements in Puerto Rico and the United States.

    The fact that these movements are still minority forces in both the United States and Puerto Rico makes it all the more urgent that those seeking to build them join forces and collaborate as effectively as possible.

    Notes
    • See César J. Ayala, Rafael Bernabe, Puerto Rico in the American Century:
    a History Since 1898 (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina Press, 2006).

    • See Puerto Rico Fiscal and Economic Growth Plan, available in web page of Puerto Rico Government Development Bank. In part, it seeks to replace tax exemptions with lower tax rates for corporations, a simpler way of achieving the same result.

    • On the Partido del Pueblo Trabajador see its statements in pueblotrabajador.com and my article in New Politics Summer 2015 “Puerto Rico’s New Party of the Working People Fights Austerity” www.newpol.org

    From: Against the Current 179, Dec 2015

  • Contemporary American Radicalism: The View from Below

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    Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps. Radicals in America: The U.S. Left Since the Second World War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 355 pp. Photos. Bibliography. Index.

    Howard Brick’s and Christopher Phelps’ Radicals in America, covering the period from 1939 to 2014, is a masterful narrative history of the left of our time, an account that integrates the experience of the post-war left into American political, economic, and social history, with an eye to the cultural context as well.

    We have had, of course, dozens of books about the history of the American left, most of them either about the Socialist Party in its heyday in the 1910s or the Communist Party in the 1930s. There are also scores of accounts of one or another of the more recent social movements: the civil rights movement, Students for a Democratic Society, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the women’s liberation movement, environmentalism, or the fight for LGBT rights. Now, for the first time, we have a book that presents a comprehensive overview of the U.S. left in all of its manifestations since World War II with a focus on the grassroots of the movements and on often little known organizers. Brick and Phelps have produced a fine history of the left of our time, a book that, unlike so many others, does not suggest that radicals must ally with or become liberals. It is a book that describes and honors radicalism, but which—surprisingly—and perhaps despite the authors’ intentions, seems to suggest that there was little possibility for building a successful movement for socialism in the recent past, a view which naturally tends to dim one’s hopes for the future.

    Other generations produced their own panoramic histories of the left. There are enough studies of the American left to constitute a genre, each book offering a view from its time and its author’s perspective. In the Great Depression years, Lillian Symes and Travers Clement produced the comprehensive, beautifully written, and inspiring Rebel America: The Story of Social Revolt in the United States, first published in 1934 at the dawning of the mass labor revolt. The Communist Party was just emerging as the leading left organization of the time, and in their conclusion, Symes and Clements offered a sympathetic but critical assessment of its role, suggesting that if it expected to make a revolution the Communist Party needed to adapt itself to American culture and conditions. One might say that the Communists took that advice but went too far in the Popular Front period that began in 1935, becoming a part of the broader radical upsurge but also accommodating to liberalism and ending up in the Democratic Party.

    In the next great upheaval, that of the 1960s, Sidney Lens published his Radicalism in America (1966) as both a summing up of the past and as a contribution to the radical movements from labor to peace in which he was personally active. Lens, a former Trotskyist labor organizer, emphasized in his book the role of workers’ struggles from below. He appreciated the sudden appearance of the New Left, but criticized it for failing to come up with a “system of ideas” and a strategy to fit the times. He concluded that, bereft of a theory and a program, he was not sure that the New Left had a future. And as it turned out, by and large, it did not, dissipating by the mid-1970s with the end of the Vietnam War and the draft.

    There was also another sort of history of radicalism of the “Great Lives” sort so popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Publishing executive Charles A. Madison wrote the stirring Critics and Crusaders, published in 1947—just before the onset of the Cold War—and dedicated “To those who cherish freedom, practice equality, and seek justice.” His book dealt with the lives of eighteen American idealists and freedom fighters—including two women—in six sections each preceded by a description of the economic, social, and political background at the time. Madison’s eighteen heroes were an interesting lot: William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, Wendell Phillips, Margaret Fuller, Albert Brisbane, Edward Bellamy, Henry D. Thoreau, Benjamin R. Tucker, Emma Goldman, Henry George, Brooks Adams, Thorstein Veblen, John Peter Altgeld, Lincoln Stefffens, Randolph Bourne, Daniel De Leon, Eugene Victor Debs, and John Reed. Wonderfully written and some 534 pages long the book presented not only the biographies but, with a historical introduction to each period, it was a real history of a hundred years of American radicalism.

    Ten years later, the enormously popular, leftwing University of Wisconsin professor Harvey Goldberg edited a similar collection of biographies written by several authors titled American Radicals: Some Problems and Personalities. Written in the depths of the Cold War and anti-Communist crusade and published in 1957, it also included many excellent essays, among the subjects John Brown, Eugene V. Debs, and Daniel De Leon, as well as the Communist Party Popular Front fellow traveler New York Congressman Vito Marcantonio. But, true to the time, not one woman was included.

    Christopher Lasch’s The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963, The Intellectual as a Social Type, published in 1965, dealt not so much with social rebels—though it does discuss a few—as with alienated intellectuals of the middle class and their relationship to American progressivism. As he explained to th reader, he was less interested in politics than in culture. Some of his most fascinating essays deal with women or the role of women in society—Jane Addams, Woman as Alien, Mabel Dodge Luhan: Sex as Politics—and they are intriguing and insightful. Beginning as a leftist himself, by the end of the 1970s Lasch had begun move to the right, a sad loss to the left.

    Histories of American radicalism frequently asked: Where did the left go wrong? And the answer was often: When it went left. By the 1950s broader accounts of the American left were attempting to prove its marginality, its irrelevance. Daniel Bell’s Marxian Socialism in the United States published in 1952 argued that Marxist dogma made the left marginal.

    “At one crucial turning point after another, when the socialist movement could have entered more directly into into American life—as did so many individual socialists who played a formative role in liberal political development—it was prevented from doing so by its ideological dogmatism.”

    The Socialists, Bell argued were “in the world, but not of it;” while the Communists “lived neither in the world nor of it.” The New Left he dismissed (in a 1967 preface) as “moral, not political.” For Bell they were all voices crying in the wilderness and getting lost out there, and, from his point of view, that too was probably for the best.

    Not so differently, in 1978 Milton Cantor’s The Divided Left: American Radicalism, 1900-1975, using Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony as its compass, contended that the lack of an historic feudal structure, the American the belief in social mobility and the fluidity of class structure, the democratic and egalitarian ethos, and the two-party system, the country’s wealth had made it impossible for the left to establish its hegemony. Cantor, it was clear, had simply brushed off and refurbished the fountain of all theories of the failure of American radicalism, Werner Sombart’s Why is there no Socialism in the United States? first published in 1906. Not only had American exceptionalism made the country immune to socialism, but, Cantor argued, there was nothing the left might have done could have changed things:

    “Whether or not radical organizations became sterile sects, descended into irrelevance, engaged in “Mecca watching” [an allusion to Moscow], deteriorated into bureaucratic rigidity—whether or not they became basically reformist or still voiced the opinions of Lenin and looked forward to the Götterdammerung—it is doubtful that a durable socialist consciousness could have developed.”

    Cleary, he thought, it made more sense to be a liberal than a leftist or a radical.

    More recent accounts of American radicalism such as Michael Kazin’s American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (2011) and Eli Zaretsky’s Why America Needs a Left: A Historical Argument (2012), learning toward liberalism rather than toward the left, fundamentally agree with the notion that a revolutionary left is impossible in the the United States. Kazin, for example, believes that American radicals generally had most influence when they acted as junior partners of liberal reformers, whether those reformers were the abolitionists working within the Republican Party or the labor activists of the 1930s working within the Democratic Party. Though, Kazin argues, the radicals, though they fail at politics, are often successful in transforming culture and thus influencing politics.

    Similarly Zaretsky argues that,

    “Without a left, liberalism becomes spineless and vapid; without liberalism, the left becomes sectarian, authoritarian, and marginal. In great eras of reform, the struggle between them strengthens both. Only when the liberal/left dynamic is weak does a strong right emerge.”

    For these authors, radicalism can only be meaningful when it is partnered with the American liberal tradition. The logic of the argument then is that independent radicals must not only engage with but must move together with the Democratic Party.

    If until now there was one book that was different, it was Paul Buhle’s Marxism in the United States: A History of the American Left, first published in 1987 and reissued in 2013 with a new preface and a new conclusion comprising 50 additional pages. Buhle’s book—encyclopedic, optimistic, and idiosyncratic—found the roots of American radicalism in its utopian forbearers and its immigrant socialists, then traced the trunk and branches of left history of America, describing the rise and fall of Socialist, syndicalist, Communist, and New Left organizations to the present day, pointing out and explaining as he proceeded cultural and intellectual developments.

    Interested in Marxist theory as much as the left, labor, and social movements, Buhle can enter into a long digression that takes us from the sixteenth century mystic Jakob Böhme, to G.W.F. Hegel at the opening of the nineteenth century, to Marx, and then to C.L.R. James, the Afro-Caribbean Marxist who is one of his heroes. Alternating between theory and practice, between mass activity and radical thought, and looking for the synergy between them, while describing the series of revolutionary organizations that in one era or another dominated the American scenario, Buhle’s book criticized the top-down tendencies, lauded cultural radicalism, and implicitly urged his readers to look for a way to turn the next intellectual insight or cultural development into a new movement, and to derive from the next movement new theoretical understandings. Where in the past there was hope in the labor movement, and later in the Black and women’s movements, Buhle came to find hope in the twenty-first century in the new environmentalism and in Occupy.

    Radicalism in America, with its emphasis on the grassroots activism of the social movements, is quite unlike all of its forerunners. Brick, Louis Evans Professor of History at the University of Michigan, and Phelps, professor of American History at the University of Nottingham, have given us an altogether different interpretation. The do not see the left’s existence and significance as depending on liberals. They do not place at the center of their book either left political organizations, such as the Communist Party or the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), nor the influential institutions created in the post-war period such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) or the National Organization for Women (NOW).

    They do mention leading figures of left, but their focus is not on the leaders or intellectuals. The heroes of this book are not Socialists or Communists, Trotskyists or Maoists, not religious activists or pacifists—though all have their place in the story. The protagonist of their history is the radical—or better put, the radicals collectively—who may or may not be members of one of the leftist parties but they can almost always be found in the social movements. They are the people whose critical spirit and willingness to challenge the system—even at the risk of being scorned, fired, spat upon, beaten, jailed, or possibly killed—succeeds decade after decade in inspiring new mass movements implicitly aiming for another sort of society with greater freedom, equality, democracy, and solidarity. 

    Brick and Phelps, who have read virtually everything about the left and radical movements of this period, from contemporary periodicals to the academic literature, have included not only leftist parties but also the groups too often neglected in radical histories: the feminists, LGBT activists, and environmentalist radicals. They weave the stories of American radicals into a dense, but highly readable and fast paced book.

    The axis of Brick’s and Phelps’ book is the tension between the radicals as marginal, minority groups often disdained by society who, at the same time, strive, principally through democratic means, to organize the solidarity that would create a new majority. The radicals always live “oscillating” between margin and mainstream, between militant minority and the upheaval of the masses. When the stars align—that is, when political and economic conditions are right—the radical minorities can set mass movements in motion, but, when the stars are crossed, radicals become persecuted—or, even worse, ignored minorities on the fringes of society, until their creativity and their persistence bring them back once again to the center of a movement. In the period from 1939 to 2014, Brick and Phelps argue, radicals—though their most radical visions often receded into the distance as they advanced—were nonetheless often the driving forces of significant reform.

    Unlike, say, Buhle’s history, this book does not spend much time on leftist political theory, though it is not ignorant of it. The authors’ point of view is close to that of the “Third Camp” or “socialism-from-below” perspective of groups such as the Campaign for Peace and Democracy (CPD) and the journal New Politics (of which I am a co-editor). While describing the radical movements they admire, they do not hesitate to criticize the “opportunism” of the CPUSA in the Popular Front period, the “sectarianism” of the anti-Stalinist and pacifist left in 1940s or the elitism and destructiveness of the Weathermen, nor do they fail to condemn the “liberal hawks” writing for Dissent in the 2000s or to show their contempt for “neo-Stalinist sects” like the Workers World Party (WWP).

    The critical and profoundly democratic perspective of this book must be applauded, and its attention to the humble organizers and lowly beginnings of what later became mass movements deserves praise. The heroes of this book—even when they are members of a left organization—are independent-minded activists who were the first to speak out against racism in the military when the dominant left tended to be patriotic; the first to risk their lives to take on the issue of civil rights for Blacks when racism was overt, violent, and deadly; the first to organize rank-and-file workers to challenge ossified labor bureaucracies even when it meant challenging the Mafia in the Teamsters or the self-styled socialist leadership of the United Auto Workers; the first to defend gay rights when nearly every gay man or lesbian woman was in the closet; the first to talk about the health of the planet when most in the country believed in “better living through chemistry.” There are people like Harry Hay and Dale Jennings who, expelled from the CPUSA for being gay, established the Mattachine Foundation, a forerunner of the LGBT liberation movement. There is the chapter Mothers for Peace that founded the Abalone Alliance to fight the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Reactor. There are Marty Robinson, Michael Petrelis, and Larry Kramer who founded the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). And there are dozens of others who in some small town or big city neighborhood organized a meeting and held a demonstration that launched a movement, changed the times, and often won reforms.

    In each period it covers, their book clarifies the debates between different leaders and groups in the various movements, whether SDS in the 1960s or the environmentalists in the 1990s. The authors’ characterizations of the various periods and their judgments about the significance of various left movements seem right to me; for example, when they write “Of all the breakthrough movements of 1968-69, women’s liberation had perhaps the deepest, most lasting effect on American life” (p. 157).

    Yet one wants more. Perhaps because this book is such a detailed, dense and fast-paced narrative of radicalism in the United States, the authors could not pause to ponder the possibility of socialism in America. Though informed by a radical sensibility, this book does not project any possibility of revolutionary change either in the period it covers or does it imply any such change might develop in the future. The authors do touch on revolutionary socialism in their chapter “The Revolution Will Be Live, 1967-1973,” and in a few pages dealing with the anti-Vietnam War movement, SDS, and the Black Panthers make some interesting and insightful one-line observations, concluding that, “This revolutionary hopefulness produced many searching and creative innovations that would reshape American culture, although in some insurrectionary fantasies or apocalyptic visions it took on surreal qualities.” Absolutely true, but not the fuller discussion that one yearns for at that point in the story.

    Developing economic and political conditions, we learn, created opportunities seized upon by radicals who were sometime able to bring about progressive change and, at other times, failed, either because of the economic strength of the system, government repression, or “the proverbial circular firing squad” exemplified in groups such as the Weathermen or tactics such as the Black Bloc. Radicalism, the authors make clear, has been significant because it has changed the attitudes of Americans about such issues as black people’s civil rights, LGBT rights and the environment, and because it has led to all sorts of reforms of American capitalism, from Food Stamp programs to the Americans for Disabilities Act.

    Brick and Phelps recognize and praise the radicals for the reforms that they brought about, reforms that improved American society. But they do not ask if these radical movements might have contributed to the building of a socialist society. And,true, it is hard to imagine. While the post-war era with which they deal saw twenty years of uninterrupted social upheaval form the beginnings of the civil rights movement in 1956 to the end of most of the large social movements in 1975, from the 1980s until today the social and political scene has beceme increasingly conservative. Throughout the post-war era, capitalism and bureaucratic Communism, two equally exploitative and oppressive systems, divided the world. Then came the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, accompanied by the victory of capitalist globalization and neoliberalism around the world. Communist China turned from totalitarian bureaucratic Communism into a ruthless state capitalist country, still devoid of democratic rights, while the Social Democratic parties in Europe became the administrators of neoliberalism. In the United States the Republicans and Democrats moved together to the right, accepting the free market ideal, attacking social welfare and imposing austerity. Certainly the global situation has grown increasingly difficult for radicals and socialists.

    Yet still one wants to ask what might have been done, both in the 20-year period of social turmoil and the in more conservative aftermath, to posit a general, societal alternative. The radicals who fought for and won reforms also often envisioned a democratic socialist socialism, and some remained true to that cause. Others either gave up the fight for socialism or turned toward Democratic Party liberalism and were carried rightward with the mainstream. How and why did some radicals either give up or fail to envision a socialist alternative, to develop a socialist program, and to build an independent socialist movement?

    To be a revolutionary is to hold a political posture that rejects capitalist society and demands the creation of a society where all democratically control both government and the economy. Were there in the post-war period opportunities to develop those ideas, to organize for them, and to begin to establish a socialist movement? Certainly the upheaval of the 1950s-1970s, the late-1990s global justice movement, and Occupy Wall Street all implicitly raised that issue, but this question of the road not taken is only just touched on in Brick’s and Phelps’ story.

    One might imagine another book on American radicalism reorganized not around the sporadic radical upheavals that won reforms, but around the axis of a series of movements that challenged the capitalist system and implicitly or explicitly posed the alternative of a democratic socialist society. Such a book would ask us to attempt—and this is no easy task—to draw the lessons of the mass movements, and to draw them together into a kind of political vision and a rough approximation of a program for the future, as well as suggesting the strategies that could put revolution—that is, the revamping of society to the benefit of all exploited and oppressed people—on the agenda. Perhaps the authors—who do so well is providing us a history of American radicalism in this book—will offer us an analysis of the failure of socialism in the past and a vision of socialism and a strategy for the future in another book.

    That said, Brick’s and Phelps’ Radicals in America will certainly become a standard history of the post-war American left, sure to be widely used in classrooms, to be dog-eared and underlined by radicals and stuffed into their crammed bookshelves, next to Lens and Buhle, and to be consulted in libraries. It will help today’s radicals to locate themselves in the trajectory of American radicalism and offers all of us the socialism-from-below perspective that defies all undemocratic regimes and challenges us to create a truly democratic society.

     

  • The Truth About Charlie: One Year after the 7 January Attacks

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    Two French Islamist gunmen of Algerian descent entered a newspaper office in Paris a year ago today and gunned down a generation of Europe’s greatest political cartoonists – many from an anarchist, anti-racist tradition  – along with their co-workers and those protecting them, who also included people of Algerian descent.  In case anyone is confused about the politics of this – it was a far right attack on the left. 

    At first the world reacted with justified horror and a solidarity which is not always forthcoming for the frequently anonymous victims of Islamist slaughter, and which was not often experienced by the Charlie Hebdo staff in previous years when they endured threats and firebombs. However, the backlash began quickly.  The truth about Charlie was that many were shockingly equivocal in their reaction to these events.

    There was the “I am not Charlie” campaign, promoted by Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.  The meaning of that was clear enough.  Those whose ideology helped pave the way for such killings were publicly admitting their lack of solidarity with the victims.

    There were outright vilification campaigns suggesting that the cartoonists (or perhaps French people generally) were racists, “Islamophobic” or otherwise had it coming.  In California – which by year’s end became the site of another Islamist bloodbath – a number of people expressed such views to me, thinking that because I have a Muslim name I would agree.  Not long after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, I spoke at a U.S. university event on freedom of expression along with a self-appointed young American spokesperson for “the Muslim community” from the Council on American Islamic Relations – whom I must say I never elected to speak for me.  She reviled the 7 January victims to the point where I felt compelled to ask if she understood that they were actually dead.  She did not know as I did that just before their murders, the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were in a heated discussion about terrible socio-economic conditions in the Paris suburbs where much of the Muslim population lives – an injustice which mattered a great deal to them.

    Another response was the more sophisticated “I am Ahmed” campaign named for the stalwart French policeman Ahmed Merabet also of Algerian descent who was killed by the Kouachi brothers as they fled the newspaper’s offices. Sadly, this was sometimes meant as a rebuttal rather than an amplification of “Je suis Charlie,” when in fact people like the murderous Kouachis have been killing Ahmeds around the world for years.  Very few have been paying attention to that body count.  When they depicted their version of the Prophet Mohamed crying over terrorism, the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists had the courage to take on those carrying out that slaughter while others looked away or were silent.

    That is committed anti-racism and solidarity, even if it comes in the shape of a merciless, sometimes disturbing French satirical tradition not always well understood elsewhere – like Mad Magazine with politics.

    On this anniversary, we must remember that those who killed Charlie also killed Ahmed and that saying “I am Charlie” is also a way of saying “I am Ahmed,” and vice versa. Indeed, opposing the Kouachis of the world is essential to saving those countless people of Muslim heritage and their fellow citizens in the Global South who have been dying in the tens of thousands at the hands of Muslim fundamentalist killers in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Iraq, Nigeria, Libya and beyond. Ahmed is a synonym for Charlie, not an antonym. That was why so many people of North African descent stood with the 7 January victims.

    For example, Ali Dilem, one of Algeria’s best political cartoonists joined the Charlie Hebdo team in February out of solidarity.  His bold cartoons have lampooned political figures and fundamentalist terrorists for years, earning him jail sentences and countless fatwas. On 7 January 2015, Dilem’s cartoon bore the heading: “God is Humour” (in French: “Dieu est humour,”a play on words derived from “Dieu est amour” – “God is Love”).  Another of Dilem’s cartoons after the 7 January attacks shows a dying figure writing in his own blood on a wall: “the idiots killed me.”

