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  • 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.

     

  • No to ISIS–No to Imperialism–Solidarity with the Victims!

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    The November 13 attacks in Paris: the terror of the Islamic State, the state of emergency in France, our responsibilities

    November 13 represents a change in the national and international political situation. The Islamic State (IS, Daesh) has struck again; and even more strongly. In January, the targets were the journalists of Charlie Hebdo, police and Jews. This time, it was the youth of the country that was the target. They did not kill just anyone, just anywhere: they attacked young people, young people in all their colours, whatever their origins, their religion (if they had one), their political beliefs. At least 130 dead, over 350 wounded – at the very least a thousand direct witnesses of the carnage. Many of us have relatives among the victims and, if not, we have friends who have. The shock wave, the emotion, is profound.

    There is no mystery about the objective pursued by the commandos of the Islamic State: to fracture society through terror. To create a situation where war against one another is imposed; where fear draws up impassable barriers between citizens according to their origins, religions, lifestyles, identities – to dig a ditch filled with blood within the Muslim religion itself, forcing believers to choose sides. Whoever is not with us in our inhuman acts is against us, and becomes a "legitimate" target.

    The attacks in Paris were among the bloodiest acts in the world perpetrated by the Islamic State and other similar movements which serve the same destructive logic. Our solidarity is international, it is directed especially towards those who, in other countries are fighting them at the risk of their lives: in Syria and Iraq, in Lebanon and in Bamako, in Pakistan and in Turkey… We must first affirm our compassion, our identification, our brotherhood with the victims and with their families.

    At such a time, we of course continue the class struggle, to support the struggle of all the oppressed; but beyond that, we defend humanity against barbarism. The humanist dimension of revolutionary commitment remains our guiding light. Any progressive politics begins with indignation, with emotion. It is not of course limited to that, but that is its starting point. Let us not counter-pose thinking and weeping! Let us not waffle in jargon, let us not write with a pen of ice! Here and now, let us help the victims and their families, take part in mourning, respect minutes of silence, take part in solidarity events. We are part of this movement – and it is from here that we can explain our positions.

    Whatever the role of imperialism, the Islamic State is responsible for its actions

    Revolutionaries must clearly and definitely reject fundamentalist barbarism. It must be fought – by our methods, according to our orientation and not that of our leaders – but it must be actively defeated.

    Under the impact of events, left organizations, associations and unions have caved in to the call for national unity; others, in a reaction against this, have so much emphasized the very real political and historical responsibilities of Western imperialism that the denunciation of the Islamic State has become inaudible. As the days have passed, the positions have often been clarified. So much the better. But we can still read plenty of articles which consider that although the attacks "had no excuse" it was necessary above all to take into account "the context" – since the analysis of that context is essentially reduced to the enumeration of imperialist misdeeds one could conclude that the fundamentalist movements are merely reacting to the actions of the great powers and we should somehow grant them extenuating circumstances. It is necessary to remove any ambiguity on this question.

    Strangely enough, many writers on the left vigorously denounce the fundamentalist attacks, but refuse to condemn by name, explicitly, the movements that commit them. Stranger still, many organizations do not hesitate to do so (naming the guilty, explaining their reactionary character), but do not draw any practical consequence from that. When it comes down to tasks, the fight against terrorism and against these fundamentalisms is no longer mentioned; which, by the way, leaves our rulers with a monopoly of specific responses. We are generally in agreement to attack imperialism and its wars, destructive capitalist globalization, inequality and discrimination, the ideology of the clash of civilizations, racism – including Islamophobia – the legacies of the colonial past, security policies and states of emergency, appeals for national unity and social peace… To attack, therefore, some of the causes and the consequences of the dramatic events that we are living through.

    But we must also combat the influence of Daesh (among others) in our own societies and concretely express our solidarity with popular resistance in developing countries torn by religious fanaticism – an internationalist duty if ever there was one! On this, there is a "blind spot" in much of the radical left, even the left that does not sink into a deleterious “campism”. That is why we accord importance to this question in our contribution.

    The Islamic State and other similar movements do not just react; they act according to their own agenda. They are political actors pursuing specific objectives. There is little doubt that Daesh is actually responsible for the attacks in Paris. This organization has built a proto-state on a territory equivalent to that of Britain. It runs an administration; it has accumulated immense wealth (estimated at nearly $1.8 billion); it organizes the smuggling of oil and cotton. It conducts military operations on multiple fronts, it has recruited IT specialists of the highest level … It is not a puppet! It is responsible for its acts –totally responsible for the attacks committed in so many places.

    Its own responsibility does not disappear because of the responsibilities of imperialism, however enormous they may be – and have been for a long time: from the Sykes-Picot agreements of the early twentieth century to the current interventions of the great powers. It is often said that without the US intervention in Iraq in 2003 (which destabilized the region and dislocated states), Daesh would not exist. This is only true with regard to a specific sequence that led to the founding of the Islamic State as we know it. Otherwise, it is false. The emergence of jihadist forces does not flow automatically from imperialist domination; it is the combined product of many factors ranging from the bankruptcy of Arab (and European) left forces to the determination of the bourgeoisie in the region to have new counter-revolutionary forces to support their regional ambitions and combat the revolutionary upsurge in the Arab world. This is also true concerning the rise of religious fundamentalisms in other parts of the world, including in countries that have experienced nothing comparable to the 2003 war, such as India (the Hindu far right), Burma (the Buddhist far right) or the United States (the Christian far right – powerful well before 2001 and very close to Bush).

    Once again on the "clash of barbarisms"

    There is a Western imperialist responsibility, as there was after the 1914-18 war (with the Treaty of Versailles) in the rise of Nazism in Germany. The antifascists of the time did not fail to recall it systematically. However, once it took off, the Nazi Party was denounced and combated as such. Daesh has taken off…

    We must continue to explain the context, but the Islamic State must be seen for what it is, not as a mere shadow of the West. Contemporary imperialism, neo-liberal policies, capitalist globalization, enterprises of colonization, endless wars, are tearing the social fabric of a growing number of countries, releasing all sorts of barbarism. But religious fundamentalisms too are formidable agents of the disintegration of whole societies. There is not in fact a "major barbarism" (the West) that we should be fighting today and a "secondary barbarism" (Daesh and consorts) that we should be concerned about in the indefinite future. The reverse is also true: we should not condone imperialist barbarity and that of “allied” dictatorships under the pretext of fighting fundamentalist barbarism. There is no hierarchy of horror. We must actively and without waiting defend all the victims of these twin barbarisms, which feed on each other, otherwise we will fail in our political and humanitarian duties.

    Religious fundamentalisms were often initially supported by Washington in the name of the struggle against the Soviet Union (in Afghanistan, Pakistan…), before asserting their autonomy and even turning against their sponsors. These deeply reactionary movements have nothing progressive about them. There is no "reactionary anti-imperialism"! They want to impose a model of society that is both capitalist and backward-looking, totalitarian in the strong sense of the term. Of course, France is being hit because of its Middle East policy and its colonial and post-colonial history. But when Daesh slaughters Yezidis because they are Yezidis, reduces populations to slavery, sells women, destabilizes Lebanon, pushes sectarian violence to the extreme, (particularly against Shiites), what is the relationship to a supposed anti-imperialism?

    All fundamentalist movements do not have the same bases, the same strategy. Are some of them, such as the Islamic State, fascists? They do not maintain the same (complex) relations with sectors of the imperialist bourgeoisies as in Europe in the 1930s, but they reproduce them with sectors of the bourgeoisie of "regional powers", such as, in the Middle East, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey … They attract the "human dust" of decaying societies as well as elements of the "middle classes", of a "petty bourgeoisie", of educated workers. They use terror "from below" to impose their order. They dehumanize those who are different and make scapegoats of them, as yesterday the Nazis did with Jews, Gypsies or homosexuals. They eradicate all forms of democracy and of progressive people’s organizations. Religious exaltation occupies the same function as national exaltation in the interwar period and enables them, in addition, to deploy internationally.

    It would be strange if the convulsions caused by capitalist globalization did not give rise to new forms of fascism, just as it would be surprising if they resembled feature for feature those of the previous century. There is a difference with European fascism: it resides in the overlapping between this totalitarian fundamentalist reaction and the crisis of disintegration of states and of the imperialist economic and military relations of domination that enmesh the region.

    The fight against terrorism must be waged by the peoples of the region, and not by a coalition of Western powers. A new military intervention of the imperialist powers and Russia, supported on each of its flanks by the Gulf States and the Syrian dictatorship, can weaken Daesh militarily, but it can only provoke a backlash from all the Sunni peoples of the region.

    The crisis of society in France

    The attacks of November 13 were primarily committed by French or Franco-Belgians – France and Belgium being two of the countries from which most of the departures for Syria take place. There is no single profile of people who align themselves with the Islamic State. They may be from families of believers, secular Muslims or not Muslims: recent converts, non-Arab, are quite numerous. Similarly, they can come from very precarious or stable backgrounds, have a criminal past or not. In some cases, the "radicalization" of an individual is the culmination of a long process; for others it is a brutal swing. As might be expected, most of the men who have committed attacks in France come from particularly disadvantaged backgrounds, have been in prison and were gang members – but not all.

    Faced with this plurality of profiles, we cannot settle for simple explanations, only sociological (casualization, racialization of social relations …) or only historical (the postcolonial dimension).

    Unlike previous waves of radicalization of youth, this one is very minor and is not inspired by the same humanist aspirations. The Islamic State presents itself in the crudest way possible: "Come with us and cut off heads." The French army practised torture on a massive scale, especially during the Battle of Algiers, but the government and the General Staff fiercely denied their crimes: there were no appeals proclaiming "Join your Grand Army, come and torture with us"! Daesh has an explicit discourse of hatred and exclusion of those who are different (as do the most extreme elements of the far right). There is no possible analogy between those who go to Syria today and the creation of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War – or the radicalization of the 1960s.

