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  • 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”.

  • South African Students Win Reforms, Build a Movement

     
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    In South Africa students have been protesting for the past couple of weeks. Their immediate concerns are the intended hike of tuition fees, on average about 10%. Starting from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg, they have demonstrated against the planned hikes. Students have occupied buildings on their campuses, held mass meetings, moved around the campus grounds, forced senior university administrators and university councils into negotiations. Campuses across the country have been brought to a stand still; this has happened at a crucial time of the South African academic year, just before the end of the year exams are about to start.

    Over the past few days the students also have moved out of university grounds and taken the protests into the cities. Most spectacularly, on Wednesday (Oct 21) hundreds of Cape Town-based students moved toward the precinct of the national parliament in downtown Cape Town. A number of them broke through the cordon of police – with their arms raised. The police responded with teargas and the shooting of stun grenades. Twenty-nine students were arrested, six within the parliament precinct and another 23 in the city’s Central Business District. Those arrested inside the parliament grounds face charges of “trespassing” while all 29 have been charged with taking part in an “illegal gathering” and “public violence”. Initially the “Bellville 6” (named after the suburban police station where they were held over night) had been threatened with the exceptionally serious charges of “high treason”, which have since been dropped.
     
    On Thursday (Oct 22) demonstrations continued throughout the country, in the major cities, but also in smaller towns and at campuses, which are located in rural areas and normally don’t find much attention in the South African public debates. Thursday afternoon saw thousands descending upon the ANC headquarters in downtown Johannesburg. This morning, Friday, 23 October, thousands and thousands of students and their supporters are marching on the Union Buildings in Pretoria, the seat of government.
     
    What is happening here? Why are these young people – dubbed the “born frees”, raised and mostly born after the end of apartheid – taking on university administrations and the South African state? Why are they, who were supposed to be the post-apartheid dispensation’s beneficiaries, exceedingly unhappy with the state of affairs? There can be no doubt that these protests are about much deeper problems than simply a raise of tuition fees, as much as such hikes will affect the poorest of the students. The current protests have brought young South Africans of different social backgrounds out to raise their voices on campus and in the streets. The protesters come from townships and rural areas, but they also come from the comfortable middle-class areas, and some even from the leafy high-end suburbs. They are black (mostly) but also white (in quite substantial numbers). Among those arrested in the Cape Town parliament incident were several children of prominent families, including, as the social media picked up quickly, the son of the University of Cape Town’s vice-chancellor. It is significant indeed that black and white students march together.
     
    The students have been principled and courageous in their activism, mostly disciplined and despite the lack of formal leadership in many institutions where the official student representative councils have often been slow to react appear to be remarkably well-organised. At Wits University they organised alternative lectures before leaving for more activism and made sure they cleaned up the spaces they occupied because, as they say, they don’t want to make the workers, “their mothers” have to clean up after them.
     
    Academics from universities across the country have come out in solidarity with the student protests; professors, lecturers and researchers have marched with the students, some having donned their academic gowns, they have protected students against police brutality by forming human shields. A national declaration in support of student protests was released on Wednesday, signed initially by close to 250 academics; now this letter has gone global. The signatories affirm that they “stand with students in their fight for the democratisation of our universities.” The incisive analysis of the letter of solidarity continues, “The current student protests that have erupted across the country are historic. They demonstrate a younger generation willing to take up the struggle against inequality, and to insist on the principle of education for all. Our students are leading the national debate on education, and we insist that they deserve our respect and attention.”
     
    The current student protests have not come about as rabble-rousing on a spur. Some have mused that the revolution is being tweeted; the movement however is far more than simply a hashtag. It may be better to say that what we see now is a catalyst of a politicisation that has spread-out on South African campuses over the past six months. In March this year, students at the University of Cape Town (UCT) began a vigorous campaign, “#RhodesMustFall” to have the statue of Cecil John Rhodes removed, which had been sitting on the university grounds in a prominent position for the past eighty years. They succeeded to find the university’s support, a few weeks later the objectionable item was removed under the thunderous applause of hundreds who had gathered to watch this significant moment. From Rhodes Must Fall the movement grew to include other campuses, mostly those of the former white-liberal English campuses, such as Wits and the small university in the Eastern Cape, which bears the name of Rhodes, but also the Afrikaans, still very conservative and overwhelmingly white Stellenbosch University in the Western Cape.
     
    The movement pursued the aim of “decolonizing the mind”. Campaigns and discussions were started, at times aggressively, with the aim to change the academic environment, to establish new syllabuses to replace those that are perceived as Euro-centric, to change the institutional cultures of the universities, which were seen as still being untransformed and “too white” in style and substance, and, last but not least, to employ more black academics. This took occasionally ugly turns, the most painful of which perhaps occurred during a spell of overt anti-semitism in the wake of a social media declaration by Wits’s former Student Representative Council President that he “loved Hitler."
    Yet prevailing has been the hunger for new forms of knowledge. “One could also see it coming”, writes Achille Mbembe, professor at Wits University who has accompanied the student movement class of 2015 with insightful analysis and relentless engagement, “in the extraordinary return to critical black intellectual traditions, to black feminism, queer theory, critical race studies, theories of intersectionality etc.” Young students have rallied to read Steve Biko again and more intensely, Biko of course had always been part of alternative and in recent years also the official South African canon. Significantly the new generation also rediscovered and revered and memorized the works of Frantz Fanon, read on his own or in conjuncture with Biko’s. More recently some have found a new hero, an icon perhaps more than a thinker and strategist in Thomas Sankara, who had earlier remained virtually unknown in South Africa.
    What has newly arisen over the past few weeks, couple of months, dating back to artistic activism to commemorate the third anniversary of the shooting of thirty-four striking miners during the 2012 Marikana massacre in August, is a new alliance of students and workers at universities. Both groups have been rendered precarious in the corporate university, which has fast been emerging with the neoliberal restructuring of the higher education sector in South Africa. “#FeesMustFall” and “#‎EndOutsourcing” campaigns have joined hands and these hashtags indeed have been painted together on banners carried by protesters this past week. This recent move from the sole focus on racism to pay more attention to issues of socioeconomic inequality has, in turn, inspired new intellectual desires. Mbembe again: “To these currents [of critical black studies] is now being added a renewed critique of political economy that aims at bringing together, dialectically, questions of race and property, of class and inequality, and of identity and what many call lived experience.”
    Mbembe has variously spoken about the present time as South Africa’s “Fanonian moment”, a time when twenty years or so after the country’s initial political “independence”, an incomplete decolonisation, a new generation enters the social scene and asks new questions. The students who now rally and march and discuss and occupy ask such new questions; they also remind – quite consciously – South African society and politics of the challenges raised by earlier generations. “1976” has been written on placards held up by students at campuses this past week, recalling the revolt of the youth that eventually brought the apartheid regime to its knees. At this moment we don’t know what will come of all this. We don’t know how the state and the ruling ANC – neither being monolithic – will react. Institutional and political reactions these past few weeks, and indeed the past six months have been uneven and even ambiguous, ranging from police brutality to attempts of incorperation. We also can’t foretell how the vibrant student movement will develop beyond the current moment. What we do know is that we witness an extraordinary moment – what a time to be alive! http://rs21.org.uk/2015/10/23/south-african-students-win-on-fees-an-extr…

  • Ten Days That Shook The World

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    In celebration of the 98th anniversary of the Russian Revolution we are publishing this short extract from John Reed’s brilliant eyewitness account, Ten Days That Shook The World. Reed was a socialist journalist from the USA, who described the revolution as: “Adventure it was, and one of the most marvelous mankind ever embarked upon.”

    This section is from the night before the insurrection of November 7th, 1917. The full text is available on Marxists.org.

    Up the Nevsky in the sour twilight crowds were battling for the latest papers, and knots of people were trying to make out the multitudes of appeals and proclamations pasted in every flat place; from the Peasants’ Soviets, the “moderate” Socialist parties, the Army Committees—threatening, cursing, beseeching the workers and soldiers to stay home, to support the Government.

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    Petrograd Soviet, 1917

    An armoured automobile went slowly up and down, siren screaming. On every corner, in every open space, thick groups were clustered; arguing soldiers and students. Night came swiftly down, the wide-spaced street-lights flickered on, the tides of people flowed endlessly. It is always like that in Petrograd just before trouble.

    The city was nervous, starting at every sharp sound. But still no sign from the Bolsheviks; the soldiers stayed in the barracks, the workmen in the factories. We went to a moving picture show near the Kazan Cathedral—a bloody Italian film of passion and intrigue. Down front were some soldiers and sailors, staring at the screen in childlike wonder, totally unable to comprehend why there should be so much violent running about, and so much homicide.

    From there I hurried to the Smolny Institute. In room 10 on the top floor, the Military Revolutionary Committee sat in continuous session, under the chairmanship of an eighteen-year-old boy named Lazimir. He stopped, as he passed, to shake hands rather bashfully.

    “Peter-Paul Fortress has just come over to us,” said he, with a pleased grin. “A minute ago we got word from a regiment that was ordered by the Government to come to Petrograd. The men were suspicious, so they stopped the train and sent a delegation to us. ‘What’s the matter?’ they asked. ‘What have you got to say? We have just passed a resolution, “All Power to the Soviets.”’ The Military Revolutionary Committee sent back word, ‘Brothers! We greet you in the name of the Revolution. Stay where you are until further instructions!’”

    All telephones, he said, were cut off: but communication with the factories and barracks was established by means of military telephonograph apparatus.

    A steady stream of couriers and Commissars came and went. Outside the door waited a dozen volunteers, ready to carry word to the farthest quarters of the city. One of them, a man in the uniform of a lieutenant, said in French, “Everything is ready to move at the push of a button.”