    I saw a copy of this Dilem heartbreaker hanging atop piles of flowers when I went to pay my respects at the Bataclan theatre in Paris in December.. I stood in the street where a pregnant woman had hung from a windowsill trying to escape the “Islamic State” offensive, and in front of the small club where 89 mainly young people lost their lives at the hands of another group of young Islamist assassins of North African descent.  I found my visit doubly poignant because I went with Samia Benkherroubi a former Algerian TV presenter whose own producer, the legendary Aziz Smati, had been shot in 1994 by the Armed Islamic Group, the forerunners of “Islamic State,” and is today a paraplegic, but continues his work from his wheelchair. Smati’s crime, like Charlie’s, was creativity.  He produced Algeria’s groundbreaking youth music TV show, Bled Music, showing the first Rai music videos on TV, which were also controversial at the time.

    Outside the bullet-riddled Bataclan, Samia and I laid flowers and mourned together, lamenting that the fundamentalists we have been battling for years are still so much stronger than their civil society opponents.  She had written to me after the 13 November attacks to say how deeply saddened she was to see the fundamentalist violence she fled in 1990s Algeria reproducing itself elsewhere.  What was especially mystifying to her, was the way in which some on the left tried to use the history of French colonialism as the excuse (or so-called “explanation”) for these attacks. The same thing happened after 7 January. Samia wrote that “looking for explanations in colonial history is an injury to all victims of blind terrorism.” It also entirely overlooks that Algeria itself lost as many as 200,000 – including many veterans of the liberation struggle – to extremist terrorism in the 1990s, a fact often conveniently forgotten.

    The same night that Samia and I paid our respects at the Bataclan, we visited the plaque by the Seine to the victims of the massacre of 17 October 1961 when several hundred Algerian nationalists were slain and thrown into the river by police during a peaceful protest.

    We vowed by that memorial not to let their brave memory be misused to justify fundamentalist atrocities, even while keeping their memory alive like those of other victims.  For me, this is very personal. My Algerian grandfather Lakhdar Bennoune died defeating French colonialism.  His death is part of an historic injustice which still demands real accounting – but is no justification whatsoever for the lamentable Kouachis who would have said he was not a true martyr because he died fighting for a republic rather than an “Islamic State”.

    All of this complexity seems to have been lost on the authors and signatories of the petition against the granting of the PEN Freedom of Expression Courage award to the Charlie Hebdo staff  signed by a group of mainly Western intellectuals in the name of anti-racism.  They wanted to make clear that they were not Charlie.  They claimed solidarity with Ahmed.  They presumed to know what the Ahmeds of the world think (and that they think alike) whileoverlooking the contemporary politics of the Muslim majority regions of the world.  They regretted the killing, but clearly didn’t understand it.

    The petition’s authors presumed a) that French Muslims were mostly devout, and b) that this meant they could not stomach satirical drawings – two huge and highly inaccurate presumptions. This was a recurring theme after 7 January – that all Muslims and all people of Muslim heritage were offended by the publication of cartoons (whether they liked the cartoons or not). It is not at all clear how assuming that 1.5 billion people have no sense of humor (and no politics) is anything other than patronizing.

    Meanwhile, the campaign to support the presentation of the PEN award to Charlie Hebdo was led by Salman Rushdie, who is of Muslim heritage, and whose name is derived from a great 12th century Andalusian Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd who likely would not have been terribly troubled by provocative cartoons, and whose own books on philosophy and theology were burned by Muslim fundamentalists while his Christian followers were slain by the Inquisition.

    So, we must remember that January 7, 2015 was one in a long line of far right attacks on creativity, and part of a history of fundamentalist assaults against artists and intellectuals who have defied them.  And, sadly, it was only one of the first armed Islamist salvos of 2015 which will be remembered as the year of endless, expanding jihad. Charlies and Ahmeds, Ceciles and Samiras died in many regions of the world at the hands of those seeking a free ticket to paradise.

    In 2015, Muslim fundamentalists would go on to target Pakistani arts promoters, Iraqi women lawyers and teachers and most of the country’s minorities, Syrian archaeologists, a Kosher grocery store in France, an event about freedom of expression in Denmark, Afghan airports, Tunisia’s national museum, countless Shiite mosques everywhere, minarets, a Beirut shopping district, a Sousse beach, Nigerian markets, a Kenyan University, and a Russian airplane carrying families home from vacation.  Grave crimes, crimes against humanity, war crimes, even genocide, in some cases.  Afterwards we were all assaulted verbally both by some on the left who tried to excuse the perpetrators or minimize their crimes in defiance of the facts, and some on the right who sought to lump all Muslims in with those perpetrators notwithstanding how many Muslims have died at their hands and how many have opposed them.

    With all of this bloodletting and intolerance, why is it important to remember the Charlie Hebdo attack and its victims?  Algerians I have interviewed about the country’s “dark decade” of 1990s fundamentalist violence have often told me about the debates regarding the motives behind fundamentalist killings. In the beginning, people tried to explain away the targeting – “oh, he was a policeman, he we was an atheist, she was a communist,” until the terrorists began killing Every(wo)man and it seemed inexplicable.  Grassroots solidarity with less popular or controversial victims was crucial but sometimes harder to come by, something which their assassins knew only too well.  A muted response to what happened to the cops and the communists only emboldened the so-called Warriors of God to attack others.

    So, a year later, remembering the Charlie Hebdo attack, and paying tribute to its victims, are critical aspects of the ongoing struggle against Muslim fundamentalist terrorism.  Likewise, remembering that many Muslims and people of Muslim heritage have spoken up in defense of Charlie Hebdo and against fundamentalist violence (and have died in that violence) is a key way of fighting the racism and discrimination against Muslims which also burgeoned in 2015.  The truth about Charlie is that in the year since the attacks we have often forgotten all of these things.

    So today, in memory of Charb, Cabu, Wolinksi, Tignous, Bernard Maris, Honoré, Elsa Cayat, Mustapha Ourad, Frédéric Boisseau, Michel Renaud, and the police officers Franck Brinsolaro and Ahmed Merabet who were killed exactly a year ago, and all those who died at the hands of Islamist terrorists in 2015, I say simply, “I am still Charlie.”  It is a battle cry in the ongoing campaign against fundamentalist violence and the ideas that motivate it, which is one of the defining human rights struggles of 2016.  That is perhaps the most important truth about Charlie.

  • "What we’ve achieved so far": An Interview with Jeremy Corbyn

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    Leo: Your remarkable campaign for the leadership not only doubled the party membership but galvanised some 400,000 people overall to associate with the party. This is frankly unheard of anywhere in terms of party mobilisation on the left in recent decades. What do you think this reflects about the possibilities for a new politics, not only in Britain but more broadly – especially in Europe? 

    Jeremy: I think our campaign excited people who were very depressed by the election result and very depressed by the analysis that was being offered at the end of it, which was essentially that Labour wasn’t managerial enough and we had to be better managers in order to do better in the future. I only really got on the ballot paper because of a combination of people – from those who just absolutely wanted an alternative to be put, to those who thought that there ought to be a democratic debate in the party. This kicked off the social media campaign that encouraged others to get involved.

    We finally made it into the ballot – which required 35 MPs so sign on to a nomination – with one vote to spare and one minute to go. Then at the hustings where the party leadership debates were held, the point of view I put got quite a good reception. And as we started organising fringe meetings around them, the campaign suddenly took off. The first one was Nottingham, where we organised a meeting in a room for 100, and 300 turned up. From then on they just grew and so by the end of July, beginning of August, we were getting 1,000 people at every rally we organised. Most of them were filled up with one day’s notice. One place, we filled a hall for 1,500 with only four hours of notice on Facebook.

    Leo: Is it your sense that the same type of thing is happening elsewhere? 

    Jeremy: Yes. Because this wasn’t anything to do with me. This was to do with people wanting a different way of doing politics – particularly the young people who came in and were very enthusiastic. Our campaign was a combination of the young and the old, very little in between, the middle-aged weren’t there. They were either under 30 or over 60, most of the people that came in to work on the campaign, and the phone-banking they did was quite extraordinary. There was one of them where I witnessed this 18-year-old Asian girl with a burka explaining to a 90-year-old white woman how to operate the mobile phone to make calls, and they were both getting on just fine. And it was kind of lovely.

    We had 400 people on a phone bank one night. It was quite extraordinary. I’m not sure how much phoning they did – they did a great deal of chatting to each other. Most of our funding was raised by crowd-funding, small donations, the average donation was £25, and we got union money in. So about half of it was union-funded and the other half was fundraised.

    Hilary: What was it exactly that you were tapping in public consciousness? 

    Jeremy: The basis of the campaign was anti-austerity – that was the whole basis of it.

    Hilary: And the appeal for the ‘new politics’, the new way of organising politics – how do you see the connections between these two themes? 

    Jeremy: Oh, they’re two sides of the same coin. Austerity is essentially making the social systems of all of Europe pay for the banking crisis, and with this comes a popular sense of either resignation or anger. So the idea that there is an alternative, that we can do things differently, is very important. That is why we have had the most unremitting attacks on me from day one of the campaign. Some of it is so bizarre it’s funny.

    ‘If you respond to these kind of ludicrous personal attacks you then end up in a swamp’

    Leo: Worse than what Tony Benn experienced? 

    Jeremy: Hard to tell, different time, different age. It feels bad at times, although I just never respond to any of it, whereas Tony tried to at times and I think that’s a mistake. I mean, I don’t blame him for it. At that time, those days, I was with Tony in responding to all this. But if you respond to these kind of ludicrous personal attacks you then end up in a swamp or a trench with these people.

    I’ll give you an example… I was accused of not bowing properly to the queen. I decided I wouldn’t respond. Had I responded, the debate would have been about at what angle one should bow. And by now, five days on from it [at the time of this interview], anyone who hadn’t followed the story closely would say, why is the leader of the Labour Party engaged in a public debate about how one should bow to the queen? They’d think, is that all he’s interested in? I’m about to lose my house and he, the leader of the Labour Party, has got nothing to say about that. So I just took the view from the very beginning that I’m not responding to any of it.

    Hilary: That links to a question I was going to put, which was that you have this reputation that’s sometimes symbolised – for example in Steve Bell’s cartoons in the Guardian by you facing Darth Vader in Star Wars – or as the wise wizard in Harry Potter. You appear fearless. Have you always been fearless, is it something that comes from your family and background – or is it something you’ve gradually, intuitively learned or cultivated through your experiences, your 30 years as an MP? When you’ve been taking on powerful interests, diving in at the deep end every day as an MP, have you ever been fearful? 

    Jeremy: There’s two points here, really. One is that I have this 18th century religious view that there is some good in everybody. Sometimes you have to search quite hard for it. Sometimes it’s very hard to find and you wonder if it really is there. Secondly, because I’ve never had any higher education of any sort, I’ve never held in awe those who have had it or have a sense of superiority over those who don’t. Life is life. Some of the wisest people you meet are sweeping our streets.

    A friend of mine, a building worker – he sadly died, committed suicide last year, I was very sad about that and I’m very sad I wasn’t there for him at the time – whose house was very simple, lots of reused this and reused that, and somebody said to him: “Jim, why do you live like this?” He said, very wise, he said: “I live simply, that others might simply live.” And you think, hang on, that’s actually very profound. So you’ve got to have a bit of respect for people. I do have a respect for people and I actually, genuinely enjoy meeting the wide variety of people I do. My constituency has probably about 70 different languages spoken within it, people from all over the world. There’s the great, there’s the good and there’s lots of people who have been in the prison system. They’re all there.

    What is fundamental is the attitude with which you approach people, it’s an attitude towards your environment, your attitude towards other people. Interestingly, the first leader of the Labour Party, Keir Hardie, who was a more thoughtful man than he’s often given credit for, was much more bothered about education and opportunities for women than about nationalisation.

    Leo: It’s interesting in that connection that before you were elected in 1983, you were already associated with the attempt to change the Labour Party’s old statist and parliamentarist politics. Tony Benn had articulated very well in the 1970s the notion that the real problem is not about more state or less state, it’s about a different kind of state and, above all, a much more democratic British state that would be capable of introducing a cooperative, egalitarian and democratic economy. He would be so proud of you for having achieved what he wanted so badly – to be the Labour Party leader committed to this. 

    Jeremy: I wish he was still here. I knew Tony very, very well for a very long time. The difference between Tony and me was that whereas he was one of those very unusual politicians who was actually very successful in a conventional career pattern, I have been monumentally unsuccessful in the conventional career pattern.

    The first time I met Tony was 1969-70 period, was when he was reflecting on his experiences as a cabinet minister in the 60s. What was interesting about him then was that, whereas most of the cabinet ministers reflecting on the experience talked about the ministerial car, the mendacity of the opposition, and how they were going to win again, Tony had quite different and more interesting personal reflections on what he had done or not done.

    Leo: Yes, and on the basis of such reflections, he wrote a Fabian pamphlet in 1970 called The New Politics: A Socialist Reconnaissance, in which he surveyed all the anti-authoritarian social movements in the late ‘60s – black power, women’s movement, anti-Vietnam War – and said, we need to bring that spirit into the party, that’s what we’re missing. 

    Jeremy: I remember those discussions with him, and then I worked very closely with him in the mid-70s on industrial democracy. Sometimes he was idealistically too excited. He’d sort of say: “Yes, it’s all going to happen now.”

    Leo: You were quoted in Tony’s diaries as saying that you attributed the defeat in the 1983 election to “the great incompetence of the party machine”. So what I want to ask you is, did you mean this in the sense of its incapacity to project the promise of the new politics you shared with Tony beyond the active party membership – and does this remain the case today?

    Jeremy: I honestly can’t remember saying that but I can imagine the thought-processes I was having, which was that the party in ’83 presented a very interesting electoral platform but lots of people in the party were quite frightened of it, and the Tories were running essentially a fairly xenophobic election surrounding the Falklands war which we never challenged. We also were faced with the SDP being set up by those leading Labour parliamentarians who left the Labour Party at that time, so it was a very interesting period. I felt the party didn’t really understand what was happening.

    Leo: But what about the incompetence of the machine? 

    Jeremy: In some cases just the actual organisation on the ground was very poor.

    Leo: Are you worried about this now? 

    Jeremy: No, not at all. The party now is in a very different place. The ground operation, as we call it, in the General Election was actually very good.

    Leo: Was it? 

    Jeremy: Oh, yeah. We had more people active than many I can remember. I went to quite a lot of constituencies, key constituencies. And the membership is now much bigger, it’s double what it was. What I am worried about now is that the party needs to reach out and involve a wider range of people. That’s my main message.

    I’ve just been speaking in Birmingham, to a very big Unite shop stewards’ conference. I said actually every one of you in this room is an expert, every one of you has an opinion, every one of you has optimism, every one of you has hopes. I want a party structure and a union structure that allows your intelligence to come forward and be part of our policy-making. So we don’t go through to 2020 where I, as the leader, go away and write a manifesto. We go through to 2020 where its patently obvious to everyone in the country what our manifesto is going to be – on housing, on health, on jobs, all those things – because everybody’s had a part in it. So the need is to reach, to widen our organisation to make us a community-based party.

    Leo: And you think the party’s regional organisers know how to do this? 

    Jeremy: Well, it’s not so much do organisers know how to do it – do we all know how to do it? I’m not an expert on this but I’ll try. We’re going to try various experiments in how we reach out and how we involve people, how we use social media, how we use digital tools to share ideas and knowledge. The idea is that we have a community conference on policy in which some people are there, some people are on Skype, some people are on a livestream feed, some people are sending in emails, whatever. All saying something, because they’ve all got something to say.

    It’s reaching out to people and understanding that what we couldn’t do in ’83 was win parts of the national media because the story was written by the Radio 4 Today programme and The Sun. Radio 4 Today is still there and it’s influential, The Sun is still there and it’s influential, but they’re both much less influential than they were.

    I do this weekly YouTube video, the lowest viewing figures we’ve had have been 400,000, the highest we’ve had is over a million. That’s the numbers of people who want to watch it. So, we’re doing all of that, and I’m spending a lot of time as well travelling around on trains, like this.

    Hilary: This links in to what we’ve done to prepare this interview. Inspired by your approach to Prime Minister’s Question Time in the House of Commons, we’ve asked people what questions they want us to ask you. 

    Jeremy: Dave from Witney, what’s his question?

    Hilary: Well, Dave from Witney did not come up with anything, but Tim, from Barking, has a question about democratisation of the state: he asks what your views are on a federal UK, given that new politics and democratisation surely involve sharing power? 

    Jeremy: Yeah, I’m glad that question has come up because of the problems that have arisen out of the UK being such a highly centralised state. It is changing, because Scotland is obviously very different now – as government in Scotland is devolved, it now has tax-raising powers which they may or may not want to use. But whatever the outcome in Scotland – whether independence or otherwise – England is still not decentralised at all. George Osborne is offering city-devolution to some places – over which I have some concerns because it is devolution to big cities and it doesn’t necessarily include adequate funding of the services that have been devolved. So you could end up with a form of devolution that doesn’t include any kind of financial autonomy or alternative source of income. You negotiate every year on limited funding with a central government which relies on you running even more services on its behalf.

    The other end of the scale is the total federal model that Germany has, with not only the very powerful ‘Lander’ levels of regional governments but also very powerful cities and a relatively weak federal state. I think there is a very interesting debate on federal models to be had here. I don’t want us to go into government in 2020 saying simply that we are going to think about it. So I’ve asked Jon Trickett to set up a constitutional convention, which he’s doing – it’s under way now. It is looking at powers of government, powers of parliament, powers of the House of Lords, an elected second chamber. Then issues of rights and accountability in society, bill of rights kind of thing – protecting the Human Rights Act but moving on from that, of course, to how you sort English regional government.

    Because there are no effective regional voices it means there is a disproportionate level of capital investment in London and the south-east compared to the north-west and north-east, for example. The East Midlands actually does the worst of every region. I put some ideas together on this during the leadership campaign as one of our consultative papers. I did 13 consultative papers on lots of different stuff. They are on the Jeremy4Leader website. Look at those and you’ll see some ideas there. All of those are open to comment. The difficulty we have at the moment is simply the capacity we have to respond to all this, because of the volume of stuff we’re getting in.

    Leo: And to raise the stakes even higher, what about democratising European institutions? 

    Jeremy: Well, European institutions – I want us to approach the European referendum on the basis of demands for a social Europe, demands for workers’ rights across Europe, demands for environmental protection across Europe, and turn it into a debate about: do you want a free market Europe that controls people or do you want a Europe where the people control the market? Essentially advancing that kind of alternative.

    ‘Some of the wisest people you meet are sweeping our streets.’

    Now I’m not sure how far we’ve got with that debate, there’s a long way to go. I’m having a lot of discussion with a lot of union people on this at the moment. Our problem is simply the capacity to respond to everything. After only two or three weeks in office we discovered we had a backlog of a hundred thousand emails sent to me. We had a backlog of a thousand invitations to speak at places all over the country, and all over the world for that matter. We started from scratch with our office, so just the sheer management of issues off this is huge. It’s now much better, it’s getting better. We’ve got more staff in place, a better team in place, it’s growing but it is quite difficult.

    Also I’m quite concerned that if I spend time in the office someone will always find something for you to do. There’s always a crisis that needs your urgent attention. If I wasn’t there, either the crisis wouldn’t happen or it wouldn’t need your urgent attention. But the fact I’m there means that it becomes my problem, not somebody else’s. So I’m quite assertive about the need to ensure I go travelling round the country. I’m doing basically three days travelling every week. So we’re going everywhere. I did over a hundred events during the leadership campaign and by the end of the year I will probably have done 400 to 500 public meetings.

    Hilary: How do you organise the input you get through those meetings? 

    Jeremy: That’s the hard part. That is the hard part. It can’t all reside in my brain – it’s not capable of retaining all this information. That is actually the problem area, how we deal with all this. And so, when we’ve finally got the rest of the team in place, we’re going to look at much more interactive websites and interactive ideas. A lot of it is depending on computers and social media. You couldn’t do this without computers and social media.

    I think back to the Tony Benn deputy leadership campaign in 1981. I think of the miners’ strike in 1984. I think back to the industrial democracy movement in the early 1970s. All of which I was very involved with, but they would have been so much more successful and so much better if we’d had better forms of communication. We had to write letters to everybody, and spent a lot of time licking stamps.

    Hilary: This leads into another question concerned with the party. It’s from Thomas Barlow: his question is how are you going to open up the party – both the party apparatus and the Parliamentary Party – to democratic inputs and participation in policy-making? And I might add, how far could your own Islington North constituency party be a participatory model for the rest of the party? 

    Jeremy: There’s no perfect model, but what I say to anyone active in the party is that we’ve recruited 200,000 new members, but please don’t take them to the branch meetings. You get to your average branch meeting and you’re discussing the minutes of the last meeting but one, it’s not necessarily very attractive. My constituency party is not perfect but we have a very large membership. We’ve got 3,300 members in my CLP and 2,000 registered supporters. So we’ve got 5,000 people and the Labour vote is 30,000 – so one in six of the Labour vote are members of the party.