    There is nothing banal in all this, nor in the use of mass terror. To pretend that terrorism is the "natural" weapon of the oppressed in "asymmetrical" wars is to ignore the lessons of the great battles for liberation of the last century, of revolutionary wars. In the struggles for independence and against imperialism in Indochina and Latin America, terrorist attacks were rare at that time and the movements concerned generally realized rapidly that the political cost of such operations was too high – and posed many ethical problems. In Algeria, the FLN, which had ventured onto this terrain, quickly backtracked under pressure from some of its sectors or from movements in solidarity with Algerian independence.

    We are suffering the ultimate consequences of the "crisis of politics", of the desocialisation that is inherent in our neoliberal societies and their growing injustice, of the defeat suffered by our generations (the radicals of the 1960s and 70s), of the inability of the left forces in our countries to offer any radical perspective and to act within the populations who lead a precarious existence. We are in fact touching on areas that most of us do not really understand: psycho-sociology, the relationship between fragile individual identities and the decay of the social fabric, adolescent searchings. The Islamic State provides an armour, with an identity and with power: the power of representation, the power of arms, power over women, the power of life and death… Much more than a supposed anti-imperialism, that is what makes it attractive.

    These are questions that we need to take on board more than we have done up until now; and we can already draw some implications. The anti-racist struggle, as important as it is, is not enough. Faced with neoliberal individualism and its anonymity (Who knows their neighbours?) we need to promote and rebuild places where people can socialize, mix, where they can "live together" – and reintroduce fundamental reflection on ethics, commitment and struggle.

    In such a situation, all forms of racism constitute a mortal danger, including of course state racism, but not only that. Let us fight against anything that can fuel community tensions, oppose oppressed people to one another, whether we are dealing with anti-Arab racism or Negrophobia, anti-Semitism or Islamophobia, discrimination against Roma … – and to do that, let us create a culture of living together, of respect for the rights of everyone.

    Our internationalist tasks

    Recent events (November 13, the blowing up of a Russian airliner over Sinai…), have precipitated a shift in alliances that could already be remarked before, with the formation of a grand coalition: the bringing in of Russia, the abandonment by France of its pretensions to independence, concerns raised even in Saudi Arabia about the deployment of the Islamic State… In counterpart, the Assad regime has been strengthened, whereas it is at the origin of the Syrian crisis and guilty of the crimes that we know about. Will this be enough to promote a temporary agreement among regional powers belonging to the so-called “blocs”, Sunni and Shiite?

    It is still early to assess the full implications of this turning point in the international situation. For the moment, let us stress the following points:

    The compromises between the West and Turkey or the Assad regime will be made to the detriment of the forces on the ground that most deserve our support: the Kurds, the Yezidis, the progressive and non-confessionalist components of the resistance to the regime. We must give them our political and material solidarity and demand that they receive adequate weapons, of which the progressive components of FSA have never benefited (and yet they resist!) and of which the Kurds could be deprived, particularly on the Syrian front. We must recognize that we have never done in France, in this field, what we should have done.

    The intensification of bombing by the coalition, with the exorbitant price paid by civilians, is likely to reinforce the audience of Daesh among other Islamist elements operating in Syria. The net result of this policy would then be to strengthen both the Assad regime and the fundamentalist organizations (starting with the Islamic State)! To avoid this trap, we must break with the logic of the great powers: help the popular forces in Syria and Iraq to continue their fight instead of trying to substitute for them or marginalizing them even more.

    So we must fight against the war policy of our rulers, but also understand the specific nature of this conflict, very different from the wars in Indochina or Algeria: the withdrawal of French or American troops then meant the end of the main foreign interference and created the conditions for a victory. This is not the case today in the Middle East: there would remain Turkey, Iran (and the Hezbollah), Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Algeria, Egypt… In such a complex geopolitical configuration we need to listen to the movements that we support in order to take into account what they need, materially and politically. It is the peoples who should decide, not the imperialist coalitions. But, and this is a particular dimension of this war, the Kurds and the Syrian democrats have asked and continue to ask for medical and military aid, including from Western governments. They must be given it. There can be no substitute for the decision-making and self-determination of the Syrian and Kurdish democratic forces, but no hesitation in helping them and pressuring our governments to respond to the appeals they make.

    On the international level, the hypocrisy of the Western forces must be denounced: on the one hand, they claim to be fighting terrorism and on the other they support regimes such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

    The coalition that is being constituted is in no sense a "democratic" alliance against a totalitarian threat. In addition to our “classic” imperialisms, it includes Putin’s Russia, Saudi Arabia, whose regime is very close to the model of society advocated by Daesh, Qatar, the Iranian theocracy, Erdogan’s Turkey… Whatever the nature of the Islamic State, any analogy with an "anti-fascist democratic front" is invalid. We are neither with the coalition, nor with Daesh, nor with Assad. We are for the right to self-determination of peoples – including the Palestinian people – against all forms of barbarism.

    A turning point in the national situation

    As in January after the massacre of the journalists of Charlie Hebdo, the deaths of police personnel, the attack on the Hypercacher supermarket, emotion has overwhelmed the country – which of course is perfectly normal. [1] Islamophobic acts have multiplied, but they are actually committed by only a fringe of the population. Acts of solidarity and friendship have also multiplied: a big smile when you pass a North African in the subway, conspicuous (even if outdated) gallantry when you step aside to let a veiled woman pass, reoccupation of places where people have parties and mix together, rejection of amalgams [between terrorists and ordinary Muslims] … Unfortunately, all these gestures are not counted and are not included in the statistics.

    As in January, too, security policies are acclaimed and the forces of order are applauded. Now, even more than in January, the government has seized the opportunity to take Draconian measures. This was the case yesterday with the law on intelligence that gives excessive powers to the secret services. It is now the case with the establishment of the state of emergency, made harsher by Parliament, the appeal of the French government for the EU to follow on, in particular by keeping files on all airline passengers, and the announcement by Hollande of constitutional reform.

    France is already equipped with two sets of emergency measures, established in particular during the Algerian War: the state of emergency (a semi-martial law that frees the police and army from judicial control and limits freedoms) and the state of siege (complete martial law, giving full powers to the army). Why is this not enough for our leaders? Because the use of the state of emergency, for example, is limited in time and requires a parliamentary vote – which as it happened was almost unanimously in favour: it was supported by the vast majority of the Socialists, the Greens and the Communist deputies. The constitutional reform would allow the government (or the President?) to take exceptional measures more freely – and ultimately make the exception the rule: intervention by the army in policing, arbitrary searches, "preventive" detentions, banning of demonstrations and strikes, press censorship, etc. The exact content of the law that Hollande will draft is not yet known, but its intentions are clear. The regime will become increasingly authoritarian, the militarization of society will surge forward.

    Many people are worried about what would happen if Marine Le Pen and the National Front won the elections (a scenario that is not political fiction), but they do not ask what Hollande, Valls, Sarkozy or others will do. It is therefore very important to remember what "republican" governments have done in the past – including torture in Algeria and the adoption of an amnesty law that prohibited the indictment of the perpetrators (you can only be accused of condoning torture if, afterwards, you defend its use), the media blackout of the massacre of Algerians in Paris on October 17, 1961( a case of state terrorism if ever there was one), the putsch by the generals in Algiers, the multiple dirty tricks of the secret services, the attack against the Rainbow Warrior of Greenpeace (one person dead, state terrorism again), the assassination of Kanak leaders, etc. In fact, the whole panoply of security laws adopted in recent years and of the surveillance measures put in place can enable any government to conduct a creeping civil war whenever they want. Finally, over and above the march towards a society dominated by security measures, there is a political calculation. Hollande and Valls are relying on the state of emergency to use once again the Bonapartist arsenal and raise themselves, in a certain way, above parties and institutions.

    The operation is aimed at neutralizing the abysmal record of governments since 2012 and promising better election results for the Socialist Party. Hollande and Valls are taking a very risky gamble: they can play the security card, supported by the institutions of the Fifth Republic, but in the present political situation, where bad winds are blowing on the right and the far right, those are the forces that are likely to benefit from this manoeuvre.

    Resistance to the extension of the state of emergency has been very weak in the parliamentary left, but more significant among the rank and file (within the French Communist Party, for example, against the vote of its representatives) and in the social and trade union movement: Solidarity, but also the CGT.

    The present political moment is fraught with very great dangers. Political democracy has been emptied of its content, elected assemblies no longer having control over the main decisions (which are taken by the European Union, the World Trade Organization, intergovernmental treaties…). Now it is civil liberties, already under attack, which may become an empty shell. The government wants to put society under house arrest. But the population is not conscious of it.

    The key is to link together the terrains of resistance, to show our solidarity with the victims of terrorism, to give the peoples fighting for their freedom the material, political and military means to survive and win, to support the progressive and non-confessionalist [2] forces fighting on the ground, at the same time against the bloody, terrorist obscurantism of Daesh and that of the Assad regime that it has so much favoured. It is to stop engaging in wars and bombings, stop supporting absolutist regimes and promoting social and political injustices in the Middle East and elsewhere.

    The state of the progressive forces in France is quite disastrous, but at this key moment, points of support for resistance exist: in the shared feelings of solidarity within the population, in the reaction of young people, in the refusal by many associations and unions to accept Draconian measures, a permanent state of emergency. There is the basis to build a united front in defence of freedom at home and abroad, of living together, of solidarity.