    There passed Podvoisky, the thin, bearded civillian whose brain conceived the strategy of insurrection; Antonov, unshaven, his collar filthy, drunk with loss of sleep; Krylenko, the squat, wide-faced soldier, always smiling, with his violent gestures and tumbling speech; and Dybenko, the giant bearded sailor with the placid face. These were the men of the hour—and of other hours to come.

    Downstairs in the office of the Factory-Shop Committees sat Seratov, signing orders on the Government Arsenal for arms—one hundred and fifty rifles for each factory. Delegates waited in line, forty of them.

    In the hall I ran into some of the minor Bolshevik leaders. One showed me a revolver. “The game is on,” he said, and his face was pale. “Whether we move or not the other side knows it must finish us or be finished.”

    The Petrograd Soviet was meeting day and night. As I came into the great hall Trotsky was just finishing.

    “We are asked,” he said, “if we intend to have a vystuplennie. I can give a clear answer to that question. The Petrograd Soviet feels that at last the moment has arrived when the power must fall into the hands of the Soviets. This transfer of government will be accomplished by the All-Russian Congress. Whether an armed demonstration is necessary will depend on— those who wish to interfere with the All-Russian Congress.

    “We feel that our Government, entrusted to the personnel of the Provisional Cabinet, is a pitiful and helpless Government, which only awaits the sweep of the broom of History to give way to a really popular Government. But we are trying to avoid a conflict, even now, to-day. We hope that the All-Russian Congress will take— into its hands that power and authority which rests upon the organised freedom of the people. If, however, the Government wants to utilise the short period it is expected to live—twenty-four, forty eight, or seventy-two hours—to attack us, then we shall answer with counter-attacks, blow for blow, steel for iron!”

    Amid cheers he announced that the Left Socialist Revolutionaries had agreed to send representatives into the Military Revolutionary Committee.

    As I left Smolny, at three o’clock in the morning, I noticed that two rapid-firing guns had been mounted, one on each side of the door, and that strong patrols of soldiers guarded the gates and the near-by street-corners. Bill Shatov, from the USA, came bounding up the steps. “Well,” he cried, “We’re off! Kerensky sent the yunkers to close down our papers, Soldat and Rabotchi Put. But our troops went down and smashed the Government seals, and now we’re sending detachments to seize the bourgeois newspaper offices!” Exultantly he slapped me on the shoulder, and ran in.

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    John Reed

    This excerpt originally appeared at rs21.

     

  • The Protests in Lebanon Three Months After

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    In response to the failure of the state to manage and dispose of accumulated trash, a series of protests erupted in Lebanon in August 2015 demanding the toppling of the Lebanese corrupt regime and the basic rights for water, electricity and a clean healthy environment. This article provides an overview of the strategies used by the state to dismantle the protest movements, a class reading of the social movements three months into the protests, and an analysis of the strengths and achievements of the demonstrations.

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    This regime is bad for: 1-Refugees; 2-Migrant workers; 3- LGBTQ, signed by the popular student movement, Lebanese University (source: Moe Ali Nayel)

    The strategies of the state, its police and paramilitary branches in targeting activists and protest movements

    The regime adopted multiple strategies to contain and dismantle the protests and shift public understanding of the protesters. These tools, visible in contingent interactions during the protests, in arrests conducted and in political statements, were all undeniably informed by the massive wave of NGO-ization of Lebanese security state institutions and apparatuses after the July war in 2006, and the rehabilitation, trainings, coordination and conferences on security and anti-terrorism issues organized for various Lebanese security sectors by foreign states. Various professionalized and ‘under the counter’ coercive and containment techniques have been adopted in these protests in Lebanon.

    The classic trilogy: ‘Ghareeb, Ta’ati, Irhab’ (Foreigners, drugs & terrorism)

    In his effort to discredit the legitimacy of the protests, Lebanese interior minister Nouhad El Machnouk relied on a classic trilogy that represented the protesters as drug addicts and non- Lebanese who are manipulating the protests for ulterior motives, like terrorism and implementing a foreign agenda. The irony of these accusations did not go unnoticed in a state that is literally and materially functional primarily because of foreign money and agendas. The interior ministry and its apparatus addressed the presence of moundasseen, or infiltrators, among the protesters, claiming that police have arrested Syrians and Sudanese nationals, as well as ‘drug addicts’ in the protests, while media sources hinted at the presence of ISIS enthusiasts planning terrorist attacks. These familiar categories are how the Lebanese regime understood and treated disobedience in times of social and political anxieties and violence.

    The ideology of Al-Ghareeb, or the foreigner non-Lebanese, has been evoked to instigate fear, mistrust and recreate an insider/outsider binary. Al Ghareeb has always been highly racialized in the Lebanese discourse. Al Machnouk’s insistence on the Syrian and the Sudanese as the main infiltrators in the protests should not go unnoticed. Both racialized bodies are refugees and asylum seekers in Lebanon, and have been part of the Lebanese labor force. In recent years, with the influx of Syrian refugees into the country, the Lebanese state have used ‘the Syrians’ as a scapegoat category for almost every occurring problem, from lack of water, electricity, to the dearth of  jobs. Sudanese asylum seekers have been engaging in a strike outside of UNHCR offices which they accuse of racism and discriminatory treatment, under severe conditions and bullying from both UNHCR and the police. Both black bodies — and we use black here inspired by Ta-Nehisi Coates’s deconstruction of blackness in “Between the World and Me” (2015) as a category foremost implicated in the national dream of what it means to be Lebanese and the racialized ideology of the state vis-à-vis its residents– are highly managed and abused by the police and army. Both are not allowed to protest for their rights and are made to be invisible except when evoked as infiltrators. The use of the Syrian and Sudanese bodies works to evoke foreignness and terror, while justifying the excess of force and governance by the police.

    Violence and the protests: military courts in a democratic state

    Another strategy used by the interior ministry consists of portraying the protests as unsafe and violent, and protesters as irresponsible rioters, to extend its own “legitimate” use of violence in the protests. This was intensified by the coordination with paramilitary forces in the form of armed civilians kidnapping protesters and beating them up. In Akkar for example, armed civilians opened fire to dismantle a protest against the opening of garbage dumps, wounding five people.

    More institutionalized and professionalized practices of detainment, such as the opening of temporary detention centers, were adopted, while less familiar maneuvering strategies were employed by riot police during protests, exhausting the protesters and depleting their spirit. However, police violence and detainment techniques seem to suddenly break away into “street violence” in other protests, with videos showing riot police throwing stones at protesters, following them in the street with tanks, and shooting disproportionate amounts of teargas directly at them, instead of into the air. One protester, Mohamad Kassir, suffered from full body paralysis when shot with a teargas canister from a point blank range on the night of the August 23rdprotest. Many other protesters have also been wounded. So far preliminary data show that approximately 250 people have been, arrested, 54 of them were referred to military court for trials. Among these were ten underage protesters. Al Machnouk have justified the excess of violence by claiming that the protesters have a desire to be beaten and arrested.

    What is disquieting is the random arrests of protesters and activists convicted and tried in military, rather than civil, courts under the pretext of disturbing “civil peace,” attacking military hardware, and the barbed wire placed to prevent protesters from reaching the parliament and the government palace.

    Three months of civil protests: a class reading of civil movements’ strategies, anxieties and of the abrupt fall of the momentum

    The protests that engulfed Beirut were met with repressive measures by state security. which sparked and galvanized nationwide popular outrage. However, that revolutionary spark was gradually tamed by the sectarian-capitalist establishment and abandoned by the organizers of the street movement that became known as the Harak (mobility). In order to understand the current stalemate it’s noteworthy to point out how the so-called Harak is governed by middle-class anxieties and privileges that when threatened took on de-escalation tactics and deflated what could have turned into a historical event in the history of modern Lebanon.

    Following the brutal attacks by state security against protesters there was a juncture when protests climaxed and became a force capable of creating a dent in the Lebanese political system. At that juncture the Lebanese political sectarian mafia felt intimidated by protesters who in their peaceful persistence turned into a raging fireball that awakened a portion of the dormant Lebanese consciousness. The peaceful method of the protests was a unique phenomenon in a Lebanon governed by daily organized violence.  Thus, the dysfunctional Lebanese state that was being condemned on the street turned into a highly functional and efficient repressive machine orchestrated by minister of interior Nohad al-Mashnouk, funded trained and equipped by foreign aid programs.

    By curbing the sentiment on the street from an uprising into a Harak, NGO-oriented activists proved that they were not fit to handle the fireball they had created; their organizational methods were inconsistent with the revolutionary spirit that united people in one protest. As pressure mounted on the streets people demanded a bigger scope of change; to topple the whole sectarian system. But protest organizers were reluctant to move towards such change and settled for merely protest organizing. Furthermore, the most prominent movements: We want Accountability, You-stink and other movements downsized their scope of action and gradually fell back from crude street defiance into flash mob activities and “event” organizers. While the street was fidgety and anxious for more action its energy was drained by the extensive meetings held behind closed doors by the You-stink and We want Accountability movements vying for the forefront of public representation. Nevertheless, the street at this point was still ahead of organizers’ hesitance; to the organizers the street increasingly became too big to handle and seemed like it might really get things out of their hands and shake the sectarian system from its foundations. As a result of not matching the sentiments on the street, the backpedalling started, which created time and space for politicians and state authority to organize their ranks and respond to the rebellion on the streets with calculated coercive and containment tactics. This is when campaigners began their withdrawal from an ongoing street battle to topple the regime, to a battle for recycling trash and finding solutions for the corrupted state whose own corruption led to the trash crisis.