    Hilary: So how do you involve them? 

    Jeremy: We have thought a lot about how we conduct meetings. Our normal monthly meeting has a guest speaker, a discussion, a report from me and then after an hour and three quarters, we do the business in 20 minutes.

    Leo: So have you sent this out to other CLPs, to the regional organisers? 

    Jeremy: This is where it’s going. We’ve organised a very interesting national executive ‘away day’ where I’ll be presenting ideas on this.

    Leo: This isn’t widely known… 

    Jeremy: It will be, don’t worry. The word will get out there and one day the BBC will mention it.

    Hilary: Maybe you could do a little film of sort of your local party in action showing what meetings could be like… 

    Jeremy: Yeah, but the whole thing should not be personal around me…

    Hilary: Then, moving on beyond the personal, how far could this model influence the Parliamentary Labour Party – so the issue is less whether MPs will be reselected as candidates for the next election by each of their constituency parties, but more that they face local parties that are so full of energy and capacity that they can’t resist the new politics agenda by clinging to the old politics. 

    Jeremy: Abraham Lincoln had a point when he said: “With charity to all and malice towards none, we go forward.”

    Leo: Are there red lines you won’t cross, apropos of this? 

    Jeremy: Yeah, I mean, my views on nuclear weapons are very well known. My views on social justice are very well known. My problem is all my views are extremely well known on everything. To be fair, you get a lot of noise from a small number of members of the Parliamentary Labour Party. But there’s a much larger group that are actually very interested – very interested in who has joined the party, very interested in the fact that their membership has doubled. Some are nervous, some are concerned, some are excited. We’re all humans. We have to try and understand people. My natural, default position is to work with somebody, not against them. It does make my life quite busy.

    ‘By the end of the year I will probably have done 400 to 500 public meetings… You couldn’t do this without computers and social media.’

    Hilary: So this relates to another crowdsourced question which is from Finn Smith, who is asking how you envisage changing the present political culture? He says that you’re “respected because you’re humble, modest and caring but you’re up against a dominant narrative of personal gain, competition, private entrepreneurship. How do we change the mentality of this neoliberal sort of narrative?” 

    Jeremy: Well it’s about the psychology of our society. It’s exactly where we started. Is socialism just about state power, state control, state ownership and so on, or is socialism about a state of mind of people. I think the response across Europe to the humanitarian crisis of Syrian refugees is very interesting. The Hungarian government are not very nice people, and very nasty towards asylum seekers and refugees. But when those poor Syrians were trying to walk through Hungary to get to Austria, ordinary people came out and gave them clothes and water. They could’ve been throwing rubbish at them. They could’ve been attacking them. They weren’t. There is a basic humanity towards other people.

    Of course, you have to unlock this when young people are brought up to understand their history and their culture largely in terms of consumerism, competition and self-advancement. So my absolute passion is that, starting with pre-school facilities, the emphasis should be on schools as places of social interaction, where people to learn to play together, and where they are asked, is the advance of a community the ability of somebody to get very rich at the expense of others; or is the advance of the community when there is nobody homeless, nobody unemployed, nobody sleeping rough? We have to insist it is only about “getting ahead” if we all get ahead.

    Somebody said to me “you don’t speak for aspiration”. So I said, “Oh yeah I do, I’ve got a real aspiration.” And he said: “Okay, so what’s that?” And I said: “Everybody to have a house.”

    Hilary: What about how to appeal to UKIP voters. Does it require redefining patriotism? 

    Jeremy: No, it just requires reaching out and saying, well actually, the housing shortage is created by not enough houses, the doctors shortage is created by not enough doctors, the limits on school places by not enough schools. Stop blaming people. Look to ourselves how we solve it.

    Leo: So, it sounds like you are actually enjoying yourself in this new leadership position? 

    Jeremy: Yeah, of course I am.

    Leo: Seriously? 

    Jeremy: Yeah, I was pushed into this, but I’m happy I was.

    Hilary: Are there any surprises? I mean, is it as you expected? Or are there things that are different, for good or ill? 

    Jeremy: I feel constantly concerned that I’m spending all this time doing everything involved in all my leadership activity and sometimes I feel a tear between that and my responsibilities to the community that I represent. So I have a weekly fight over the schedule set out in my diary. That’s where I do get quite assertive, because I insist on spending time with those people and groups I always have represented even while now also travelling across the country – and also I make sure that I have time for myself. Half a day, or a day a week, so I can dig my allotment.

    Hilary: OK, just one final question. You are known for your exemplary lack of sectarianism. You work with whoever is on board for the cause. You worked with the Greens, for example, in Stop the War, on anti-austerity platforms and so on. Now people are worried – and this is reflected in the crowdsourced questions – about the party’s electoral approach to the Greens, and in particular whether the Labour Party should stand down in the next election from challenging their leader, Caroline Lucas, in the Brighton constituency she is MP for. How does a non-sectarian ethic extend to that level as a party leader? 

    Jeremy: That’s tomorrow’s problem, that’s not today’s. We’ve got to build the ideas, then develop the movement, and then we’ll see. Today is what we’ve achieved so far.

    Originally published at Red Pepper.

  • Connecting Anti-Austerity and Climate Justice Policies

    ImageHumanity is currently faced with a number of deep and challenging crises: economic, social, political, food, and—last, but not least—the climate crisis, which is threatening the very existence of millions of people on this planet. These crises have many of the same root causes, which go to the core of our economic system. Strong vested interests are involved. Thus we are facing an interest-based struggle.

    All over the world, people are organizing and fighting against the effects of these crises. Trade unions are heavily involved in many of these struggles, as are many other movements—single-issue as well as broader social movements. Increasingly, our entire social model, the way we produce and consume, is being questioned. The way out of these crises requires a system change, which can only be achieved if we are able to shift the balance of power in society. This leaves us with the challenge of unifying movements and on-going struggles—particularly to unify the struggle against austerity with the struggle against climate change.

    Emissions continue to rise

    Governments have been negotiating for more than 20 years (more or less since the Rio Summit in 1992) in order to agree on measures which can save us from the climate crisis. What has happened during those more than 20 years, however, is not the required reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Quite the opposite, emissions have increased immensely, by more than 60% since 1992. Transport emissions have increased 120% over the last 30 years, and they are still increasing all over the world— at a rate that outweighs reductions in other sectors of the economy.

    Given the catastrophic effects that global warming will have, why have our governments not been able to agree on necessary measures—which are both possible and realistic—to reduce GHG emissions? It is not because solutions are lacking. The climate crisis can be prevented. We have the knowledge and technology we need. What we lack is the social, political, and economic power sufficient to carry out the measures necessary to stop global warming. It is, in other words, a question of power.

    The social, political, and economic power to stop global warming, however, will not come from the economic and political elites who govern us and control big oil and big finance. Only massive pressure from below, from a broad coalition of trade unions, other social movements, environmentalists, and others can save us from climate catastrophe.

    An interest-based struggle

    We are talking about vested interests, and we are up against some of the most powerful corporations in the world—in cahoots with an army of neoliberal politicians serving their interests. Seven of the ten biggest and most powerful corporations in the world are oil companies. These companies are using all their power to avoid policies that could hurt their economic interests. They execute enormous economic and political power. Where politicians are for sale, they buy them. Where governments or regimes challenge their power, these companies contribute to getting rid of them.

    The effects of the economic, social, and political crises we live with—and have lived with for some time—is another interest-based struggle, and it is not so difficult to identify the different interests. Workers all over the world fight against the crises. They fight for jobs. They fight for decent jobs. They fight for living wages. They fight for social protection. They fight against unemployment. They fight against social degradation. They fight to improve their communities. They fight for their families’ livelihoods.

    Many of the policies addressing these crises are austerity policies. Austerity policies are not, as some will have it, “necessary cuts in over-expanded public services” or “necessary downward adjustment to make workers’ wages competitive.” Austerity is a class-based policy, carried out in order to destroy the welfare state, privatize public property and public services, and defeat the trade union movement—all with the final aim of increasing the return on investment. This represents the main frontline in the current global class war.

    Systemic crises

    The fight against climate change—against climate catastrophe—is not an additional struggle that the trade union movement must take on, alongside fighting austerity. It is, and will increasingly be, an important part of the same struggle. If climate change is not stopped, or limited to the 1.5 or 2o C, it will become job-killer number one. It will destroy communities. It will destroy millions and millions of jobs, and it will lead to enormous social degradation. It will further redistribute wealth from the bottom to the top, massively increase poverty, and cause emigration crises of unknown dimensions. Our struggle to avoid devastating climate change is therefore an important part of the interest-based struggle for the kind of society we want.

    Both the economic crisis and the climate crisis are systemic. They are both rooted in the same economic system: a system which is geared toward making profits rather than producing use values, a system which is dependent on economic growth (a capitalism without growth is a capitalism in crisis), a system which is exploiting workers and over-exploiting natural resources, a crisis-ridden system which again and again creates and recreates mass unemployment, poverty, and misery. Now, this system is also about to destroy planet earth as a place to live for future generations.

    Public ownership and democratic control

    To stop this we need to act rapidly and forcefully. We are already approaching the point of no return regarding the 2o C threshold of global warming. During the more than two decades of the COP process, we have seen that big oil, big finance, neoliberal governments, and market forces have not been able to solve these problems for us. The same goes for the economic and social crises. On the contrary, they are mobilizing all their power to avoid any restrictions on their desperate hunt for more profit. More austerity and more greenhouse gas emissions are the results.

    Therefore, the only way to meet these challenges is to bring these powerful corporations and institutions under democratic control. That requires the mobilization of enormous social and political power. Neither the trade union movement, nor the environmental movement, nor other sectoral social movements, nor single-issue movements are able to win this struggle alone. We need, more than at any time before, to build broad alliances of social movements—and others—if we are to turn the tide in this struggle.

    Unify the social with the climate change struggle

    Because of its strategic position in society, the trade union movement will have to play a decisive role in this struggle. However, we have to be honest and admit that, so far, the trade union movement has not taken sufficient responsibility in fighting these crises. Trade unions are on the defensive all over the world. There are reasons for that, which I am not going to go deeply into here, even though it is an immensely important issue which I think should have been higher on the agenda in many of the meetings here, not least in the meetings organized by trade unions themselves. Maybe that could also have helped us to go beyond the very narrow, textual preoccupation of the so-called “just transition,” to focus more on the strategies to achieve it.

    The main tasks we face today seem quite clear to me. We have to unify the social struggle with the climate change struggle—since the root causes as well as the measures necessary to fight them are mainly identical. We have to build broad alliances—strong enough to mobilize sufficient power to shift the balance of power in society. To bring strategic sectors of our economy into public ownership under democratic control will have to be a decisive part of such a struggle. In the climate change struggle, the energy sector stands at the forefront. CO2 emissions are all about energy, and without bringing it under democratic control, there is no possibility to achieve the transformations we need, deeply and rapidly enough.

    Growing pressure from below

    The anti-austerity struggle raises the need for public ownership and democratic control in a number of other areas—in defense of public utilities as well as in the fight to bring privatized property and services back under democratic control. The fight against climate change and the fight against austerity cannot be abstract and too general. These struggles have to address concrete problems and solutions in workers’ and people’s daily life. We need to unify and make the struggles broader, as our experiences teach us to do. Most unions today are involved in some kind of anti-austerity fight, and more and more trade unions are joining the campaign against climate change. Initiatives like Trade Unions for Energy Democracy (TUED) represent important developments in this regard. What we need now are broad coalitions willing to fight, a more radical agenda, more militancy, and thus a growing pressure from below.

    Asbjørn Wahl serves as Chair of the International Transport Workers’ Federation’s Working Group on Climate Change. This text is from his presentation at the panel “Power to the People,” organized by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung—New York Office and Trade Unions for Energy Democracy at the Peoples’ Climate Summit in Paris, December 5, 2015.

    Originally posted here.

  • Turkey’s Elections: Crisis Continues – And This is Not the Worst Outcome

    Image

    The November 2015 snap elections in Turkey have given back to the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) the parliamentary majority that it lost just a few months ago, in the June 2015 elections. However, the election results can neither resolve the crisis of Turkey’s authoritarian and neoliberal order, which is being challenged by the spirit of Gezi Park and new developments in the Kurdish movement nor obscure its complexity.

    In the Prison Notebooks Antonio Gramsci describes a crisis as an “interregnum,” a period when “the old is dying and the new cannot be born,” and “morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass.”[i] The morbid phenomena arise because the rulers lose their capacity to lead by consent and desperately attempt to re-assert their rule by using excessive force, what Gramsci calls domination. The rulers’ loss of capacity to lead, the approaching “death of the old,” needs to be viewed dialectically. It is the possibility of the new — although not-yet-become but can be foreseen — which causes the loss of consent, and pushes the rulers to exert coercion. And the bigger the threat of the new, the more ferocious are the attempts to contain it.

    Such has been the nature of violence that preceded Turkey’s November 2015 elections. The June elections meant that the AKP lost its parliamentary majority for the first time; and should the opposition parties have founded a coalition, many who became victims of the violence could still be alive today—and the AKP could have been questioned for a few of its wrongdoings. But the old has been given another breath not only by the AKP but also by the ultranationalist Kemalist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), and by the silent support of the anti-AKP Turkish public, thus allowing the state to continue its war against the Kurds. The latter has been reinforced by retaliation by the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) that awoke dormant prejudices against the Kurds.

    As the clashes between the PKK and the Turkish Army brought the Kurdish southeast back under exceptional rule (martial law), neither the People’s Democratic Party (HDP) nor the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) could have rallies. The AKP’s aim was clearly to evoke fear and terror in the eyes of the Turkish and Kurdish public that still has vivid memories of the violent 1990s. The disregard for the threat from the Islamic State (ISIS) also contributed to terror, with 108 people dying at a peace rally in Ankara in what became the deadliest terror attack in the history of Turkey. The November 2015 elections happened amidst this violence, handing back to the AKP its parliamentary majority. What the violence has shown, however, is the continuation and deepening of the crisis Turkey finds itself since the turn of the century and the crisis’s multi-layered nature.

    The AKP as the First Popular Sign of the Crisis

    Turkey’s crisis has first and foremost been political and pertained to the “representativeness” of the Kemalist foundations of the regime. The regime maintained its elitist and exclusionary configuration in its nationalist-conservative, hence seemingly populist, neoliberal form that was put into place following the 1980 military coup. The select few, who ran the state apparatuses, continued to exercise the most radical interpretations of Kemalism against the pious and ethnic groups, while those seeking representation continued to increase in the decades following the coup. The 1990s were a period of heavy conflict with the PKK and closures of various Kurdish and political Islamist parties by the Constitutional Court.

    The situation was altered with the economic crisis of 2001, when public expenditure hit sky-high levels and the Turkish banking system collapsed. Given the high intensity of strikes during the 1990s — 1996 was the year with the highest worker participation to strikes in Turkey’s history[ii] — the need for transforming the hegemony to save Turkish neoliberalism became clearer.

    The AKP emerged in the midst of this crisis. As an organic transformation of Turkish political Islam, it was first of all the representative of two groups seeking recognition from the regime: a religious capitalist class that was getting richer and a religious poor that was urbanizing during the 1990s. The former was ready to jump from the domestic markets to the global ones and the latter prepared to be more visible in public life. Thus, it challenged the regime on grounds of representativeness, anticipating its approaching death. Yet, to satisfy the needs of the first group and also to save Turkish neoliberalism, it has also been a neoliberal party unlike its predecessors in the political Islamist tradition. Eventually, the AKP acquired the new label required in the post-9/11 world, “moderate Islamist.”

    The AKP’s Transformation and Its Limits

    The AKP’s initial popularity and legitimacy in the eyes of most domestic and global critics of Kemalism show the depth of the Turkish regime’s crisis at the time. Yet, the party has essentially displaced Turkey’s crisis to the contours of a pragmatist representative democracy that was globally being questioned on the legitimacy of the Iraq War and by a nascent broad alter-globalization movement. It has continued to deepen the neoliberal reforms of the previous two decades in the country. In other words, the AKP may have challenged the hegemony in Turkey but it has sided with the hegemony globally. Its neoliberalism has always limited its democratization, and has relied heavily on state intervention to facilitate dispossessions of social, ecological, and urban commons in favor of capitalist classes. The party’s indifference to workplace deaths, which reached a total of 15,000 in its 12-year rule, is a case in point.[iii]

    Even though the economic growth until 2007 rendered opposition to the AKP invisible, by 2008 the contradictions of the AKP as a supposed solution to Turkey’s crisis have become apparent for wider segments of society. The regime has transformed itself into an authoritarian neoliberalism, a natural development given the political soil in which the AKP grew and its response to the capitalist crisis of 2008.

    The first source of this authoritarian neoliberalism is the AKP’s political Islamist roots, which much like any other ideology in modern Turkey’s history, grew out of the same soil as Kemalism. Behind its populist facade, it desires an equally, if not more, authoritarian and top-down control and full-deployment of state apparatuses, which should transform society. Nevertheless, the depth of conservative and nationalist ideologies in Turkish society means the AKP’s conservatism has acted partly like a mirror image of Kemalism, which was critical of society and aimed to transform it to resemble the “modern man.” The AKP has, instead, transformed the state to resemble the conservative and nationalist masses; filled with myths about national grandeur, religiosity, and an infamous culture of public shaming known as “neighborhood pressure” (mahalle baskısı). While this system is not representative, this community involvement provides the necessary illusion.

    The second source of the AKP’s authoritarian neoliberalism is global. The 2008 economic crisis and the massive opposition to austerity politics that followed have exacerbated the authoritarian neoliberalism put into place following 9/11. The AKP, now feeling secure inside the state apparatus as the military’s influence had been minimized, yet also fearing that a halt to the economic growth since 2002 was imminent, dropped any democratization discourse and put the unitary, homogenizing logic of the Turkish State apparatus into motion. Backed by the AKP’s popular conservative ideology, this state apparatus was more than suitable for the global rise of authoritarian neoliberalism.

    The AKP’s authoritarian neoliberalism has continuously revealed itself since 2008. Erdoğan urged the small shopkeepers to undertake their “traditional role” and keep the “neighborhood clean,” while the State kept its own “neighborhood” clean by pressuring journalists and incarcerating many. Everyday life and bodies would become targets of the regime. Erdoğan criticized popular TV shows for damaging Turkish values, compared abortion with murder, and continued his disparaging remarks about women.

    All this happened as the economic growth proved unable to solve the unemployment problem in the country. The overall unemployment has been stuck at 11%, while unemployment for those between 15-29 has increased to a staggering 32%. By 2008 and onwards, the engine of the AKP’s economic growth was to turn Istanbul and other major cities into a “giant construction site,” entirely disregarding the environment and rural livelihoods.

    The Gezi Uprising and the Nascent Opposition

    The AKP’s balance sheet shows it has actually become the morbid interregnum that accompanies a crisis. In order to salvage its neoliberalism and guarantee its permanence, the party has appropriated the parts of Turkey’s regime that it deems useful for its conservative authoritarian neoliberalism, hence contradicting its democratization claims and constraining its representative capacities into much less than even a liberal democracy. As a result of the increasing repressiveness, the simmering opposition erupted with in a radical and unexpected form. The Gezi Uprising, despite its limited outcomes, proved that the possibility of the new has been alive in Turkey.

    The characteristics of the participants were the uprising’s first novelty. The so-called silent, apolitical generations of the 1980s and 1990s took to the street. It is true that there were also activists in this generation, part of the alter-globalization movement influenced by Zapatismo and active in urban and ecological struggles. Yet, most had no prior political experience, and the activist strand had usually been sidelined by the centralizing logic of the hierarchical leftist parties of all sorts. The transformative potential of the uprising appeared, when the previously silent youth embraced the activist element’s politics.

    The politics in the occupied Taksim Square and later in the neighborhood assemblies was reminiscent of the uprisings that had shaken the world in 2011. It was radically inclusive — as if all the old divisions in the country disappeared for a while, and radically democratic, horizontal, and autonomist — as if the dominant histories in Turkey have not been written by a homogenizing hierarchy in the left and right alike. In many ways, Gezi has brought the country’s radical politics to the present time, much like the AKP has brought its hegemonic politics in line with the global hegemony. Gezi has liberated Turkish radical politics from its esprit de sérieux, its Orthodox Marxism, democratized and popularized it.

    Gezi defied definition by every dominant political organization in Turkey. However, it has also avoided defining itself, which might have made it possible to educate and mobilize some if not all of its constituents. The problem became more apparent as the uprising dissolved into hundreds of neighborhood assemblies. Almost every assembly had its own distinct definition of the Gezi depending on the socio-economic and/or ideological composition of the neighborhood. This discordance meant the new could not materialize out of Gezi, yet Gezi has undoubtedly altered Turkish politics in an unprecedented way.

