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  • Fish in a Manmade Pond

     

    Economic oppression remains ubiquitous. In the West we are moving towards, or are already at, a condition of corporate governance enforced by the state apparatus. This is not capitalism as it is commonly understood— allowing for the ostensibly free pursuit of capital, an open market economy— nor is it democracy, or even sovereign nation states. It is a new corporatocracy, in which powerfully entrenched (international) corporations reign supreme, and define policy and economic planning in perpetuity.

    The increasingly significant player in this world is international capital, money itself, unencumbered by the state apparatus. Indeed such capital seeks to dismantle the state structure to loosen all constraints on its expression. Long-term this is faulty— states’ power, prestige, the foundational pillars of money and military might (etc) decline— but in the short-term it allows exponentially increased profits.

    Is this the final stage of capitalism? Abstract Money bets on and inflates itself, and then through itself controls the world’s resources, with general assent? The absurdity of the situation is paramount: Money defines itself, Money regulates itself, money decides what money is worth. Money determines world power and productive capabilities, but this is based on mutually agreed upon beliefs in the value of money— which are illusory, and allow for unprecedented conscious deterioration of the natural world.

    This worsening destruction of the environment and endemic ‘climate change’ is apparently the most serious and destabilizing consequence of the corporate policy. The crisis appears poised to dramatically alter present economic arrangements in a way that few in power and indeed mainstream culture acknowledge in its full implications. Very simply it serves as a blatant rebuff of profit-seeking corporate policies. Profit cannot be the goal, profit seeking profit at the expense of all else— inevitably in the end it undermines the foundational systems that give profit meaning. (The very concept of Profit is made irrelevant by a collapsing society, and fictitious notions of ‘markets’ fail to take into account the natural and human worlds, confining themselves to narrow, abstract, electronic networks of finance).

    Yet despite the continually ominous economic systems of today the corporate age may be running itself out— in its ruin of the planet, its extreme inequality, in its warmongering, it has more than lost its legitimacy. The sense that humankind is at the ‘end of history’ with liberal capitalism as civilization’s golden achievement and indefinite future is called into serious question as destabilization, chaos, and an increased worsening of the situation reign, and as humans we remain mired in an ineffectual system with only few and relatively minor and powerless alternatives.

    A most striking feature of corporatocracy is its facelessness. Less and less is there a single leader to rally behind, or against. The U.S. president’s evident impotence in effecting real change, his hewing to the course set out by policy makers before him, the transmutation of politics into an absolute theatricality, is evidence enough of the restrictive and impersonal political culture. Even power within corporations is diffused— the CEO governs with a board of directors, responsible to shareholders. More broadly power is spread out across an elite class— professionals, administrators, bureaucrats— without a singular leadership entity at the head, but a mess & maze of decentralized policy decision makers defining and operating the course of events and operations.

    We may then see a certain optimism in the deterioration of the natural world, as it delegitimizes the corporate order and perhaps paves the way for a new one. Albeit this is a darkest optimism, for we teeter on the brink of apparent apocalypse, and the cost of this ‘transition’ is unconscionable. Moreover, we are aware that the ones hurting first, maybe most, are the most disadvantaged, which is criminal.

    *Will Solomon lives in Vermont, where he records music and writes. He is a ’13 graduate of Wesleyan University.

  • Beyond Reform vs. Rupture

    ImageIf nothing else, phase one of Syriza’s tenure has revealed the limits of reformism in a period of stagnation and global economic integration.

    It’s also shown the need for a Plan B. Given the recent failed efforts to “change Europe” through creditor negotiations, key figures on the European left are increasingly discussing whether a break with the eurozone is necessary for advancing a progressive agenda, particularly in the continent’s periphery.

    What would be the implications of such a move? And what other changes would need to happen alongside it to ensure that exit isn’t on the terms of either international finance or domestic elites?

    Beyond that lies an even more complicated set of questions: does Greece, in particular, have the productive and state capacities necessary for such a plan? If not, at this point should the Left do anything more than distribute austerity more evenly across classes? Is such a modest compromise with the ruling class even possible given the restrictions the new memorandum places on the Greek government?

    Today’s debates often frame these concerns as part of the broader dilemma of reform versus rupture. Often, rupture and revolution are conflated, and quickly the accusations ensue between “bourgeois reformists” and “looney Leninists.”

    But there’s an alternative to this discourse, and a range of compromises and confrontations within the socialist tradition.

    Reframing the Dilemma

    Major reform is often the result of a class compromise reached either from the outset based on certain risk assessments or alternatively after a stalemate, in which both sides make concessions to avoid the cost of escalated confrontation. Rupture, on the other hand, is confrontation escalated to whatever end, at whatever cost.

    In weighing the costs of concession against those of confrontation, and in considering the material and organizational capacities that exist and those that could be developed, we can better assess the viability of certain strategic options.

    There was a potential class compromise available to Syriza when it took power last January. But it was not the sort of compromise its leadership was aiming for. What Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras sought was the first type of compromise described above, a “positive class compromise.” A historical example of this is the democratic corporatism that emerged in the small states of wartime Western Europe.

    The backdrop for Syriza’s compromise was the Greek political crisis, signs of which had emerged even before the recession but which were exacerbated by the successive memoranda, starting in 2010. After the party became a serious contender in 2012 on the heels of mass mobilizations and the center-left’s collapse, its leadership felt they could offer the crisis resolution that domestic and foreign elites sought. And hence they could secure a lighter austerity deal within Europe, with perhaps even some debt reduction, on the basis of the stability they would bring as essentially a social-democratic power.

    Once Greek elites had exhausted most other options in stymying a leftist threat, they tolerated Syriza given that the party had itself lowered the stakes. In fact, numerous elites welcomed the government after its election, claiming that business confidence would improve after a deal was reached. Voters, also aware of the challenges their well-intentioned prime minister faced, expressed approval even if he only accomplished some of his goals.

    But though Syriza may have convinced its electorate and some domestic capitalists of this plan, European elites were not willing to play ball simply because Greece asked them to.

    After the Great Panic of 2010, certain safeguards were set up to protect the European payment and banking systems in the event of a default. By 2015 the major losers would have largely been German and French taxpayers; the political costs of such an outcome were not the preoccupation of key eurozone managers like German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, Eurogroup President Jeroen Dijsselbloem, and European Central Bank President Mario Draghi. And hence, though elites might have been scared by the mere threat of a Greek exit at the start of the crisis, within several years, that threat was mostly contained.

    The only remaining fear, then, was around the potential domino effect of a Grexit. This would have been a real possibility had Syriza made the necessary preparations to ensure that an exit wouldn’t be disastrous. Only then would Spanish, Irish, Portuguese, and Italian electorates have considered a break. This was the troika’s gamble in the negotiations, and it should have been Syriza’s, too.

    But by the end of February, as Syriza refrained from imposing capital controls and instead accepted a deal on its creditors’ terms, it was clear that exit preparations were not in the cards. Former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis says he had a small team working on contingency plans and was prepared to use them after the July 5 referendum, but that is quite different from taking decisive action in critical moments. And that moment came far earlier than July.

    In other words, to get its negotiating partners to make concessions, the Greek government would have needed to sufficiently escalate the conflict so as to raise the costs of further confrontation. To begin with, it would have needed to impose capital controls in February as soon as the ECB began restricting access to direct liquidity lines. Doing so would have prevented what amounted to five months of liquidity asphyxiation.

    These actions would have constituted the basis for a “negative class compromise.” We will return to this missed opportunity in a moment. For now, let us further examine Syriza’s continued attempt at a positive compromise.

    Chasing False Hopes

    Syriza now claims that even if the Europeans didn’t budge in round one, it can still secure a compromise with its domestic capitalist class in round two. For the party today, the major subjects of reform are taxation and corruption: shipowners with extremely lenient tax privileges; media magnates, often the same people, with license fee waivers; and an informal sector that constitutes nearly half of the total economy and offers few labor protections.