    This article was written for the site Viento Sur “El terror del Estado Islámico, el estado de excepción en Francia, nuestras responsabilidades”. We have republished here the English translation that appeared in International Viewpoint. The flag that accompanies the article was created by the Canadian Union of Public Employees to symbolize its solidarity with the victims of attacks in both Paris and Beirut.

    Footnotes

    [1] We refer you to the article we wrote at the time Charlie Hebdo – And now what? The events, their impact and the issues at play..

    [2] We mean here movements promoting “confessionalism”, représentation through “religious communities”, like in the case of the Lebanese political regime (a system of representation which the Left denounce). It does not mean “with religious references”. Movements linked to the Theology of Liberation, for example, were part of social conflits and class struggle. The “confessionalist” regime in Lebanon aims to maintain the status quo.

  • Bernie Sanders’ Political Revolution

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    Even a somewhat cynical 71 year old socialist like me could be thrilled to see Bernie Sanders talking about the need for an American political revolution on MSNBC. To be honest, I’m not sure that I ever expected to see a leading presidential candidate say we need a revolution on prime time TV.

    When Bernie Sanders says we need a political revolution, he’s mostly talking about turning many thousands of new people out to vote. That would obviously be a very good thing. It’s just not enough to win the meaningful social changes that would add up to a political revolution.

    For example, Sanders was appearing in what MSNBC billed as the “First in the South Presidential Forum.” Until just over 50 years ago, very few Black people could vote in the South. Only a real political revolution won that most basic democratic right.

    It began when tens of thousands of Black people in Montgomery walked for six months rather than ride the segregated buses. Soon there were sit-ins and freedom rides, demonstrations and marches. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets. Many were arrested. Some were killed.

    Even when voting rights had been won, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. found that they weren’t enough without jobs, housing and an end to poverty. Of course Bernie Sanders wants those things too. But it was King who insisted they had to be fought for in the streets not just at the ballot box.

    Before he died Dr. King was organizing the Poor People’s Crusade to bring tens of thousands of people to Washington and shut the government down until Congress acted to end poverty. So far Bernie Sanders’ political revolution doesn’t seem to involve that kind of radical popular mobilization.

    Now Sanders has built his presidential campaign largely around preserving and expanding New Deal programs like social security and unemployment insurance. They weren’t won because Franklin Delano Roosevelt was some kind of people’s champion. Or even because the Democrats had big majorities in both the House and Senate. Instead it took a massive, militant popular movement extending from the plants into the communities.

    The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was built on a national wave of sit-down strikes. The Flint Sit Down that brought the first UAW contract has become legendary. Not too many people know that steel workers, rubber workers, and even bakery and Woolworth workers sat down too.

    The CIO was never non-violent. Strikers fought hand to hand battles against scabs, cops and even the National Guard.  Longshoreman, auto workers, steel workers and Teamsters died fighting for the union.

    In communities like Harlem, it was very hard for landlords to even evict unemployed people who couldn’t make the rent. As soon as the cops put people on the street, their neighbors put their furniture right back in. Confronted by large, angry crowds, the cops often thought discretion was the better part of valor.

    As difficult as it may be to believe today, many in the political and economic establishment seriously believed that unless they made major reforms they were likely to face a socialist revolution.

    The civil rights movement and the CIO are what actual political revolutions look like. It would probably take something close to them to win even some of Bernie Sanders’ goals – such as ending poverty, equal pay for women, reversing climate change, full employment, free public education, and universal health care.

    Bernie Sanders isn’t going to get the 2016 Democratic Presidential nomination. The Democratic Party establishment, the millionaire donors, the mainstream media and even the top leaders of most AFL-CIO unions will make sure of that.

    Many of us had hoped that Sanders would run an independent presidential campaign. Unfortunately, he’s made it perfectly clear that’s never going to happen. He’s promised the Democrats that come November, he’ll be out there campaigning for Hillary.

    Even so, Bernie Sanders could still work for a political revolution after the November election is over. He could do it by joining the social movements that can win the real social change we need so badly.

    Bernie could be there any time an innocent African-American is murdered by the cops. He could speak at climate change demonstrations from coast to coast. He could walk the picket line with minimum wage workers demanding $15 an hour. These kinds of actions would accomplish much more than getting out the vote for Democratic politicians.

    What we know for sure is that Bernie is absolutely right when he says the U.S. needs a political revolution. His campaign is probably introducing the idea to millions of people who never even considered it before. But if we’re going to have a political revolution, we’ll have to make it through grassroots struggle, with or without Bernie Sanders.

    This article originally appeared in Socialist Worker.

     

  • ISIS in Syria: Stop the march to war – There are alternatives

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    Militant Islamic State fighters parade on military vehicles along the streets of Raqqa (Reuters)

    In the wake of the murderous massacres in Paris, the demand for violent retaliation against Islamic State (IS) is gaining momentum. David Cameron now plans a renewed bid to secure parliamentary approval for UK air strikes against IS in Syria.

    At one level, this is an understandable reaction to the fascist-like tyranny and brutality of IS. But understandable reactions and effective reactions are often two different things. The desire for retribution, no matter how seemingly justifiable in response to the slaughter of so many innocents, is not a sound basis on which to frame political and military policy.

    The key question we have to ask is: Will bombing Syria defeat IS? I doubt it. Western intervention in Syria would, in all likelihood, strengthen IS; allowing it to portray our intervention as a 'crusader war' and to depict itself as the defender of Muslims.

    IS wants the West to overreact and crack down hard; in the expectation that this will alienate Muslim people and win them more recruits and supporters. They want to frame their fight as Islam versus the West. Intervention would play into their hands.

    Moreover, because IS has deliberately embedded itself in populated areas, air strikes are likely to result in civilian casualties which, apart from being morally wrong, could turn many affected communities against the West and into the arms of IS – in the same way that US drone attacks in Afghanistan have killed innocents, provoked anti-Americanism and boosted support for the Taliban.

    A more successful strategy might be to empower the Syrian progressive forces that are currently and very successfully defeating IS: the new multi-ethnic, secular Syrian Democratic Forces, a military coalition comprising Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) and Arab, Christian and Assyrian militias; plus elements of the Free Syrian Army.

    Between them, they defeated IS at Kobane, have expunged IS from most of northern Syria and this month alone liberated 196 villages and 545 square miles of land from IS control.

    Similar victories have been won in Iraq by the Kurdish peshmerga of the Kurdistan Regional Government and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which last week liberated Sinjar city with the support of Yazidi and Syrian Kurdish forces.

    What is the point of Western intervention when Syrians are doing such a great job in freeing themselves from IS oppression? It is true that they've requested and received US air support but on a limited and targeted scale. The battlefield gains have been won primarily by anti-IS ground forces – and, thankfully, with relatively few civilian deaths.

    There are also two non-military options.

    The first is to cut the financing of IS through its sale of oil produced in the areas it controls. It is making tens of millions of pounds which it uses to buy weapons, train and pay fighters and fund its administration of captured cities. Many of these oil sales appear to be via black market middle men in Iraq, Syria and Turkey.

    With less oil funding, IS's military, propaganda and administrative capacity would be degraded.

    The second non-military option is to cut IS's supply lines via Turkey, which have been vital in funneling fighters and equipment to their frontlines. It is truly outrageous that a NATO member state, Turkey, is effectively aiding a terrorist organization that created bloody carnage in another NATO country, France.

    Equally bad, Turkey is actively fighting the main effective resistance to IS, the PKK, and sabotaging the anti-IS Syrian Kurdish YPG.

    The drive to war must be resisted. It is short-sighted, won't work and is likely to be counter-productive. We need less Western military action and more Western support for anti-IS forces inside Syria. The non-military options should also be explored.

    The last thing we want is a rush to armed intervention and being dragged into another Iraq-style quagmire.

    For more information about Peter Tatchell's human rights work, to receive his email bulletins or to make a donation: http://www.PeterTatchellFoundation.org

    This article and its headline were amended after publication at the request of the author.

     

  • ISIS Carnage in Paris Portends Repression in Europe and Intensified War in Middle East

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    The despicable ISIS attacks on Paris and elsewhere have unleashed intensified war and imperialist machinations over Syria and Iraq, as well as repression of immigrants and renewed Islamophobia. Can the left oppose the carnage on all sides without losing sight of its emancipatory aims?

    The November 13 murder of over 130 totally innocent French civilians by criminal jihadists linked to the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS) has brought the carnage of Syria and Iraq to the heart of Europe. Operating in three teams, these ISIS members massacred the audience at a rock concert, also attacking a soccer stadium and several restaurants. Claiming to be Muslims, they were influenced by a far-right sectarian ideology rooted in extreme fundamentalism that is alien to the vast majority of the world’s Muslims. Most troubling of all in terms of the current state of European “civilization,” especially its treatment of minorities, is that most of the perpetrators grew up in France, as members of its deeply oppressed and embittered Muslim minority.

    French President François Hollande immediately declared a “war on terrorism,” thus dignifying these criminals with the more honorable label of soldiers. Here he followed in the footsteps of U.S. imperialism’s failed “war on terror” after the attacks of September 11, 2001, language that of course allows the military to be deployed, both at home and abroad. Hollande also declared a state of emergency, banning all public demonstrations and allowing warrantless searches and the use of the military on the streets of France. He then proposed to extend it for three months, something that would require a change in the Constitution, and which was supported almost unanimously by the National Assembly (with 6 abstentions from leftists and ecologists). A social democrat with neoliberal tendencies who remained largely silent while Germany and the EU put the screws to Greece’s leftwing government last summer, Hollande immediately received the praise of his rightwing opponents in France, surely an ominous sign.