    The people’s experiences in the occupation of the Taksim Square and of some of the neighborhood assemblies generalized a new sensibility towards the country’s politics, one that sees the country’s problems are not only caused by the AKP’s conservatism and authoritarianism but are also related to the authoritarianism deeply rooted in Turkey’s political history as well as in neoliberalism. Notably, this new sensibility has found hope in inclusive, horizontal, and autonomist tendencies challenging the very foundations of the country. Through this new sensibility, a bridge between the younger populations in Western Turkey and a transforming Kurdish movement could be created, and so the HDP has appeared on the country’s political stage.

    The Transformation of the Kurdish Movement and the HDP

    The HDP is the latest reincarnation of the Kurdish movement’s political parties, organizations which had been shut down by the Constitutional Court. Yet, different from the past parties of the movement, the HDP clearly situates itself as a party for all peoples of Turkey. And in rallies before the June 2015 elections, the party’s co-president Selahattin Demirtaş acknowledged Gezi’s neighborhood assemblies and the city of Kobane as the inspiration of their “new life,” based on grassroots democracy, an outlook that positioned the party in line with the new left emerging in Europe such as Podemos and Syriza.[iv]

    Overall, the HDP reflects the transformation of the Kurdish movement from Stalinist nationalism and secessionism to a radically democratic and autonomist political project dubbed “democratic confederalism” and represents its unification with the radically democratic sensibility that came out of Gezi. The most noteworthy example of democratic confederalism has been put into practice in Rojava by the Kurdish movement in Syria, whose fight against ISIS drew Western support, and also attention from notable leftist intellectuals, some of whom compares the political project to that of the Zapatistas. Yet, before Rojava Group of Communes in Kurdistan (KCK) undertook a similar effort in Turkey. The infamous reaction of the AKP government to the siege of Kobane, the state pressure to the KCK since 2009, and the heavy police response to the Gezi Uprising and the neighborhood assemblies prove the challenge put forth by these radically democratic projects to the authoritarian neoliberalism of the AKP regime but also show the difficulty of these projects to defend themselves without a defensive line inside the State. The HDP was born out of the hope generated by the Gezi Uprising to correspond to this necessity.

    The Kurdish movement saw an unexpected ally in the Gezi Uprising, as well as a chance to legitimize its political project in the West of the country through a more popular alliance than what its usual leftist allies could offer. Leading individuals in the Kurdish movement praised Gezi for “breaking the hegemony,” defined it as “a message for democratic and new vision for Turkey” with which the Kurds should join forces, and assessed that “nothing can stay the same in Turkey after Gezi.”

    Similarly, the grassroots forces in Gezi required a new bloodline because their first experiments in creating their own institutions through the neighborhood assemblies started to slow down by the end of 2014. Groups like On’dan Sonra and +1 organized mostly by people in neighborhood assemblies and in Western Turkey provided support to the HDP from below while preserving their autonomy from the party. Backed by such forces, the HDP has managed to become a hope for the country’s underrepresented as well as the younger generation in the West and the East, alike, overcoming prejudices against the Kurdish movement.

    From June to November 2015: Crisis Intensifies

    The violence inflicted upon the HDP prior to June elections and between June and November demonstrates the extent of the threat it has posed upon the old kept alive inside the morbidity of the AKP. Yet, electoral success of June and the necessary hope invested in the HDP have also concealed the contradictions of the Kurdish movement, which poses a challenge to the future of the party and the politics it promotes. For some in the Kurdish movement, the HDP appears to represent the “degeneration” of the Kurdish cause and the left. PKK’s leading cadres’ warning to the HDP to “get rid of the marginals in Cihangir” in August 2014 following Demirtaş’s promising results in the Presidential elections targeted the LGBTQ groups in the HDP, a manifestation of the PKK’s patriarchal and orthodox logic. Right after the June elections, the Group of Communities in Kuridstan (KCK) accused the HDP for wrongly suggesting to Öcalan that the call upon the PKK to give up the armed struggle, which, they argued, should be the decision of the PKK. What perhaps became the climax of the tense relationship between the HDP and older forces in the Kurdish movement was Demirtaş’s interview in the Financial Times in which he both invited the Turkish State and the PKK to an armistice and condemned the killings by the PKK. The PKK, however, played deaf to Demirtaş’s calls for a ceasefire, and it appears that the armed movement regards the HDP as subject to its control.

    The PKK’s response to the state violence did not help the HDP, particularly, the killing of two police officers at their home by PKK’s urban forces on July 22, just two days after ISIS’s Suruç bombing that killed 33 people, thus legitimizing further action from the Turkish State. The AKP, using the incident to accuse the PKK of  “unilaterally breaking the truce,” cultivated Turkish public’s fear of Kurdish separatism, which, the government claimed, was now “active not only in rural areas, but also in the cities” and “could kill police officers at their home.”

    These instances suggest a deeper contradiction that overshadows the transformation of the Kurdish movement. The movement may articulate radical democracy, horizontality, and autonomism, but it has yet to provide a critique of the armed, hierarchical PKK and the idolized vanguard role of Öcalan’s which are incompatible with such politics. This situation adds another layer to Turkey’s crisis. The PKK and Öcalan’s persona feeds the hierarchical, centralizing logic of the Turkish State and the charismatic authority such a logic strives for, and vice versa. To address this deeper contradiction of the Kurdish movement is more critical at this juncture than the losses in the November elections.

    What is to come?

    At this point, without resorting to any short-term optimism, we should expect that the AKP will worsen its “morbidity” in the short term, as curfews and heavy military and police attacks over Kurdish towns, and the murder of the human rights lawyer and President of the Kurdish city of Diyarbakir Bar have already shown. Between June and November, the AKP has managed to consolidate a wartime power bloc that includes the entire political spectrum of Turkey’s strong state tradition. The attacks against the HDP and the Kurdish populace received support from the nationalist MHP, which has lost half of its voters to the AKP, and Kemalist nationalists, who seemed to be more concerned with the defense of the state than AKP’s anti-secularism for a change. Traditionally aligned with the CHP, the Kemalist Nationalists have recently been critical of the CHP’s softening towards Kurdish separatism with promises of increasing local autonomy and the selection of members who feel affinity to the Kurdish movement.[v]

    The AKP also continues to reinforce unity through the possibility of an international war. The recent downing of a Russian plane is a case in point. This interregnum is likely to deploy all of its powers as it continues to intensify the authoritarian neoliberalism in responding to the economic crisis looming over Turkey and suppressing the opposition. Street thugs, pro-government civil society organizations that spread the AKP propaganda,[vi] a devoted police force, forced dispossession of the commons as well as opposition businesses, the reemergence of Turkey’s notorious “deep state,” and a daily religiosity that would try to infiltrate more and more into the daily lived experiences of Turkey’s society are likely to worsen the morbidity.

    The global conjuncture also seems to work in favor of the Erdoğan regime as “a clash of barbarisms” that is no longer a distant possibility. The fears of radical terrorism and ISIS as well as a refugee influx generate another source of legitimacy for Turkey’s authoritarianism as it confronts the continuing crisis of capitalism. Accordingly, the EU officials have decided to restart negotiations with Turkey less than a month after the violence of the November elections, which comes in exchange of an agreement that allows the EU to return refugees, who used Turkey as their passage to EU countries. The AKP's risky actions towards Russia show its confidence in its Western allies.

    Yet, the possibility of countering this development also remains alive because what a regime that is incapable of generating the single bit of consent from half of its people can do with violence will always be limited. The AKP’s weakness in creating a cultural hegemony had already been apparent during the Gezi Protests as the Party failed to exert any influence on the popular culture and technological savvy of the younger generations. The AKP and its authoritarian neoliberalism also have to deal with the inherent contradictions of neoliberalism, which promises individual liberties, all the while destroying the social fabric where such individually can gain meaning. The AKP’s destruction of the urban and rural commons is not only an economical dead-end but also a social one that will soon hit the poor classes among the AKP’s supporters.

    It should also be noted that the HDP may have lost the conservative Kurds, but this saves the party from a “representational burden,” and its 10% in November elections shows it has consolidated much of its support in the West since the June elections. This consolidation also shows changed perceptions towards radical democracy and autonomism in the West of the country, despite how the Turkish state had associated these demands with the PKK and Kurdish separatism historically as well as recently during the June-November period.

    Moreover, the opposition to the AKP outside the HDP is not entirely an oppositional position which only seeks to get rid of the AKP. The CHP’s internal democratization, opening towards the Kurdish cause, albeit limited and slow, is a demonstration of the latent influences of the new post-Gezi sensibility. The sooner the CHP can fight with the ghosts of its past, and pick its side in this crisis, the sooner it can serve as an immediate, although not permanent solution to the violence of the regime by seeking an alliance with the HDP.

    Such a move could be beneficial in the short term for various reasons. It would create a broad democratic left bloc — whose leftism would undoubtedly come from the HDP but democracy can come from both parties given the authoritarianism of the present moment — to counter the AKP’s authoritarian statism. The HDP would then become more able to challenge the hierarchy of the PKK, and could also explain the similarities between “democratic confederalism” and the new sensibilities of Gezi, saparting the left from the shadows of the violence that concern many in the West. And finally, such a broad coalition could cultivate hope again against the risk of increasing apathy among the youth, who for a second time in two years witness their nascent dreams of change being crushed. While focusing on organizing—where the regime would feel the most damage in and around everyday life—is the most crucial step for the radical transformation of Turkey, such a broad coalition – although pragmatist – could provide the barrier against further regression of the people’s hopes amidst state violence.

    Finally, there is the new that is waiting to born from the global crisis. The movements of 2011 continue their struggles, and despite failures, the hybrid parties combining autonomism and electoral politics such as the Podemos of Spain and the Syriza of Greece, or Barcelona in Comú and its role in the Guanyem citizens’ platform in Spain are examples to follow for the nascent new in Turkey’s radical politics.

    In the end, the AKP may have extended the morbid interregnum by using the old repressive state apparatus and its constituents, but the crisis is nowhere near resolved. Should the opposition not accept defeat and continue organizing the new not only through political parties but also inside everyday life, which the AKP’s authoritarian neoliberalism would eventually target, the possibility remains of deepening the crisis of the old, preventing the consolidation of the authoritarian neoliberalism, and bringing to earth what may as well be a much more seasoned “Gezi Spirit.”

    * Onur Kapdan is a PhD. candidate in Sociology and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is from Istanbul, Turkey and his current research scrutinizes the aftermath of the 2013 Gezi Uprising in the country in relation to the global crisis between the autonomist and radically democratic tendencies that surfaced since 2011 and the authoritarian neoliberalism imposed since the capitalist crisis of 2008. He has written two pieces, published online, on the Gezi Uprising. The first was written at the beginning of the event ,“Reflections on Turkey’s Gezi Park Protests” and a later one followed during his field research in Turkey last year, as a silent solidarity against the police murders in the US was taking place, titled “Lonesome Corners, Where So Many Flowers Bloom Like Accidents.”

    Contact: Kapdan@umail.ucsb.edu   Twitter handle: @onurkapdan

    [i] Antonio Gramsci. 1999. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Electric Books, p. 556.

    [iii] One unforgettable incident is the Soma Coal Mine Massacre on May 13, 2014, in which 301 miners died due to the absence of legally required safety systems. In the face of the massacre, Erdoğan argued, “mine deaths were normal” and compared Soma with mining accidents in 19th century Britain, while one of Erdoğan’s consultants was kicking a protestor on the streets of Soma under police protection.

    [iv] See (Selahattin Demirtas, “Le rêve d’une Nouvelle Turquie est possible,” Le Monde 6-30-15).

    [v] See a series of columns from Yılmaz Özdil, a popular columnist among the nationalist Kemalists (ulusalci) since 2011 at the dailies Hürriyet and Sözcü such as his final column for the Hurriyet available here.

    [vi] The Ottoman Hearths, Osmanli Ocaklari, has been the most visible of these prior to the elections. Moreover, as the state-supported violence targeted HDP offices across the country, and the PKK-Turkish State armistice came to an end pro-AKP NGOs, under a platform called “Civil Solidarity Platform” held a rally in Istanbul, which was framed as a “civil” reaction to terror. Yet, Erdoğan and Davutoğlu were the only political figures invited, and both gave speeches related to the November elections.

     

  • Urgent Action for Imprisoned Iranian Teacher Unionist

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    Mahmoud Beheshti Langroodi has been on hunger strike in Evin prison since November 26, 2015. His health has severely been deteriorated but he has refused to stop his hunger strike.

    In a statement from Evin Prison on December 2, 2015, Mr. Beheshti Langroodi announced: “I hereby declare: I, Mahmoud Beheshti Langroodi, who have spent 25 years of my life teaching children of this land, and have more than 15 years of trade union activities in support of our esteemed teachers, have been on hunger strike since Thursday, November 26, 2015 (Azar 5, 1394), to protest against an unjust verdict of “9 year imprisonment” by Judge Salavati in a trial that lasted a few minutes, hoping that authorities, especially judicial authorities, after hearing my cry for justice, take actions ‘to vacate the prison sentence until a judicial review by a competent court with a jury is conducted publically’.”

    Mr. Beheshti Langroodi ends his statement by emphasizing that those who have put him behind bars are directly responsible for any unfortunate consequences of this hunger strike.

    As previously reported, Mahmoud Beheshti Langroodi, a board member and spokesperson for the Iranian Teachers’ Trade Association (Tehran), had been granted a furlough from October 11th to 17th, 2015; however, Tehran’s prosecutor denied his request for the extension of his leave despite the fact that his bail conditions had previously been approved. He therefore returned to Evin prison on October 17, 2015.

    Prior to his temporary leave, Mr. Beheshti Langroodi had gone on a dry hunger strike for six days following his arrest on September 6th to protest against his unjust incarceration. Mr. Beheshti Langroodi had previously been arrested a few times and was sentenced to a total of 9 years as indicated above, but it was not clear whether this sentence was going to be carried out, suspended, reduced or otherwise annulled. In recent months it has become very clear that the Iranian government is increasing repression of teachers and intends to keep as many leading members of Iranian teachers’ associations as possible in prison.

    Mr. Esmail Abdi, General Secretary of the ITTA-Tehran, as well as a number of other prominent teachers including Rasoul Bodaghi, Ali Akbar Baghani, Alireza Hashemi and Abolreza Ghanbari continue to be in prison. Mr. Bodaghi has recently been given an additional three year jail sentences despite finishing his six-year prison term. Iranian Teachers’ Trade Associations form the Central Council of Iranian Teachers Trade Associations, which is affiliated to the Education International.

    Background: Iranian teachers organised three rounds of nationwide rallies in January, March and May 2015, to protest against their poverty wages (the estimate for the poverty line in Iran is above 3 million toman, approximately $1000.00 per month, but teachers’ average monthly income is around 1 million toman or about $330.00). Iranian teachers have been calling for free education for all and are strongly opposing the privatisation and commercialization of schools and the education system and demanding that all classes meet the internationally recognized standards. For these rightful demands they have been paying heavy prices. Their last day of action on July 22nd was crushed by security forces and over one hundred teachers were arrested.

    Please send protest letters to the authorities of the Islamic Republic of Iran (Please see the sample letter below).

    Sample Protest: Free imprisoned teachers in Iran: updated December 13, 2015

    We are writing to raise our extreme concerns and condemnation regarding increasing repression of teachers and labour activists in Iran.

    We are alarmed that Mahmoud Beheshti Langroodi has been on hunger strike since November 26, 2015 and the authorities have refused to address his concerns and demands. Mr. Beheshti Langroodi has been sentenced to 9 years imprisonment in an unjust trial that lasted only a few minutes. He has demanded that the authorities to take actions to vacate the prison sentence until a judicial review by a competent court with a jury is conducted publically.

    Mr. Mahmoud Beheshti Langroodi is a board member and spokesperson for the Iranian Teachers’ Trade Association (ITTA-Tehran), who was arrested by security forces at his home on September 6, 2015. Iranian Teachers’ Trade Associations form the Central Council of Iranian Teachers Trade Associations, which is affiliated to the Education International.

    We are also seriously concerned that many teachers have been persecuted in recent years. Mr. Esmail Abdi, General Secretary of the ITTA-Tehran, as well as a number of other prominent teachers including Ali Akbar Baghani, Alireza Hashemi, Rasoul Bodaghi and Abolreza Ghanbari continue to be in prison. Mr. Bodaghi’s prison term was for six years and he was scheduled to be released in September 2015; instead, he received an additional three years in prison.

    We denounce repression and prosecution of teachers and other trade union activists in Iran and call for the immediate and unconditional release of all teachers and labour activists in Iran and the recognition of workers and educators to have the right to organize without fear of persecution. In particular, we are extremely worried about the health and well-being of Mr. Beheshti Langroodi and call on the Iranian government to immediately address his demands and vacate his prison sentence. All governments around the world have obligations to protect the lives of their prisoners. Mt. Beheshti is a prisoner of conscious and must be treated according to all internationally recognised human rights.

     PLEASE SEND protest letters to:

    • Leader of the Islamic Republic
    Ayatollah Sayed ‘Ali Khamenei
    Twitter: @khamenei_ir (English) or @Khamenei_fa (Persian)
    Email: info_leader@leader.ir

    • President of the Islamic Republic of Iran
    Hassan Rouhani
    Email: media@rouhani.ir
    Twitter: @HassanRouhani (English) and
    @Rouhani_ir (Persian)

    • The Judiciary of the Islamic Republic of Iran – High Council of Human Rights
    Email: info@humanrights-iran.ir

    • Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations
    Email: iran@un.int

    Cc: info@workers-iran.org

    International Alliance in support of workers in Iran (IASWI)

    Information originally found at http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article36704.

  • On Racism and Revolution: An Interview with Cuban Activist Norberto Mesa Carbonell

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    Since 1959, the Cuban revolution has been dedicated to racial equality. In a country where slavery was abolished only in 1886, the revolution offered many black Cubans their first access to land and education, through the new universal egalitarian policies, and an explicit commitment to eliminating racial discrimination. Even critical scholars argue that though it falls short of racial democracy, Cuba has done more than any other society to eradicate racial inequality.

    Yet since Cuba’s “Special Period” began in the early 1990s, resources have been severely limited. Market-oriented reforms have come at the price of rising inequalities, which are not color-blind: racial tensions have increased substantially. To counter this trend, several black artists and public intellectuals have created a vibrant anti-racist activist scene, partly attached to the government-sponsored “Regional Afro-descendant Articulation of Latin America and the Caribbean, Cuban Chapter” (abbreviated in Spanish to ARAAC).

    It was at one of ARAAC’s events, that the interviewer, Luisa Steur, first met Norberto Mesa Carbonell – a sixty-year-old black man, leaning forward on his chair, eyes brimming with political passion. The following are excerpts from several long interviews in late 2014 and early 2015. Luisa Steur is from the University of Copenhagen and does research in Cuba. A longer version of this interview is available at Global Express http://isa-global-dialogue.net/?p=4222

    LS: Norberto, can you tell us a bit about yourself?

    NMC: Politically I am complicated. One of the revolution’s first great campaigns was the Cuban Literacy Campaign (1961); I had barely turned ten when I began to teach others to read and write! In 1963, when hurricane Flora swept over the island, I was thirteen, with a brigade picking coffee in Oriente. I wasn’t even sixteen in May, 1966, when there was a big military mobilization: we were there, behind the canons, waiting for American boats! That is to say, I was brought up with the practice of revolution. On the other hand, I read a lot. I was a leader of my worker group, organizer of a party cell.

    The revolution meant a lot in my life. But something happened in 1980 that made me leave the party. During the “Mariel boatlift,” many poor people, many blacks, were leaving Cuba, because of poverty. We were supposed to treat them as traitors, to throw eggs at them. I found myself in a meeting where a young comrade was being criticized because he refused to participate. They expelled him! Leaving that meeting I was thinking, if my brother left on a boat, and people wanted to treat him like that, as scum, they’d have to fight me first. And so, I decided to send in a letter requesting my resignation. It was a question of conscience.

    The revolution has achieved many positive things, including for blacks. That’s why I continue appealing to the governing institutions, sending them public letters; unlike political dissidents, I still think positively about those institutions. And I’ve stayed a revolutionary according to Fidel’s definition. The majority of blacks are with the Revolution – it’s logical, given all the revolution has brought to black people. But that’s not to say we should be “grateful” forever.

    So when the 1990s came, with growing inequalities, including racial inequalities, we created theCofradía de la Negritud [Brotherhood of Negritude] to fight racial discrimination. What is threatening about the Cofradía is that we cannot be labeled political dissidents. We work within the socialist discourse, even though we’re critical: we simply don’t want socialism with racial discrimination! Our struggle calls on the Communist Party to confront the problem of racism in Cuba. So long as the party doesn’t explicitly take up the problem, all other institutions will be hesitant to act.

    LS: What are the major problems related to racism in Cuba today? And have you experienced any of them yourself?

    NMC: Organizations of black people have often been repressed, accused of being “racist.” Blacks have had little chance to form a positive identity. You can see it in this idea of adelantar (moving forward), which means marrying a white person, getting rid of blackness! This whitening ideal limits the extent to which people can identify with their racial condition. It makes it difficult to confront the most serious racial problems today, which are about blacks being excluded from well-paid positions in the Cuban economy.