    Reforming these aspects of the Greek economy is the underlying message of statements about how the government, no longer mired in negotiations in Brussels, can now begin the real work of putting its own house in order and making elites pay their fair share. As captured by one of its slogans in the recent elections, “It is in everyone’s interest to have no interests.”

    But sadly this is mostly empty rhetoric.

    First, like European elites, it’s not in the interest of Greek elites to make concessions simply because their government demands them to. Historically these oligarchs have reproduced their power through corruption. It is not simply that corruption has enabled them to influence state managers. Handouts, exemptions, and weak taxation were requirements for Greek capitalists to maintain bare minimum levels of profitability and competitiveness into the 1990s.

    Eurozone integration in the 2000s raised foreign investment levels — largely by German and French businesses, who did not disrupt but rather inserted themselves into the existing web of clientelistic practices between Greek capital and the state. The bank bailouts starting in 2010 were intended to protect that investment, but this attempt mostly failed.

    What comprises the Greek economy today are remnants of a corrupt and inefficient private sector dominated by a small number of very powerful elites who, like their foreign counterparts, are relying on the continued assault on workers to raise profitability at some unspecified point in the future. Meanwhile, these elites can remain untaxed while vying for the state assets being auctioned off, now worth an additional €50 billion after the July memorandum.

    Between this accumulation structure, however dysfunctional, and one threatening short-term profitability, we can expect capital to choose the former, especially if not pressured to do otherwise.

    The oligarchs are powerful but few and far between. Greek capital is mostly made up of small enterprises, which contribute nearly 60 percent of value added in the total economy. Theoretically, the government could mobilize a portion of this group in an alliance with the working class, one strong enough to confront the more powerful sections of Greek capital. The “cross-class ‘popular’ alliance,” after all, is a key tenet of Eurocommunist strategy.

    But this memorandum, with its quasi-automatic spending cuts and indefinite troika surveillance, hits the working class and small businesses the hardest. In fact, a key aim of the troika, in accordance with the dictates of international capital, has been to reduce the number of small businesses in the Greek economy: retail, construction, pharmacies. Even neighborhood bakeries have been targeted in the July deal.

    Whichever of these businesses survive will serve as subcontractors either for large multinationals or the crony oligarchs. And as less efficient capitals, not only would they be more vulnerable in a situation that would potentially limit the financing of imports or exports, but given their status as subcontractors, they are not structurally inclined to confront larger interests.

    This brings us to the second reason that Syriza will have enormous difficulty targeting corruption going forward. It is not simply that capital has no reason to strike a deal with the government, but that there is little room under the memorandum to mobilize pressure against it. And hence, the historical reasons for which the Greek state is clientelistic — largely the disenfranchisement of popular forces against a corrupt and oligarchic ruling class — will be perpetuated.

    In other words, a class compromise could only be reached through escalated conflict, and there’s little sign that Syriza will be able to go down that path.

    Locating Real Openings

    But what about the counterfactual to Syriza’s failed attempt, a negative class compromise premised on popular mobilization and confrontation? Here the government would have needed to test the creditors.

    An imposition of capital controls in February may have been enough to at least get them to concede on some measures, which again was Syriza’s intention. It also may have led to a chain of other events: in the first instance, a default within the eurozone, with the expectation that doing so may have resulted in an exit.

    This escalation would have necessarily included either taking over the Bank of Greece or setting up a new central bank. And this is where the lines between reform and rupture become blurred.

    Of course, the negative compromise did not happen when it could have, and with such high levels of capital flight and reduction in foreign exchange reserves over the past half year, we might consider whether that particular iteration is still possible. At the very least, we would need experts to work out the details of how it could happen now.

    But we can at least get to the heart of the matter: does an exit from the monetary union have to involve a total rupture with the existing social order? If our immediate aim is to nationalize the banking system and control investment in key sectors, should we be discussing revolutionary strategy?

    Some sections of the “Oxi” political camp, like Antarsya, maintain that we do. And hence the bulk of their work and vision lies outside the ballot box. These militants see their key task as remobilizing people on the ground, reinvigorating the labor movement, organizing the young and unemployed — in other words, preparing for conflict.

    Other parts of the Left, like Popular Unity, have been more open to discussing reformist options. And we have reason to believe that, in a prepared exit, where the government has control over its central bank, it is possible to strike a compromise with Greek capital — but only by being prepared for a confrontation with them.

    It is possible, for instance, to sever lucrative pharmaceutical contracts that burden the public health budget and perpetuate corruption in hospitals and universities, and to rely more heavily on generic medicine production domestically and in the BRICS countries.

    It is possible to discipline domestic-based asset management with more powerful segments of the ruling class, such as by controlling investment decisions in oil refining and natural gas sectors on the basis of securing energy deals with Iran, Venezuela, Russia and elsewhere.

    It is possible to redirect savings from these highly profitable sectors, as well as those from the strategically located Port of Piraeus, toward developing a complex including logistics and ship repair industries. It is also possible, using those savings, to forge an industrial policy harnessing the natural endowments of Greece toward solar energy.

    It is possible, in other words, to reconstruct the country’s productive base, and we can start by finding sources of leverage.

    But all of this is premised on navigating the constraints of world economic integration and strengthening the Left, both through more traditional sections of the labor movement and newer forms of collective organization. And that ultimately is contingent on building and maintaining popular support, which includes being clear with people about the risks involved with pursuing such a path and the costs that could be avoided at various points of it.

    For instance, we cannot say, as often is done, that Argentina quickly recovered after defaulting while neglecting to mention that this was on the basis of a commodity-export boom that has since busted. At the same time, we also need not reject, as is also done, any use of Keynesian policy tools in the short term simply because they belong to a reformist vision of change.

    Both points miss the elephant residing in the basic intuitions of most people: a progressive vision for a small, weak, highly unequal economy needs some kind of developmental plan to survive in the medium term, and this includes finding some way of confronting its elites without telling people simply to storm the palace.

    In short, the key disagreements within what remains of the radical left in Greece, which ended up and which will continue straining its efforts to offer a political alternative, are still being pitched far too abstractly. One side calls the other too voluntarist; the other meanwhile denounces all things as reformist. Neither of these critiques, however, addresses the fears people still have around a strategy based on escalated conflict: mass inflation, shortages, turmoil.

    If we are to give workers hope in this climate of defeat and exhaustion, we need to reckon with these risks while finding real openings in a difficult context. And that starts with thinking and speaking not only programmatically but above all strategically.

     

    Nantina Vgontzas is a sociology PhD student at New York University. She is a member of the UAW Graduate Student Organizing Committee and is involved in the Academic Workers for a Democratic Union reform movement.

  • An Auto Worker Writes to the CEO of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles

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    The United Auto Workers union (UAW) has reached a tentative agreement with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) and is presenting the proposed contract to its members for a vote beginning this week. The contract affects some 40,000 unionized hourly workers.

    At the beginning of the economic crisis in 2007 the UAW agreed to let Fiat Chrysler establish two tiers, that is, workers doing the same job would have different rates of pay, with newer workers sometimes working for $17 an hour while more senior workers might earn as much $28 an hour. Such a system had been introduced earlier in the auto parts plants.

    The tier system is a particularly invidious invention since it not only generates resentment among workers who may be working alongside each other, but it is also an insidious practice because it provides an incentive for management to drive out the higher paid, more senior workers and replace them with their lower paid coworkers. Obviously such a system erodes the notion of union solidarity, which binds workers of different generations together, protecting the gains won in the past for all.

    Sergio Marchionne, the CEO of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles has become notorious for his compensation, which reached $72 million last year, more or less. Marchionne is a tier one CEO, earning more than any other auto industry CEO in the United States or Europe.

    The contract proposed by Marchionne would offer pay raises to both tiers—but second tier workers would not catch up to the first tier—leaving the invidious, insidious system in place. When senior workers retire, their first tier positions are simply eliminated. One report says that the FCA and the UAW may have created a three-tier system. In addition to the two-tier issue, the Detroit Free Press listed several other workers concerns as voting on the agreement approached:

    ·  Tier 2 workers cap? There is no limit on the number of FCA workers paid under the Tier 2 wage structure, which increases but doesn't catch up with the wage of those hired before 2007. In the previous agreement, FCA indicated it would accept a 25% cap on Tier 2 workers in the 2015 contract.