    On the 23rd of August was the protest that exposed the classist colours of the You-Stink organizers who betrayed the street calling on state security to clean the protest of agent provocateurs while thousands of protesters stood their ground defying state repression. Approximately two million refugees and migrant workers in Lebanon face the worst forms of daily violence; however the emphasis on the “Gharib” by minister of interior and rumors spread by organizers about “infiltrators” eliminated the participation or even the suggestion of including refugees and migrant workers in protests. The classist aspect amongst protest organizers especially among the You-Stink movement has a) criminalised and alienated protesters who have come from low income areas with vengeance and stood up to police brutality during protests and b) supplied Lebanese politicians a pretext to delegitimize the protest for being “infiltrated by agent provocateurs,” simultaneously blocking the way for participation of migrant workers and refugees and serving further bogiemanization of the latter.

    While in privately planned minimalist-protests prominent You-Stink activists acted violently in front of the cameras as they confronted state security; these were celebrated as heroic acts, but when this same violence was taken by ordinary and low income angry protesters they were called “infiltrators” and “undisciplined elements” by You-Stink activists. Then it became clear that you-stink activists wanted any direct action to go through their filters and get their approval: a move to monopolize the public image and representation of the protests, not an unusual occurrence in sectarian Lebanese politics.

    When violence was perpetrated by protesters in general as a defense mechanism against repressive state security measures, then the reaction by the whole array of the sectarian polity and their media trumpets was that of shock and bafflement, as if Lebanon was an island of tranquility. The fact that the state has been devolving in a dysfunctional mode for decades is in itself a form of daily violence that led to angry resentments on the streets this last summer. Violence against refugees, domestic migrant workers, LGBT individuals and women is an ongoing violence that doesn’t raise an iota of the outrage voiced against “violent protesters.”

    The major achievement of the protests is that it has created cracks in the sectarian bubbles and some people have started leaking out to meet their counterparts andrealize that everything is in fact common, that they are all victims of the same repressive social order. The patriarchal sectarian blinders fell in the street.  That’s why it’s imperative for the street movement to abandon the Harak mentality and return to the uprising mode. Only an uprising could impose a real threat to the capitalist ruling elite and the sectarian lords, while simultaneously creating confidence in the street to empower those undecided citizens still stuck inside their sectarian bubbles, who need to defect and leak out to the street.  That’s why it’s erroneous to wait for a corrupt establishment to come up with solutions or even feel morally pressured by the Harak’s tactics and reform. The make-them-wait-promise-to-keep-them-waiting approach is what the Lebanese have had in the last 25 years; Mafioso politicians will only feel intimidated if their own thievery was directly threatened and when their own timid constituencies find an alternative to their hegemonic sectarian social order.

    And so the street movement has sunk into a frustrated feeling of defeat as a result of the Harak’s inaction and de-escalation tactics. The biggest mistake was committed while the climax on the street was at its peak; the organizers who led the protests failed to embrace and organize those outraged on the streets who had just abandoned their sectarian social bubbles. Those dissident individuals who dared to defect from the social hegemony of family authority and broke away from the sectarian political identity that governs their social relations needed a safe Haven.

    The Harak’s weakest point is the fact that on an organizational level its ranks are dominated by middle-class activists steeped in an NGO mentality, and as a result the revolutionary mood on the street was taken hostage by their middle-class anxieties.  Seeing that the street swelled with angry protesters making demands beyond the scope of action that was planned by the organizers of You-Stink, the Harak then de-escalated its measures of direct action. Worse, the campaigners switched their modus operandi into exclusive and elitist-looking attempts, seeking media stunts rather than taking the uprising to the next level, thereby nipping in the bud the revolutionary character of the protests. The toxic elitist sentiment lies within decision-making circles that kept on meeting behind closed doors away from the street and missed the chance of establishing an open sit-in at Riad al-Solh that could function as a shelter, a place of belonging, a visible ongoing body of the protest and a safe haven reclaiming public space. Secular activists who have had experience with and a history of street protests and organization have failed to open the doors of the streets or/and secure them – to embrace first-time protesters who flowed onto the streets since August 22. Many young individuals who had just abandoned their traditional habitats at the risk of severing their familial/social-sectarian ties joined their peers in the streets denouncing the defeatism of their parents’ generation. They needed an alternative to embrace them, but that alternative did not match their needs.

    It’s precisely this type of middle-class anxieties that reproduce the system within the protest movement itself. The two major movements that were born out of public resentments against trash and corruption, You-Stink and We want Accountability, became the two most dominant movements in the Harak. It increasingly seems that the way in which these two movements operate and politically differentiate themselves from the other have placed them at the risk of slipping into a polarization that resembles the political mode of March 8 and March 14 political blocs, the political alliances that were formed following the withdrawal of Syrian security from Lebanon in 2005.

    At present, autumn’s arrival has cooled down the atmosphere in Beirut. The sentiment in the street seems to be back to square one, but not without its symbolic achievements. The backtracking from movements’ organizers into tactical gambling to solve the trash crisis deflated the revolutionary enthusiasm that created a momentary existential threat to the Lebanese political order. Middle-class activists who are at the risk of missing a historical chance to change the lethal Lebanese political equation ought to realize that it’s only a matter of time until their middle-class privileges that they cling to are eventually going to vanish by the political establishment they hesitated to topple.

    The shaking of the patriarchal discourse and political cynicism: reconfiguring hope & political action

    Perhaps the undeniable strength of the protests so far rests in their ability to put an end to the cynicism and helplessness reigning over conversations and actions for change in Lebanon, thereby producing political hope in the ability to dismantle the Lebanese corrupt structure. The personal-emotive transformations experienced by activists and non-activists alike, and the possibility of imagining something new, have created a stimulating platform for political and social debates. One slogan held in the protests “A revolution on the life we live with (the help of) drugs and pills,” portrays this personal revolution over slow and structural death in a stagnant system.

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    A revolution over the life we live with drugs and pills (Source: Al Manshour)

    The protests have also caused a crack in the discourse and esthetics of power itself. This is visible in the state’s rhetoric and arguments against corruption that are no more convincing. Ministers and state leaders are ridiculed and mocked in the protests. Intellectuals are challenged publically and accused of being paternalistic.

    In a counter move, the regime attempted once again to attack the authenticity of the protests on the basis of morals, manners and the esthetics of protesting. They filed lawsuits against name defamation, arrested activists under the pretext of disrespecting the flag and nation. Not everything of course has been challenged. The sacredness of certain political leaders and parties, notably Hezbollah, remained mostly unchallenged and undebatable while protesters try to advance the idea of “All means All,” that everyone is corrupt and needs to be held accountable.

    However, social movements have yet to offer new forms of political action and expression. Many of the protests have been incorporated into sometimes outdated and a politically insignificant way of doing politics & protesting. Protests have been turned into a media spectacle, constricted by recycled speeches and old political music that has lost the ability to express the present. A rise in nationalism is also noticeable, where many times there is an intentional forgetting of Palestinians, Syrians and foreign migrant workers and maids who also have crucial demands and rights in the country they reside in and are as affected by the same system if not more severely.

    The feminist bloc, a feminist platform for groups and activists that emerged as a result of the protest to provide feminist solidarity and secure a safe space in the protests for women and gender-minority groups to express their opinions and demands, has been marching in the protests under the slogan of “the patriarchal regime kills.” This is a good example of these practices of challenging and revealing what lies inside the Lebanese discourse of power. The bloc’s chant “I want to dance, I want to sing and I want to topple the system” can be read as a double commentary on the freedom of women to occupy the streets, but also as challenging hegemonic male-centered ways of doing politics and protesting, signaling the need to challenge and take back the streets and protests re-appropriated by “the Lebanese male activist” and recycled activist forms of political expressions.

  • Comment on Recent Elections in Argentina

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    The Frente de Izquierda y los Trabajadores (the Left and Workers Front) or FIT went into last week's election with confidence. The new electoral alliance, comprised of the older and more doctrinaire trotskist formation Partido Obrero (Workers Party) or PO, the newer PTS (Socialist Workers Party), and the smaller IS (Socialist Left), hoped to build on recent electoral successes, including double digit tallies in a few provincial elections, and continue advancing along the ripples of youth and rank-and-file discontent against looming austerity and layoffs.

    With a climate of polarization surrounding a contest that is to decide on the continuity of neo-populist Kirchnerism and the general rightward shift of the major electoral forces, peronist and non-peronist alike, this election was going to be challenging for the left. But the FIT nevertheless expected to increase its voter appeal and establish itself as a radical pole for left national politics. The Front's aim was to peel off sectors of the working class and progressives who are sympathetic to Kirchnerismo or straddle the fence, skeptical of its reform agenda yet unwilling to support the pro-business fractions of the mainstream opposition.
     
    Many FIT sectors thought this was possible as Scioli, the candidate hand-picked by outgoing president Cristina Fernandez, was undeniable evidence that Kirchnerismso has exhausted any progressive potential and is inescapably moving to the right. In a race in which all leading candidates took positions that sought in some measure to win over business confidence, the FIT was optimistic that it could capitalize on a popular-left space it expected to open.
     
    Surprisingly, the FIT was led by the PTS which edged out the PO-IS alliance in Argentina's bizarre compulsory primaries held in August (PASO). THe PTS claimed success both in terms of electoral performance and broader anti-capitalist political positioning celebrating that it's candidate, the youthful Nicolas del Cano, who surprised socialists and the entire country by being voted into congress in 2013 with 14% of votes, got 800,000 presidential votes and nearly 1,000,000 congressional votes cast for the FIT. While other FIT members have been relatively silent, the PTS is claiming that this election cemented the FIT's position as the 4th electoral force of the country, having displaced what remains of the 'progressive-liberal' opposition. It points to a vote total that compares favorably to the 500,000 votes the FIT received in the last 2011 presidential elections.
     