    I have some first-hand experience. For years I worked at the Marina Hemingway. I started there in 1997, when a neighbor of mine became the boss of the shops there. So I asked whether there was a job for me – after all, we were from the same village, we had worked together before. And by then I had experience at the reception of international hotels, plus I spoke English. So he said, “Norberto, I’m going to help you, but listen, what are you saying about working at the reception or in the shops? That’s not possible. I’ll put you to work in the storehouse because here in the Marina Hemingway, blacks don’t work in contact with the public.” And that was someone who used to be a party leader! I needed the job so I said, “Ah, yes, the storehouse, why not…”

    After a while, I heard they were looking for porters and I managed to secure a position. There were five of us – two who had some higher-up backing and felt secure, while myself and two others, all three of us black, actually had been studying English. But who were the first to be sent for re-training when the hotel didn’t need so many porters? Of course, we three blacks, who actually spoke English! I was sent to be trained as a security guard. I remember entering the place we were sent. There are few blacks in the tourism sector, but there, where they send excess staff for retraining, it was at least 60% black!

    But things got worse: they laid me off, totally illegally. I complained to the union but nothing happened. I decided to file a complaint on the basis of the violation of the right to equality, established in the Penal Code. I went to a lawyers bureau first; from there I was sent to the municipal Prosecutors Office, who eventually sent me to the police station. I remember telling the official that I wanted to make a grievance regarding the right to equality. She looked at me with total incomprehension: “violation of the right to equality??” “Yes compañera, I want to accuse the hotel manager of racial discrimination!” She was dumbstruck. The head of the unit took my complaint – and they started an investigation! The hotel was full of commotion: the police investigator took it seriously and the manager of the hotel was transferred to another hotel. But eventually I received a letter from the prosecutor stating that the subject of my complaint did not constitute a criminal offense; no appeal was possible. And that’s where it died.

    Cubatur were looking to hire tourist guides. I went running; with my hotel experience and English I was perfectly qualified! I was told the manager was not in, come back tomorrow. The third day, I was waiting for the manager when two young white men came in, talking about the job I had been waiting for. Suddenly the manager appeared to be in! When I wanted to join the two boys inside I was told there were no places left.

    These problems exist with all the better jobs in Cuba. Most of my life I worked as a geneticist at one of Cuba’s most advanced dairy enterprises, raising Holstein cows. At the beginning, when I was at high-ranking meetings and noticed almost all the other attendants were white, I didn’t think much of it. Nowadays I pay more attention. Too many times I’ve seen blacks, well-qualified for their jobs, getting replaced by whites. This happened in the last job I held at Cuba’s prestigious bio-pharmaceutical enterprise: they were trying to get rid of all the black professionals – and of me all the more because of my activism. Many of my black colleagues left because of harassment. In the end I chose to take early retirement.

    Last year our organization wrote an open letter to the CTC (the Worker’s Central Union of Cuba), asking them to denounce this racism but did they do something? Nothing. We need the party to take leadership and acknowledge the problem exists. As long as that doesn’t happen, no other civil society organization will talk about it. “Building a prosperous and sustainable socialism” is the order of the day. “Prosperous and sustainable,” great – but what about racism?! All these new economic reforms, attracting foreign investment, increasing cuentapropismo (small entrepreneurship) – all this is bound to worsen racial inequality in this country.

    LS: Does the economic problem of racism in Cuba mostly concern more skilled, more educated black workers?

    NMC: The main problem of racism in Cuba is poverty. Many black youngsters cannot go to university. Instead of studying, many take small jobs simply to keep the family afloat. How is it possible that we bring almost a thousand Pakistani youngsters here to study to become doctors, paying for their education, but we can’t provide the five thousand poor Cuban youngsters who need money to study? This revolution was supposed to be “by the humble, for the humble” – and now only those families with money can let their children study?

    You know that in Cuba there are thousands of acres full of weeds, because people don’t want to work on the land. At the same time, we have all these people who migrated to the cities but cannot find a proper place to live. My suggestion is to find black families who want to move to the countryside and set up an agricultural community. Of course, they need a lot of support, inputs, a tractor, etc. Why not ask some NGOs to support this financially? Of course the Cuban state has to grant them ownership of the land. These days land is being sold all over the place, so why not?

    Here in Cuba in the nineteenth century, some farms actually belonged to free blacks, particularly in the Oriente Province. Many free blacks fought in the War of Independence [against Spain] – they left their farms to join in the Liberation Army. But American companies bought up their lands, because their title deeds weren’t registered properly. What happened to those blacks? They were ready to protest of course. To reclaim their land, many of them joined the 1912 revolt in the Eastern province, led by the Partido Independiente de Color. In the ensuing repression, many of them were killed.

    So this resettlement program of today is a question of historical justice – for this government to give land to these people would be a great gesture. It should be for those who want – a program of historical justice for black families, but if some whites want to join, why not? But for blacks, this is one of the few ways to improve their economic conditions.

    LS: How do you yourself get by these days, how do you find the resources to organize the activities of the Cofradía?

    NMC: I live on a pension paid in pesos, a few dollars, and it’s not easy. I work at night as a guard for some rich guy, for $30 a month. It’s difficult to organize with so little money – people travelling from far expect at least something to eat. Sometimes we have to postpone meetings simply because we don’t have the means and everyone is too busy “luchando” [making ends meet]. But at least people know we are doing it out of sincerity, not because of ulterior motives. And we will continue, that’s for sure. I cannot think of my grandchildren facing the same problems that I faced or worse, falling back to where we were before the revolution.

    Direct all correspondence to Luisa Steur (luisasteur@yahoo.co.uk) and Norberto Mesa Carbonell (nmesacarbonell@gmail.com)

    Originally from http://isa-global-dialogue.net/on-racism-and-revolution-an-interview-with-cuban-activist-norberto-mesa-carbonell/

  • Podemos, the 15M Indignados Movement and the Radical Left in Spain

    In this article I will analyze the current situation of the Left in Spain, ahead of the forthcoming December 20, 2015 General Elections, by considering how four of its political actors (United Left, Podemos, The Municipalist Platforms and Anti-capitalist Left) have shaped their strategies and agendas in response to the political changes that the 15M Indignados movement brought about. Indeed, at a time when Podemos, the newest party of the Radical Left, has distanced itself from the spirit of the 15M Revolution, the changes that the Indignados brought about into mainstream politics have achieved an almost mythical status in the imaginary of the Left.

    “Izquierda Unida” (United Left) was until recently the largest, state-wide electoral force of the Radical Left in Spain. Although it is commonly considered a party, United Left is actually a permanent coalition of parties. Founded in 1986, it has a federal structure and its main partner is the PCE, the Communist Party of Spain. Its agenda straddles between revolutionary socialism and radical social-democracy, with important influences from environmentalism and feminism. Their electoral clout has been substantial over the years — their gains hover around 9% — although never important enough to shape policy at the state level.

    Things started to change for United Left on May 15, 2011. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered in different cities throughout Spain in protest against the political and financial elites, whom they blamed for the severe economic crisis in the country. They demanded political democracy and socioeconomic rights. A series of demonstrations, assemblies and occupations of public spaces would take place during the following two and a half years; the 15M Indignados Revolution was born. Despite the similarities between the socioeconomic demands of the Indignados and those of United Left, the results for United Left in the elections held on May 22, 2011 (Regional and local, 7.38%) and November 20, 2011 (Spanish State, 6.92%) were disappointing. This put United Left’s status as the main actor for the Radical Left into question.

    The 15M Indignados
    At the end of 2010, Fabio Gandara and Pablo Gallego, two young cyber activists concerned about the crisis in Spain, initiated an impromptu platform in Facebook (Platform for the Coordination of Groups for a Civil Mobilisation) that soon attracted other individuals along with a wide range of new and more established socio-economic protest groups. This platform, who made the first call for a demonstration on the 15 May 2011 (a date chosen for its proximity to the 22 of May Regional and Local Elections), was given the name of “Democracia Real Ya” (“Real Democracy Now”) in March 2011. Fabio and Pablo had no allegiance to any protest group, and explicitly rejected any connection with ideological or political party labels.

    The agenda of the Indignados started to build up from the foundation of a number of lists of grievances connected to economic and political dispossession. But this autonomous and multi-organisation horizontal movement never managed to develop and agree on a detailed set of socio-economic and/or constitutional proposals. The demands for social justice and political change, put forward by the organisers of the demonstrations of the 15M, lived alongside more group-specific issues being raised by many pre-existing organisations such as the PAH (Platform against home evictions) or JSF (Youth Without a Future), as they joined their efforts in the promotion and organisation of the mobilisation.

    The indispensable role played by social media in the organisation and promotion of the demonstrations and the collaborative nature of online activism made the 15M an unprecedentedly decentralised movement. However, social movement sociologist Flesher Fominaya emphasizes the connections of the 15M with other political movements who throughout the previous decades had developed the participatory and deliberative culture that seemed so natural to the Indignados when they emerged. She disputes the constitutive role played by social media for this new movement, claiming this should be regarded as the latest episode of a long-standing political struggle.

    In many respects Flesher Fominaya is right. The indignados embraced well-trodden methods of participatory democracy. Capitalism was criticised comprehensively in line with previous protest groups’ demands. The political system as a whole, including all parties with political representation, was openly questioned. The content of the demands of Democracia Real Ya can be clearly read as a reproach of the power of the economic and political elites of Spain. However, in their Manifesto they make no mention of the words “capitalism” or “class”.

    At this point it is worth reflecting upon the role that language played in the building of the 15M Indignados as a self-created movement. Given that the most immediate objective of Democracia Real Ya was to hold a number of demonstrations on May 11, the first Indignados created digital spaces of communication for the purpose of promoting and coordinating those demonstrations. In this context, the production of appealing slogans and short pieces of counter-hegemonic discourse became a priority. The digital environment multiplied the messages and accelerated their distribution. Those spaces of communication were hugely autonomous, allowing language production to depart from existing linguistic canons used by traditional revolutionary groups. This type of communicative engagement involved a reframing of political issues. After the first months of their existence, the creation of an autonomous language became such a useful and distinctive practice of the Indignados that it acquired an essential role as a component of the new Radical Left community.

    This interpretation resonates with research that looks at the Indignados movement under the frame of the populist theories of Ernesto Laclau, for whom language is a tool to define conflict and build the new identity of the people. However, this theory of populism does not touch upon the effect of online mass communication on the nature of the resulting political movement. I believe that the decentralized and fast processes of production and consumption of language in online environments disrupt all the conventions about authorship of the new linguistic usages and frames, enabling them to be owned collectively. This is why language becomes a key attribute of the identity of the new political community, and not just a tool.

    Another defining characteristic of the Indignados movement is its structure. The Indignados used a formula of organic voluntary accumulation of individual citizens, grievances, local assemblies, protest groups, parties with no political representation (eg, Anti-capitalist Left), bloggers, public communicators, academics, (eg, Pablo Iglesias and Manuel Castells) and informal leadership networks.

    In order to have a full picture of the Indignados, and understand some of the dilemmas of this new Left, we need to take into account the interplay between the digital and the physical spheres. In the case of the Indignados their first gathering on May 15th acquired an unsuspected emotional dimension: after months of work in the mainly digital back stages, the online community of organisers and supporters witnessed an explosion of street physicality. For most people, the 15M protest was different from previous mobilisations such as the anti-war movement or trade union campaigns due to its origin, composition, appeal, size and potential.

    This shock of self-consciousness is particularly poignant given that the Indignados did not feel represented by anyone but themselves. Clearly, it was difficult for any traditional party to communicate with them without being a part of them. Neither United Left nor the main trade unions could do more than show sympathy for the movement, and echo some of their demands. No existing large party could dare direct the movement, let alone influence it. However, the uniqueness of the Indignados is also the reason for its downfall. By 2013, the pace of activity slowed down considerably and electoral prospects were not promising. With the May 2014 elections to the European Parliament approaching, many activists and leaders felt compelled to make a move to provide an effective electoral vehicle for the Indignados.

    Podemos
    “Mover Ficha” (“Making a Move”, as in a chess game), the founding manifesto of Podemos that was signed by a number of public figures, academics and activists, was published on January 12, 2014 only a few days after it had been set in motion. By January 14, 2014, Pablo Iglesias, who initially had not signed the manifesto, had confirmed his involvement as the speaker of the movement. The manifesto was conceived within “Izquierda Anti-capitalista” (“Anti-capitalist Left”, a section of the Fourth International). It contemplated the need to create an electoral platform — with open primaries for the selection of candidates — for the European Elections of 2014 and involved well-known public figures with media projection.

    Iglesias was the ideal choice for many reasons. He was a university lecturer in politics, a former activist in United Left and had worked for years in alternative local TV projects where he would promote counter-hegemonic approaches and content. Iglesias had also become a well-known advocate of the 15M. In December 2013, the largest online left-wing newspaper Público had agreed to provide a digital platform for Iglesias’ TV programme “La Tuerka”. The founder of Público, Jaume Roures, a former Trotskyist activist who had been imprisoned several times during the Franco dictatorship, had also key business connections with La Sexta TV, one of the big commercial channels. The appeal to the Indignados was guaranteed as Podemos had embedded the linguistic strategies and contents of the Indignados. Podemos was making an intensive and carefully planned use of social media and had promised to honour the key demands of the 15M, including the use of participatory democracy.

    The creation of Podemos in January 2014 was not only motivated by the slow pace of the different organisations linked to the Indignados in reaching an agreement on a shared electoral platform for the 15M. The perceived inability of United Left to formulate a convincing strategy to attract a substantial mass of voters and win elections was also an important factor. However, at the time of Podemos’ inception there was not an agreed master plan for it to become a populist force that would compete against United Left. In fact, as early as January 2014, some of the signatories of the “Mover Ficha” manifesto, including Iglesias himself, indicated their willingness to converge with United Left and be part of the same electoral list in the May European Elections.

    For United Left this was not an easy option. Anti-capitalist Left had already been trying to get United Left to agree over a shared platform for those very elections. However, “Mover Ficha” contained a belated criticism of United Left and Operation Podemos had not gone down well with the less open sector of the Spanish Communist Party, which managed to prevail over the sector led by Alberto Garzón and Mauricio Valiente, who supported integration with Podemos. By the end of February 2014, United Left had confirmed that they would not include Podemos candidates in their lists to the European Elections. The greatest obstacle, though, was Podemos´ demands to hold open primaries for the selection of candidates.

    The evolution of Podemos during its two years of life has been noteworthy: Podemos has moved from grassroots participatory internal democracy, to a de facto centralised committee structure. Although its statutes grant extensive rights of proposal and decision making, including the removal of officers, the shrinking of members’ participation makes it impossible to achieve the minimum number of members’ votes required to activate many processes. Podemos has also opted for a closed number of ready-made online platforms and tools, downgrading the role of the open software grassroots activists who saw Podemos as a techno-anarchist movement in which to develop ambitious alternative spaces of participation.

    The transformation of Podemos’ policies can be summarised as a shift from revolutionary policies that would disrupt austerity and neoliberalism, to a well contextualised and creative, yet un-revolutionary, neo-Keynesianism that has been garnished with the glamour of specific contributions and endorsements of prestigious international economists. Some key policies such as the auditing of the public debt have been dramatically modified. Podemos are now respectful with an increasingly wider section of the business community and very mindful of the constitutional and factual boundaries of the market economy and capitalism. Pablo Iglesias himself has recently declared that many of their original proposals of May 2014 were not feasible in the short or medium term.

    Anti-capitalist Left
    The case of Anti-capitalist Left is very interesting because it shows the liquidity of the Radical Left in Spain. This section of the 4th International had been part of United Left until 2007, under the name “Espacio alternativo”, and played an important role in the creation of Podemos. The text of the manifesto “Mover ficha” (“Making a move”) had been drafted as an internal motion within Anti-capitalist Left. According to the newspaper El Diario, who provided a copy of the original motion, the text had been copied almost literally and then inserted in the founding manifesto of Podemos. The unsuspected kiss of life received by the manifesto was celebrated by the organisation.

    However, when Iglesias was asked by signatories of “Mover ficha” to become the figure head who would kick-start Podemos, many Anti-capitalist Left members thought that a more thorough discussion was needed. Nonetheless, key Anti-capitalist Left members and most of its activists became involved in Podemos and managed to gain positions of responsibility within the party. The two most notable cases are the hugely charismatic Teresa Rodríguez, the leader of Podemos in Andalucía, the largest region of Spain, and Miguel Urbán, European Member of Parliament.

    The relationship between members of Anti-capitalist Left and the Podemos´ apparatus has been tricky, particularly from the summer of 2014, when the constituent process for Podemos to become a fully-fledged party started. In the internal processes and elections, Anti-capitalist Left would typically side against Iglesias’ loyal officialist faction called “Claro que Podemos” (“Of Course We can”) and join or promote alternative proposals and electoral lists.

    Anti-capitalist Left restructured and renamed their organisation as the “Anti-capitalists” movement in January 2015 as they relinquished their status as a political party. This was forced on them by new Podemos Statutes passed in autumn 2014 according to which nobody could have elected positions in Podemos and in another organisation. The tensions became more notorious in the media when Podemos obtained 15 (out of 109) seats in the regional elections of March 2015 in Andalucía. As PSOE had not won an absolute majority in the Parliament, various sorts of agreements to form a government between two of the four main parties, including Podemos, started to be contemplated. A confrontation with the national executive, dominated by Iglesias, arose over 1) the conditions under which Podemos would agree to support Susana Diaz (PSOE), 2) how to deal with the party base and the media about these conditions, and 3) the role of the regional branch of Podemos in any negotiations.

    The discrepancies continued when the process for the nomination of candidates for the December 20, 2015 elections were agreed over the summer. The deadlines were so tight that it was hardly possible to put together lists for the internal primaries. Also, the party’s executive had the right to reserve a number of centrally designated positions in the lists of each of the 50 electoral constituencies in Spain. Anti-capitalists rejected this to the extent of not presenting candidates. Even the sector loyal to Iglesias split into two over the designation of candidates. Many top positions in the lists had been given to candidates who are new to Podemos, as they have been headhunted centrally on the basis of their public projection and professional prestige. Often, they are not local to the constituency they have been allocated to.

    Nevertheless, for many Anti-capitalists the drift of the political agenda of Podemos toward “the centre of the chessboard” (using Podemos´ terminology) is not a reason to abandon the most powerful Trojan horse they could dream of in neoliberal Europe. Another reason why Anti-capitalists remain loyal is their belief that a bad result for Podemos in the election would generate a defeatist atmosphere across the whole of the Radical Left. For Miguel Urbán, Podemos needs another general assembly after the December 20 elections.

    In my view, the faction of Iglesias, who still see Anti-capitalists as a necessary but increasingly uncomfortable contribution to the party, may take the opportunity to push them even further away. Therefore, the key for Anti-capitalists is to connect with other militants of Podemos who do not belong to Anti-capitalists but are unhappy with its centralisation and would prefer to see more radical left wing policies. The Anti-capitalists involvement in the recently reactivated anti-war (Syria) movement, and their enthusiasm about Municipalist platforms, provides them with opportunities to tap into causes that will certainly grow stronger.

    The Municipalist Platforms
    The Platforms are the other new electoral strand of the 15-M Indignados. The first one of them was created in Barcelona in June 2014. Soon after a handful of them sprung up in other parts of Catalonia and Madrid. Their aim was to create political spaces in which a programme and a list of candidates to the local elections of May 2015 would be agreed to by using the methodology of participatory democracy. In some cases, like Barcelona, the Platform continued after the elections. In some others, like Madrid, the platform disappeared after the election.

    Podemos and United Left participated in these platforms, alongside other organisations and individuals, sometimes with great difficulties. Following the great results of the Platforms in Madrid (Ahora Madrid), Barcelona (Barcelona en Comú) and other big cities, leading to their top candidates becoming mayors, the inclusive formula of the platforms, combined with the inclusion of charismatic figures, was hailed as the perfect solution to integrate all the Radical Left parties and activists in an electorally effective way for the General Elections.

    United Left
    United Left supported this view and suggested converging under a state-wide platform called “Ahora en Común”, but Podemos decided to integrate only into the left-wing multiparty platforms in Catalonia (under the wing of Barcelona’s mayor Ada Colau), Valencia, Galicia and in one of the 3 provinces in Aragón. Podemos’ rationale for this selective policy of alliances is that Podemos alone would not be able to compete in those autonomous communities with a strong local Radical Left. In relation to the rest of the Spanish State, Podemos regards itself as the electoral platform in which United Left members, notably Garzón, would be extremely welcome.

    Under these circumstances, United Left had no option but to promote their own platform, Unidad Popular, with a clear reference to the Chilean socialist party of Salvador Allende. Independent activists, members of smaller groups and candidates from Unidad Popular itself are running together. Open primaries were held, delivering the victory to Alberto Garzón as a candidate for the presidency of the Government. Given the proximity of the elections, the composition of the lists was, in many constituencies, quickly negotiated between United Left and different smaller groups. The idea was to reach the primaries with as much consensus as possible for voters then to ratify. Any citizen with relevant ID was allowed to vote, online or physically. The policies of Unidad Popular, less detailed than Podemos’, question the economic system and recover much of the socialist spirit of many proposals of Podemos that were watered down or eliminated in their current programme.