    ·  Healthcare: What, if anything, changes to workers’ out-of-pocket expenses for health care coverage?

    ·  Tier 2 concerns: What, if any, limits are there on FCA's ability to hire temporary part-time workers who start at a wage below Tier 2 workers?

    ·  Early retirement: What incentives are there for more senior workers to take early retirement?

    ·  COLA? The cost-of-living adjustment, which the UAW gave up several contracts ago, was not restored.

    ·  Why fewer tardies? Workers can be fired after the sixth time they are more than 30 minutes late, but they can use vacation days to offset the sixth incident. The previous contract allowed seven tardies before firing. 

    We publish here a letter was first published on the writer’s Facebook page from a UAW member, Denny Walker Crum, to Sergio Marchionne. – Dan La Botz, Co-Editor

    Dear Mr. Marchionne,

    This tentative agreement is disrespectful. I feel insulted that the company even offered this to us. And even more insulted that the union thought this was a good idea to present it to our membership. I am absolutely befuddled by the fact that everyone is praising this deal. The UAW is saying we have made “substantial gains.” And you, Mr. Marchionne, have called this deal "transformational.” I call it a slap in the face.

    Many of you in the public reading this may think that I am speaking out of greed. That simply isn't the case. You read things in the media. You see how Bloomberg and the Detroit Free Press report this. They say “substantial pay raises and bonuses” for everyone. And you think that we are just typical greedy union thugs who want more. No. We only want we deserve and what was promised to us in the past. Allow me to break it down for you.

    Put yourself in my shoes. As a tier 2 employee, you read that I will make up to 25 dollars an hour. And the way it has been reported, they make it seem like one will go from 19 dollars an hour (which I am not making at this point) to 25. And, yes, that would be a substantial raise. But, the facts are, one would have to work for seven years to obtain that kind of increase. Nobody gets a 6-dollar an hour raise right away. And, while 25 dollars an hour is a good living, when you are working next to somebody who is making 30 dollars an hour, it can be quite disheartening.

    So, I ask you this. If your employer told you that after working for 7 years, you will still make 5 dollars an hour less than the person working next to you doing the same job, how would you feel? Is it not disrespectful for the company to tell you that your time is worth less than the person next to you? Is it not disrespectful that one would have to work for 3 quarters of a decade and STILL isn't worth the same as their coworkers?

    You wave these bonuses in our face as if they are significant. Allow me to break those down. Under the 2011 agreement, the company agreed to a World Class Manufacturing (WCM) bonus that would be paid 2 times a year based on the status level of the plant the employee works at. At the Toledo Assembly Complex, we are set to make Silver status under WCM standards. Which would mean 2 payments of 750 dollars every year of the contract. That is 1,500 dollars every year or 6,000 dollars over the course of the contract. That is under the 2011 agreement.

    Under this new agreement, we will get a ONE-time payment of 2,000 dollars. That is 4,000 dollars less over the course of a 4-year contract. So I ask you Mr. Williams and Mr. Marchionne, where exactly are these “gains”?

    You change the profit sharing bonus. You tell tier 2 employees that they could make substantial gains as long as the company is doing well. FCA would have to have a profit margin of over 10% for tier 2 employees to even come close to what our tier 1 brothers and sisters make. Considering FCA had a banner year in 2014 and our profit margin was only 4.1%, I look at this as a fantasy. I cannot feasibly see how the company can make that margin rise by two and a half times in the foreseeable future.

    The fact that you wave 25 dollars (after 3 quarters of a decade) in front of my face with the “potential” to make a 12,000 dollar profit sharing check under the guise of this fallacy insults my intelligence. It says you do not value my time or sacrifice. You can keep your profit sharing. I want financial stability.

    Many of you reading this still think that I am speaking out of greed. And you are entitled to your opinion. But, we have been force fed this fallacy that workers asking to be fairly compensated are the reason that inflation happens. We have been force fed this fallacy that workers asking for fair compensation are the reason we lose jobs. That isn't the case.

    A strong middle class is the driving force behind any economy. When we have spending power, the economy grows. More jobs are created. People asking to be paid equally for equal work isn't the problem. CEOs who take 72 million dollar “bonus” checks on top of their already substantial CEO pay might be the issue.

    And that isn't just an issue in the auto industry. In fact from 1978 to 2013 CEO pay has risen by 937%. You read that right. 937%. While workers rages have remained stagnant at a raise of 10.2 percent. So, I ask you this. Who is being greedy here? The guy who took a 72 million dollar bonus? Or the workforce who are simply asking to be paid equally for equal work?

    To Mr. Williams and the rest of our union, I am sad to say that you let us down. You said at the public hug-fest that you had with Mr. Marchionne that “ultimately our membership” will decide. As part of that membership I will tell you that we will overwhelmingly reject this offer. Listen to your constituents. We are not happy. Remember which side you are on. And I ask you to please come back to us with a better offer. Please get us the things we were promised. Please do what a union is supposed to do. Get us equal pay for equal work.

    To the public, many of you still will not understand. You see these numbers and would love to be in my shoes. And I understand that. My job really is a good job. With a good opportunity. But, when you work 10 hours a day for 6 days a week and you are told that at the end of this contract that you will be compensated fairly, and you work next to people who make significantly more money than you, you would feel disrespected by this offer as well.

    To my brothers and sisters in this, please stay strong and together. I urge you all to vote with your best interests at heart. And IMO, this offer isn't it. We deserve a path to equal pay. And our brothers and sisters on tier 1 deserve a raise that they haven't seen in over a decade. In 2011 the union made painful sacrifices in order to keep the company afloat. And contrary to what they want you to believe, it wasn't the middle class who crashed the economy. It was deregulated banks and corporate greed. In 2011 we made the sacrifice because those banks hurt the auto industry. It wasn't the pay for its workers. 28 dollars an hour doesn't hurt a company that size. But, it makes a significant difference in the lives of those middle class workers. Let's stay together and get exactly what we were promised and what we deserve.

    To Mr. Marchionne, you are a smart man. I doubt you will ever read this. But I hope this gets enough attention that you will at least hear about it. I hope you continue to lead the company forward. But, you have to show your employees that they matter. And offers like this are the antithesis of that. I want a happy relationship between the company and the union. You know what we deserve. I urge you to come back with a better offer.

    Thank you to whoever took the time to read this. I will not respond to negative comments. But, I hope this gets some attention.

    In solidarity, sincerely, 
    Denny Walker Crum

  • Turkey and its Kurds at War

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    The Kurdish town of Cizre, a settlement with a population of approximately 150 thousand souls in Southeastern Turkey, is now under siege by the Turkish armed forces and the so-called “special operation force” of the police for a second time, after a previous one-week long siege was lifted for an interlude of two days. Around-the-clock curfew is accompanied by power cuts and the interruption of all means of communication including mobile telephones and the Internet. The evidence that came out when the first round of siege was lifted attests to a terrible human drama. Over 30 civilians are dead, ranging from a 35-day old infant to a 75-year old man. 

    Before the siege was lifted, government sources claimed that security forces had killed more than a dozen fighters of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), the Kurdish guerrilla army, denying any civilian deaths. How the baby and the old man could have contributed to the fight of the PKK remains a mystery unexplored by government spokespeople after the facts have come to light.

    The plight of Cizre is just the latest and most dramatic episode in a war that the Turkish state has been waging against its own citizens in the Kurdish regions of the country since late July. Basing itself on the excuse of the Suruç massacre on 20th July, in which 32 young Turkish leftists holding a press conference to express their solidarity with the people of Kobane, a city that is part of the Kurdish entity of Rojava within the frontiers of Syria, were killed by a suicide attack, in all probability the making of ISIL, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the Turkish government of the AKP, the party of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, started a war… not against ISIL, but against the PKK and the Kurdish people! It is true that the AKP government has made a concession to the U.S. by finally allowing it to use the Incirlik air base in Turkey to attack ISIL and, somewhat later, has also agreed to participate itself in those air raids. This was, however, simply a manoeuvre to consolidate its flank while embarking on a wholesale attack on the Kurdish movement, avoiding tension with the U.S. while engaging in a difficult military enterprise.
     