    Unfortunately, a more pessimistic analysis of the FIT's electoral performance is more compelling. In terms of electoral results the inescapable fact is that the FIT failed to grow compared to its 2013 congressional vote total and the August primaries. This time around, the FIT got almost 500,000 fewer congressional votes than in 2013! And while it surpassed the half million presidential votes that it won in 2011, this increase should not be viewed as real growth. The FIT's low 2011 total came in the context of pro-Cristina euphoria which has since faded considerably.
     
    Over the ensuing four years, things have turned south for Cristina and Kirchnerismo yet the FIT was unable to capitalize on growing popular discontent as it has been optimistically claiming it would do since the 2013 congressional elections. In this light, the extra 70,000 presidential votes it picked up since the PASO are discouraging. Considering that 300,000 voters went for other radical left candidates in the primaries, this marginal improvement indicates that the FIT was unable to turn out layers of the electorate that should be natural supporters. In other words, a chunk of Argentine radicals actively voted against the FIT. Viewed this way, the fourth place finish is not much of an accomplishment, reflecting instead anti-Kirchner mainstream realignment rather than actual consolidation of an anti-capitalist pole.
     
    The PTS thought it could run a less orthodox campaign, targeting youth and women for instance, and thus win over the progressive wing of Kirchnerismo. It's fair to say this strategy failed for a number of reasons. But the defeat of the PO candidate (Altamira) in the primaries also shows that, though the alliance itself is a valuable step away from the characteristic sectarianism of Argentina's revolutionary socialists, it has not yet figured out how to run a non-dogmatic socialist campaign rooted in the working class and based primarily on anti-capitalist grievances. Nevertheless, even if the FIT failed to reach beyond its hard activist base of a small minority of worker activists and a majority of campus activists, the alliance deserves to be supported and inclusively transformed from within. If, however, the PTS continues to insist on combining programmatic purity with facile campaigning, prospects for the Argentine socialist left will remain weak.
     

  • Behind Ciudad Juarez’s New Labor Movement

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    The Mexican and U.S. government first agreed to the creation of the maquiladora plants along the U.S.-Mexico border in 1965 and already by 1975 there were strikes for union recognition. Yet in the last 40 years, thanks to the cooperation of the multinational corporations and the U.S. and Mexican government virtually no group of workers has succeeded in organizing a genuinely independent labor union. Most plants have no unions. Some plants have unions run by lawyers and gangsters who are allied with the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the government. A combination of legal chicanery, intimidation, and violence have been used to keep workers from organizing. Now, once again, after many years there are labor protests in Ciudad Juarez one of the major maquiladora centers across the border from El Paso Texas as reported by Kent Paterson of Frontera NorteSur News where this article originally appeared.- Dan La Botz

    In a virtually unprecedented development, labor protest is widening in the maquiladora industry of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. While worker dissatisfaction or protest is nothing new in the foreign-owned border factories that produce goods for export to the United States, previous manifestations of discontent in the generally union-free industry have usually been confined to one company at a time.

    But recently, movements for better pay and working conditions- and union representation- have emerged at four different companies-Foxconn, Lexmark, ADC/Commscope and Eaton. Hundreds of workers have participated in street protests, hunger strikes and leafleting.

    “This is the time bomb going off,” said Elizabeth Flores, director of Pastoral Obrera, the Ciudad Juarez Catholic Archdiocese’s labor justice and human rights arm. “It’s interesting to see how all the people are demonstrating.”

    Flores spoke to FNS as ex-workers of the North Carolina-based Commscope company, a manufacturer of products for networking infrastructure like fiber optics, joined in on an October 26 demonstration at the Bridge of the Americas organized by rural, human rights and environmental activists.

    Several former workers complained to FNS about abusive treatment by company management that included shouts, insults and arbitrary changes in work shifts. The workers said they had been fired for forming an independent union on September 16, Mexican Independence Day. Many of the former employees are single mothers like Veronica Rodriguez, who said more than 100 workers joined the new union.

    According to the mother of three, her earnings came out to less than $50 in base pay weekly plus bonuses that averaged about $40 per month. “You can’t get by very well. You have to look for another source of income,” Rodriguez said. “We are also protesting to see if the government helps.” To press their cause, Rodriguez and fellow workers have set up an encampment outside Commscope’s Juarez plant.

    “The company isn’t disposed to negotiate and doesn’t want to dialogue,” said Cuauhtemoc Estrada, lawyer for the fired Commscope workers. “We don’t know why the company fired 120 workers in an act of revenge.”

    Estrada told FNS that he filed a legal complaint on behalf of the dismissed workers  with Mexico’s Labor Arbitration and Conciliation Board. The firings, he contended, were not only illegal but a violation of human rights.

    In addition to the guarantees of union association written in the Mexican Constitution,  Mexico belongs to the International Labor Organization of the United Nations and recognizes the American Convention on Human Rights, both of which uphold freedom of labor association.

    Despite its commitments, the Mexican government has privileged the power of the semi-official Mexican Workers Confederation and other unions historically tied to the ruling PRI party in the places where nominal union representation exists, while “independent organizing has been impeded in the northern border part of the country,” according to Estrada.

    Rick Aspan, vice-president of corporate communications for Commscope, disputed the workers’ version of the labor conflict. “We terminated fewer than ten people from the facility recently,” Aspen told FNS in a phone interview. Although declining to go into details, Aspan said the workers were fired for violation of work rules and not because of joining a union.

    Commscope’s spokesman said he was in the process of obtaining more information about the Juarez conflict, but maintained that his company had been a “good employer” with a productive work force of more than 3,000 employees at its Juarez facility.

    Formerly run by ADC, the Juarez plant was acquired by Commscope in August of this year, Aspan said.

    The status of labor rights in Juarez is being monitored by Cereal, a Jesuit-supported worker advocacy organization with offices in Mexico City and Guadalajara.

    In recent conversations with Juarez workers, Cereal staff member Felipe Burgueno said he found commonalities in their grievances, including wages and benefits, safety, union representation and management practices.

    The current wave of protest “has to do with the conditions under which workers are laboring and how they are being recruited,” Burgueno said. Low wages, he added, lubricate a “vicious circle” of poverty that does not allow workers the necessary income to obtain educational studies that could improve their lot in life.

    “Who thinks that a father or a single mother can provide food, education and health care for their children on 90 pesos (less than six dollars) a day?” labor attorney Estrada separately weighed in. “Nobody can do this.”

    Burgueno said Cereal’s findings on the Juarez labor situation will be included in a forthcoming report on the Mexican electronics industry’s working conditions also in Tijuana, Mexicali, Reynosa and Guadalajara. “They are the same violations of labor rights, but each region has its own particularities,” he added.

    The surge in labor protest at Juarez factories comes as the local industry trade association, AMAC-Index Juarez, celebrates the 50th anniversary of the arrival of the maquiladoras to the border city.

    The assembly-for-export plants were envisioned as an alternative source of employment for former Mexican guestworkers in the United States who lost their jobs in the agricultural industry when the Bracero Program was terminated in 1964. However, the maquiladoras largely harnessed a distinct workforce, especially young women workers.

    FNS spoke to two Juarez women with a combined experience of 30 years in the maquiladora industry. One of the women is still actively employed. Both asked that their names not be used for this story due to security concerns.  The women identified three major reasons why worker protests are escalating now as opposed to earlier years, when wages and shop floor conditions were also burning issues.

    According to the industry veterans, the first reason has to do with a changed composition of the labor force, from younger and even adolescent workers to employees with more household responsibilities. The second factor is connected to the current crisis of worker recruitment, in which many locals are shunning factory jobs because of the low pay. Consequently, to lure workers, employers offer new hires better deals over long-time employees, who with ten years or more of service are resentful to see their compensation stagnating.

    “The majority of the new movements are arising in repudiation of these policies,”  one of the women said.

    Last but far from least is the decline of violence in Juarez in comparison with the years between 2008 and 2012, when more than 12,000 people were estimated murdered during the so-called narco war. During that time the city was under virtual occupation by soldiers, federal police or warring gangs.  Extortion, kidnapping and car theft were rampant. According to the two women, free speech was suppressed while labor organizing was rendered virtually impossible.

    “People are survivors and have lost some fears,” one woman said. “When you lose your fear, you act.”

    Still, the atmosphere for labor organizing is a fragile one. Cereal’s Felipe Burgueno pointed to one well-known labor lawyer who became the target of constant threats and harassment. Burgueno also cited the case of an activist worker who was followed home by management personnel. “This could be symbolic,” he added. “’We know where you live, where you are.’”

    For Burgueno, the present juncture in Juarez is a critical one for not only workers, but the city as whole.

    “It’s important that the workers are becoming conscious of their rights, and it could result in the creation of a social actor who improves conditions for everybody. It’s important to strengthen these groups,” he said.

    The two maquiladora veterans interviewed by FNS said they are working with a newer women’s collective in analyzing the socio-economic conditions and the Mexican government’s latest political and economic reforms to strategize a path forward for women workers.

    “Our objective is to generate an organic process of women workers for social and economic development,” one of the women said. “We are barely constituting ourselves as a non-profit organization, and will have a diagnosis of the social situation, of how violence impacted the city, and of the structural reforms and how they impact women.”