    United Left has gone through, and overcome, a deep crisis as a result of Podemos’ challenge. United Left has found a second wind precisely when, forced by the new scenario, its internal balance was tilted in favour of those United Left members and leaders, such as Garzón, who supported a more open and flexible approach to political collaboration. This shift has enabled United Left to resort to the very strategy that they rejected in 2014 for the European elections. Since their intention seems to be the consolidation of the platform model and, in the future, to collaborate with Podemos, they must concentrate in sustaining Unidad Popular. Even if their results are well below their expectations, the concentration of activists around this platform may prove key for the survival of United Left in the aftermath of the elections.

    Concluding thoughts and a way forward

    The evolution of the Spanish Radical Left after the 15M Indignados movement has been fascinating. The current organisational landscape has been shaped by 1) the staunch stance of United Left about its own survival in the face of the business-like modus operandi of the growth-thirsty leaders of Podemos, 2) the capacity of Anti-capitalist Left/Anti-capitalists to act and adapt rapidly and 3) the inclusiveness and effectiveness of the Platforms, who have not dropped the baton of participatory democracy that they took from the 15M Indignados Movement.

    The intensive use of social media is a decisive factor that triggered and enabled substantial transformations that cannot be regarded solely as a continuation of the political struggles and dilemmas of earlier movements. The new role of these political organisations challenges assumptions about mobilisation and traditional ways of political articulation. It also provides a rich texture for the study of more contemporary phenomena such as populism.

    In a forthcoming article in New Politics (New Politics #60 Winter 2016), I will look at the use of new language for the redefinition of radical left wing demands. I will also reflect upon the use of language as an element of the political identity of the Indignados political movement in the context of some of the recent processes, including the creation of Podemos and its internal struggles.

  • More Than Equality: Reasons To Be a Feminist Socialist

     

    ImageI want to talk about feminist socialism, rather than socialist feminism. As a student in Oxford I directly witnessed, and participated in the first conference of the Womens' Liberation Movement, held in Ruskin College in 1970. My whole world was shaken. My vision of the world up to that point was very hierarchical. For women it meant climbing up the hierarchy: being in there, getting up there, and so on.

    The way feminism emerged at that point completely turned that over. It challenged those hierarchies, fundamentally.

    There was a cartoon saying ‘Equality? We’ve got something better in mind’. And that was the idea: that we weren’t actually about ‘equal opportunities’, or equality within the existing system, we were about something entirely different, and we were experimenting in the process of creating this radical alternative through our daily lives.

    At the same time, feminism was very personal. To change the world, we started from our own experience, so we had this immense personal confidence and a sense of power as a result of the quite intimate forms of solidarity created, especially but not only by what we called consciousness-raising groups. It gave us the sense that change would begin with ourselves. 

    This prefiguration – expressing and working toward in our own daily lives the change we want to see – took the form of consciously changing ourselves. 

    As a kid, I’d been quite tomboyish and loud, but somehow in these meetings of the left, like the Oxford Revolutionary Socialist Students, I was really quiet, and I couldn’t understand it. It was partly to do with the blokes in the room, maybe one or two I fancied. Somehow it made me into this rather quiet, hesitant person, which seemed strange. 

    Feminism, and sharing the predicament with other women, allowed me to understand the roots of this and how to change the relations and culture that produced it through organising with other women. Politically, that time (and the spirit of '68 was still powerfully in the air, so it was a good time) has given me confidence to keep fighting, keep the optimism that comes from glimpsing a possibility of being part of movements for very radical change.

    I’d been brought up as a liberal, but by '68 I had rejected liberalism; I came to realise that liberalism, though it claimed to be about social and economic equality as well as inidividual freedom, wasn’t going to achieve it. It became clear to me that the policies required to take steps towards equality, like wealth taxes and higher taxes on corporate profit, were going to challenge capitalism, and Liberals were generally not prepared to do that.

    I became a socialist, but I knew I rejected both the Soviet model and the Harold Wilson, Fabian model. I was experimenting with a knowledge that the ending of capitalism was necessary, but without knowing what socialism was.

    So, for me, feminism, the making of feminism and the making of socialism, converged and fused in my mind. Looking back, feminism provided me with the tools to work toward a new kind of socialism.

    I’ll mention two or three ‘tools’ that I learnt through my feminism, and why I talk about a feminist socialism. I think feminist socialism hasn’t been realised, and yet I also think that it’s so obvious! 

    I’m repeatedly shocked by the fact that the relevance of feminism for the rethinking of socialism hasn’t been taken on board, and that the left has trudged on as usual, making its usual mistakes, pretty much as if feminism had never really done more than ‘put women on the agenda’. The left adopted policies towards women, but has not carried out a fundamental rethink of socialism, which is what I felt feminism was enabling us to do.

    The first tool is about power, the second about knowledge, and the third about the relationship between the individual and the social. What I learnt about the transformative nature of power was that we had power in a daily sense. We were implicitly – Betty Freidan talks about this – reproducing our oppression as sexual partners, as mothers, and as workers – in all sorts of ways: in our passivity, in our representations of ourselves. We faced a choice between reproducing or refusing; and refusing is only a small step from seeking to transform. 

    So there was that sense of a power that lay within ourselves and in our own capacity to transform social relations through our own action, in daily life. This helped me become clear about why I rejected the so-called Leninist relations of state power and party power, and the Fabian understandings of power whereby the state delivered concessions and policies, rather than power coming from within ourselves.

    That led me to draw on the work people have done distinguishing different forms of power – for example, in very different ways, John Holloway, Steven Lukes and Roy Bhaskar. There’s power as domination, which could effectively be what we think about when we think about government – taking power to then use the levers of government to deliver policies. Sometimes that’s referred to as ‘power over’.

    Then there’s power as transformative capacity: the power to change things, to do things. Sometimes referred to 'power to'. That was the kind of power the women’s movement was illustrating, transformative power and capacity, and I think that’s a very useful concept now. Much of what Occupy and the Indignados were about is power as transformative capacity. They have been in the squares, they have been creating a different kind of society, illustrating a different kind of society in their daily practice.

    I was also influenced by the shop steward/trade union movement at its most radical and alternative: when they weren’t simply refusing redundancies and closures by occupying factories, but saying ‘we have skills, practical skills that can be the basis of different kinds of production’. Socially useful products rather than missiles, for example, or working towards the conversion of industry to a low-carbon economy.

    This recognition of a transformative capacity that lies amongst the mass of people completely changes the nature of socialism, which has most often been based exclusively on the idea of power over – when you capture the means of power over production, over resources, and deliver it in this paternalistic way, without any recognition of the kind of power people actually have in their own capacity to refuse, and to change. Without any recognition of the dependence of existing power structures on actual people as knowledgeable and creative human beings.

    Secondly, knowledge. What I learnt from consciousness-raising groups and from shop stewards – who were mainly men, but interesting anyway – was the importance of different forms of knowledge. Most traditional socialist parties, be they Leninist or Fabian, believe in intellectual leadership. (Beatrice Webb made the classic Fabian statement that, “whilst the average man could describe the problem, he couldn’t provide the solution; for that professional experts were needed”.)

    Knowledge was traditionally understood in a very narrowly scientific way, involving laws understood as the correlation of cause and effect, that could be codified, centralised and then, through a central apparatus, provide the basis of a scientific form of planning.

    But the women’s movement, with its consciousness-raising groups, often began with gossip – with forms of knowledge that were not acknowledged, knowledge carried in emotion and daily experience, but which ended up producing policies: well-women clinics, a large range of educational projects, rape crisis centres – all kinds of women’s centres.

    These were policies that were developed through women actually defining their experiences and their problems in a way that was rooted in their practical knowledge. Similarly, radical shop stewards were not writing long papers based on scientific laws, but actually designing alternative products; they recognised their knowledge was tacit, was practical, but nevertheless could be shared and made explicit through practice, and hence socialised. 

    I once read Hayek, for my sins, and that was quite a shock, because he was writing about ‘tacit knowledge’, ‘things we know but cannot tell’; and he said that, whilst knowledge was constituted by the individual, it could only be co-ordinated through the spontaneous movement of the market. He used a notion of practical knowledge as the foundation stone of his theory of neoliberalism! 

    I argue that what we learned in the social movements is that it isn’t a question of a choice  between scientific knowledge and practical knowledge; nor, most important, is ‘practical’ essentially ‘individual’, as Hayek insisted it was. Social movements and particularly the women’s movement have discovered and generated tacit knowledge as shareable and socialisable. This is what we were doing. Relationships were key. 

    What are the relationships which are necessary for doing this? Practical knowledge needed to be socialised, to become the basis of a new kind of planning, in the sense of seeing ahead whilst being constantly experimental and responsive to what’s been discovered. Understanding power as both capacity and as domination, and knowledge as practical and tacit as well as scientific, laid the basis for a completely different understanding of socialism. 

    The third tool is to do with the relationship between the individual and the social. The women’s movement was about individual realisation; we were there as individuals, because of our own personal pain, oppression and feelings; but we understood very quickly that in no way could we realise our potential as women without a social movement, without a power – often in alliance with other social movements – without changing the structures that underlie those oppressive social relations.

    Today, the new forms of organisation emerging in the new politics, particularly in direct action, with their emphasis on horizontality and consensus, are very exciting. But sometimes they’re expressed – particularly by young men – as if they’re completely new! Now, we weren’t using exactly the same language about networks, but our first women’s groups were themselves networks, and they in turn were networked. We were exploring, in a practical, rooted way these net-worked forms of organisation.

    I don’t want to be the person saying ‘we knew that first!’ but: does it make a difference that some of these thoughts and innovations have their roots in a movement of liberation, a movement that was shaped by the experience of struggling for emancipation against a particularly intimate and socially embedded form of hierarchy?

    How can we actually pay attention to the conditions that can realise such insights that people have as they struggle? 

    Another question is how to combine power-as-transformative-capacity with power-as-domination. In the women’s movement we tried to gain public resources for childcare centres, rape crisis centres, women’s centres. All of this came out of exercising power-as-transformative-capacity, but we also needed public resources, which we felt we had a right to. In the words of a very influential book we had work in and against the state, to defend and extend its re-distributive, socially protective, and 'space creating' powers, but at the same time radically transform how and with and through whom these public resources were implemented and administered.

    At the Greater London Council, where I worked under Ken Livingstone’s leadership, we made that a key principle. The state would not deliver all these facilities; nor would we hand them over to the market, because it doesn’t have values of care or non-monetary measures of public benefit: everything in the capitalist market is about maximising profit. But we did delegate resources to ‘transformative groups’: to women’s groups of different kinds, for example. And we did work both 'in and against' the market through the Greater London Enterprise Board and our work with co-operatives.

    Similarly, now, when parties that are rooted in social movements like Podemos and Syriza (however ambivalently and precariously) are seeking power over the state, what can we draw from the experience of feminist socialism working in and against the state? Was it actually a dead end? Were we emasculated and incorporated? 

    Or was there a potential for a different kind of state – transcending the usual choice of 'more or less state' – that wasn’t realised, because feminist socialism hadn’t been thorough-going enough, or was defeated and halted by Thatcher and the neoliberal onslaught?

    This article is drawn from a roundtable discussion with Mandy Merck, Nira Yuval-Davis and Deborah Grayson, published by Soundings Journal.

    Originally found at https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/hilary-wainwright/how-i-became-feminist-socialist.

  • Paris Deal: Epic Fail on a Planetary Scale

    Image The Paris Agreement is being hailed as a great success. But will it deliver climate justice? After two weeks of tortuous negotiations – well, 21 years, really – governments announced the Paris Agreement. This brand new climate deal will kick in in 2020. But is it really as ‘ambitious’ as the French government is claiming? Before the talks began, social movements, environmental groups, and trade unions around the world came together and agreed on a set of criteria that the Paris deal would need to meet in order to be effective and fair. This ‘People’s Test’ is based on climate science and the needs of communities affected by climate change and other injustices across the globe. To meet the People’s Test, the Paris deal would need to do the following four things: 1. Catalyze immediate, urgent and drastic emission reductions; 2. Provide adequate support for transformation; 3. Deliver justice for impacted people; 4. Focus on genuine, effective action rather than false solutions; Does the deal pass the test? The 15,000 people who took to the Paris streets today (Dec 12, 2015) to condemn the agreement clearly didn’t think so. Here’s New Internationalist’s (NI) assessment. Test 1. Catalyze immediate, urgent and drastic emission reductions: ‘In line with what science and equity require, deliver urgent short-term actions, building towards a long-term goal that is agreed in Paris, that shift us away from dirty energy, marking the beginning of the end of fossil fuels globally, and that keep the global temperature goal in reach.’ NI assessment: Fail. The Paris Agreement aims to keep the global average temperature rise to ‘well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C.’ But the emission cuts contained in the agreement are based on voluntary pledges called ‘Intended Nationally Determined Contributions’ (INDCs) that governments drew up individually before the talks, based on what they were prepared to deliver, not what science or equity demanded. These cuts have now become an official part of the deal, but go nowhere near far enough to achieve a 1.5°, or even a 2° goal, and the agreement does not require these targets to be re-examined until 2020. In the words of Asad Rehman from the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice, ‘This agreement is a great escape for the big polluters, and a poisoned chalice for the poor. We’ve got some warm words about temperature levels, but no concrete action. Rich countries aren’t pledging to do any more about their inadequate emissions reduction targets which are going to lead us to 3.7° warming of the planet. None of the developed countries are doing their fair share to reduce their emissions and move away from dirty energy.’ This agreement is a great escape for the big polluters, and a poisoned chalice for the poor According to Kevin Anderson, Deputy Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, ‘The Copenhagen text included aviation and shipping emissions, that together are as large as the emissions of Britain and Germany combined, but they are not mentioned in the Paris text.’ Overall, he says, the agreement ‘is weaker than Copenhagen’ and ‘not consistent with the latest science’. The Paris deal requires no emissions reductions from countries before 2020. Steffen Kallbekken, Director of the Centre for International Climate and Energy Policy, explains that ‘by the time the pledges come into force in 2020, we will probably have used the entire carbon budget consistent with 1.5°C warming. If we stick with the INDCs we will have warming between 2.7°C and 3.7°C.’ In order to have a decent chance of reaching that 1.5° target, we need to keep at least 80 percent of known fossil fuels in the ground, and urgently halt the exploration and extraction of new sources. We need to stop deforestation and reduce other greenhouse gases such as methane, by tackling major drivers such as the growth of animal agriculture. But the Paris agreement contains no mention of the words ‘fossil fuel’ – no coal, no oil, no gas – and not a whisper about the livestock, palm oil and other industries driving deforestation either. ‘Our survival is non-negotiable. But after all the hype about high ambition and the 1.5°C aspirational limit for global warming, the final version of the climate agreement is sentencing us to even more deaths and destruction’ said Lidy Nacpil, coordinator of the Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD). Test 2. Provide adequate support for transformation: ‘Ensure that the resources needed, such as public finance and technology transfer, are provided to support the transformation, especially in vulnerable and poor countries.’ NI assessment: Fail. According to the International Energy Agency, the transformation to a fossil-free world will require $1,000 billion per year by 2020. Around two-thirds of this – so $670 billion – will need to be spent in developing nations, hence the need for a significant transfer of finance from North to South. This is only fair, because industrialized nations have grown so wealthy by burning fossil fuels for the last 200 years; countries containing just 10 percent of the world’s population are responsible for around 60 percent of the greenhouse gases currently in the atmosphere. However, the Paris Agreement only commits to ‘mobilizing’ $100 billion per year by 2020, to cover not just emission cuts but also adaptation (see 3, below). This is far short of the support required, and there is no firm commitment to increase this figure, merely an aspiration to review it by 2025. Meanwhile, the definition of ‘mobilize’ is purposefully broad, to include loans, private finance, grants with strings attached, and the reallocation of aid budgets. There has even been talk of calling the money sent home by migrants working in richer countries a form of climate finance, and counting it towards the total ‘mobilized’ by those rich countries. This is inadequate and mean, especially given that governments spend an estimated $5,300 billion per year on direct and indirect subsidies to fossil fuels. Janet Redman, Director of the Climate Program at the Institute for Policy Studies, puts the finance required in perspective: ‘We spend $2,000 billion a year on our military and mobilized $14,000 billion to bail out banks. Wealthy nations have to shift money from banks and tanks to clean energy and climate resilience.’ Test 3. Deliver justice for impacted people: ‘Enhance the support for adaptation in a new climate regime, ensure that there will be a separate mechanism to provide reparations for any loss and damage that goes beyond our ability to adapt, and make a firm commitment to secure workers’ livelihoods and jobs through a Just Transition.’ NI assessment: Fail. According to the UN Environment Programme, on top of the $670 billion needed for emissions cuts per year by 2020, vulnerable countries will also need around $150 billion per year for adaptation measures to protect them from the worst impacts of climate change. That’s more than $800 billion per year in total – so the $100 billion ‘finance floor’ represents less than 15 percent of what is actually needed. Developed countries have done the most to cause the problem, and therefore have the responsibility to solve it, but this crucial principle (known as ‘Common but differentiated responsibility’) has been watered down in the Paris text at the behest of the US and other industrialized nations. Rather than a clear statement that richer countries should provide finance to poorer nations for adaptation, the Paris deal just says that developed countries should ‘take the lead’ on providing finance, as part of a ‘shared effort’ by all parties. While the US and some NGOs have been quick to blame developing countries for not pulling their weight in the agreement, the ‘Fair Shares: A Civil Society Equity Review of INDCs’ report, from climate justice organizations, social movements, faith groups, trade unions, environmental and development organizations, shows that the opposite is true. Many developing countries are pledging to do more than their ‘fair share’ to cut emissions while rich countries are dragging their feet. The US and its allies do not want to pay for loss and damages which countries like mine are already experiencing Furthermore, as climate change is already happening, many countries are already being hit by devastating floods, storms and droughts. These will continue – and worsen – for many years, even if the world succeeds in keeping temperature rises below 1.5 degrees. They deserve compensation and financial support to deal with the loss and damage caused by rich countries’ pollution. But the Paris Agreement denies them this by introducing a clause that says the deal provides ‘no basis for any liability or compensation’. Many climate-vulnerable nations fought hard for the right to compensation, but were bullied, bribed and browbreaten by the US and EU into accepting this clause. As Asad Rehman puts it, ‘the EU, the US, and the umbrella group of rich countries have imposed a clause which absolves them of the legal, moral and political responsibility for the carbon pollution that they’ve created and that has devastated the lives and livelihoods of millions of people.’ Magline Peter, an Indian fisherfolk leader whose flight to Paris was delayed because of the floods in Chennai, also denounces this clause. ‘The US and its allies do not want to pay for loss and damages which countries like mine are already experiencing, whether through rising sea levels or freak floods, like the latest in Chennai. It’s absurd to see these developed countries continue to blame India for blocking a fair and just climate agreement.’ The concept of a just transition – that governments should provide training and financial support to ensure that workers in the fossil fuel industry can find alternative employment in the shift to a zero-carbon world – is mentioned in the preamble but not in the core, agreed text of the Paris deal. And the requirement that human rights should be taken into account has been stripped from the text. This means that the rights of Indigenous peoples has also been removed from the binding part of the text. As Dallas Goldtooth, of Indigenous Environmental Network, explains: ‘It’s hard to take as an Indigenous person that our ability to decide and self-determine our futures, where we get our food from, where we get our water from is not legally recognised by the nations of this world. It’s destructive, it’s hurtful, and it shows that this agreement is a failure.’ Test 4. Focus on transformational action: ‘Ensure that renewable and efficient solutions are emphasized rather than false solutions that fail to produce the results and protection we need, such as carbon markets in land and soil, dangerous geoengineering interventions, and more.’ NI assessment: Fail. The agreement talks vaguely about ‘technologies’ and ‘actions’ without defining what these are, leaving the door open to all kinds of false solutions. Renewable energy is mentioned just once, in relation to Africa. The deal aims to ‘achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century’. This could mean anytime between 2050 and 2100, when a 1.5 degree target would require a definitive end to fossil fuel use by 2050; and the purposefully slippery language allows for the possibility of continued fossil-fuel burning ‘offset’ by ‘removals’ via dubious carbon capture, geoengineering or forestry schemes. The door is left open for carbon trading mechanisms – which have so far been wildly ineffective at cutting emissions – with ‘internationally transferred mitigation outcomes’ recognised in the text as a legitimate solution. Meanwhile, there is no mention of effective and fair solutions such as respecting the land rights of forest peoples, promoting clean democratic energy or ensuring food sovereignty for communities and small farmers, all of which would keep carbon safely locked up underground and in trees and soils. Regulations to rein in destructive industries, halt deforestation and keep fossil fuels in the ground are not even hinted at. Worse, there is no language in the deal to give it precedence over imminent trade agreements such as Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and Trans-Pacific Partnership, which are threatening to give corporations the power to overturn environmental regulations that affect their profits. In the words of Dallas Goldtooth, ‘The Paris agreement is a farce. Any discussion of carbon markets and carbon trading is a false solution. The truest solution, which is backed up by science, is that we have to keep fossil fuels in the ground. We must see a moratorium on fossil fuel development, and we must see a just transition for all those communities that are dependent on fossil fuel economies. Whether we’re from the global north or the global south, we need help and support to create a future that has renewable energy for 100 percent of people on this planet.’ NI Final score: 0/4. Scored in this way, the Paris Agreement is a disaster for the world’s most vulnerable people. The headline target of 1.5 degrees and eventual decarbonization look good on paper but there’s no sign that governments are willing to make them a reality yet. Paris could mark the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel industry, but much more needs to change before that becomes a reality. So what next? None of this comes as a surprise to climate justice campaigners. As Asad Rehman puts it: ‘When we came into these Paris talks we had very low expectations. These expectations have been exceeded in how low they are. It’s what happens on Monday that’s the most important thing. Do we return to our capitals, do we build a movement, do we make sure our countries are doing their fair share? Do we stop the dirty energy industry, do we invest in new climate jobs, do we invest in community-owned decentralized energy? And most importantly, do we stand in solidarity with the millions of people across the world who are struggling for climate justice?’ Dallas Goldtooth agrees: ‘The decision-makers of the world can’t make the changes that we want. It’s on us as people to make that change. And we’re already seeing the power of the people. Look at North America – the Keystone XL pipeline was taken down because of people organizing. It wasn’t the governments who made that choice, it was the ranchers and farmers, the Indigenous peoples on the frontline in the heartland of America that made that choice, and the politicians adjusted accordingly.’ People shouldn’t be surprised that the deal is bad, Goldtooth says. ‘Industry has heavily influenced these negotiations. We have nation states who are dependent on a fossil fuel economy influencing these negotiations. Grassroots people who are advocating for the alternatives are not allowed in those negotiations. So we shouldn’t be surprised. Instead we are using this moment to reinvigorate our base, to continue forward demanding climate justice, and to show the world, show the countries, show the corporations what people can do when we unite for climate justice.’ – See more at: http://newint.org/features/web-exclusive/2015/12/12/cop21-paris-deal-epi…