    Turkey's War Against the PKK, and the Kurdish People

    Turkey's war is not only against the PKK, but the Kurdish people as a whole. It has taken at least three different forms. The first is the military conflict proper between the Turkish armed forces and the PKK. This has so far taken the form of bombardments by the Turkish air force of PKK camps in Northern Iraq, on the territory of the Kurdish Regional Government led by Barzani, a close American and Turkish ally. The PKK has reciprocated by killing Turkish soldiers and police officers by the day. However, the two most spectacular instances of such raids came within forty-eight hours in early September, when the PKK blew up 16 soldiers in the southeast of the country and subsequently 13 police officers in the northeast. The very long geographical distance between the locations of the two incidents, as well as the heavy losses suffered by the Turkish forces, were meant to show the country that the PKK is a formidable force.

    The second form the war has taken is the effort on the part of the state to pacify the flashpoints in the cities and towns of Turkish Kurdistan. Since early 2013, a process of negotiations between the government and the PKK, called the “solution process” was going on. However, not all in the Kurdish movement are happy with this process. Abdullah Ocalan, the historic leader of the PKK, held in captivity since 1999, is the architect of the process. Yet there are other actors on the scene. The official ones are the PKK based in Northern Iraq and the HDP, the People's Democratic Party, an avatar of the parliamentary Kurdish movement that has now joined forces with a host of Turkish socialist parties and movements. Among these three, Ocalan is the most flexible while the PKK projects a more intransigent image. However, there is a fourth actor on the scene, called the YDG-H, which is usually presented as the youth wing of the PKK, but really has lately acted as a quasi-independent force. It stands to the extreme left of the movement and despite swearing unswerving allegiance to Ocalan, is patently critical vis-a-vis the “solution process”. It is they who organise whole neighbourhoods in many Kurdish cities and towns and make these neighbourhoods inaccessible to Turkish security forces by digging ditches and trenches and defending these with arms in hand when needed. The population at large may not agree with their methods, but sides with them against governmental forces during periods of conflagration when push comes to shove.

    Hence the attacks on a series of Kurdish towns as part of the ongoing war, towns such as Silopi, Varto, Yuksekova, Silvan, and now, most dramatically, Cizre, the most prominent stronghold of the YDG-H. (These and all other settlements in Turkish Kurdistan have original Kurdish names that were replaced forcibly by Turkish names in republican times, but citing these, important as that may be in the local context, would not mean much to an English-speaking audience.) In contradistinction to the first form that the war has taken, a conflict between two armed forces, this one is a war waged against the civilian population. Since almost the entire population stands with the youth, what seems to be an assault on a militia force is necessarily transformed into a war on the whole people. The author of these lines only weeks ago visited, for purposes of solidarity, Silvan, a town near Diyarbakir, immediately in the aftermath of a similar assault staged by security forces and witnessed with his own eyes the ravage wrought on the whole town as a result.

    The third form is the potential threat of veritable civil war involving civilians from both sides. This threat is contained in the continuous harping on the nationalistic, even chauvinistic, emotions that exist within major sections of the Turkish population of the country, not only on the part of forces close to Erdogan and the AKP, but equally by what is known in the West as the “Grey Wolves” of the Nationalist Action Party, the more traditional fascist movement of Turkey, the third biggest party of the Turkish bourgeoisie (the second force being the Republican People's Party, the party of Kemalist origin that now poses as social democratic). It was the “Grey Wolves” that descended on the streets on the night of 8th September in reaction to the two spectacular PKK attacks referred to above. More than 140 HDP locales were attacked, many set ablaze, ordinary Kurds were hunted on the streets of the cities and towns of the Turkish-dominated western parts of the country, intercity buses stopped and stoned, and Kurdish seasonal workers attacked collectively, their houses and cars burnt down, and they themselves driven away en masse. Now, although the Kurds are a minority in the cities of the west, they are quite a sizeable minority in many of these and, moreover, they are extremely politicised communities with considerable martial skills. If they did not respond in kind, this was out of self-restraint. This means that in future the situation may get out of hand and the war may degenerate into an ethnic civil war that may take extremely bloody forms.

    The Dynamics Behind the War

    In order to stop this war, one needs to identify the dynamics that lies behind its eruption. Unfortunately, the Kurdish movement, long under the influence of the liberal intelligentsia, keeps repeating that what is needed is a return to the status quo ante, i.e. to the “solution process” at the stage where it was left off. This ignores the fact that there are very definite forces at play that have led to this war and these should be countered and defeated before peace or at least a cease-fire can be re-established. These forces are of different kinds, some deriving from the political conjuncture while others are more structural in nature.

    The overbearing reason, eclipsing all others in importance, is that which derives from the political interests of Tayyip Erdogan. In an earlier article (“The strategic defeat of Recep Tayyip Erdogan”) published on this web site after the elections of 7th June in Turkey, we pointed out that the pitiful results obtained by Erdogan's party, the AKP, which lost 10 percentage points of the popular vote, as well as its parliamentary majority for the first time since 2002, is simply a registration of the earlier strategic defeat of this politician at the hands of the masses, first in the popular revolt that was triggered by the Gezi Park incident in June 2013 and subsequently during the serhildan (intifada) in October 2014 staged by the Kurdish people in reaction to his callous attitude to the plight of Kobane when it was attacked by ISIL. The election results were a double catastrophe for Erdogan. On the one hand, he needs a two- thirds majority in parliament if he is to amend the constitution so as to convert the Turkish political system into a presidential one, giving him the powers to control the whole political process, powers that he now lacks under the current parliamentary setup in which the office of the president of the republic he now occupies is rather ceremonial in nature. On the other hand, the fact that the AKP has not even been able to hold on to its parliamentary majority may possibly open up the floodgates of investigation into the very serious and well-documented cases of corruption in which not only his ministers but he himself was involved. Most commentators dwell on his ambition regarding the acquisition of the mantle of executive president. We think that it is much more an urgent need of avoiding the opening up of the corruption files by a parliament in which the AKP now finds itself a minority. If the other parties could get their act together and open those files, Erdogan may find himself facing the precipice, with the outcome being his conviction (the legal details need not detain us here).

    Since it was the success of the HDP of overcoming the extremely high electoral threshold of 10 per cent that directly led to the failure of the AKP to obtain a parliamentary majority, Erdogan and his cohort have placed their hopes in raising Turkish chauvinism and presenting the HDP not as a messenger of peace, but as a force that supports the “terrorism” of the PKK, thereby causing the party to fall below the critical 10 per cent threshold in early elections, to be held on 1st November. Hence, the war is, first and foremost, a war of survival for Erdogan. There have been imperialist wars in history and anti-colonialist ones. This is the first egoist war ever!

    This is what we wrote immediately after the elections on this web site:

    “The erroneous policy of the left provided a breathing space for Erdogan that gave him the possibility of climbing to the presidency. Now the AKP cannot form a government on its own, but Erdogan will still be holding the reins of power. He will use every inch of the space he has thus conquered to cling on to power and may even resort to war against the Kurds or in the Middle East at large for that purpose. In politics every mistake has a price.”

    It need not even to be pointed that the prediction contained in that paragraph has unfortunately come true. As for the mistake we were talking about there, this referred to the fact of not having tried to bring down Erdogan when it was possible to do so. Here, the major blame lies with the Kurdish movement. Had they moved in tandem with the popular revolt triggered by Gezi in 2013, Erdogan would almost certainly have fallen from power, so strong is the capacity of the Kurdish movement to organise the masses especially in Diyarbakir. It is sad to note that the suffering of the Kurdish people at the hands of atrocious attacks by Turkish security forces is, at least partially, a product of the errors of the Kurdish movement.