    As FNS was going to press, the Ciudad Juarez daily Norte reported that a group of 70 Lexmark workers began staging a protest early Monday morning, November 2 at the maquiladora’s plant entrance.  According to the newspaper, the demonstration was called to protest the firings of two workers, including one who had previously spoken out on television in favor of a union. “We demand an independent union” read one placard carried by a protester.

    Meanwhile, Veronica Rodriguez and other ex-Commscope workers continue with their protest outside the company’s Juarez plant. A hearing on the workers’ complaint before the federal Labor Arbitration and  Conciliation Board originally scheduled for October 30 was postponed to November 19, Rodriguez said.

    “We are surviving by donations, and with the little bit that the workers have left,” she said. The Juarez labor activist said the public response to the workers’ protest was “good,” with people stopping by the encampment to give protesters burritos, water and other supplies. Former Commscope workers are also meeting with workers from other companies to discuss forging a bigger movement, she said.

    “A union would be the biggest gain we could get, and to get our jobs back” Rodriguez told FNS.

    Reprinted from: Frontera NorteSur: on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news, Center for Latin American and Border Studies, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico. For a free electronic subscription email: fnsnews@nmsu.edu

  • Brazilian Activists Prosecuted for Giving Small Donations to Left-Wing Parties

    A still undetermined number of supporters, activists, and sympathizers of two Brazilian left-wing political parties, the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL, Partido Socialismo e Liberdade) and the Unified Socialist Workers’ Party (PSTU, Partido Socialista dos Trabalhadores Unificado), are being charged by the State Prosecutor's offices (Ministérios Públicos) of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo for having made small donations to these two parties during the 2014 elections.

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    One of the activists linked with PSOL, Lucas Mourão, being charged by the Electoral State Prosecutor's office (Ministério Público Eleitoral) of Rio de Janeiro, explained his case on his Facebook page on October 15. He says in 2014 he donated R$60 (about US$15) to the campaigns of Jean Willys and Tarcísio Mota, two PSOL candidates running for, respectively, Federal Deputy and Governor of Rio de Janeiro.

    "I aided the campaign as a volunteer, in my free time, always with a handful of pamphlets in my bag and stickers on my chest, and, obviously, without receiving a single penny.

    I donated 40 reais (10 US dollars) to the campaign for Jean and 20 reais (5 US dollars) to the campaign for Tarcísio. That was what I could spare at the time.

    (…)

    Now this is where the story gets strange: the Electoral State Prosecutors office is charging me (and many others!) for having donated those petty 60 reais (15 US dollars)! That's because electoral law only allows for donations from individual persons up to a limit of 10% their income of the previous year…

    When it was all tallied up, the State Prosecutors’ office arrived at the brilliant conclusion that I, in the year prior to the donation (2013), earned a gross income of less than 50 reais (13 US dollars) per month!

    These guys, these great thinking Brazilian lawyers, came to this conclusion because, upon cracking open my confidential tax report (!) they saw that I was exempt from income tax, then, they concluded that I had earned ZERO income in 2013 and, therefore, I could not donate anything to any electoral campaign…"

    In Brazil, people with an annual income under R$22,499.13 (about US$5,790) are exempt from paying income tax. Electoral law allows campaign donations up to 10% of an individual person's income from the year prior to an election, but, being exempt from paying income tax, the State Prosecutors office deemed the activists to have no income. As such, the state claims they could be committing an electoral crime by making donations.

    Lucas Mourão, who is also an attorney, explained that exempt individuals may donate up to 10% of the value of the exemption limit, therefore, there is no illegal wrongdoing.

    Mourão says that already nearly 100 such cases have been counted in Rio de Janeiro alone. In fact, in the comments on his post thread, multiple people reported how they are being prosecuted by the state for the same reason.

    One of these is Sabrina (who asked not to disclose her last name), who donated R$15 (just under US$4) to the campaign of Marcelo Freixo, a PSOL candidate for the Federal Deputy position in Rio de Janeiro in 2014. According to Sabrina, her case has already been ruled in her favor:

    "I donated 15 reais (4 US dollars) and was also prosecuted! (…) In my case, the State Prosecutors office requested to dismiss the case and the judge ruled in agreement, in a judgment that was shorter than 2 paragraphs… And now I'm advocating the defense of a guy that was also charged for having donated 50 reais (13 US dollars). It's so surreal to use the judicial machine like this just because of these donations!

    (…)

    All donations to PSOL from individual persons exempt from income tax are being investigated, by all indications."

    Antônio Bastos noted that cases seem to be coming “in order from top to bottom,” which would point to a persecution of left-wing parties and their supporters.

    "In some cases there is even a copy of the announcement sent to electoral prosecutors from the head of the Rio de Janeiro Electoral State Prosecutors office, asking for “commitment” in pressing charges. […] I mean, it's a directive from above for “general prosecution” framed in these terms, and maybe some prosecutors made a point to gather cases to prove it…"

    For Sabrina, this is a “clear violation of the democratic principle”:

    "[To] presume that an exempt individual cannot donate anything at all prohibits income tax exempt citizens from being able to contribute to whichever political party they hold in highest affinity (and, thereby, disenfranchises their citizenship) and, consequently, tosses the smaller-sized political parties out of the electoral race."

    The activist Matheus Lara said he had been acquitted, but he did not agree to the invasion of privacy:

    "I was also prosecuted. I was exempt, but I had a way to show my income. I was acquitted. But my tax AND banking confidentiality were broken open."

    The activist Cristiane Talhiaferro is also being prosecuted:

    "My case is still in proceedings too. The judge requested evidence and I had to send in my year of banks statements from 2013. They can breach into confidential banking records for someone who donates 50 reais (13 US dollars) and that's okay, but for someone who embezzles millions they can't…"

    For further details, see the original article at GlobalVoices.

     

  • Katrina: 10 years after

    I was sitting in a small town Greyhound bus station when I first saw images from Katrina. Happenstance, in retrospect, was so apropos. Bus terminal stations throughout America (so often) being lachrymose warehouses for the poor, the vulnerable, the mentally ill, the psychologically worn down and the just plain penniless –hostels of the many with vagabond destinations. The station held any number of “the kinds of people” who knew what it was to go elsewhere, oftentimes meaning anyplace but the places they’re at. I sat among America’s disenfranchised classes.

    All eyes fixed on the overhead television set. The scenes. Abandoned rooftop families. Watery chaos. “I guess they should have left” somebody darkly whispered. A women (probably mentally ill) began performing a kind of spastic interpretive dance. I suspect under other circumstances she might have had security called to remove her. But on that day the mood – I would call it the mood of real identification– was so thick it infected the security personal, who “let it slide.” America was absorbing the news. The facts were still coming in. But my fellow Greyhound travelers understood that many of them could have been residents of the Lower Ninth Ward. There was no lack of empathy because they intuited the real story was a tragedy of the ne’er-do-wells and the expendable. It revealed the worst that can happen in America, if you can’t afford to stop it.

    Katrina – from beginning to end — described America’s usual relationship with the poor; first, they were “set up for failure” by land and housing patterns that put them in high risk; secondly, perfunctory and indifferent systems of government bureaucracy worsened the toll; and finally the capitalist hierarchy deflected focus away from its responsibility by the usual means – classism and racism.

    Weren’t the poor the least equipped to leave New Orleans under the threat of the hurricane? Besides which generations of the poor had been forced by economics to live in New Orleans’ most dangerous death traps, the “low ground.” It was a nightmare for the residents who had bought into the American dream, by buying homes in the perilous Lower Ninth, trusting in insurance policies and the Army Corps of Engineers expressed commitment to upkeep the levee system. On August 28th and 29th this assurance proved to be like so many promises made to the poor – a con. The shoddily maintained levee system collapsed like pipe dreams (under winds which had diminished to a category 2 or 3 hurricane)

    Then a human calamity followed a manmade catastrophe. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) botched the rescue effort so badly that Geraldo reached the New Orleans to film a sensationalistic TV show, while FEMA presumably could not. The Bush administration handled the rescue effort as irresponsibly as it had ignored urgent warnings, and cut necessary funding to restore the levees. Three weeks later, when Bush finally addressed the carnage, he merely opined “Americans have every right to expect a more effective response in a time of emergency.” He stated the obvious. “As all of us saw on television, there is some deep, persistent poverty in this region. And that poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action.” Again, the obvious.

    “As all of us saw” (but some of us lived) elided the real harm, weight or damage of forms of social, economic, or physical oppression. (So many more Americans than Bush allows for live in or close to conditions of poverty and economic stress–for them they are not armchair reality television.) But Bush referred to the silent accusation inherent in Katrina, the TV melodrama. Every lost soul crying, pleading and suffering in the Lower Ninth Ward’s death trap was a Black woman, child or man. This crack in America’s imaginary Norman Rockwell revealed the racist Hieronymus Bosch beneath. It revealed who really subsisted at the bottom of America’s socio-economic ladder under an enterprise which had functioned by exploiting race, racism and race privilege since slavery till today’s for-profit prisons and the school-to prison pipeline.

    Then the victim blaming began which exhibited why racism remained capitalism’s most effective social marker. Conservatives “played dumb” regarding the levee failure. Blame Mother Nature. Or rather, blame slow-witted Blacks for living in the hazard zones in the first place. “The failure in New Orleans was a failure of character” wrote columnist Michael Graham, who withheld the least sympathy for Katrina’s “government dependent victims.” During the first days after the hurricane hit rumors (later shown to be false or exaggerated) circulated that New Orleans had fallen into the hands of gangs of looters and roving rapists. Media bias was such that while federal assistance was slow-in-coming a white couple scavenging to stay alive in New Orleans was described as having “found food” and assistance, while blacks were invariably “looters.” Katrina coverage proved a high point in the lowly American tradition of personifying Blacks as animals.