    While France immediately launched new airstrikes against ISIS in Syria, the real action was elsewhere, in the diplomatic maneuvering among the U.S., France, Russia, and Iran. It now seems surer than even a month ago, as was put forth in the statement of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization (“Russian Intervention in Syria and Imperialist Realignment,” Oct. 22, 2015) that these powers will unite to roll up ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and that they will do so in a manner that hands a victory to the murderous Assad regime over its internal opponents, more than 200,000 of whom it has slaughtered, and some of whom remain true to the emancipatory ideals of the 2011 uprising. Like the additional civilians who will surely die as these powers attack or pretend to attack ISIS, these Syrian oppositionists, until recently nominally supported by the U.S. and France, will be sacrificed as pawns in a great power game. Whether Bashar Assad himself is forced out (unlikely) or placed in some kind of nominally broader governing coalition stitched together by these global and regional powers, all of these “order-mongering powers” (to use Marx’s expression) have made it crystal clear that they want the Assad regime and especially the Syrian state apparatus to survive, fearing the chaos of another Libya or another Iraq.

    ISIS has gotten exactly what it wanted out of the Paris massacre, in two ways. First, France’s 4.7 million strong Muslim community, percentage-wise the largest in Western Europe, is sure the feel the brunt of the state crackdown and likely of popular vengeance as well. In this regard, it is notable that Hollande has not said much in terms of declaring that the state needs to protect French Muslims from persecution and discrimination. This will create the possibility of more recruits for ISIS, whether in the impoverished suburban ghettoes (banlieus) that ring the cities or inside the prisons, in both of which Muslims constitute a disproportionate part of the population.

    Second, the attack will burnish ISIS’s image outside France as a viable force against Western imperialism, even as it has suffered defeats at the hands of the Iraqi and Syrian Kurds, who liberated the Yazidi town of Sinjar in northern Iraq just one day before the Paris attacks.   It was quite moving to see Yazidi forces take part in the battle to liberate the town where genocide and sexual slavery had been carried out against their people in 2014.

    Even the victory for the democratic forces in Sinjar carries some worrisome contradictions within it, however. The U.S., which is aiding the Kurds with airstrikes, has unsurprisingly been favoring the conservative, Turkey-aligned Barzani Kurds, rather than the Syrian Kurds. It is of course the latter who have done the bulk of the fighting, whose forces include women officers, and who did not run away in 2014 in the face of ISIS like the Barzani group did.

    Another terrible result of the Paris massacre is the anti-immigrant hysteria and Islamophobia that is being whipped up not only in France, but also in Germany, the U.S., and elsewhere. The fact that one of the Paris attackers seems to have crossed from Turkey into Greece in October amid the wave of refugees from Syria has helped to spur on this anti-immigrant racism. Conservative U.S. politicians have fanned Islamophobia by coming out against admitting any Syrian refugees at all, while Germany has come under pressure to curtail its far more generous policy, which has projected admitting 800,000 refugees and asylum seekers.

    It is important to underline that the Paris attacks are merely the most dramatic so far of a whole series of inhuman massacres by this reactionary, racist, misogynist organization. Because they targeted Europeans in one of the globe’s most important cultural centers, the Paris attacks have made the whole world pause. But despite the media focus on Paris, we should not forget ISIS’s other recent outrages, among them a series of attacks in Middle Eastern countries that have killed far more than in Paris: more than 100 killed on October 10 by ISIS suicide bombers at a leftwing pro-Kurdish rally in Ankara where the Turkish police seemed to have disappeared, 224 killed on October 31 by an ISIS bomb placed aboard a Russian airline carrying tourists from Egypt, 43 killed by ISIS suicide bombers on November 12 in Beirut in a predominantly Shia neighborhood. And that is not counting the ongoing carnage in Syria and Iraq themselves, or the nearly totally ignored depredations of Boko Haram, and ISIS-aligned group in Nigeria that has kidnapped and enslaved thousands of African women.

    Most members of the global left point out, and rightly so, that ISIS grew in the wake of Bush’s disastrous war in Iraq, which toppled a militarized dictatorship but never succeeded in setting up a stable puppet regime in its place. This created an opening for all sorts of sectarian Islamist parties, both Shia and Sunni, and among which ISIS is the most virulent strain, but not the only brutal or reactionary one. Most leftists also note that ISIS emerged out of Al Qaeda, which itself emerged out of the Arabs who came to fight in Afghanistan against the Russian-backed regime in the 1980s, and whom the U.S. (and its allies Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Britain, France, Germany, etc.) lavishly supported as part of their Cold War rivalry with Russia. Such explanations are an important and necessary part of grasping the nature of these events, given all the blood U.S. imperialism has shed over the decades, from Vietnam to Indonesia, and from Nicaragua to Congo.

    Although necessary, such explanations are insufficient. This is because they put the entirety of the blame on a single force, U.S. imperialism. This leaves unanswered questions like these: First, in so many parts of the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, why has Islamism displaced the left on the campuses and in many communities where the socialists or leftwing nationalists had once predominated? Clearly, one must look here not just at U.S. destabilization schemes like 1953 in Iran, but also at the failures of the left itself, both regionally and globally. Second, one could consider France itself, with a Muslim population drawn primarily from North Africa and that is among the most economically exploited and oppressed groups in Western Europe. In a country where revolutionary and Marxist traditions were especially strong, how has the left increasingly lost ground in these communities to religious identitarianism, even when it does not take the form of outright jihadism? Here one would have to look at the outright racism found all too frequently in the two large leftist parties, the Communists and the Socialists, and beyond. One could easily give more examples.

    Recall that during the days of outright Stalinist dictatorship in Russia, the best parts of the left knew how to support both the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua and the Solidarnosc workers' movement in Poland. We also knew how to oppose Mao’s repression of the youth in China, which he disguised as an anti-bureaucratic “cultural” revolution, while at the same time pointing to his betrayal of the Vietnamese in their struggle against U.S. imperialism. Later, we worked out how to oppose both U.S. imperialist machinations and the efforts by Khomeini and his followers to usurp the Iranian revolution, beginning with their forced re-veiling of women in March 1979, something they termed a blow against the culture of imperialism.

    Yet another deleterious effect of the Paris attacks is that they will further undermine what remains of the spirit and the actuality of the 2011 Arab revolutions, especially in Syria, but really throughout the region. While some green shoots remain amid the repression in Egypt and elsewhere, as in the new Tunisian constitution and the Kurdish left in both Syria/Iraq and Turkey, these will now be in greater danger. (On these green shoots, see my earlier “Four Years After the Arab Revolutions: Fighting on Amid Reactionary Retrenchment,” Logos, Summer 2015). The global effect of this undermining of the spirit of 2011 is not to be underestimated. This is because it was those very Arab revolutions, which as is often forgotten were about class and economic oppression as much as political emancipation from tyranny, that touched off the era of radicalization of the past few years, from Occupy to Podemos in Spain and similar movements globally.

    Inside the U.S., the Paris attacks are being used by the state, by capital, and by reactionary political forces. Everywhere, there are calls for more security, more surveillance by the state, more hunkering down behind the established powers of the state and of capital. There is an attempt to change the subject from Black Lives Matter, from obscene economic inequality, and from looming ecological disaster. The movements centered on these progressive and revolutionary causes, and similar ones around the world, will now face the challenge of operating in a situation where the global “war on terror” is being ramped up once again. How these movements negotiate the treacherous paths of the new global situation will be crucial, both for their survival and their further development. I refer to movements not only in the U.S., but also those against austerity in Greece and southern Europe, to the new energy kicked up by Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader of the British Labor Party, and to those planning to march for the environment in Paris in December, a march Hollande wants to ban in the name of security.

    One crucial point will be how we can separate ourselves both from the carnage of ISIS and the various imperialist and regional powers that are seeking to gain from the Paris events. Another key issue will be how, amid all this terrorism and war, we can keep the focus on the needed uprooting of capitalism, not as an abstract universal, but in relationship to actually existing social movements against class and racial oppression, environmental destruction, and sexual and gender subordination.

    This article originally appeared on the website of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization.

     

     

  • Solidarity with the Victims of Terrorism–No to War and Racism

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    The following statement of the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) was published on the International Viewpoint website on November 18, 2015.

    The horrific attacks that took place in Paris on Friday night left 129 dead and 352 wounded – including more than a hundred in critical condition. This indiscriminate and reactionary violence, sparked nationwide – but also worldwide – astonishment, indignation and revolt. This weekend spontaneous solidarity rallies took place.

    The New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) shares this feeling of revolt and solidarity with all those who are affected by this tragedy, the families of the victims and all those close to them. The deadly violence is especially shocking and unbearable that, instead of fighting the (states) governments, which are at war in Syria, Iraq or Africa, it deliberately strikes innocent victims here, members of the public, just as in Iraq and Syria where it imposes dictatorships.  

    Refuse their War

    Holland,Valls, Sarkozy and Le Pen tell us that France is at war. This is true, but the war is not ours. It is not a response to terrorism because it is the wars waged by successive governments of this country in Afghanistan, Mali, Libya, Syria, which created the chaos from which was born first Al Qaida and then Islamic state. And it is the decision of Hollande to intervene in Syria that caused the response of terrorists.  

    These bombings are supposed to fight the Islamic State, the jihadi terrorists, but in fact, together with the Russian intervention and bombings, they prop up the system of the person mainly responsible for the martyrdom of the Syrian people, the Assad dictatorship. There too it is civilians who are the first victims condemned to survive under terror or flee in fear of their lives.   France must immediately withdraw its troops from the Middle East and Africa.  