    There are, of course, more long-standing and structural factors that push Turkey to wage war on the Kurdish movement. One has already been touched upon. The radical wing of the Kurdish movement, embodied most visibly in the youth movement, is against the “solution process” unless Ocalan has been previously released from prison. (A striking slogan that the youth displayed during a mammoth demonstration in 2013 read: “A peace with the serok (Ocalan's title in the movement) captive is muddle-headed”.) The youth have many supporters, albeit less fiery than they themselves, and almost the whole population tends toward that kind of intransigent position when things get rough, as they frequently do. Theserhildan of October 2014 scared the ruling circles immensely and posed on the agenda the liquidation of these pockets of (armed) urban resistance, which, as opposed to the rural guerrilla, would pose an immediate threat in case a new serhildan erupted. So the present war may also be considered as an attempt on the part of the Turkish state to do away with these pockets of resistance.

    The other major factor that leads to friction between the state and the PKK is, by the sheer objective fact of its existence, Rojava, the autonomous Kurdish entity south of the Turkish-Syrian border. Kurdish autonomy or, a fortiori, independence in other parts of Kurdistan, i.e. in Iraq, Iran or Syria, has always loomed as a threat to the Turkish ruling classes, if only because it could act as an example to Turkey's Kurds. Within the first 15 years of the 21st century, first Iraqi Kurdistan, then Syrian Kurdistan have attained autonomy. At first deeply disturbed by the creation of Iraqi Kurdistan under Barzani as an autonomous region, Turkey finally came to terms with it and is now becoming the dominant power both economically and politically over the Kurdish Regional Government. The Turkish bourgeoisie is filled with expectations of benefits to flow from the oil of the Kirkouk region. Rojava, though, is a different matter. Barzani is a staunch ally, even a protégé, of the U.S. and lately of Turkey itself. Rojava has been set up under a leadership organically linked to the PKK! The AKP government has always made it clear that Turkey will not come to terms with a PKK-dominated political entity to its south. So Rojava has been, all throughout its three-year period of existence, a thorn on the side of the “solution process”.

    Whither Turkey, Whither the Kurdish Question?

    The last point about Rojava suggests that the future of the Kurdish question of Turkey and, indeed, of Turkey itself is intimately tied up with prospects for Syria. As most readers will be aware, Erdogan and his AKP are major actors in the ordeal that Syria has been going through since 2011. Erdogan, alongside Saudi Arabia and Qatar, has fanned the flames of hatred and war in Syria between the Sunni and the Alevi (the Alevi being a minority denomination in Islam, closer to the Shia than the Sunni.) This is part of a larger design, whereby Erdogan strives to assume the leadership of the Sunni masses of the Middle East and return to Turkey the glory of its Ottoman past. That is one reason why the AKP government supported ISIL until very recently and continues to support other Islamist groups fighting against the Assad regime.

    The situation born of the deal between the U.S. and Turkey in late July, whereby Turkey opened the Incirlik base to U.S. air raids on ISIL in return for American license for its attacks on the PKK, bears a dialectical contradiction that may in time suck Turkey into a ground war in Syria. In its fight against ISIL, the U.S. relies, among others, on the armed forces of Rojava as ground troops. Turkey's efforts, on the other hand, aim to keep these same forces of Rojava out of certain regions south of the Turkish-Syrian border, regions where Turkey wishes to establish so-called “secure zones”. However, the U.S. needs the forces of Rojava to fight ISIL on the ground. It seems the only way Turkey can talk the U.S. out of collaborating with Rojava militarily is to send ground troops itself to establish what it would consider secure zones.

    This prospect deriving from the contradictions of the military alliance between the U.S. and Turkey is complemented by the infernal logic of Erdogan's quest for survival: should the AKP fail to obtain a majority in parliament in the near future, Erdogan needs to suspend the normal functioning of the system, which would best be done by resorting to an extension of the war to Syria or even the Middle East at large. It is only the first half of our prediction that has materialised for the moment (“Erdogan” we were saying in the passage quoted above, “may even resort to war against the Kurds or in the Middle East at large for that purpose”). It would not be surprising to see the second half come true as well.

    There are, of course, certain counteracting tendencies that may come to play their part. One is the possibility that one of the major actors, Ocalan, silent so far since the elections and the eruption of the war, speaks out to create a kind of thaw. The coming Eid al-Adha, the great religious festival of the Islamic world, may be an opportune moment for him to open a new chapter in the “solution process”. It should not be forgotten that despite the ferocity of the war, neither the AKP, nor Erdogan, nor yet the Kurdish side has totally thrown out the possibility of a new beginning. Erdogan himself has explicitly said that the “solution process” is in the deep freezer (and not dead, as the unfolding war may lead one to think). It is obvious that as soon as he finds himself on safer ground, he may willingly go back to the status quo ante. This would be the reactionary exit from the present impasse. Erdogan is a malediction for Turkey and the Middle East and the longer he remains at the helm of this country, the more trouble will be brewing for the peoples of the region.

    The progressive exit would of course require the defeat of Erdogan, hopefully leading to his ouster from office and conviction for his crimes. The conditions for this are gathering. Already the succession of mass struggles in Turkey in the recent period, the Gezi popular revolt (2013), the Kobani serhildan (2014), and the metalworkers’ strike (2015), following upon each other's heels within the space of a mere two years, demonstrates that this is a society full of social groups ready to vent their anger. On top of this, Erdogan has lost credibility, as we have been emphasizing since 2013, in the eyes of his erstwhile allies, the U.S. and the European Union, as well as the liberals of Turkey, the Gulen fraternity, and many sections of the capitalist class. Now he is losing more and more the support of large sections of his party. Former president of the republic Abdullah Gul, another founding leader of the AKP, is waiting in the wings to take over the party at the right moment. The party convention that is gathering these days will not yet bring to the surface the deep fractures that run through the AKP, but contradictions are maturing there as well.

    If the positive outcome holds, it will of course make a great difference whether it is the bourgeois opposition headed by Gul and the two bourgeois parties, social democratic and fascist, or even the army, that removes Erdogan or whether it is the masses that do the job, headed hopefully by the working class, which now seems back in action after a long slumber. It is our hope and aim to make this latter solution prevail. 

    Sungur Savran is based in Istanbul and is one of the editors of the newspaper Gercek (Truth) and the theoretical journal Devrimci Marksizm (Revolutionary Marxism), both published in Turkish, and of the web site RedMed.

    Originally posted on The Bullet. 

  • The Potential of Urban Agriculture

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    Recently the local food movement seems to have sprung up from nowhere. Yuppies are flocking to farmer’s markets and community gardens across the nation to help the environment and local farmers. But this movement is not at all inclusive; urban agriculture has often been actively suppressed amongst low income populations. This is not always the case, however, especially in times of economic crisis. For example, in the seventies, urban agriculture was promoted in New York’s Lower East Side as a productive way to use land that served no other purpose. But when the gentrification of SoHo spread in the eighties as the economy improved, land prices shot up and gardens which had been tolerated previously were bulldozed with nary a thought to the people who relied on them for access to healthy food.

    It’s hard to find healthy food in low income urban areas; food insecurity, defined by the USDA as “limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways,” is often a catalyst for participation in urban agriculture for these communities. Not helping the earth, not helping local farmers, and perhaps most importantly, not making a profit. These things often go against the power structures that typify the modern city.

    One of the most well-known examples is LA’s South Central Farm. The fourteen acre garden was cultivated by some of the city’s low income residents, mostly immigrants. For many, the medicinal plants grown there served as their only form of healthcare. After fourteen years of cultivation, the former owner tried to buy the land back from the city, citing the fact that it was not being used for what it had been bought for (a trash incineration plant). During lengthy court battles, protestors and gardeners were forced off the land by heavily armed police officers, and the farm was bulldozed, even though only an unquestioned owner can legally order demolition. To this day, all fourteen acres still lie fallow.