    Bush commiserated sympathetically on TV. But by the time he spoke Katrina coverage was so entrenched in racist connivance, innuendo and fearmongering that his speech was notable for all that he didn’t say. He didn’t criticize the stereotyping of Katrina victims. He didn’t abhor the enthusiasm that a Louisiana representative had already expressed for the idea that Katrina would provide a pretext to roll back public housing. His lack of offense winked in the eye that the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast would be market-driven, gentrification-friendly, and (particularly in New Orleans) a scheme to eliminate the dispossessed poor.

    I was able to visit New Orleans nine months after the hurricane hit, while the city was still partially in wreckage. I spent weeks there interviewing the excess numbers of homeless New Orleanians and participating in the activist movement which was vigorous at the time — because New Orleans’ spirit was still strong. The poor suffered from a basic lack of housing and resources (not character). Progressives from across the country responded by inundating the area with volunteer activism. Thousands locally and afar contributed to making post-Katrina New Orleans an experiment in hands-on cooperative living. They lived in bunk beds and often relied on power generators, but for a brief moment in history “government dependent” New Orleanians and volunteers experimented with a cooperative living microcosm. The work they accomplished was by any measure was more successful than the botched FEMA assistance. This was also a time of extreme hostility towards the federal bureaucracy, which had few local defenders.

    New Orleans became the focus of a movement that demanded the federal government take full responsibility for the levee failure by repatriating New Orleanians on the basis of “human values” — renters’ rights to affordable housing and homeowner’s right to rebuild based on actual costs, not pre-storm property values. I have never forgotten a slogan that was popular at the time, a rallying cry, a summation of the heart of the movement. “Solidarity. Not Charity.” The banner “Solidarity. Not Charity” was also a response to various “non-political” charitable organizations which provided assistance, without mentioning rights. Charity and gift giving was insufficient (even condescending) without acknowledging how racism, indifference and capitalist economics had abrogated New Orleanians’ rights (and extracted a cost in lives.)

    Ten years since (because this year marks Katrina’s watershed 10th anniversary) New Orleanians have achieved legalistic moral victories. In 2009, a federal ruling blamed the extent of the destruction on the Army Corps of Engineer’s negligence. (The caveat is that a later ruling granted the Corps legal immunity, regardless of the prior verdict.) In 2010, a housing advocacy group won a ruling that federal rebuilding grants have been racially discriminatory. (This ruling came with the caveat that no retroactive compensation would be made to the thousands of Black homeowners who had already accepted grants at discriminatory rates.) These moral victories marginally impacted the preordained end results — New Orleans today is a much whiter and heavily gentrified city. Hopefully a percentage of the Lower Ninth’s displaced poor chanced on “better lives” elsewhere. The majority have probably been reshuffled to less inconvenient ghettos.

    I will sum up Katrina’s legacy, like this. Sometime ago I and a small group of economically disadvantaged friends speculated the impossible. We imagined a hypothetical political party in Citizens United USA whose platform prioritized the interests of America’s poor — literally, a Poor People’s Party. Yet all of us eschewed this name. The title “Poor People’s Party” seemed a concession to too many racist and classist stereotypes. (“Poor” and “worthless” seemed inextricably ideologically linked.) I suggested “The Solidarity, Not Charity Party” inspired by the movement in New Orleans which championed the un-American idea that the poor have rights. The condescending cliché is that the poor have dignity –but they also have rights. These included rights immediately related to Hurricane Katrina and beyond –rights to environmental safety, housing, healthcare, quality education, quality public services, and beyond. Respecting rights (and protecting rights) required public policy to meet higher standards than providing “charity” “safety nets” or “welfare.” The Solidarity, Not Charity Party was enthusiastically embraced.

    Katrina’s 10th year anniversary legacy rests in remembering the poor by embracing Solidarity, Not Charity — by protesting cuts to nutritional assistance, and state governments which refuse to accept Medicaid expansion. It lies in all the nagging questions related to the possibility of justice – in particularly the bleak possibility of justice for the poor — under a capitalist system.

  • My Week with Libertarians: An Accidental Socratic Socialist vs. Capitalism’s Euthyphros

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    This story begins where all good stories do; I hit a bit of a rut with the second to last chapter of my dissertation, a dissertation which looks at the psychological aspects of capitalism that undermine arguments for global justice that are deeply entrenched in the liberal political-philosophical tradition. When I get stuck, I try to motivate myself by reminding myself how necessary this kind of demystifying critical scholarship is. Naturally, I usually turn to Fox News for such motivation. However, for whatever reason, I decided to look on Facebook for something that would piss me off and send me on a writing blitz.

    I had no intention of writing anything about my experience. Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick and a few Tea Party platforms have been plenty for me to work with. I was looking for motivation and inspiration—what I found was all sorts of both.

    Here is what I learned about libertarians (some of which I knew or could have guessed, but to experience it first hand and to have successfully resisted the urge to slam the computer closed was something that I will remember until I die—or lose my mind). In fairness to libertarians (another idea that they think is a complete joke: I was told several times that because there are always some natural differences between people and luck varies, doing anything that exacerbates this unfairness—however preventable—is completely acceptable because we can’t ever get rid of all unfairness. Follow the logic? Me neither), I don’t think that a thoughtful, sophisticated libertarian political philosophy would actually include all of these dimensions exactly as they were presented to me. With that qualification, much of what follows represents actual-existing libertarianism (and these points are not wholly inconsistent with those made by the most prominent purveyors of this philosophy like Mises, Friedman, and Rand…Paul).

    1.     Everything the government does based on taxation is violent. Taxation in and of itself is violent and coercive, even if it is voted on by an actual non-corrupt direct or representative democracy. Yet, manipulative practices of capitalists, including proven-psychologically manipulative advertising and marketing are not coercive in any way.

    2.     Free exchange cannot harm anyone under any circumstances. I asked if I sold someone a bomb, not telling them it was set to detonate in ten minutes—though never telling them the opposite—and the person I sold it to was killed along with several bystanders, would that constitute a harm from free exchange? My interlocutors agreed this was a free exchange, but it was not the free exchange that was harmful, it was the bomb. (I also used the more realistic example of pollution, but they were even more dismissive of that possibly being a real harm or the result of unregulated trade.)

    3.     Relatedly, lying and coercion should be outlawed, but they oppose all government attempts to enforce this, because obviously that would be central planning and Hitler did that (and apparently from what I was told, that inspiration came from Marx. I’m still waiting for the textual or historical bases for that claim…I won’t be holding my breath much longer).

    4.     After one generation, people have no responsibility for where their inheritance came from (e.g. from slavery or other forms of outright theft).

    5.     Inheritance though is legitimate, yet everyone’s wealth (not acquired during any recent theft and/or government policy) was acquired and/or maintained through hard work.

    6.     An individual does not benefit from society if they work hard and make a lot of money, no matter what their career is (unless they are a college professor because “they contribute nothing to society”), and therefore owe nothing to anyone else. Even asking the question of where their justification for their irrevocable right to whatever they possess, however obscenely excessive amongst so much extreme poverty of their fellow citizens or human beings globally comes from, makes you a “bullshit Marxist” and worthy of death or at least grievous bodily harm.

    7.     Libertarians like to quote John Locke—out of context. They may (as they did to me) accuse you of intentionally misquoting Locke when you post the exact language from Locke that asserts (in Ch. 2 Sec. 6 of the Second Treatise of Government): "Every one as he is bound to preserve himself, and not quit his station wilfully; so by the like reason when his own Preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of Mankind." Instead of saying “well I guess I don’t agree with Locke,” they would rather accuse me of lying.

    8.     Anything that is not profitable by definition has no social importance (see any college degree that cannot obviously get you a job like “Women’s’ Studies” or “Race” (though I think they meant African-American Studies?)). I was told that no matter how useful and necessary these fields may be for society (a point none of the avowedly non-racist, non-misogynistic libertarians would concede to), because they are not profitable they are “stupid majors.”

    9.     Military wages paid by the government are not in any way in principle similar to a college professor’s wage from a public university. Why? Because a military is necessary and education is not. I was told twice that I was forbidden from speaking on the topic because I was too biased, being an instructor at a public university. However, the soldiers were not too biased to speak on the subject.

    10.  Lastly, and this one truly is the most egregious: voluntary slavery (including pimping) is okay so long as it is agreed to “voluntarily.” When I inquired as to what counted as “voluntary,” I found out nearly everything we do is voluntary by virtue of the fact that we do it. I came to the conclusion that according to libertarians on Facebook, the only things that wouldn’t be voluntary would be if you were given very specific drugs that made you 100% susceptible to suggestion and/or were attached to strings like a marionette and someone was literally controlling your movement.

    What surprised me the most, I must say, were the number of people who came to my defense either by “Liking” a comment I made or by posting something expressing their agreement, thanking me for being polite and continuing to challenge libertarians to provide justifications for their views and provide more coherent arguments for their opposition to alternatives, but the most humorous gestures of support asked me more or less why I was wasting my time arguing with fundamentalist “psychos.” Little did they know, they were answering their own questions.

    Though I began my week with the libertarians, and this weird case of gonzo political philosophy, simply trying to get inspired to write forcefully and creatively against capitalism, I continued on because of the support from like-minded Leftists and the few middle-of-the-road people who posted that the debate was helpful or interesting to them.