    No to National Unity

    Hollande, just as he did as after January 7, called for "national unity" and has met all the political parties, with members in parliament or not, who support this call. [received this from all parliamentary parties associated with it or not.] This unity is a hypocrisy that has nothing to do with solidarity with the victims. Hollande (tries) is trying to use the tragedy in his favour and to get people’s support for his war policy. He also wants to silence the growing discontent in the country.  

    The right and the extreme right have gone full throttle, equating Islam and fundamentalism, proposing that "preventive detention" is imposed, that mosques are closed down and so on. Yet it is not Muslims who cause wars, on the contrary they are the first victims, in Syria, Iraq and France.  

    We must fight the causes of barbarism, namely the pillaging of poor countries by the big powers. For this, we need the unity of the workers and peoples, beyond their origins, their skin colour, their religion, beyond borders, against those who have built this world.  

    The choice of the government to implement the state of emergency goes in the opposite direction. The state of emergency does not guarantee the security of civilians. On the contrary, it gives the state control over the press and bans public meetings and demonstrations. Under these conditions, how to express our indignation and solidarity with the victims? How to protest against redundancies at Air France and elsewhere, against racism, against wars?

    The NPA calls for the lifting of the state of emergency and an end to draconian measures.

    In solidarity with the victims, to say no to war, no to terrorism, no to racism, we stand together.

    Montreuil

    November 16, 2015

     

  • What Happened to the Mexican Revolution?

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    November 20 marks the anniversary of the Mexican Revolution of 1910‐1920. The party created by that event, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), is in power today. Yet, over the last nine years 60,000 people have been killed and 25,000 forcibly disappeared in the drug wars, while more than half the population lives in poverty. Foreign investment pours into Mexico to take advantage of wages lower than China’s, while the country is controlled by a handful of billionaires. One has to wonder: What happened to the Mexican Revolution?

    The dictator Porfirio Díaz, who ruled Mexico from 1876 to 1910, caused the revolution. He and his cabinet of wealthy landowners and businessmen took land from the peasants and violently repressed any dissent. They also invited foreign capitalists from the United States, Britain, and France to invest in Mexican mines, railroads, oil, and agriculture until foreign corporations controlled much of the economy.

    In 1906, anarchist revolutionary Ricardo Flores Magón of the Mexican Liberal Party organized armed uprisings accompanied by strikes that shook but did not topple Díaz’s  dictatorship. Four years later, Francisco I. Madero, a wealthy landlord and industrialist, ran for president against Díaz but ended up in jail. Escaping, he called upon the people to rise up in revolution on November 20, 1910.

    Madero represented the modernizing bourgeoisie of Mexico, northern farmers and manufacturers influenced by U.S. capitalism who resented Díaz and his cronies cornering the market. When Madero called for revolution, not only the Mexican business class but also the plebeian classes, heard him. Ranchers, peasants, factory workers, miners and railroad workers picked up the gun and rode with Francisco “Pancho” Villa and Emiliano Zapata. The nation rose up and drove Díaz from the country.

    In Mexico’s first‐ever democratic election in 1911, Madero won the presidency, but his moderation and temporizing failed to satisfy the peasants and workers, while his suggestion of reform outraged the old ruling elite. Mexican conservatives, with the collusion of the U.S. ambassador, overthrew and assassinated Madero and put

    Victoriano Huerta in power in 1913. In a second wave of revolution, led by another northern landlord and businessman, Venustiano Carranza, the forces of Villa and Zapata were again victorious and Huerta was toppled.

    The revolutionary forces then divided: modernizing capitalist state builders led by Carranza against the plebeian armies of Zapata and Villa. The great irony of the revolution is that Carranza made an alliance with the anarchist House of the World Worker to provide troops in exchange for recognition of workers’ unions. So workers went off to fight peasants and lifted the modernizing capitalist to power.

    Carranza, however, failed to satisfy workers and peasants with his new government, and was soon overthrown by General Álvaro Obregón. Obregón and his successor Plutarco Elías Calles were finally able to end the violent stage of the revolution by 1920 on the basis of concessions to the society’s underdogs.

    The revolution had been fought over four fundamental issues: peasants’ demands for land, workers’ demands for unions, society’s demand for education, and the nation’s demand to control its natural resources. The Constitution of 1917 responded to all of those issues, but no action was taken on them until 1934 when Lázaro Cárdenas became president. Cárdenas carried out a massive land distribution, recognized the labor unions, and seized and nationalized Standard Oil and Royal Dutch Shell in Mexico. Schools were built throughout the country. So, one can say that the revolution was finally accomplished and fulfilled in 1940, improving the lives of millions.

    Cárdenas also reformed the state, incorporating into the ruling party the Confederation of Mexican Workers, the National Peasant Confederation, and the public employees’ unions. The PRI government became a one‐party state. When Cárdenas stepped down in 1940, he was succeeded by conservative leaders who favored foreign and domestic business over Mexico’s working people.

    By 1960, Mexico faced new problems. The population grew dramatically and millions moved to the cities. Modernization created new social classes. Now, there were not just peasants, ranchers, and industrial workers, but also white‐collar workers, university students, technicians, and new layers of management. The PRI’s one‐party state was challenged, and when students demonstrated in 1968 on the eve of the Olympic Games, demanding democracy, the government killed hundreds. A new left developed in Mexico in the 1970s, organizing among students, peasants, and workers; the government responded by disappearing some 500 in the country’s “dirty war.”

    Beginning in the 1980s, the PRI adopted neoliberal policies, and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas (son of Lázaro) led a split in an attempt to preserve the nationalist economic model. Though Cárdenas won the 1988 election, computer fraud put Carlos Salinas of the PRI in the presidency. Still, resistance persisted. In January 1994, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation led an uprising in an attempt to overthrow the government, but its rebellion was contained in the state of Chiapas.

    Not allowed to elect a president from the left, to break the power of the PRI the Mexican people voted for Vicente Fox of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), who became president of Mexico in 2000. Fox proved a failure for his own party and for the people of Mexico. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, populist leader of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), challenged him and won the 2006 election, but, despite massive protests, vote fraud kept him from power. Felipe Calderón became president and launched his war on the drug cartels, unleashing the terrible violence that has taken so many lives.

    So, in 2012 Enrique Peña Nieto was elected president and the PRI was back in power, passing a neoliberal program of education, labor, and energy counter-reforms. His government has not gone unchallenged. The murder of six and kidnapping of 43 students of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College in September 2014 led to massive demonstrations against the government. At the same time, Mexican teachers have been striking against the education reform program. Still, though Mexico surely needs another revolution, the forces that might bring it about have not yet developed.

    *Dan La Botz is a teacher, writer, and activist, editor of Mexican Labor News and Analysis, and a member of Solidarity. This article first appeared on the Democratic Left blog.

     

  • New Hampshire SEIU Breaks from International–Endorses Bernie

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    They don't put the slogan “Live Free or Die” on New Hampshire license plates for nothing!

    There has been an inspiring statewide local union response to SEIU's predictably short-sighted headquarters embrace of Hillary Clinton. This Sanders endorsement comes from public workers who know Bernie well because they live and work just across the Connecticut River from Vermont–or, in some cases, are Vermonters themselves.

    Mary Kay Henry should have an interesting time, in the snows of New England, this January and February, stumping for a Democratic primary candidate her own local affiliate has wisely rejected. To avoid that little Labor for Bernie embarrassment, maybe she'll decide to do her personal GOTV work for Clinton a little further west or south of the New Hampshire state line?

     

     

  • Can Workers of the Global South Change the World Labor Movement?

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    Immanuel Ness. Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class. London: Pluto Press, 2016. 226 pages. Tables. Notes. Index. Paper $28.

    Immanuel Ness, professor of Political Science at City University of New York and a prolific writer on labor, has written an important new book whose title, Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class, should, I think, have ended in a question mark. Manny, a friend and a colleague—who, when I have seen him lately, has been in a state of jetlag from his travels to centers of worker activism around the globe—argues that those interested in labor should direct their attention from the stagnant and declining labor movement of the Global North to the migrant and contract laborers in places like South Africa, India, and China who are building democratic, militant, rank-and-file movements from below—struggles that, Ness suggests, are laying the foundations of a new global labor movement.

    While labor unions in the Global North and in the Global South have long been bureaucratic or corporate organizations—whose partnership with their governments and employers has not saved them from decline—new workers’ movements in the South, Ness argues, more resemble what he believes to have been the prototypical model of democratic and militant unionism: the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Labor’s future, Ness believes, lies, in the enormous new industrial working classes of the Global South.

    Ness’s Southern Insurgency poses very important questions at several levels. First, will the southern insurgency that he describes be able to win higher wages, better conditions, and build rank-and-file organizations and labor unions throughout the Global South as it has in some places? Second, will a revived labor movement in the Global South be able to revitalize the labor movement throughout the world as the title suggests? Third, will such a revitalized global labor movement be able to prove Karl Marx was right, that industrial workers do have the ability to lead the working class, farmers, and all of the exploited and oppressed in that revolution that will liberate not only themselves, but all of humanity? While cautious in his assertions, Ness implies that the answer to all three of these questions is “Yes.” Certainly he hopes that that will prove to be the case. There are, however, counter-tendencies that would inhibit such developments, arguments that he has not addressed and which we raise here.

    Ness establishes a framework for his study based on a theory of imperialism and monopoly capitalism that he has in a very general way taken from Vladimir Lenin and Harry Magdoff. While he doesn’t elaborate on these theories, he suggest that imperialism today operates in the form of neoliberal globalization as corporations seek profits through the capture of natural resources and the exploitation of cheap plabor on a planetary scale. Globalization has also created a vast migrant labor force, an industrial reserve army, that employers take advantage of to keep wages low.