  • The Graphic Juggernaut

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    Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg, Kate Evans, Verso, 2015, paperback, $16.95

    Capitalism and Climate Change: The Science and Politics of Global Warming, David Klein (author) and Stephanie McMillan (editor and illustrator), Amazon digital services, 2015, eBook, $2.95

    Gene Basset’s Vietnam Sketchbook: A Cartoonist’s Wartime Perspective, Thom Rooke, Syracuse University Press, 2015, paperback, $24.95

    My War, Szegedi Szüts, Dover, 2015, paperback, $12.95

    The graphic lit juggernaut rolls on. Even as DC and Marvel crank out superhero comics at roughly the same pace they have for the past twenty or thirty years, trade publishers and university presses are issuing nonfiction narrative art on a scale that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Back in the day, the four books under review would have represented a significant percentage of like-minded cartooning to appear in any given season. Now practically every publishing house under the sun boasts a new graphic novel line or at very least a fistful of titles aimed at the words-and-pictures market.

    For many NP readers the title that most likely jumps out here is Kate Evans’ new biography of Rosa Luxemburg, which cleverly encapsulates Luxemburg’s life and work in a way that is both substantive and accessible. Even those who are well versed in the history of early twentieth century socialism will be struck by the clarity of Evans’ prose as well as her page compositions, which trace Luxemburg’s development from her childhood in Poland to her emergence as a famous intellectual and political figure, one whose writings on economics, imperialism, and political organization remain relevant even today. Evans’ account pays close attention to the social milieu within which Luxemburg operated, along with the political debates that she took part in. I was especially impressed by her presentation of her (and Marx’s) ideas about commodities, class relations, and the contradictions of capitalism.  Her book also does a fine job of conveying Luxemburg’s wry sense of humor and her love of the natural world.  

    As the political cartoonist Tim Sanders pointed out in his review of Red Rosa for the UK journal Socialist Review,

    Evans takes us on a journey through the revolutionary’s career, focusing not just on politics but also on her personal life and loves. Even her pet cats are graphically brought to life in Evans’ vivid illustrations. We get a strong sense of Luxemburg as a real rounded human being rather than a collection of her political stances, though the historical notes at the back of the book make for fascinating reading too.

    (Sanders himself was profiled in a Words & Pictures feature in NP #52.)

    The specter of conflict hangs over the entire narrative, from the threats that Jewish families like Luxemburg’s faced in late nineteenth-century Poland, and the horrific blood letting of the First World War, to the democratic class war she advocated in her journalism and at public rallies. There is scarcely a page in which warfare in one guise or another is not threatened or invoked. Indeed, the cover image is taken a two-page spread in which Rosa Luxemburg’s neck and head are filled with miniature soldiers, explosions, and dead bodies. On the page that follows the spread, Evans reproduces a stirring passage from Luxemburg’s “The Junius Pamphlet” (1916):

    Into the disillusioned atmosphere of pale daylight there rings a different chorus; the hoarse croak of the hawks and hyenas of the battlefield. Ten thousand tents, guaranteed according to specifications, 100,000 kilos of bacon, cocoa powder, coffee substitute – cash on immediate delivery. Shrapnel, drills, ammunition bags, marriage bureaus for war widows, leather belts – only serious propositions considered. And the cannon fodder that was loaded onto the trains in August and September is rotting on the battlefields of Belgium and Vosges, while profits are springing, like weeds, from the fields of the dead.

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    Not surprisingly, war is also the central theme of Szegedi Szüts’ My War, which was first published in 1931 and which Dover has just now reissued in a handsome edition that features a new foreword by Peter Kuper (see NP #36). István Szegedi Szüts (1893-1959) was a Hungarian painter and illustrator who saw combat during World War I and settled in Cornwall in the 1930s. His “wordless novel” consists of 206 drawings that were originally exhibited in London to critical acclaim. Dover recently announced plans to issue twelve graphic novels and nonfiction titles a year, with an emphasis on out-of-print books. If My War is any indication it is a promising development.

    Both My War and Red Rosa are filled with sometimes rousing and sometimes horrifying depictions of political and military campaigns from a century ago. But the two books are quite distinct from an aesthetic perspective. Whereas Kate Evans’ pages carefully record period details, from living rooms to military uniforms, Szüts favors a spare approach in which white space is interrupted by sudden outbursts of black ink. Evans’ characters are garrulous, and many of her pages are organized around conversations, classroom lectures, and soapbox speeches. By contrast, Szüts eschews formal language and uses thick brushstrokes to trace the protagonist’s journey from civilian life to the battlefield.

    The two books share an antipathy to nationalist rhetoric and mass warfare, and end on a similarly tragic note that – spoiler alert – involves the state-sanctioned murder of their main characters. Neither offers a conventional happy ending, but Szüts’ final pages are purely melancholic while Evans’ conclusion is guardedly optimistic. More specifically, her book’s afterword notes that, with the “crushing of the Hungarian Rebellion and Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev’s own repudiation of Stalin at the Soviet Congress of 1956, Rosa’s reputation was bound to revive.” This “process of popular recognition,” she suggests,

    has continued with the emergence of still younger generations into the twenty-first century, perhaps tied most of all to the anti-austerity movements sweeping many parts of the globe. Rosa’s insistence that the expansion of Empire is at once the salvation of capitalism and doom for the planet is an ecological insight of ever-greater value for radicals drawn to her ideas and example.

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    The stance adopted by Gene Basset in his Vietnam Sketchbook is neither as mordant as Szüts’ nor as politically engaged as Evans’. Gene Basset (1927-) is a retired U.S. newspaper cartoonist who spent much of his career working for the Scripps Howard News Service and, subsequently, the Atlanta Journal Constitution. In 1965 a news editor at Scripps Howard came up with the idea of sending a cartoonist – Basset – to South Vietnam to cover the war, which at that point was starting to escalate. He ended up spending three months “in country,” dividing his time between Saigon, military bases, and patrolling with U.S. soldiers. Basset tended to sketch whatever he came across, from farmers’ markets and motorized rickshaws to fishing boats and medical clinics. Many years later, Basset showed some of these long-forgotten drawings to his friend Thom Rooke, a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic. Rooke was so impressed that he “hung some on the walls of my house as decorative art,” and put together this collection of nearly 90 cartoons, most of them wordless.

    Rooke’s involvement in this project has its pluses and minuses. On the debit side, he carries a somewhat inflated sense of himself as a dispassionate observer of reality. “By missing the war,” he loftily claims at the start of the book, “I was left with a relatively unbiased perspective, one that has allowed me to look back at it – almost half a century later – with a genuine objectiveness that remains impossible for many of my peers.” Having emphasized his powers of objectivity, Rooke then tallies up the “consequences” of the war, but from an entirely U.S.-centric perspective, as if the Vietnamese people themselves were not a factor. While his breezy introduction does little to illuminate the causes or trajectory of the Vietnam War, it does provide interesting details about Gene Basset’s career as an editorial cartoonist, which more or less coincided with the heyday of newspaper cartooning as a full-time profession. Rooke additionally had the editorial inspiration to organize Basset’s drawings around Kubler-Ross’ famous five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. These categories lend a sense of narrative sequence, and a touch of pathos, to Basset’s sometimes cryptic and guarded pen-and-ink images, which are closely observed but not always easy to decipher.

    The differences between the artistic styles in these books are interesting. Kate Evans’ pages exude a kind of quirky indie-comics energy. They spotlight Berlin street scenes, lovers’ quarrels, and larger-than-life personalities – Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, Clara Zetkin, and Karl Liebknecht, for example. Szüts’ pages, on the other hand, are graceful, austere, and technically accomplished. They usually focus on a single visual element – a tree, a face, a corpse. As Kuper writes in his foreword, Szüts’ “work seamlessly moves from lyrical images that would sit comfortably on your grandmother’s dining room wall, to gritty portraits of wounded and dying soldiers that could hang boldly in a museum setting next to Otto Dix, George Grosz, Käthe Kollwitz, and Francisco Goya’s series of etchings, Disasters of War.”

    Gene Basset’s drawings are in an altogether different register – the linework is loose, almost rubbery. Some of his pieces seem light-hearted, or merely descriptive. Others brim with subtext, especially the ones that portray Americans and Vietnamese interacting, either on the streets of the country’s capital city or on training exercises that Basset was invited to observe. There are several knockouts, including a drawing titled “Fatal Fire Fight,” which he drew after a Green Beret patrol that he was attached to came under fire. “I ducked behind a rock as the Montagnard in front of me was hit in the head and the Green Beret was hit in the legs…My sketchbook took a bullet during the fight,” he later remembered. Basset’s depictions of Saigon’s black market are also highly evocative, and more than a little disturbing. While I would not go so far as to describe these illustrations as antiwar, they are indicative of a sensibility that was becoming increasingly disenchanted with the war effort, and perhaps to some extent with the American way of life itself.

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    If Gene Basset’s Vietnam Sketchbook exhibits signs of political dissatisfaction, Capitalism and Climate Change is all about revolutionary change. In the book’s forward, Stephanie McMillan argues that, “capitalism and a healthy planet are totally incompatible.” The “struggle against ecocide,” she says, “is an integral part of class struggle. It can only be won in the context of the fundamental struggle of the working class against exploitation, for emancipation, for the demise of capitalism.” While McMillan is an activist, writer, and cartoonist, David Klein is a professor of mathematics at California State University, Northridge. He shares McMillan’s anti-capitalist ideology but provides the empirical data, scientific terminology, and secondary sources to help readers make sense of the connection between carbon emissions and global economics. His text is organized around two sections, “What Does Climate Science Tell Us?” and “Why Capitalism Cannot Solve the Climate Crisis.” The first is should prove especially helpful for anyone who remains put off by the technical jargon and who seeks a lucid explanation for why so many experts in the field are themselves starting to consider radical alternatives to mainstream approaches and paradigms. The clarity of Klein’s prose is nicely complemented by McMillan’s appealing single-panel cartoons, which utilize zany colors, humorous figuration, and biting one-liners. There are other graphic books about climate change out there, such as Philippe Squarzoni’s Climate Changed: A Personal Journey Through the Science (2014), but this affordable eBook does the best job so far of looking at contemporary climate science via from a broadly Marxist perspective.   

    Kent Worcester's latest book is Peter Kuper: Conversations (2016).

  • Black Lives Matter is Not a Civil Rights Movement

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    Black Lives Matter is often called a “civil rights” movement. But to think that our fight is solely about civil rights is to misunderstand the fundamental aspirations of this movement. Today, on International Human Rights Day, we recognize the current struggle is not merely for reforms of policing, anymore than the Montgomery Bus Boycott was simply about a seat on the bus. It is about the full recognition of our rights as citizens; and it is a battle for full civil, social, political, legal, economic and cultural rights as enshrined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

    As black activists from two different generations, we understand that the black liberation movement in the U.S.—from its inception as an anti-slavery movement, through the Civil Rights Era, and up to now—has never been only for civil rights. The movement is a struggle for the human rights and dignity of black people in the U.S., which is tied to black peoples’ struggle for human rights across the globe. Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “Since we know that the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system.” This vision is critical to our work, as it highlights that that this struggle is beyond just, “Stop killing us, we deserve to live.” We deserve to thrive, and this requires the full acknowledgement of the breadth of our human rights.

    A powerful example was in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gary in police custody. We saw an uprising to demand justice for Gray and an indictment for the officers. Although activists got the indictment they demanded, they continued to push through the narrative that an indictment was the sole aim of their protest. They elevated issues such as high unemployment and systemic injustice as the true plague within their neighborhoods. Police brutality was just a symptom in a long line of structural injustices and social ills. Groups in New York and Chicago present a public-safety narrative that demands solutions to community challenges comes from the grassroots. This has led to calls for investment in solutions like quality education, restorative justice, mental and emotional health support, and job opportunities. These solutions recognize our humanity and right to self-determination, which are fundamental rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

    The beautiful thing about the black liberation movement is that it is more than saying “Black Lives Matter.” This period in history is a celebration of intersectionality, which mandates that the full breadth of our humanity be acknowledged and embraced. This means that queer, trans, migrant, formerly incarcerated, disabled and all of us who find ourselves unapologetic about our complexity are more committed than ever to champion the scope of the human rights agenda that we deserve. Ella Baker, an activist of the 1960s, reminded us of the global nature of our struggle when she stated: “Remember, we are not fighting for the freedom of the Negro alone, but for the freedom of the human spirit a larger freedom that encompasses all mankind.” From our vantage point, the Movement for Black Lives’ agenda this International Human Rights Day is for all people. Once achieved, it will create an inclusive democracy that guarantees freedom and justice for all.

    Opal Tometi is Nigerian-American, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter and the executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), the only national immigrant rights organization for Black people. Gerald Lenoir is the founding executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), and former director of San Francisco Black Coalition on AIDS. He is long time leader of the Anti-apartheid global solidarity movement.

    Originally published at http://time.com/4144655/international-human-rights-day-black-lives-matter/

  • Standing against war, repression and tyranny

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    In this statement, socialist organizations from the Middle East to Europe to North America speak out against war, racism and repression.

    WE FIGHT dictatorships, imperialist aggression and Daesh [the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS]. We reject the politics of "national security," racism and austerity. It's time to mobilize!

    Over recent months, people across the Middle East have been hit by an intensification of conflict in Syria and Iraq. That escalation has been sponsored both by global imperialist powers–chiefly the U.S., Russia and European countries–and regional imperialist actors, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Iran. These conflicts are the product of two distinct forms of counterrevolution: local dictatorships and counter-revolutionary regimes on one hand, and reactionary Islamic forces like Daesh [ISIS] on the other. The determination of major international and regional powers to impose their political and economic hegemony over the region is also a central cause of the current tragedy.

    In Syria, the first form taken by the counterrevolution is support for the Assad regime. Russia's deadly raids and the intervention of Iran, Hezbollah and sectarian Iraqi militias champion this profoundly reactionary, anti-democratic project. Assad is fuelled, too, by the mistrust Western powers routinely demonstrate toward democratic and revolutionary forces in Syria, including Kurdish forces.

    Those fighting for a democratic and socially just future are the first targets of the Syrian regime, imperialists and their allies in the region. Syrian democratic forces are also the target of Islamic forces playing a counterrevolutionary role, supported at one time or another, directly or indirectly, by the Gulf monarchies and Turkey.

    As always, women are the first victims of war. Rape, abduction and even the sale of women are gruesome outgrowths of the conflict.

    What is Daesh? It is the creation both of international and regional imperialist aggressions and of the dictatorial, sectarian nature of regimes in the region, particularly in Iraq and Syria. The rise of sectarian tensions in the region is also the consequence of this deadly compound of domestic repression and external aggression.

    – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

    IT IS in this context that we should understand the recent attacks in Ankara, Beirut, Paris, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia, and the attack on the Russian aircraft in Egypt. These attacks only strengthen the evil that spawned them–state terrorism.

    The rhetoric of the "war on terror" finds material expression in the ramping up of authoritarian state security policies, in war and in racism. Racism, particularly Islamophobia, has increased exponentially and has become state policy across Europe. Imperialist powers have used the rhetoric of counterterrorism to justify their support for dictatorships and their restrictions on freedoms, while regional dictators have used the same language to defend their own repression.

    Now, it is this same overarching world view that unites France, Russia, the U.S., Turkey and the Syrian regime–though each has its own particular interests–such that they coordinate, directly or indirectly, their strikes and military maneuvers in Syria.

    In the name of a war "against terrorism," today, the French state demands the power to terrorize. In the name of so-called "French values," freedoms are being attacked. In an authoritarian headlong rush, François Hollande bombs Syria and Iraq while all the talk of war and noble "values" is unable to provide answers to the political and social aspirations of the French working classes. Meanwhile, undocumented migrants, refugees, Muslims, veiled women, the Roma, foreigners and others are all prone to being designated "enemies within."

    Throughout the wider Middle East, state repression of political opponents and social movements is on the rise; in Egypt and elsewhere, hundreds of death sentences have been issued in recent months.

    In the face of the temporary demobilization and disorientation of large sectors of the oppressed, we must step up to the challenge with constructive initiatives. In practice that means:

    — Oppose draconian policies; defend the democratic rights of everyone.

    — Oppose all imperialist aggression, alongside implacable opposition to dictatorships and counterrevolutionary regimes.

    — Oppose the Western military campaign in Syria, which includes bombing and other direct participation of Western military forces and also includes the armed participation in the conflict of forces supported by the West.

    — Fight against all forms of counterrevolution in the Middle East and the Maghreb, as elsewhere.

    — Fight repressive security policies, racism and austerity–whether in Europe, Asia or Africa.

    — Fight "fortress Europe"; demand the opening of borders and decent living conditions for all refugees and migrants.

    — Strengthen solidarity with people fighting for their liberation and emancipation in the Middle East, the Maghreb and around the world.

    — Solidarity with democratic and progressive anti-imperialist forces throughout the Arab region.

    — Solidarity with the people of the Middle East and the Maghreb in their legitimate struggles for emancipation and against foreign aggression: we insist that the emancipation of the people of the region will be the work of the people themselves.

    – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
    Signatories (in formation)

    Revolutionary Left Current, Syria
    Socialist Forum, Lebanon
    Revolutionary Socialists, Egypt
    Workers Left League (LGO), Tunisia
    New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA), France
    Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Britain
    revolutionary socialism in the 21st century (rs21), Britain
    The editors, Salvage, Britain
    Revolutionary Communist League-Socialist Workers Party (LCR-SAP), Belgium
    SolidaritéS, Switzerland
    International Socialists Scotland (ISS), Scotland
    International Socialist Organization (ISO), U.S.

     

    Originally found at http://socialistworker.org/2015/12/09/against-war-repression-and-tyranny

  • Puerto Rico and the Fiscal Crisis

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    Puerto Rico is undergoing a profound fiscal crisis.  Our country is besieged by the big interests of Wall Street’s credit agencies and vulture funds, which as they’ve done in other parts of the world, such as Spain, Greece and Argentina, only seek an uncontrolled increase in their profits.  These profits come at the cost of great sacrifices to working people, which include drastic cuts to social services that will have a special impact on education and health care.

    In order to impose their inhumane demands, they use their powerful influence within government structures, in the courts and in the mass media to guarantee payment of the immoral and odious debt, with no concern for the deterioration of our quality of life and the elimination of hard-won labor rights.  They establish, de facto, a dictatorship of oligarchic and monopoly capital over the whole of society, the working class majority stripped of the financial resources needed to insure a dignified subsistence.

    Different sectors representative of the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York have come together as part of Call to Action on Puerto Rico clearly stating that the situation which Puerto Rico is undergoing is more than a mere fiscal crisis.  It is a crisis of the capitalist colonial model and of the political subordination to the U.S. Congress where we are seen as a territory or possession which belongs to but is not a part of the U.S.  This colonial regime was imposed upon our country following the 1898 military invasion and occupation that Puerto Rico was subjected to by the United States army.