    Once I realized where these debates were headed, I looked back on a number of previous posts on this page and the comments that followed. There are tens of thousands of people following this page, and about 300 to 500 might “Like” or comment on a particular post. From what I found there was very little beyond masturbatory self-congratulating and fully-capitalized (pardon the pun) posts of agreement and reinforcement. With that said, I found out that not everyone who follows or comments on a far-right wing libertarian page or blog does so because they agree that page. Sometimes, they’re people like me who know they disagree and just enjoy calling out the bullshit, but sometimes they are people who are overworked, raising children, with little time to figure out their own political views or are unsure what to do with all the conflicting narratives, so they follow a variety of pages representing different political perspectives (I only know because I asked a couple of these people that exact question).

    Gaining access to the so-called “undecided” with clear, cogent, rational argumentation from the radical Left against the contradictory, cold-hearted, idealism of unquestioned belief in the unregulated “free” market and the complete rejection of all government and all taxation, is worth the effort. Though my experience certainly hasn’t made me more sanguine about the possibility of the Internet and social media being a potential progressive public sphere, it didn’t completely erode that hope either.

    Though I have always understood the value of a good conversation and a good argument with smart people, I don’t think I have ever come close to arguing for as long and as in-depth with as many different people who seemed to hate me than I did during my week with the libertarians of Facebook (though some were rather explicit and appeared to possess some intimate knowledge about what kind of phrasing does and does not count as an illegal threat of bodily harm…). What I learned, more than anything, is how passionately people can believe that capitalism is inherently just and how viscerally they react when someone merely questions it—never mind providing ample historical and contemporary evidence for its injustice (and I also learned to never EVER ask a libertarian what the “free” in “free trade” or “free exchange” means).

    For the first time, I felt like I knew how Socrates must have felt arguing with Euthyphro and how difficult such conversations can become when they take place on social media (though I was pleasantly surprised at how few people attempted to derail the conversation with absurd trolling—at worst there were vague threats and mindless sloganeering).

    I wanted to conclude by saying that my experience provided evidence for the importance of the Socratic figure in a social-mediatized society, and although solidarity found me at times, I may have provoked these people more than I successfully convinced the unsure or inspired the already-Leftists. I think reminding those on the Left of the ideological baggage we are up against and the violent fervor with which people defend capitalism, are important take-aways from my experience. I am thoroughly depressed about the possibility for genuine democracy in a society so thoroughly conditioned by the ideals that I confronted in my view brief but all-too-long encounter on Facebook, but not so depressed to ignore the possibility that as easily as these people were convinced of the virtuousness of their beliefs, so too they can be unconvinced or convinced of our alternative. We’re only generations behind capitalism, but luckily we have conscience and truth on our side—along with the contradictions of capitalism, which eventually everyone will be unable to ignore.

    Perhaps I got precisely what I should have expected or perhaps this experience represents little more than an aberrational coterie of the American Right—but based on the success of Tea Party candidates and Donald Trump’s unconscionably popular racism-driven superrich-as-hero worship (though Trump himself is not a libertarian, his “message” is certainly popular with them), I think this experience represents more of a scary microcosm than it does some fringe exception. According to Reuters’ polling done in April 2015, 20 percent of Americans self-identify as libertarians, and 32 percent of people aged 18- 29 adopt that label. As opposed to labels like liberal or conservative, labels like socialist or libertarian tend to get used more often when the person has some idea of what those labels actually mean. Having 32% of young people sympathetic to these far-Right ideas, regardless of the increase in favorability to the term “socialism” (now 31 percent), should motivate us more than ever to call-out the injustices and sheer hypocrisies that are central to American libertarianism.

    I am still processing the experience myself, but I, at the very least, accomplished my goal: these people certainly inspired me to keep writing and working toward a more just and emancipated society—however we can.

    *Bryant Sculos is a doctoral candidate in political theory at Florida International University. His dissertation deploys the social-psychological understandings of capitalism developed by Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm to criticize contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism and post-Marxism. Bryant teaches Modern and Contemporary political theory, and he is also a regular contributor to the open-access journal Class, Race, and Corporate Power.

  • Despite Protests, Guatemalan Elections Return the Military to Power

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    Karl Marx once wrote, quoting Hegel, that history repeats itself, but he added “first as tragedy, and then as farce.” And history has repeated itself in Guatemala following voting in the second round of the country’s 2015 presidential election. Despite protests against corruption, Jimmy Morales, a former comedian who is backed by the same military forces that backed disgraced ex-president Otto Pérez Molina, easily won the presidency by a wide margin following the second round of voting October 25.

    Morales’ election comes after the nearly 24 weeks of protests in the Guatemalan Constitutional Plaza against corruption. Tens of thousands gathered here to demand the resignation of Pérez Molina, a former military general, following revelations of massive corruption in his administration. On September 3, just days before the elections, Pérez Molina resigned. All these events greatly influenced people’s decisions to go to vote, and on September 6, Jimmy Morales, a political outsider and former comedian, came in first, and Sandra Torres, the former first lady, in second.

    Protesters had hoped that for once they were participating in actual change for their country, but in the end, they got more of the same.

    The revelations of widespread corruption, protests, and elections have exposed deep-seated frustration within Guatemalan society with the state of their country, and society. Furthermore, there is an understanding that this election wasn’t going to change anything. Many voters who I spoke with on Election Day stated that they were only voting because they wanted the right to protest later. For many in Guatemala’s indigenous communities, none of the candidates represent them as indigenous persons.

    The demonstrations against corruption brought together a diverse group of people to demand an end to corruption and impunity. Many organizations and community associations, such as the United Campesino Committee (CUC) and Committee for Campesino Development (CODECA), which have been important part of the historic mobilization and organization of communities in the defense of territory, played an important part of mobilizing in the protests. These historic organizations were supported by mobilization of students from the National University of San Carlos, and by indigenous authorities such as the 48 Cantones of Totonicapán.

    Yet despite these social organizations, much of the support for the protests came from people who are unaligned or unassociated with any organization. They were inspired by a sense of indignation with the corruption of the administration of Pérez Molina, and joined the movement. Many times this was done in spite of their feelings about the other groups who were participating. One woman during the elections explained that she was voting so that she had the right to protest, but went on to complain about the “devil children” from the National University.

    The administration of Pérez Molina represented a rallying point for people from middle classes to link with the poor and indigenous to challenge the inequalities in the country. For many who joined the protests, the realization of the massive levels of corruption, and the enrichment of their leaders through the corruption, represented the final straw after years of faltering public institutions.  Many people who turned out to the part stated that they were joining the protests due to the fact that their leaders were enriching themselves while children died of hunger, and because hospitals lack medicine. They were hoping for the actual possibility of change in their country – it is this that led for many to refer to the movement as the “Guatemalan Spring.”

    But the protests opened the door for the victory of a candidate with troubling connections. In the end, Guatemalans received more of the same with Morales’ victory, and his victory represents the doubling down of the power of the Guatemalan military’s full return to politics.

    The Return of the Internal Armed Conflict

    The accusations and charges against OPM that were raised by CICIG just weeks before the beginning of the campaign, and the subsequent movement against corruption together formed the perfect opening for Jimmy Morales’ campaign, and his success as the frontrunner on election day.

    “My candidacy is just part of the anti-corruption movement,” Morales told the rightwing outlet Breitbart. “I’m not a career politician. I am not a traditional politician, but I am a citizen who has tried to prepare to confront a corrupt political class that steals money from the state with impunity.”

    Frontrunner Jimmy Morales had painted himself as a political outsider, who is concerned with state of the Guatemalan political structure. But behind the scenes lies on of Guatemala’s political powers; Morales has become the latest face of the Guatemalan military.

    Support for Morales has poured in from the various elements of the military. Across Guatemala former members of the Civilian Defense Patrols, death squads formed by the military in communities during the 1980’s to combat the Marxist insurgency, have expressed their support for the comedian, turned politician. Support has also come in from former military officials such as Byron Lima, a former Captain, who is currently serving a prison term for the 1998 assassination of Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi.

    The Morales campaign has attempted to downplay the presence of former military leaders in the party. The candidate told the Guatemalan digital magazine, Diaro Digital, “I believe that there is not a single party that can say that it does not have military among its affiliates or within its organization.” But despite this, connections between the FCN-Nación and the Guatemalan military run deep.

    The FCN-Nación party was founded in 2004 by retired generals Luis Felipe Miranda Trejo and José Luis Quilo Ayuso of the Association of Military Veterans of Guatemala because of the perceived disrespect for the military following a confrontation between families of the disappeared and military officials on Guatemala’s Day of the Military. Reportedly, both are no longer involved in the party, but Quilo Ayuso has contributed financially to the 2015 campaign.

    Morales is also not quite the political novice that he paints himself as. According to the campaign, he has studied and prepared for his political run since 2004. In 2011, he attempted to run for Mayor of the municipality of Mixco, near Guatemala City, but lost to Otto Pérez Leal, the son of Otto Pérez Molina. In 2012, Ex-Colonel Edgar Justino Ovalle Maldonado, who was a member of FCN’s executive committee, approached Morales about joining the party. Ovalle Maldonado also ran for a congressional seat during the 2015 election, and won.

    The Guatemalan Military was responsible for the majority of human rights violations during Guatemala’s 36-year-long internal armed conflict, which led to the deaths of over 200,000 people, majority of whom were indigenous Mayan, and the disappearance of nearly 50,000 people. The founders of the party directly participated in the genocide against the indigenous Maya people in the Guatemalan departments of Alta Verapaz and El Quiche.