    The force driving the fundamental shift of working class power from North to South, Ness argues, is finance capital’s search for profits, a quest that has led to massive foreign direct investment in the Global South, the building of enormous new industrial cities and enormous factory complexes that employ a relatively a relatively small core of permanent, full-time, and more skilled workers and hundreds of thousands of temporary contract workers, many of them internal migrants of immigrants from abroad. The multinational corporations’ drive for profits has frequently pushed these workers to the wall, and they have fought back, but outside of the framework of the labor unions.

    Three Case Studies

    Ness’s book concentrates on three cases taken up in three separate chapters that form the heart of the book. They are: 1) the Maruti Suzuki auto plants in Haryana State in India; 2) the Yue Yuen shoe manufacturing plants in the Pearl River Delta of China; 3) the platinum mines of South Africa. Each of these nations has its own history of imperialism, of domestic capitalism, and of labor unionism which Ness briefly and clearly explains. India’s unions formed during the colonial era and in the struggle against colonialism represented workers in the historic industries, but failed to take on the challenge of organizing the migrant contract laborers. So between 1999 and 2013 workers repeatedly formed rank-and-file labor organizations and independent labor unions in the Maruti Suzuki plants in Haryana State to fight for higher wages and better conditions. Yet, despite their heroic struggles, Maruti Suzuki destroyed the workers’ organizations, though labor organizing and strikes continue in Haryana State.

    In China the situation has been quite different. The Chinese Communist Party’s All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), created initially for workers in the state-owned industries, and designed to prevent independent labor action of any sort, responded to the economic reforms and expansion of private industry by signing up hundreds of thousands of workers at newer plants, also with the goal of controlling workers and preventing strikes. But as workers began to engage in widespread strikes at workplaces throughout the country, the Chinese government responded by passing the labor reforms of 2008. Those reforms allowed workers to form rank-and-file groups at the local plant level, as long as they did not attempt to either leave the ACFTU and form independent unions and didn’t attempt to form links with other workers in other plants. At the Yue Yuen shoe plant 30,000 of a total of 43,000 workers organized just such a rank-and-file movement and went on strike for weeks, eventually succeeding in winning such things as employer pension contributions and higher wages. Their strike was just one of thousands in the strike waves between 2009 and 2014.

    Ness’s third case is that of the South African platinum miners. South Africa’s black workers’ labor unions had been formed in the struggle against the white apartheid government in the period between the 1950s and the 1990s. When the African National Congress (ANC) came to power, supported by its historic allies the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), it adopted neoliberal economic policies. The ANC worked with COSATU in an attempt to keep the South African working class under control, while its constituent unions such as the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) collaborated with multinational employers in squelching rank-and-file omvements and firing workers. Platinum miners nevertheless organized rank-and-file groups that cooperated with the independent Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU). The miners’ strikes between 2009 and 2014 culminated in the ANC government’s massacre of 34 Marikana miners on August 16, 2012. Workers organized in their rank-and-file groups and working with the AMCU continued to strike and won significant wage gains. The South African miners movement not only fought the company but also challenged the ANC government.

    In these three central chapters, Ness describes the workers’ struggles in some detail, arguing that in each case—either because of the opposition or neglect of the dominant labor organizations—workers built rank-and-file movements and in some cases independent labor unions. While in some cases those workers won victories—an expansion of labor right to organize and bargain in China and wage gains in both China and South Africa—in no case does he make the case that the movements he so much admires have succeeded in turning the corner and building a new militant and radical labor movements in their respective countries that can turn back the tide of imperialism in the form of neoliberal capitalism and of multinational corporations, and they are far from overturning their own neoliberal governments much less their capitalist states. The movements that Ness describes remain contained, sometimes within one plant and sometimes within one industrial region, and they seldom result in a national independent labor organization—except, one could argue, in the case of South Africa where they have created an alternative national mine workers union. In India and China we see no creation of a national union movement in even one industry.

    So far, at least, the southern insurgents have not built a powerful, autonomous labor movement in any of the countries that he discusses. And it is not clear how a victorious labor movement of industrial workers in the Global South would have an impact on the world labor movement. While international labor organizations and networks of various sorts exist—such as the international trade federation—genuine international labor solidarity to fight the corporations is really quite rare. Finally, unless one can show that workers can take power and reorganize society, Marx’s proposition of workers liberating humanity remains in question.

    The Marxist Proposition

    We might briefly reconsider that Marxist proposition. Karl Marx and his followers agued that the industrial working class, whose labor produces products for society, stands in a privileged position at the point of production where at the same time it also creates profits for the capitalist class. At the same time, capitalist industry brings workers together in factories, mills, and in mines where management organizes them into virtual armies of production that have the power to bring a nation’s industry to a halt. The employer’s exploitation of these workers leads them to form labor unions to demand higher wages and better conditions, and to form political parties to fight for legislation to establish maximum working hours, minimum wages, and to take on other issues such as child labor. Workers as a class have a comprehensive understanding of their workplaces and industries, and together have the knowledge to reorganize production on a new democratic and socialist basis. Their privileged position in the workplace, the economy, and the society as a whole gives the industrial working class a social weight that allows these workers to lead other wage-earners in other sectors (services, public employment) as a class forming the majority of society to fight to take power and lead the nation, to collectivize the economy and to establish socialism, and thus to liberate humanity. So argued Marx, Friedrich Engels, and their successors.

    The transformation of the economies of the Global North in the late twentieth century—the declining role of the industrial sectors, the reduction in the size of industrial workplaces, the automation of industry and the deskilling of labor, the movement of many major plants and entire industries to the Global South, and the increase in precarious employment—raised the question in the North of whether or not industrial workers unions remained as central as they had once been, whether or not the labor movement more broadly remained significant, and whether or not Marx’s dream of a working class fight for socialism was possible.

    If a militant labor movement and the dream of socialism now seemed to some impossible in the North, Ness argues that in the Global South multinational corporations’ investment has created even larger industrial zones, bigger plants, and a huge industrial working class far larger than that ever known to Marx. In the Global South, Ness argues, the most oppressed and exploited workers—migrant and contract workers—have formed rank-and-file organizations and independent unions, such as those described in his case studies, that do not share in the traditional labor unions’ bureaucratic structures, partnership with the employers, and corporative relationships to the state. Ness believes that these unions resemble the Industrial Workers of the World or, as he says in another place, the Council Communists of Germany in the 1920s. That is the kind of labor movement than can liberate the world, and once again, he seems to believe capital is recreating it.

    Counter-Tendencies

    While it is true that neoliberal capitalism and the multinational corporations operating on a global scale have created an enormous new industrial working class, there are also countertendencies that should be taken into account. First, while China’s industrial working class has grown, its future is not completely clear. The working class is not the only class in formation in Chinese society; there is also the rapid growth of the service sector accompanied by a decline in size of the industrial sector as a percentage of total production and employment. Throughout the history of capitalism from its origins in Europe to its spread to North and South America, Asia, and Africa, nations have generally experienced an initial surge in the growth of the size of the industrial sector, though soon the service sector grows even more rapidly than industry, as agriculture shrinks in importance (as measured in GDP). Today in China the fastest growing sector is not industry, but services, and it is not at all clear that service workers can play the same role in the labor movement and in society as China’s militant industrial workers.

    It should also be taken into account that as the Chinese workers’ movement is successful in winning strikes for higher wages, Chinese employers will, as employers have always done, turn to the use of more automated machinery, thus reducing the number of industrial workers necessary to produce the same amount of products. It is also to be expected that Chinese capitalists will move their plants to other lower-wage areas in South and Southeast Asia, further reducing the size of the industrial working class. We even have cases such as Brazil where the rise in commodity prices for agricultural products has led to disinvestment in industry and the expansion of agriculture. The future of the Global South’s industrial working class is not clear.

    Second, there is the problem that successful labor organizations, those that begin to achieve permanence and to engage in collective bargaining, will in all likelihood tend to become bureaucratic. As labor unions develop, they tend to elect officers and to hire staff both of which no longer work in industry while they often receive higher salaries than the workers they represent. This labor union leadership thus becomes a social caste that mediates between the employers and the workers, and as such a caste it develops an ideology: it comes to believe that its privileged position of contact with bosses and workers allows it to know what’s best for the industry and for the workers as a whole. One has to ask why the rank-and-file groups and incipient unions and actual independent unions described by Ness will not tend to follow the same path of development.

    These new labor movements may through their industrial economic activity help to open the way to democracy in China and to greater and more genuine democracy in countries like India and South Africa. If that happens, wouldn’t we expect these rank-and-file labor movements to lead not only to independent labor unions, but also to labor politics and labor parties? Clearly the development of an economic and political crisis in one of these nations might give these rank-and-file movements greater impetus, leading them to become a political factor. Very likely new labor parties would tend to become part of the existing party systems and governmental structures as they have in other nations.

    Then, too, there is the question of a revolutionary party. Wouldn’t we expect the development of democratic and revolutionary socialist movements? In fact, we know what some of the current labor organizers working through the labor NGOs in China (several of which were recently shut down) do consider themselves to be socialists. Ness’s discussion only extends as far as the current syndicalist movement.

    Finally, there is the question of the Global North. The rise of manufacturing in the Global South since the 1980s, with increasingly sophisticated technology contributing to high value added, has put pressure on the capitalist of the Global North to impose austerity and work to drive down wages as well as the social wage (unemployment insurance, workers compensation, health and pension plans). The Global North comes more and more to resemble the Global South—except that its industrial plant has been dramatically reduced. One can see that developments in the Global North could lead to a revived labor movement, even if one led by teachers, hospital workers, and restaurant employees and not industrial workers. While they have less economic clout, public employees directly confront and challenge the political system.