    One way urban agriculture subverts urban power structures is by dealienating participants. In this context, alienation refers to one viewing themselves as external to the environment. An oft-used example is children who don’t know that plants come from seeds, but alienation is much more pervasive than that. The way urban agriculture de-alienates people is twofold. First, it brings participants in direct contact with the environment. Second, they control the product of their labor (food). This is supremely important. In her essay “If Only They Knew,” Julie Guthman discusses an urban garden in a housing project that one of her students did research on. The workers, mostly teens who pulled weeds and were uninvolved in harvesting, hated it. De-alienation necessitates that the participants get to see the whole process through.

    Urban agriculture also blurs the divide between public and private property—reclaimed urban spaces become the new commons. Use of these commons partially returns the means of (agricultural) production to marginalized communities. But the commons are not limited to land alone, as Nathan McClintock stresses in “Why Farm the City? Theorizing Urban Agriculture through a Lens of Metabolic Rift;” they include “all agricultural resources and foodways that have been commodified.” Seeds, water, fertile soil, knowledge, and biodiversity are all parts of this new commons. Women involved in the Siyakhana Food Garden project in Johannesburg got more than food out of it; they were also able to learn of and share remedies for common medical ailments, using plants grown in the garden. Not only do urban farmers reclaim the physical commons, they also reclaim other aspects of agriculture and community that have been systematically taken away.

    Many of these issues stem from the differences between traditional and contemporary localism, something conceptualized by Jesse McEntee. Traditional localism refers to the procurement of local food for the purpose of acquiring fresh, affordable food, keeping with tradition, etc., while contemporary localism refers to the procurement of local food with the explicit intention to help local farmers, or the environment, often by paying higher prices. When gentrifiers participate in urban agriculture, it is almost always contemporary localism, which does not clash in any way with the mainstream, profit driven food system. While urban agriculture practiced by marginalized communities may share some of the same motives of contemporary localism, it is traditional at heart. The informal economic systems that typically arise around traditional localism challenge the hegemonic presence of the capitalist food market in urban spaces. As J. I. Guyer says in the introduction to Feeding African Cities, such informal exchanges of food and small scale urban agriculture undermine the expansion of more formal markets.

    And these small exchanges often explicitly reject the rules of running a “proper” business. Many urban agricultural projects, such as City Slicker Farm in Oakland, use sliding scales for their pricing so that everyone is able to afford fresh food and no one is turned away, even when this results in losses. Additionally, extralegal “guerrilla gardens”—gardens planted without official permission from the landowner, immediately draw attention to questions of land use and ownership.

    However, it would be absurd to posit urban agriculture as a perfect solution to issues of food access. Under the current system, no one thing can permanently eradicate food insecurity. But it goes beyond that; it could be argued that such projects actually speed up the process of gentrification by making neighborhoods that had formerly been avoided by gentrifiers appear more appealing.

    This is an issue that must be confronted. Organizations such as Black to Our Roots and Growing Power do so by using names that code them as black spaces, both to participants and outsiders. As Guthman also notes, this may sometimes involve turning away well-meaning members of the “anarchist/hippy/crust sector” of the city. This not only keeps those urban agricultural projects in the hands of the communities they serve, but also prevents potential gentrifiers from gaining a foothold in the area, which could lead to an influx of new residents.

    Even when these measures are not taken, urban agricultural projects and the communities that form around them can serve as a strong force against gentrification. Boston’s Dudley neighborhood was a victim of redlining and white flight during the sixties and seventies. In the early eighties, one third of the land there was vacant, ripe for gentrification. But it wasn’t gentrified, due to the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI), which organized community members who eventually pressured Boston to give DSNI the power of eminent domain over sixty acres of vacant land in the middle of the neighborhood, which otherwise would have become hotels and offices serving downtown Boston. Now, among other things, that land boasts affordable housing, a community greenhouse, and several gardens. Additionally, as part of the agreement that DSNI negotiated, housing prices are kept artificially low, meaning no one was pushed out despite a rise in standard of living.

    In this scenario, a strong community came together to stop gentrification and eventually launched several urban agricultural projects. But it could also happen the other way around. Projects like urban farms and the bonds that formed through them help to strengthen communities. So when gentrification threatens to encroach upon their neighborhoods, they already have a strong community organization ready to organize against it.

    Urban agriculture is more than people growing food to feed themselves. It constitutes an explicit rejection of the food insecurity that has been forced on urban communities and a radical reassertion of agency. When practiced as traditional localism, urban agriculture is the polar opposite of its gentrified cousin. These projects move beyond lifestyle politics; through their struggle to reach food security, marginalized communities highlight the fact that truly achieving food justice in incompatible with the very nature of our economic system. These projects should be supported and protected, but it is important not to intrude on these new autonomous spaces; control must be kept in the hands of the communities that created them. When communities lose control of what they’ve created and lose access to organizational structures that can aid in collective action, gentrification only becomes easier.

  • What is the left supposed to do electorally?

    ImageJeremy Corbyn won the leadership of the UK Labour Party. As usually happens when the left scores an electoral victory, the center-left and others has made sure to inform Corbyn and his supporters that it is bad that he won and that he never should have tried to win. I am more familiar with this in the American context where every left-wing electoral effort is similarly cast as irresponsible. Given these attitudes, I am left to wonder what exactly people think the left is supposed to do electorally?

    By now, the centrist Democratic party has developed a pretty standard line on left-wing third party runs. This line says that someone who wants to run to the left of the Democrats should run as a Democrat in the primaries. This doesn’t mean you necessarily have to be happy with the Democratic party, but to avoid vote-splitting and other things, you should just try to become the Democratic nominee. So, in the case of Nader, the refrain has always been that he should stop running as a Green or independent, and instead compete for the Democratic nomination for president.

    Given the recent popularity of third party runs, this has become a very convenient thing for centrist Democrats to say. It doesn’t instruct the left to not participate in electoral politics and, on the assumption that leftists will always lose Democratic primary contests, it doesn’t really threaten any Democratic victories. So Democrats get to avoid the vote-splitting threat while adopting a procedural posture that they think will also mean the left candidate always loses to their candidate.

    But this is basically what Corbyn did by running for the leadership of the Labour Party. He didn’t challenge Labour through the Greens or some other party. Instead, he ran within it like the good and reasonable leftist is supposed to do. And, as it turns out, the center-left is not actually happy with that either. Similarly, if Sanders manages to win the Democratic primary in the US, you can be sure the same centrist Democrats screaming at Nader to run in the primary will immediately sour on the idea of left-wing primary challenges.

    So, you can’t run as a third-party because you might split votes. You also can’t run in the primary if you have any chance of winning the nomination because then you increase the risk that the “party” (so defined) will lose the general election. What, then, can you do? What is the center-left’s view on how the left is supposed to interact with electoral politics? It seems that the actual view is that they shouldn’t involve themselves at all, except as voters to a centrist party that does not accomplish (or even aim to accomplish) the left’s political goals.

    I realize, as I am sure many centrist Democrats do, that these “problems” are mainly just a function of having a really bad system of democratic representation. The best electoral systems, most notably proportional representation parliamentary governments, don’t have these particular issues. In those systems, it is perfectly fine to have multiple left-of-center (and right-of-center) parties, with each competing against one another to gain the biggest vote share. This then gives the left the ability to create a party and try to grow it in order to become the biggest in the left-of-center bloc and, provided that the bloc wins the majority overall, eventually run the government.

    But there is no similar outlet or point of entry in the existing system for left-wing politicians or parties. Indeed, this is basically what the centrist Democrats are saying if you add it all up: the system is not designed in a way that allows you to meaningfully participate (either in your own party or in the Democratic party) and so you simply shouldn’t. This is a clearly ridiculous suggestion, especially if you imagine for a moment that those on the left genuinely do care about the issues they talk about.

    The instruction to the left that they either engage impotently in electoral politics or not at all is cast as practical, but it’s hard to imagine anything more impractical than thinking such an instruction will work, that in a democratic system you can get 10-15% of the population (or whatever it might be) to simply be content with having no input whatsoever (or even a chance at input) in how the government runs. Unless you commit yourself to creating a system that can actually accommodate political participation from the full spectrum of views, which the Democrats have not done and don’t seem interested in doing, you are going to always have the problem of the people who you are trying to lock out of the system refusing to be locked out.