    Miranda Trejo was stationed at Military Base 21 in Coban as head of intelligence between 1981 and 1982. During this time hundreds of indigenous Q’eqchi Mayas were murdered and buried on the base. Ovalle Maldonado would also briefly be stationed at the Coban base in 1983. Quilo Ayuso was stationed in the Ixil Triangle between 1981 and 1982 as the head of intelligence during the time of the genocide against the Ixil people.

    In a sense, it is a direct result of the movement against corruption that Morales came in first. But it is important to state that social movements are complex, and represent a diverse set of interests and goals. The movement against corruption in Guatemala is no different. There were radical elements within the movement that pointed out the inequality, and structural violence, but overwhelmingly the protests tended to be conservative in nature.

    Many voters were looking for someone who was not part of the political elite, and Jimmy offered them this. During a time of crisis, Morales’ campaign slogan “Not corrupt or a thief,” his positioning as a political outsider, and the electorates’ familiarity with his television show played to his favor.

    But as many involved in Guatemala’s social movements recognize, Jimmy represents more of the same. Furthermore, all these connections to the massacres and genocide are troubling to the indigenous communities that today face new attacks by the expansion of transnational capital into indigenous territory. One indigenous authority told me, “we are worried by the connections of Jimmy to the generals of the past.”

    Politics as Usual

    Morales faced former first lady, Sandra Torres of the center-left National Unity of Hope (UNE) party in the run-off. If Morales represented the military, than Torres was the representative of the oligarchy. A report by the Guatemalan daily newspaper, La Hora, exposed that her campaign has received millions of Quetzales from business interests. Some of the financers, such as Roberto Carlos Antonio López Roesch, who has contributed millions of Quetzales, have interests in projects such as the Santa Rita Hydroelectric project, which has been a source of violent conflicts.

    She had received support across rural communities, because of the memory of the social welfare programs she formed during the administration of her ex-husband, former President Alvero Colom. She has campaigned on continuing these programs, and has promised the expansion of similar programs. But these mild-social reforms should never overshadow the return of social conflict that emerged during the administration.

    But Torres’ support was unable to mobilize voters on October 25, and she was unable to win the presidency. For many, Torres represented a more direct continuation of the corruption.

    The Coming Storm and Further Social Conflict

    There is near consensus that Morales will be a continuation of social conflict created by the extractive industries and “development” projects. For indigenous and campesino movements, the deep connections of the Morales to the military and the oligarchy has lead many in Guatemala to be concerned about the coming administration.

    “Either candidate is going to be the same as before,” said Benito Morales, a lawyer who has worked with the Guatemala’s indigenous movements. “These elections are not going to change anything for us. If anything, things are going to be worse (for the social movements.)”

    The administration of Pérez Molina was marked by not just corruption, but as well for the rise of widespread social conflict over the expansion of extractive industries looking to exploit the country’s vast natural resources. These conflicts have also led to the re-militarization of indigenous communities.

     “The panorama right now with the elections is nothing good,” said Morales. “There will be a continuation of violence against the communities. Though I think it will be a more aggressive campaign.”

    The Seeds of a Larger Movement

    It is in this environment of crisis that the movement against corruption and for structural changes can lead to the beginning of a larger movement in Guatemala for real change, or as Andrea Ixchiu, an activist and independent journalist, told me recently, “We are planting the seeds.” And it is after the elections that these seeds must sprout into the real organizing for change. And it is in this environment of continued examples of corruption that will contribute to the further growth of the movement in Guatemala, and lead to the real “Guatemalan Spring.”

    The climate of protest has galvanized the left, and inspired the formation of new forms of organizing. The Popular and Social Assemblies, which brought together over 72 organizations from the spectrum of women’s groups, campesino organizations, indigenous groups, and civil society, brought together a diverse group of resistances and movements to discuss the social conflicts in the country. It is here that the formation of change begins.

    The elections have brought to the forefront once again the forces of repression of the past, and threaten to unearth the darkest memories of the war. But the ‘Resign Now’ movement has brought about a renewed sense of the ability to bring about change is that these protests have undone years of fear that have gripped the Guatemalan population. As Donald Urizar, an organizer from Quetzaltenango, Guatemala’s second largest city, recently described it, “At first our parents, who grew up during the war, were contributing to the fear. They were telling us that (the government and military) were going to kill us, or going to disappear us – this is a military government. The fear was a strong. But we broke this fear that has crippled us. Right now we have the opportunity to renew our country.”

    The breaking of the fear was also fostered by the lack of repression by state forces against the protesters. This fostered a sense of feeling that Guatemalan civil society could actually challenge corruption. Yet time will tell if the large protest movement re-emerges following the elections. Either way, the new administration will face a mobilized and vigilant population.

    “Right now comes the real work,” said Urizar. “This was never just about Otto Pérez Molina, but rather about changing the system into something that benefits all Guatemalans.”

    *Jeff Abbott is an independent journalist currently based in Guatemala. He has covered human rights and social movements in Central America and Mexico. His work has appeared at VICE News, Truthout, and Upside Down World. Follow him on twitter @palabrasdeabajo

     

  • Building the Paris COP21 Climate Protest

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    The pace of climate change is relentless. The projected date for the arrival of a 2°C rise in the global average surface temperature over pre-industrial levels is coming down all the time. It’s now estimated to happen by 2038. The earth will warm by at least 4°C by the end of the century, possibly 6°C.

    The results of this are catastrophic: intensifying extreme weather events – heatwaves, droughts, floods, water shortages, hurricanes and tornadoes. The sea level is rising as a result of the melting icecaps.

    It was clear by August that 2015 will be the hottest year on record in terms of the average global temperature. Only freak conditions late in the year could prevent this happening, and this is highly unlikely since the current El Nino weather pattern – a warming of the central Pacific Ocean that changes weather worldwide – continues to strengthen.

    In fact this year’s temperature could go off the charts. June was the fourth month in a row to break all previous records. Monthly heat records have been broken 25 times since the year 2000 whilst the monthly cold record has not been broken since 1916.

    This summer has seen exceptional temperatures in Spain, Austria, in parts of Asia, Australia and South America. In May, a heatwave in India claimed more than 2,000 lives and ranked as the fifth deadliest on record. In May Southern Pakistan had a heatwave that killed more than 1,200 – the eighth deadliest in the world since 1900.

    All this makes the Paris COP crucially important. A binding global agreement is an essential component in tackling climate change.

    Preparing for Paris

    Over 600 activists attended the final meeting of the International Coalition on Climate Change, formed to organise the events around COP21 in Paris jointly with the French COP21 Coalition, on October 2-4.

    The aim is to make the actions from November 28 until December 12, around the talks, the biggest series of protests against climate change the world has ever seen. We are on course to achieve this goal.

    The meeting was titled The Road To Paris and Beyond; making it clear that the first and foremost objective of the exercise was to build the movement itself, to come out of Paris stronger and to continue the momentum into 2016.
Reports were given of the very successful events and demonstrations organised across France, in particular over the weekend 26 -27 September; which were termed a staging post to Paris. Across France over 200,000 people took part in various events including the culmination of a two month round the country cycle ride involving over 1500 riders.

    The main events to come include:

    The eve of the Summit, November 28-29 will see a series of mass demonstrations, across Europe and the world, protesting about climate change and calling for the COP to take action. Over 1,000 events have already been registered.

    In Paris on December 5-6 there will be a Citizens Climate Summit centered on Montreuil. As well as multiple conferences and debates on a range of issues concerning climate change and ecology and workshops to prepare actions for the week ahead, in parallel there will be a Global Village of Alternatives; a place to explore practical technologies.

    From December 7-11 there will be Citizens Action Zones during which many forms of direct action and protests will take place. These will include flash mobs and occupations, with targets such as EDF and Total as well as the summit itself, being explored. Each afternoon there will be a general assembly to discuss what is happening at the COP itself.

    On December 12, at the end of the COP, there will be a massive international mobilisation in Paris – and other parts of France but predominately Paris – to make a declaration that whatever has or has not happened at the COP the struggle continues as a higher level than before.

    The assembly is planned for 12 noon on the 12th of the 12th – a massive demonstration, which have at least two starting points and converge in the Eiffel Tower area, but not only a demonstration. It will be linked to various forms of mass action and civil disobedience that will take place in the course of the day. The aim will be to bring parts of Paris to a standstill.

    There is a plan for a call out when the final plenary starts at the COP for people to head for the key transport hubs near Le Bourget airport where the summit is being held in order to completely surround the area. The idea is also that similar actions will take place in other parts of the planet at the same time.

    This is how it is motivated on 350.org:

    “We want to have the last word as the climate talks conclude. And we’ll get it by speaking in the language of movements: by putting tens of thousands of people into the streets of Paris, and making sure business as usual cannot proceed as long as world governments fail to do what’s needed.

    “This will be a day of mass mobilization and actions in the streets. We will take to the streets of Paris with our determination, our diversity and our creativity; to resist and to build. Our movement is here to last, and it will be shaped by every one of us. Everything we do, we will do together.

    “The Paris moment will be defined not by what happens in the negotiating halls, but in the streets of Paris and around the world. Politicians aren’t the only ones with power. If enough people agree that it’s time for the world to move in a new direction, and push together, the world will begin to move.

    “December 12th plans are still developing. We’ll be in touch as details come together, so sign up now to stay up to date.”

    The task now is to build all these events to the maximum. Nothing is going to come out of Paris that will be adequate to the problems we face. We know that in advance. Another total failure such as Copenhagen five years ago would be a total disaster.

    This is probably the last chance to get an agreement that can actually influence the 2°C tipping point. The struggle for a binding global agreement needs to go alongside the fight to build a movement on a scale that can take the climate struggle forward.

    This article was originally published on October 21, 2015
 at www.leftunity.org