    Ness’s book provides an account of some quite important labor struggles taking place in countries of the Global South where clearly there is a Southern Insurgency. And it raises important and interesting questions about the future of global labor. Yet, he has failed to convince us that the admirable and heroic struggles he describes constitute a genuine alternative to the bureaucratic labor unions he quite rightly disdains. Perhaps developments will prove him right, and a powerful syndicalism will develop, but it is not here yet. And even if it does, it will need a political force if it is to change the system that so oppesses and exploits global labor today.

     

  • In Solidarity with the Victims of Paris, Beirut, Ankara, Baghdad

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    The statement below was issued by solidaritiéS Suisse, a Swiss socialist organization on November 15.

    In the last few weeks, numerous countries suffered lethal ISIS attacks: on November 13, over 130 dead in Paris; on November 12, 45 dead in Beirut; on October 10, close to 100 dead in Ankara; on August 13, close to 80 dead in Baghdad… In all cases the targeted victims were civilians. We condemn these despicable and barbaric attacks and address a message of support to all who have been and continue to be victimized by them throughout the world.

    Divide and Conquer

    ISIS seeks to drive wedges between believers and non-believers, between Muslims, Christians, and Jews, between Sunnis and Shias, etc. Its strategy is to create an atmosphere of terror in order to encourage the hatred of the other that fuels its growth. Its recruitment efforts in Europe are based on the deliberate stoking of virulent racism and islamophobia.

    Criminal, reactionary, fundamentalism is not unique to Islam. There are many other political tendencies that engage in and justify the murder of civilians in the name of ideologies with varying degrees of religious content: the massacres of Muslims in Myanmar, of Palestinians in Israel, of African-Americans in the United States, of Christians in India, of young Socialists in Norway, etc.

    The Bombs and torture

    Such fundamentalism is a contemporary phenomenon, the result of the extreme brutalization of the peoples under capitalist globalization: the dispossession of the masses of small farmers, the growth of slums, the deepening of inequalities, including between men and women, the growing flow of refugees and the internally displaced, the tyrannical regimes supported by the different imperialist powers, the indiscriminate aerial bombardments, the remote killing with drones, the widespread rise in racism and religious sectarianism, etc. The mythical past to which these terrorist groups appeal serves only to conceal their origins in the present.

    Like Al-Qaida before it, ISIS is the outcome of decades of blood-soaked dictatorships, pillage, and foreign military interventions in the Middle East. Their spectacular savagery emerged from underneath U.S., British, French, and Russian bombs, from the prison cells of Tunisia, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and from the torture chambers of Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Assad.

    We must resist together!

    As happened earlier in the United States, the French government is preparing to restrict our freedoms in the name of the war on terrorism. Switzerland is on the same path. We call for the very opposite. We must reject the growing physical and administrative walls that are being erected against refugees. We oppose the populist and racist discourse and the violence it encourages.Finally, we demand the end of foreign military interventions in the countries of the Middle East, and likewise the end to the arms sales to and military collaboration with the bellicose regimes of the Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Israel, and the petro-monarchies.

    See more at: http://www.solidarites.ch/common/fr/international/222-cdp-solidarite-victimes-attentats#sthash.gknxetRl.dpuf

     

  • "Alive As You And Me": The Songs of Joe Hill

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    Almost a century ago, the socialist journalist John Reed wrote of the Industrial Workers of the World, popularly known as the Wobblies, “Remember, this is the only American working-class movement which sings.  Tremble then at the IWW, for a singing movement is not to be beaten.”  On the other hand, the sheriff of San Diego complained of his jails filled with Wobblies, “I do not know what to do.  I cannot punish them.  Listen to them singing all the time, and yelling and hollering, and telling the jailers to quit work and join the union.”

    Joe Hill stood foremost among Wobbly songwriters, composing songs to be sung on soapboxes, picket lines or in jail.  And one hundred years ago this November, the forces of capital and the state of Utah executed him.

    Chicago musician and scholar Bucky Halker is honoring the centennial with a CD of new interpretations of Hill’s music, Anywhere But Utah—The Songs of Joe Hill (Revolting Records, available online at CD Baby), taking his title from Hill’s dying wish that his remains be transported out of state because he didn’t want “to be found dead in Utah.”  “I wanted to make a record that Hill would like,” Halker says.  “That was my priority from the beginning.  I don’t think he’d like a straight folk revival, strumming acoustic guitar approach, as that has nothing to do with most of his material.  He played the piano and the fiddle, after all.  The folk revivalists did a great service by keeping Hill’s work in circulation, but trying to keep him in that small musical box is way off the mark.  So, I borrowed from vaudeville and the music hall, piano blues and early jazz, alt-country, swing, punk, and gospel.”

    Born Joel Hagglund in Sweden in 1879, Hill immigrated to the United States in 1902, changing his name to Joseph Hillstrom, which would eventually be shortened to Joe Hill.  As a Wobbly, Hill was active in a free speech fights in Fresno and San Diego, a strike of railroad construction workers in British Columbia, and fought in a revolution in Mexico.  In 1914, Hill was arrested in Salt Lake City and charged with killing a storekeeper, allegedly in a botched robbery.  The evidence was thin, but the prosecutor urged conviction as much on the basis of Hill’s IWW membership as his involvement in the crime.  An international amnesty movement pressed for a new trial, but the Utah governor refused and Hill was executed by firing squad on November 19, 1915.  In a final message to IWW General Secretary Bill Haywood, Hill urged, “Don’t waste any time in mourning—organize.”

    Hill’s life, death and music have continued to inspire.  As Wobbly historians Dean Nolan and Fred Thompson have written, “There is that about Joe Hill that has endeared him to union people around the world, including many who know they might have quite an argument with Joe if they could meet.  These many expressions of regard … have developed largely outside of Hill’s union.  Hill’s persistence as an enduring symbol is thus not some artifice maintained by a handful, but part of the process … through which the working class shapes its hopes and values.  Hill has become an industrial William Tell.”  In the words of the Alfred Hayes-Earl Robinson song “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill,” “where workingmen are out on strike, Joe Hill is at their side.”

    In Halker’s view, “music was a centerpiece of the Wobbly movement culture.  The IWW cleverly used singing and chanting as a way to garner attention from workers, the media, and the authorities.  Fifty workers singing makes a lot more noise at a rally or in a jail cell than one speaker on a soapbox or one person ranting in the joint.  Singing jailbirds can make a big ruckus, one that the taxpayers and authorities discovered early on.”

    Hill’s mastery of American vernacular is especially impressive given that English was not his primary language.  As Halker comments, “his work is filled with humor, irony and sarcasm, hardly easy skills to gain in your second language.  No doubt he picked all this up from hobos, labor activists, and Wobblies, but I also believe his ear for music helped him in this effort.  You can tell from his lyrics that he paid close attention to the music-hall and Tin Pan Alley writers of the day.  Most of them were also immigrants or children of immigrants and were very skilled at slang, lyrical twists, and clever use of idioms.”

    Hill’s lyrics remain timely, addressing issues of unemployment, police brutality, feminism and militarism.  “Stung Right,” for instance, “represents the strong anti-military bent of the IWW, even before the outbreak of WWI,” Halker says.  “Many immigrant workers came from regions of the world where they were drafted and made to fight the battles for ruling class aristocrats and capitalists and were determined to stay out of future frays of that sort.  What’s more, many working-class groups saw war as a senseless ruling class fight that only pitted workers against each other.  Nationalism was suspect.  Little wonder, then, that after the Spanish-American War in 1898, and the needless slaughter that entailed, anti-war and anti-military sentiments found welcome ears.  Hill was aware that workers also signed up with the military when their economic situations were difficult.  At least they gave you a bit of cash and some food in the army.  In this piece, he’s warning workers not to fall for it.  It’s noteworthy as well that he mentions the contaminated rations in the final verse. During the Spanish-American War the big meat packers like Swift and Armour made boatloads of profits from their contracts to deliver rations to the troops.  In their efforts to maximize profits they often included contaminated and chemically-laced foods that made workers very sick and killed more troops than the ‘enemy’ ever did with guns and bayonets.  I think it’s one of Hill’s best efforts.”

    Similarly, “The Preacher and the Slave” speaks to our world of television evangelists.

    The Starvation Army they play,
    They sing and they clap and they pray.
    Till they get all your coin on the drum,
    Then they’ll tell you when you’re on the bum:
    You will eat, bye and bye,
    In that glorious land above the sky;
    Work and pray, live on hay,
    You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.

    Hill often used the tunes of hymns of popular songs for his parodies, Halker says.  “Since hymns were well known, even across sectarian religious (and political) lines, hymn tunes were often used by labor songwriters going back to the mid-nineteenth century.  In that regard, Hill’s use of ‘In the Sweet By and By’ as the tune for ‘The Preacher and the Slave’ was very much in a labor tradition, as was ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ for his ‘Nearer My Job to Thee.’”

    The CD also contains some surprising obscurities, like the wistfully romantic “Come and Take a Joy-Ride in My Aeroplane,” which represents the power of dreaming as a weapon against capitalist miserabilism.  “Frankly, I think historians and musicians have missed the boat in not addressing this romantic impulse,” Halker comments.  “I suppose it seems counter to our image of the left-wing radical and revolutionary, at least for most observers.  But hell, I’d rather hang out with a person with strong romantic tendencies and a left-wing leaning personality, than some dour old sourpuss like Marx or Lenin, wouldn’t you?  Also, I think within the IWW there was a strong sense of romance about the world.  This can be found clearly in Wobbly writers like Haywire Mac or Ralph Chaplin.  Some of this could be channeled toward a utopian impulse, as in the classic IWW song ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain.’”