    Matt Bruenig has written for The Atlantic, The New Republic, The American Prospect, Salon, The Week, Gawker and Demos’ Policy Shop. His content has been featured or mentioned at Financial Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Reuters, Guardian, Forbes, NY Magazine, Mother Jones, Slate,Washington Monthly, Think Progress, Roosevelt Institute, Dissent Magazine, Jacobin Magazine, and elsewhere.

    Originally posted here.

  • Jill Stein Campaign Seeks to Meet Matching Fund Goals

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    [The following item comes from the Jill Stein campaign for the Green Party presidential nomination.]

    Now is the time to support a serious, independent, left candidate for Presidential in 2016.  Jill Stein, Green Party candidate for President, is already garnering media attention, building support in social justice movements and frontline struggles and taking on the undemocratic Presidential Debate Commission.

    The Stein campaign is committed to running a clean money campaign and is refusing donations from corporate lobbyists or officers of for-profit corporations. She is also committed to qualifying for public matching funds. When qualified, all her donations of between $5 and $250 from an individual will be matched dollar for dollar.  In other words, an individual's total donations up to $250 will be doubled by the matching funds system.

    Jill needs our help to meet the qualifying threshold. She must raise at least $5,000 in qualified contributions in at least 20 states. The campaign's goal is  to qualify a year ahead of the election since this would be a highly visible statement that a serious independent left candidate is heading for the ballot in November 2016.

    As of Labor Day weekend, the Stein campaign was qualified in five states (CA, FL, MA, NY, and WA). She was more than half way to the qualifying threshold in another 8 states (CO, CT,  IL, MD, NJ, OR, PA, and TX).  And she is working hard to accelerate efforts in AZ, GA, MI, MN, NC, NM, OH, VA, and WI. Weekly state-by-state updates of the matching funds campaign will be posted here.

    So please help push Jill over the top by going to https://jillstein.nationbuilder.com/donate to donate on line or get check information.  Please share widely.

     

  • Upcoming Discussion on Greek Elections and Socialist Strategy

    The Greek Drama of 2015: What Next?
    a talk by Nicholas Levis (Nikos Evangelos)

    The preliminary report of the parliamentary Truth Committee on Public Debt declared the entire Greek debt to be odious, unethical, unsustainable and illegal. Do they have a case?

    Sunday, September 13, 2015
    2:00 – 3:00pm
    International Affairs Building, Room 409
    Columbia University, Manhattan
    Entrance at 118th Street and Amsterdam

    Days to the Greek election. By the standards of 2015, this is an eternity, and so let us imagine things will be better than expected after the vote. But I fear every word Yorgos Mitralias writes in Counterpunch is on target. http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/09/greece-a-capitulation-bearer-of-d…

    Post-Syriza (or Syriza-Tsipras if you prefer) is bleeding out of party activists, youth and the movement people. The heroic symbol, Manolis Glezos, is now running with LAE (Popular Unity), while the odious Bolaris, one of the people behind the infamous witch-hunt of innocent women in 2012 (detailed in the must-see documentary, Ruins) is standing for election with post-Syriza in Thessaloniki. That prompted more resignations.

    Who is leaving?
    Energetic and creative people who created Syriza’s success.
    Where are they going?
    We can only hope for a revitalization of the movements in the next months, but the shock and awe of this defeat has so far brought demoralization and further demobilization.

    Mitralias is also right that for now Left Platform/LAE is an old-style “camp” party and the leadership of Lafazanis is not going to inspire a very big chunk of votes. You all know how partisan I am for Zoe Konstantopoulou, who remains an independent but tops the LAE candidate list in Athens. I believe the way the oligarch media, the establishment parties, and now post-Syriza have turned her into the most demonized person in Greece will eventually redound to her credit. But that only might be, if she eventually becomes the leader of the anti-memorandmu front. And given enough time for Greeks to get over their hangups about amazon women who are smarter than everyone else in the room (the memory of her being right and loud at all the decisive points will help). She’s not the leader, however, and the results on 9/20 would be little different with her or anyone else leading the charge. The total capitulation following the awesome public arousal brought about by the referendum have poisoned the leftist well.

    The voters are disgusted and from this debacle most will learn only the old if not entirely true lesson that politicians are all the same shit. A low turnout is likely, and the right will be strengthened, though post-Syriza is still going to come out first party, thanks to Greek memories being slightly longer than, say, Americans’. It’s ND that still disgusts the majority.

    Meanwhile Tsipras with his coalition talk has effectively endorsed PASOK as an alternative for potential ND voters! When the post-Syriza leadership keep quiet on the Third Memorandum and say now is the time to go after oligarchs and corruption, I don’t disbelieve them; I’m certain most of them were also honest in January when they were going to tear up the memoranda and persuade the EU to cut Greece a break with their sweet deliberative reason! This fantasy shit ain’t going to fly for long. Mitralias is also right in saying that the door is being opened wide for Golden Dawn (or a less obviously Nazi successor party). Again, not this round, but the financial brick wall looms and the IMF itself has said it.

    What happens after the next insolvency, at the next election?
    What should we expect from the new constellation of power as elections loom? Is a break with the politics of deflation and neoliberalism still possible?
    What does this mean for the rest of the EU, and for the struggles beyond?

    Nicholas Levis is a Greek-American author, editor and translator. A history scholar who has been active in the Greece Solidarity Movement (AKNY) for years.

  • Jeremy Corbyn versus the Third Way

    A development which no one expected now appears inevitable. Barring either otherwordly intervention or old-fashioned political dirty tricks, Jeremy Corbyn, long on the left wing of the British Labour Party, is slated to become that party's new leader.

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    And the rabidly pro-capitalist heirs of long-gone "New Labour" leader Tony Blair, as well as the traditional right wing of the Labour Party, are absolutely apoplectic.

    I wrote an article for Jacobin which puts Corbyn's campaign within the context of recent UK Labour Party history — and connects Blair's "New Labour" with its forerunners in the New Zealand Labour government of the 1980s and the Australian Labor governments of the 1980s and 1990s. These governments have been little discussed in Anglophone left-wing publications outside of Australasia, but they should be.

    New Politics editorial board member Bhaskar Sunkara's interview with Leo Panitch, co-editor of the Socialist Register, on the Corbyn phenomenon, also shouldn't be missed. 

     

     

     

  • Union-Backed "Fight For $15" Campaign Marginalizes Larger Struggle for Worker Power

    Interview with Arun Gupta, journalist and a founding editor of New York City’s Indypendent newspaper, conducted by Scott Harris:

    http://btlonline.org/2015/mp3/150918a-btl-gupta.mp3

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    It’s been almost three years since the movement for a living wage burst into protest, first in New York City and then in dozens of other cities and towns across the U.S.

    In its short life span, the national campaign for a hike in the minimum wage has seen significant victories, including announcements from fast-food giant McDonald's and America’s largest retailers, Walmart and Target, announcing they would increase the base pay for their lowest paid employees. Elsewhere, 11 states have legislated minimum wage increases and major cities, including Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles have passed measures that will phase in a $15 hourly wage.

    The national workers alliance known as "Fight for 15," is backed by the Service Employees International Union, which has initiated other successful organizing drives including the Justice for Janitors campaign. SEIU has spent millions on organizing major protests, job walkouts, pickets and a sophisticated public relations campaign designed to move public opinion in favor of minimum wage increases. A recent National Labor Relations Board ruling will make it easier for unions to negotiate contracts for employees working at fast-food chains and other companies with franchises using contract labor.

    Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Arun Gupta, a founding editor of New York City’s Indypendent newspaper and a widely published journalist. Here, he examines the strengths and weaknesses of the Fight for 15 campaign for higher wages that he’s written about in an article titled “Wage Gains Won't Last, Unless Fight for 15 Builds Worker Power."

    For more information on New York City’s Indypendent newspaper, visit https://indypendent.org and Arun Gupta's blog, see http://arunkgupta.com.

    Reposted from Between The Lines, a weekly radio newsmagazine.