    The growing indebtedness to Wall Street occurs within the context of the cold war and the blockade against Cuba by Washington.  Puerto Rico was presented as the showcase of the Caribbean, with a false economic development model, that created a fiscal paradise with tax exemptions to big North American corporations which annually generated billions of tax-free dollars in profits. The colonial government of Puerto Rico was able to maintain its façade of a model for the Caribbean region, as long as it could issue bonds and obtain loans, though with increasing interest rates and costly agreements imposed by the credit agencies.

    When faced with the current fiscal crisis, the government of Puerto Rico initially stated that the debt was unpayable only to later begin a patchwork process of renegotiating the debt with the same credit agencies.  Meanwhile, the credit agencies are stubbornly opposed to any process that renegotiates the debt and insist upon the implementation of austerity measures and strict compliance with the debt payments they established.

    Many Puerto Ricans, from those in government to community, labor and religious organizations, who can’t imagine other possibilities outside of the political subordination of the empire-colony relationship, look for the government of President Obama and the United States Congress to provide salvation from the problem of the fiscal crisis.  True, in the process it’s been widely recognized that our particular colonial situation puts Puerto Rico at a total disadvantage for facing the future creatively and makes it impossible for Puerto Rico to establish its decision-making power.   But there are no clear political intentions to break with that historic nullification.

    Surely those Puerto Ricans who seek to pressure Congress to take measures to rescue Puerto Rico from the fiscal crisis understand that it is clearly dominated by the same conservative forces that respond to Wall Street interests.  So, we ask, why do they insist that this is the only way out?  Those brothers and sisters know that any type of rescue will take place within the framework of preserving the interests of the credit agencies and not the interests of the Puerto Rican people.  Is that what they want for our people?

    At this point, it is clear that an imminent imposition of a Federal Fiscal Board will be part of any arrangement made regarding the restructuring of or fiscal rescue from the debt. The Federal Fiscal Board will be an entity with the power to determine the management of public funds, payments or non-payments under collective bargaining agreements and the assignment or the elimination of assigned funds to government agencies, all within the context of providing the best service for paying the bondholders.  It will be a Board composed of foreigners with powers above those of the governor, the legislature and the courts of Puerto Rico.  It will be the dictatorship of capital, marking a historic step backward for our country where we will return to the Puerto Rico of the 30’s.  Are the brothers and sisters who are lobbying in Washington, aware of the historic responsibility they will have to assume if they insist on walking into the ambush that the credit agencies and representatives of big capital are setting up?

    Call to Action on Puerto Rico / Llamado a la Acción por Puerto Rico and the different groups organizing along a similar basis insist:

    1. That Puerto Rico’s debt is unpayable.
    2. That in the last 20 years alone, foreign corporations operating in Puerto Rico have reaped over 600 billion dollars in tax free profits 10 per cent of which would suffice to pay the otherwise unpayable debt.
    3. That the social cost of increasing the sales tax, reducing the work day, education and health services, of eliminating labor rights gained and the dismantling of the retirement system among other recessionary measures, are a detriment to the quality of life of the people of Puerto Rico and to the strategic development of the country’s economy.  Thus, these measures are not a solution.
    4. That as a colony of the United States, Puerto Rico’s position of political subordination cuts across the problem and independence would break the stalemate and create the possibilities of a solution benefiting our country.
    5. That the proposals from the financial institutions are the same ones which generated the neo liberal policies that are based on the uncontrolled increase in profits by the few at great sacrifices to the many.  Some of our Latin American countries have now freed themselves from this neoliberal model by developing independent economic policies which place collective social wellbeing over the greedy profits of corporate and finance capital.
    6. That the root of the problem is the colonial status of Puerto Rico as echoed in the UN Decolonization committee resolution on Puerto Rico adopted on June 22, 2015 which states “the condition of political subordination prevents Puerto Rico from taking sovereign decisions to attend to its serious economic and social problems including unemployment, marginalization and poverty.”

    It is for these reasons that Call to Action on Puerto Rico understands that this is a unique historical moment that offers the opportunity to educate, denounce, and advance the cause of independence and social justice for Puerto Rico.  We strive to deepen the work we have begun so that we can broaden and give continuity to a step-by-step plan of struggle in that direction.

    Copyright © 2015 A Call to Action on Puerto Rico, All rights reserved.
    Thank you for supporting our efforts.

  • Hollande called on to lift ban on climate protests at COP 21

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    An international coalition of NGOs, civil society groups and political figures such as Naomi Klein and Susan George have called on the French president to lift the ban on protests during the COP 21 climate talks in Paris, which began on November 30th.

    Following November’s terror attacks in Paris, the French government has imposed a temporary state of emergency that has prevented any protests from taking place in France. The local coaltion of NGOs and trade unions in in France, Climat 21, had planned a series of protests in Paris before, during and at the end of the climate talks which have now been banned.

    Over forty different groups and individuals from countries including Brazil, Belgium, India, the USA, Korea and the UK have signed on to the letter which tells President Hollande that “we are deeply concerned by the decision of your government to prohibit the mobilisations in Paris during COP21. This will make it extremely difficult for ordinary citizens of the world to make their voices heard and to create the political space necessary to build a brighter future. We believe this strips the COP process of its legitimacy.”

    Nick Dearden, the director of Global Justice Now said:

    “People from all over the world are flocking to Paris to have their voices heard on one of the most urgent challenges of our lifetime – the threat of climate change.  It is essential that there is robust participation from civil society during the climate talks and that world leaders are held accountable for how they engage with the issue.

    “One of the aims of terrorists in carrying out atrocities like we have seen in Paris is to attempt to disrupt and derail how ordinary people go about their lives. The French authorities have said that ‘life must go one’ with regards to public occasions like football matches, and we call on President Hollande to use similar logic in standing strong against these attacks by allowing people the fundamental right to protest on crucially important issues like climate change during the UN talks.”

    Thomas Coutrot, the spokesperson for Attac France, one of the NGOs that had been involved in organising demonstrations in Paris said:

    “The French authorities are using the shock of the 13 November killings to cancel demonstrations throughout the country, even in small cities where no terrorist threat is plausible. Do they want to keep us silent in the face of the results of COP 21, and its probable failure to tackle effectively climate change? Attac and its partners will be pushing hard to ensure our voices are not silenced.”

    The letter has also been made into an online petition that members of the public are being invited to sign.

    The letter and its signatories

    Dear Mr. President,

    We want to express our sympathy with the French people for the terrorist attacks that took place last weekend. The barbaric attacks on civilians in Paris, Ankara, Bamako and Beirut in recent weeks are the latest terrible symptoms of a world economy experiencing multiple crises.

    One of those crises is climate change. As you will be aware, we have driven our planet to the verge of environmental catastrophe. The impacts are being felt everywhere to a greater or lesser degree. Indeed the conflict in Syria was partly fuelled by climatic events. And unless we start enacting very different policies, climate change will increasingly fuel war, migration, poverty and dispossession.

    That’s why many of us are coming to Paris in the next fortnight – to demand world leaders begin the radical transformation to a low carbon economy, with serious financing to assist less industrialised countries to build societies without resort to fossil fuels. We understand that the challenge is huge. It isn’t possible for politicians to carry out the changes needed without massive movements and mobilisations creating political space and will.

    For this reason we are deeply concerned by the decision of your government to prohibit the mobilisations in Paris during COP21. This will make it extremely difficult for ordinary citizens of the world to make their voices heard and to create the political space necessary to build a brighter future. We believe this strips the COP process of its legitimacy.

    We urge you to reconsider the decision to prohibit the demonstrations in Paris. We understand the need to keep citizens safe, including those mobilising on climate change. It must be possible to find a way to do this short of banning our demonstrations. Many other mass events and gatherings continue to happen in Paris on a daily basis. We would also like to ensure that the police treat us with dignity and that you send a clear message that our civil liberties be respected.

    We must not suspend democracy and freedom while proclaiming our commitment to democracy and freedom. A peaceful world can only be built on equality, solidarity and sustainability. We must be able to say this in Paris.

    Yours,

    Naomi Klein, writer
    Friends of the Earth International
    Avi Lewis, filmmaker
    Shalmali Guttal, researcher and writer
    Susan George, writer
    Global Justice Now, UK
    Bolivian Platform on Climate Change
    Focus on the Global South
    Fondacion Solon, Bolivia
    Friends of the Earth, Scotland
    Ecologistas en Acción (Spain)
    Ekoloji Kolektifi / Ecology Collective Association, Turkey
    Iniciativa Construyendo Puentes – Redes de Latinoamerica frente al cambio climatico
    Campaign against Climate Change, UK
    Bharat Jan Vigyan Jatha, India
    Public & Commercial & Service Union, UK
    Attac Japan
    Transnational Institute
    Engajamundo, Brazil
    Beyond Copenhagen collective, India
    End Ecocide on Earth
    Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development
    Our Rivers, Our Life (OROL) – Philippines
    Corporate Europe Observatory
    IBON International
    Philippine Movement for Climate Justice
    Friends of the Earth Sweden
    Public Advocacy Initiatives for Rights & Values in India (PAIRVI)
    Energy and Climate Policy Institute for Just Transition, Korea
    UK Tar Sands Network
    Sentro ng mga Nagkakaisa at Progresibong Manggagawa (SENTRO), Phillipines
    Platform, UK
    Sanlakas, Philippines
    Planet Defenders, Brazil
    DeSmog, UK
    Labor/Community Strategy Center, USA
    WomanHealth, Phillipines
    New Internationalist, UK
    Institute for Policy Studies, Climate Policy Program, USA
    York Climate Action, UK
    Ecological Society of the Philippines
    The Otesha Project, UK
    GAIA – Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives
    Povod Institute, Slovenia
    Abibiman Foundation, Ghana
    Clubs Nations Unies, Senegal
    Excellent World Foundation, Nigeria
    Swedish Antinuclear Movement
    GCAP, Action/2015
    Ageing Nepal
    Global Call to Action Against Poverty, Burundi
    Burundi Child Rights Coalition (BCRC)
    Union de Jeunes pour la Paix et le Développement (UJPD/asbl)
    SÜDWIND, Austria
    Association for Promotion Sustainable Development, India
    The Network of African Youths for Development (NAYD)
    Somos el Presente, Peru
    Alliance Contre la Pauvreté/GCAP Mali
    Youth partnership for Peace and Development, Sierra Leone
    Pakistan Development Alliance
    Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP)
    Climate & Sustainable Development Network of Nigeria (CSDevNet)
    Freshwater Action Network. FAN. Geneve
    Red Centroamericana de Acción del Agua. Central America
    Asociación Regional Centroamericana por el Agua y el Ambiente (ARCA)
    Youth Association for Development (YAD), Pakistan
    Norway Social Forum
    Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD)
    Freshwater Action Network, Mexico
    Coletivo Bahia 21, Brazil
    Hagancatwright Organisation, Germany
    PAPDA, Haiti

    This article originally appeared on November 26th at http://www.globaljustice.org.uk/news/2015/nov/26/hollande-called-lift-ban-climate-protests-cop-21.

  • Building a Sex Workers’ Trade Union: Challenges and Perspectives

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    It is a far from straightforward decision to found a union in a sector in which such an organisation has never existed before. For the most part, trade unions today have a (long) history: it may not be rare for workers to join a union, but it certainly is for them to participate in one’s founding and initial building. It is acutely challenging when the work itself to be organised is not entirely legal; when most of the workers are migrants in very precarious situations, who are regularly arrested and deported; when the legal context overlooks, and contributes to, high levels of violence and exploitation; and when, as if all of this was not enough, those who should be showing solidarity are on the other side, fighting to increase the criminalisation of the workers’ activity.

    Despite all of these difficulties, this challenge has been taken-up by sex workers in many countries. Nowadays sex workers’ unions are full agents in social and political struggle, raising a variety of issues, such as women’s emancipation and anti-racism, redefining work and fighting against exploitation .

    In France, in 2009, STRASS-Syndicat du travail sexuel (Sex Workers’ Trade Union) was created. Despite harsh criticisms, it became a strong voice in the debates about sex work – its strength coming from its capacity to allow sex workers to relay the struggles they face in fighting for their rights.

     

    Reframing prostitution as a sex work: theoretical issues

    Prostitutes’ revolts are documented throughout history, but it is commonly acknowledged that the ‘modern’ movement of sex workers was born in 1975 in France, when women in Lyon occupied Saint Nizier Church. The women were protesting against their daily arrests for standing in the streets, and the fact that many had recently been killed without any action from the authorities against these crimes. The occupation of churches by prostitutes extended to other cities, not only in France but also in England, where the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP) had recently been founded. In the decades that followed, in the face of the AIDS epidemic, sex workers mobilised essential campaigns around community health organization, effectively learning to protect themselves against this new threat.

    In 2002, the arrival of Nicolas Sarkozy at the French Ministry of Interior gave yet another dynamic to the movement: his 2003 Law on Internal Security introduced the offense of ‘passive’ solicitation, which was nothing less than an outlawing of street sex work. This law, still applied today, has been incredibly harmful, forcing sex workers to work in more isolated areas, where they are exposed to more violence, precariousness and health risks. It has also been used as a very efficient tool against immigration, legitimating the arrest and deportation of migrant sex workers.

    It was in such a context that sex workers moved towards political action. They began to self-organise, particularly around mass annual meetings and workshops, at which they raised among themselves the many issues they face. Eventually, they decided to build their own autonomous organisation in order to make their voices heard, to try to intervene in the political discussions that concerned them and to encourage their colleagues to do the same, providing them with the necessary skills to engage in struggle. Some similar, small, organizations already existed, but a different perspective was raised in the new organisation: sex workers wanted to organise as workers, in a trade union. It was a perspective that would allow them to shed new light on the issues that concern them.

    The reframing of ‘prostitution’ issues as (sex) workers’ issues is not new. It is widely reported that Carole Leigh, sex worker and feminist activist, created the term ‘sex work’ during a feminist workshop in San Francisco in 1978. Marxist-feminists, especially those engaged in the Wages for Housework movement in the early 1970s, built a theoretical framework in which sex was considered as a part of reproductive work, and prostitution read as an externalised, commodified form of work – one that was also performed by housewives for free. Whereas talking about ‘prostituted women’, as many anti-prostitution feminists do, leads to categorising women who sell sexual services separately from those who don’t, talking about sex work does not separate the ‘good’, ‘honest’ woman from the ‘bad’, ‘fallen’ or ‘venal’ one. This allows for a new basis to build solidarity among women in order to fight the exploitation they experience in all aspects of their lives.

    In this perspective developed by STRASS, talking about ‘sex work’ not only works towards removing the stigma surrounding sex work – a stigma that threatens all women – but also serves to shed light on the political and economic factors causing the exploitation and violence experienced by sex workers. Indeed, when this exploitation and violence is used by policy makers to legitimate new repressive laws against sex work, it is necessary to recall that these working conditions are actually reinforced by a repressive and stigmatising context, against which workers should be able to organise in order to fight for their emancipation.

     

    Starting a union at point zero: practical issues

    It is a challenge to start any union; to start a sex workers’ union is another thing entirely. Firstly, because of the semi-illegal status of sex work, reaching the people working in the industry is no easy task. In France, as in most European countries, sex workers are not allowed to share a workplace, and even when they do –  in illegal brothels such as saunas, massage parlors, and so on – organising is hardly easy, as it inevitably involves attracting attention to their work, revealing the illegal activities taking place, and thus risking the closure of their workplaces. This is surely not any kind of solution for workers facing bad working conditions. In addition, as with much precarious labour, for many people working in the sex industry the job is temporary – and/or is considered to be so by the workers themselves, an attitude that can make workers, in all industries, reluctant to struggle for better working conditions.

    Because of stigmatisation, the fear of speaking publicly as sex workers, and of facing troubles in one’s personal and social life as a result, is also a big obstacle in organising sex workers. Such stigmatisation is also one reason among others that sex workers often have such bad experiences in their work: because ‘whores’ are so often depicted as passive objects, reduced to endure male desires, without bargaining power, many people, including those going into sex work, do not know that skills exist which can help to reduce or avoid the harms that can be caused by their work. Given that it is illegal to give advice to people entering in the sex industry – it is considered to be ‘encouraging prostitution’, which is to say ‘pimping’ – it is difficult to raise awareness.

    Power dynamics are an issue not just between sex workers and non-sex workers, but between sex workers themselves. Anti-sex-work movements nurture divisions when they pretend to be working in the interest of trafficking victims as they push for criminalization. As a result of their campaigning, each generation of migrant sex workers are sometimes accused, by other sex workers, of being part of ‘criminal networks’, not knowing the ‘business rules’, or of undercutting prices. Such a divisive tendency also appears in some ‘pro-sex’ or ‘sex positive’ speeches that insist on the ‘sexual freedom’ issue: such a rhetoric ignores the experience of those for whom sex work is a traumatizing and exploitative experience, and who cannot therefore recognise themselves in this approach.

    It is also the case that, because many sex workers work independently, and because of the increasing precariousness in the sex industry, there’s a lot of economic competition between sex workers. The existence of a union as a place where people, including those in different sectors, who might not usually meet can do so (for example, street workers and escorts) has had very positive effects in this regard, allowing sex workers to find and practice solidarity instead of mistrust toward their colleagues.

    Despite these difficulties, many by no means exclusive to the sex industry, trade-union work is not so different from that in other such organisations. Most of the activity consists of making sex workers aware of their rights, in order to help them defend themselves against the many abuses they experience, whether from the police or third parties; accompanying those facing administrative or penal issues; and fighting for more rights. In so doing, the union has helped create a situtaion where sex workers can self-organise, in or outside the union, building their own community structures – for instance, Chinese sex workers have recently created their own autonomous organisation – sharing information in order to react quickly and effectively to arrests, raids, or violence from a client.

    Another central part of a union’s work in the sex industry one very much needed, is to struggle against repressive laws by entering into political debates in order to make our voices heard.

     

    Reclaiming sex workers rights : political issues

    Once we consider the issues so far raised – sex work as part of reproductive work, the regulation and restrictions applied to sex work, the struggle for sex workers’ rights – it becomes clear that sex work deserves much more attention than, and attention different from, that usually offered by discussions about the statistics of ‘free’ and ‘trafficked’ sex workers. It would be more useful to consider the regulation, or criminalisation, of sex work, with regards to the context of a neoliberal globalised capitalism in which this gendered and racialised industry takes place.

    If we analyse sex work in relation, for instance, to the situation of other women participating in reproductive work, whether housewives or domestic workers, the criminalisation and stigmatisation of sex workers can be read as a way to constitute them as a reserve army of reproductive labor, guaranteeing a supply of cheap (or even free) reproductive labor, by the threat it poses to all women who would seek to refuse the terms of their work or marriage contract. From such a perspective, it becomes clear that the fight against whore stigma, which hurts not just those women who do not ‘honestly’ earn their living, but any who do not obey patriarchal rules of women’s sexuality, should be a priority of the feminist agenda.

    However, many feminists promote more criminalisation, perhaps believing that women’s emancipation cannot happen without the help of repressive laws. Allegedly, they do not mean to target women selling sex, but rather clients or so called ‘pimps’; but when a landlord has to make his tenant homeless because she’s a sex worker, because he fears he will be arrested for pimping, we must ask how such criminalisation can possibly contribute to women’s emancipation. Furthermore, how do such feminists suppose clients or ‘pimps’ will be located without increasing the surveillance of women themselves? It must be noted that the majority of sex workers in the global North, as well as people working with them, are not white, so the fight against prostitution often contributes to the reinforcement of migration control and of the systemic surveillance and imprisonment of non-white populations.

    While discourses promoting the criminalisation of sex work tend to individualise and essentialise the situation of sex workers – focusing on sex work as violence against women – a trade-unionist approach must seek to recontextualise this situation, in order to understand the dynamics from which it emerges. The issue of violence against sex workers, as well as that of ‘trafficking’, cannot be considered without taking into account what makes possible such situations and maintains them. It seems, for instance, naive to ask for state interventions against traffickers, without calling into question the restrictions on migrations that drive many third-world women to take on huge debts in order to migrate.

    In many parts of the world, sex workers receive the strong support from (a minority of) feminist and LGBT organizations, and this is very encouraging. It is not a coincidence, since sex work involves sex, that groups engaged in campaigns for sexual freedoms increasingly support sex workers. However, if sex work involves sex, it also, and especially, involves work.

    It is therefore very disappointing that much of the Left takes part in campaigns for increased criminalisation of sex work, on the behalf of the workers of an industry about which most of them know nothing, denying sex workers their rights as workers, and thereby demonstrating their inadequacy with regards to theorising women’s work and, more generally, women’s emancipation.

    The rare integration of sex workers in general trade unions, however, continues to inspire sex workers here. They do not ask for permission to participate in the class struggle they are already an integral part of.

    Merteuil’s article is also available in Greek (from KollectNews) and Arabic (from Al-Manshour).We are republishing the version first published in Salvage.