    Halker continues, “I think Hill and other Wobbly bards and writers should get some credit for their use of sarcasm and irony in the development of American literature.   They had sharp wits and tongues that worked deftly and at great speed, something which only pissed off the lunkhead bosses, the law, and the ruling elite even more.  The authorities and their lackeys dislike radicals and they really hate them when they’re much smarter than they are.”

     

  • An Exchange of Views on the Situation in Portugal

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    The following discussion was originally published in Internatonal Viewpoint
    What will happen now in Portugal? Here we publish an exchange of views between Stathis Kouvelakis, leading member of the Left Platform in Syriza and now of Popular Unity in Greece, and Catherine Samary leading member of the Fourth International, from France. Thoughts on Stathis Kouvelakis’s text “From Greece, taking the risks into account: Some thoughts on the situation in Portugal“ “The risks are however immense and seem to me to outweigh by far the expected gains,” says Stathis Kouvelakis. What are what he calls “the three ways of summing up” this opinion? (His text is below.)

    Stathis Kouvelakis.
    First thought The question of the debt is dodged – whereas the PS repeats that it wants to remain within the framework of the European commitments. (“it is just impossible to see how even a “relaxation” of austerity can take place without dealing head-on with the issue of the debt and the straitjacket of the eurozone, and it is just crazy to imagine for a second that the PSP is willing/prepared to do that – actually even the BE and the PCP are relatively cautious on these two issues”.) This is true. And it will be a major question. But: a) the ratio of debt to GDP in Portugal is weaker than in Italy, close to that of Belgium and does not imply a current subordination the European mechanism of stability (EMS): there are more margins than for Greece; and it is necessary to see more closely what are the agreements and means of financing recommended to implement them: Stathis seems to affirm an “assessment of costs/benefit”, without concrete evaluation of the gains for the population and the room to manoeuvre …
     
    b) Why not propose to all the European and Portuguese left to put back on the table the question raised by Tsipras, of a European conference about the debt, to thus loosen the grip of the bilateral relations with the Eurogroup: it is a major “lock” for the dominant policies and a subject which requires acceptable and coherent “rules” for a Union, therefore the respect of principles. Let us discuss democratically, and on pluralist bases: in short let us seek a European politicization of the challenges of the debt, making possible a democratic challenge to the legitimacy of the pressures from the Eurogroup, shedding light on the mechanisms and criteria of tax and budgetary effectiveness, and what are the European common popular interests against the dominant “arguments” on the national debt; c) This could also be prepared by a procedure of audit started in Portugal independently of the governmental agreements – launched by groups from the civil society.
     
     
    Last remark on this same subject: neither the leadership of Syriza, nor its left (for opposite reasons that do not finish the debate) supported the work of the Committee for the Truth on the Greek Debt, and thus truly did not campaign around these challenges. A European campaign does not interest those who consider that there are no specifically European strategic and internationalist stakes. This is in fact linked to the second point: Second thought “The Greek experience has also shown that between full scale confrontation and capitulation there is no intermediate way”. Was that “shown”? And is it thus general? In other words does one need a European campaign for all countries to leave the EMU and the EU? There is no place for struggles for rights against or within the EU and the EMU? And has that “been shown” simply by the Greek case alone? In other words, there weren’t any other possible policies than that of Tsipras – or leaving, despite all the debates on this subject?
     
     
    In addition, would there be no more room for struggle in countries in a better relative situation than Greece? Was the Greek experiment the only and last – or the first attempt to carry out a national fight against austerity, in the name of the interests of the people in all the Union, in particular? Third thought The difficulty of the “red lines” – and logic “would you dare to reverse the left government”? – in Greece, or in Portugal? (“It is conceivable to withdraw support if the government crosses some “red lines” – but experience shows that defining those “red lines” is far from being simple.”) This is an essential question. But in what has the example of Syriza, on this point too, exhausted the subject and “demonstrated” the absence of possible criteria and safeguards? In my contribution written for the next issue of the review Les Possibles of the Scientific Council of Attac, I comment on this argument in particular – which is in my opinion essential for any political struggle apart from a clearly revolutionary situation: what are the acceptable compromises? Who judges? On which criteria? All betrayals are made (sincerely or not) in the name of the “lesser evil”. One cannot face these difficult dilemmas by pre-existing recipes, outside a concrete examination of what the suggested compromises would bring, in their context and dynamics: do they improve the concrete situation of the population and give – or not – confidence in an alternative policy?
     
     
    The procedure to judge this is more important for transforming a failure into support for the future, than the choice itself. Let us hope that this will be the fundamental lesson learnt by the Portuguese comrades for deciding at each stage. This itself implies that a judgment from outside – although not without interest – should at the very least be relativized. The 3rd Memorandum accepted by Tsipras continues the austerity policy and breaks a great hope of resistance to austerity. This is the opposite situation to that opened by the 70 points of the agreement negotiated in Portugal: they are commitments to real breaks with the policies in operation in Portugal, opening new possibilities. The path will be strewn with obstacles, faced with difficult confrontations and choices which will arise rapidly. Nothing is guaranteed. But each battle can and must shake the legitimacy of the Eurogroup and the operation of the EMU if it is carried out in defence of fundamental human, social, political rights: this is the guiding principle to which all currencies and finance must be subordinated. Thank you to the Portuguese comrades, for widening the new possibilities, from which we must still learn.
     
     
    Catherine Samary
     
     
    From Greece, taking the risks into account: Some thoughts on the situation in Portugal I am very hesitant commenting on the recent developments in Portugal and I listened yesterday with a lot of attention the arguments of comrade Mariana Mortágua at the plenary session of the Historical Materialism conference. I also read the interview Francisco Louçã, the historical leading figure of the Left Bloc, gave to Ugo Palheta in the Contretemps website [1]. However, on the basis of the Greek experience, the lessons of which have now begun to be widely understood by the European radical Left, I feel I have some responsability issuing a comradely warning to the comrades of the Portugese radical Left (Left Bloc/BE and PCP). I understand the situation is far from simple for them. There is huge pressure from the electorate to "give a chance" to the Socialists to form a government and bring down the attempt to constitute a minority government of the Right, staged by Cavaco Silva and Passos Coelho with the full backing of the EU.
     
     
    It’s clear that a socialist government dependent on the support of the radical Left and, at least formally, committed to reverse some austerity measures, will be from the oustet under the fire of both the EU and the domestic ruling class. In this context one could perhaps understand the tactics of "external" support to a socialist government on the basis of some common agreement which becomes void if violated by the socialists. The risks are however immense and seem to me to outweigh by far the expected gains.
     
     
    There are three ways of summing this up. 1. The first is the idea that a party such as the PSP would be ready to confront the EU and the domestic bourgeoisie to implement some, even modest, anti-austerity measures seems to me a complete illusion. Even a party of the radical Left such as Syriza, in a country which has experienced social movements of a magnitude unknown in Portugal, proved utterly unable to pursue the confrontational approach that is necessary to get even the most minimal of "concessions". To put it very simply, it is just impossible to see how even a "relaxation" of austerity can take place without dealing head-on with the issue of the debt and the straitjacket of the eurozone, and it is just crazy to imagine for a second that the PSP is willing/prepared to do that (actually even the BE and the PCP are relatively cautious on these two issues).
     
     
    2. Secondly, the Greek experience has also shown that between full scale confrontation and capitulation there is no no intermediate way. And this applies not to some kind of radical anticapitalist set of demands but to the very moderate programme on the basis of which Syriza won the January 2015 elections. Even the current Syriza government, which has signed up a horrendous Memorandum and is committed to its implementation, is totally unable to get the slightest concession from the EU on issues such as an ultra-minimal and incomplete protection for home repossessions by the banks. The EU institions will be even less inclined to be lenient with a PSP government supported by the BE and the PCP and they will most certainly behave in a way comparable to the blackmailing to which the first Syriza government was subjected.
     
     
    3. Of course supporting a government without being part of it is less risky than full participation. It is conceivable to withdraw support if the government crosses some "red lines" (but experience shows that defining those "red lies" is far from being simple). In any case, it’s quite likely that the PSP leadership will use the agreement with BE and the PCP the way Tsipras behaved vis-à-vis the left of his own party when he entered the downward spiral of concessions paving the way to surrender. That is constantly blackmailing it by saying "don’t you dare overthrowing the leftwing government of this country". And his calculation proved right: he trapped Syriza’s left until it was in a way "too late", that is until the cost of withdrawing from the government became costly for the left opposition and quite manageable for him.
     
     
    The experience of Rifondazione Comunista "external support" to the first "centrel-left" Prodi government (1996-1998), a support that was withdrawn after two years, also showed that a "junior partner" to the left has more to lose in such an exercise than the main "moderate left". Concerning more specifically the BE, to which I feel very close, I think this move contradicts the lucidity with which these comrades drew the lessons from the Greek tragedy and changed significantly their position on the euro – a point emphasized in both interventions of Mariana and Francisco mentioned above as well as the great piece by Catarina Príncipe in Jacobin [2] published after the elections. It’s always a very sensitive issue to express disagreements with comrades giving the fight in another country but I fear that the Portugese radical Left is entering a road that will end up dilapidating the precious political capital it has so painfully succeeded gaining these last years. However, the extent of the disaster suffered by the Greek people and the Left of my country, and my own personal responsability in this outcome, oblige me however taking that risk. Hoping of course, as I did when I was writing on Syriza in these last months, that I prove wrong. Source Facebook Stathis Kouvelakis. Footnotes [1] Une nouvelle situation politique au Portugal ? Entretien avec Francisco Louçã. [2] Hope for the Portuguese Left – “The election’s silver-lining came from the forces to the left of social democracy”.