     

  • Seattle suggests what teachers' union contracts can do for kids

    Members of the Washington Education Association (WEA), an NEA affiliate in Seattle, are on strike this morning. Picketing has begun outside schools though bargaining has resumed. The demands in this strike show the power of a teachers' union to use the contract to make schools what they should be for all kids.  The ones that I think are most significant:

    1. Guaranteed student recess: Recess time varies wildly across the district, and we believe all students benefit from a guaranteed amount of time for play and exercise.
    2. Reasonable testing: Too much standardized testing is stealing time away from classroom learning.
    3. Student equity around discipline and the opportunity gap: We need to focus on equity issues across Seattle, not just in six schools.

    I'm with the Seattle union in this struggle and hope you are too.  More information on the strike here.

  • Labor Day 2015: Which sides are you on?

     

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     This Labor Day, which sides are you on?

    Nope, “sides” is not a typo. This Labor Day I’m calling on organized labor to grapple with and overcome our unions’ simultaneously heroic and sordid history in regard to social justice and especially racial equality, U.S. working people’s “Many Pasts.”

    Liberals often don’t want to touch criticism of labor unions because this would be “washing dirty laundry in public,” weakening a frequently-attacked progressive force we badly need. But the corporate media and the Right are quick to expose union wrongdoing — though they are silent about Wall Street’s corruption. We can’t clean up problems we don’t face so we actually weaken unions when we don’t insist on their being self-critical.

    One reality we should discuss this Labor Day is that unions can’t be counted on to be on the right side of the struggle between wage earners and the boss. They still have the identity crisis Kim Moody described in 1998. The AFL-CIO has the “vaguely class-oriented idea that the federation must speak for all ‘working families’ and turn up the ‘street heat’ to organize the millions.” But at the same time the unions cling to the illusion they will be rewarded if they cozy up to capitalism, accepting all but its worst excesses.

    This schizophrenia is apparent in the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which collaborates with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Through NED, AFT assists the U.S. State Department to undercut unions that are unfriendly to U.S. capitalism. In doing so the AFT subverts resistance to the global project to destroy public education. NED sponsors the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) which supports “development of market-oriented institutions around the world.” While it has started to campaign against privatization of education, AFT simultaneously pushes for the “free market” globally. Which side is the AFT on?

    Let’s commend the positive change in labor, like its shift on immigrant rights, the campaign for #FightFor15, efforts to raise the issue of race in unions in response to #BlackLivesMatter. But these efforts are constrained by the unions’ lack of internal democracy and unwillingness to break with business (unionism) as usual. Unions can’t fix every social problem and ought not be expected to do so, but to win the loyalty and trust of working people labor has to embrace and act on the principle that if it’s a social justice problem, it’s a labor issue.

    When AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka acknowledges the contradiction of police unions being in AFSCME, that both Michael Brown’s mother and killer are union members and “our brother killed our sister’s son,” he begins to do that. However, it’s not enough to talk. We need the courage to enforce the principle that solidarity, social justice and democracy are as “union” as salary and wages. Though it may seem counter-intuitive, but when unions make social justice (and union democracy) labor issues they become the connective tissue of a broad social movement that wins public loyalty and trust in labor battles.  

    What does this kind of unionism actually look like? The Battle of Virden in Illinois, a miners strike, simultaneously inspires and cautions about the challenge unions face in confronting racism.  As Carl Weinberg explains, to break the miners’ strike, which had deep, social support and an extraordinarily courageous, militant union, employers recruited blacks from Alabama, bringing them by train to Illinois. African-American union miners, mainly from Springfield, helped patrol the tracks approaching Virden in a show of solidarity with their brother miners. In a remarkable show of solidarity, “penniless Black miners and their families who arrived in Virden refused to serve as strikebreakers once they learned the truth of the situation.” Yet the operators’ “divide and conquer” tactic was partly successful in making white Illinois miners believe that blacks would always be strikebreakers. The strike was successful in winning its immediate aims but Weinberg concludes that the limit of the miners’ success in the Battle of Virden was “the powerful and ongoing scourge of racism in the region.”

    The other part of this story is how black miners who defended union principles negotiated relations with racist miners. The letters of Richard L. Davis, a black spokesman in the 1880s and 1890s for many black miners in Ohio and three southern states, shows he had a tough sell as an intermediary with the white majority and white national leadership of the UMWA. But what a salesman he was! In one letter he responds to a black miner who justified going to coal fields near Seattle, Washington, breaking a strike. Striking white miners and the Seattle labor movement as a whole responded with vicious, violent racism to this strike breaking, yet Davis held fast to his defense of interracial solidarity. In his letter he asserts the need to fight for racial equality in the society, union and the coal fields.

    But he then turns the issue around and asks the strikebreaking miner “suppose that you were working in a place and the company brought in three or four hundred white men to take your places, what would be the result? I fancy you would not speak as you do now. No, sir, you would pick [up] your gun if you had one, and you would try to kill every white man that you saw, whether he was your enemy or not.”

    Davis responds to the strikebreaker’s argument that “28 years ago he was a chattel slave; today he is a free American citizen” by pointing to workers' shared self-interest: “How utterly false! None of us who toil for our daily bread are free…Does any negro think that an operator thinks any more of him than he does of a white man? If you do, you are sadly mistaken, for I remember several instances right here in this valley: whenever the colored men asked for that which was something like right and just, the answer was, whenever you colored men want the same as the whites do then we have no further need for you…it is not a white man’s country; it is partly ours as well.” Davis urges black strikers to defend their rights to be treated as equals, a right they forfeit when they allow themselves to be used to break strikes.

    We hear Davis’ ideas in battles that are not typically seen as “labor” struggles but in fact, are, if we take the struggle for racial equality,for social justice, to be a labor principle as dear as not crossing a picket line in a contract dispute. “You are not better than us; you are not smarter than us; and you do not love these children more than we do,” says Jitu Brown, one of the African American activists in the #FightForDyett in their third week of a hunger strike demanding their rights as parents, citizens to be involved in deciding what school their children should attend. They are pushing back against “systemic disinvestment” in Chicago public schools by the powerful elite that runs the city under the helm of President Obama’s former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.

    The school district has been dismantling neighborhood schools and with them, African American neighborhoods. Activist teachers in the Chicago Teachers Union have been supporting the Dyett 12, as they’re called, but the hunger strikers deserve and need far more help from other unions, especially the Illinois state teachers unions, the Illinois AFL-CIO, and the two national teachers unions.  A letter from both state teachers unions to the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus is not an adequate response to address “white silence” — organized labor’s historic complicity in racial segregation in Chicago and Illinois schools.  The letter is an embarrassingly token gesture.

    I was recently asked by a union activist “How many backs do we have to watch?” My answer: As many as we want to watch ours.  That’s the meaning of solidarity. Let’s live it this Labor Day by taking sides. Dyett hunger strikers and Black Lives Matter are giving U.S. unions an opportunity to reinvigorate themselves.  

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

  • The Campaign “You Stink” Shakes the Sectarian Regime in Lebanon

    Lebanon had experienced some major protests in early 2011 against the sectarian regime following the regional popular uprisings, but the movement unfortunately ended a few months later, especially after the sabotage of several religious and reactionary parties against the movement and with the complicity of leftist movements of Stalinist tradition.

    A new popular dynamic started with the campaign “you stink” that was triggered after a waste management crisis. Piles of garbage were accumulated in the streets of Beirut since early July, after the closure of a major garbage dump’s site in the city of Naameh, a coastal town in the South, at that time.

    Opened in emergency in 1998, this landfill of waste had to close ten years later and never exceed 2 million tons of garbage. Last July 17 2015, when the inhabitants of nearby villages blocked the road to the garbage trucks of the company Sukleen, the garbage dump had been enlarged four times and contained 18 million tons of waste. Since that day, the smell that was choking on a daily basis Naameh extended to the streets of Beirut. After ten days without garbage collection, it already accounted for 3000 tons of daily waste.

    Subsequently the Lebanese national unity government composed of the forces of March 8 and 14, [1] transported some amounts of garbage heap in the poorest areas to temporarily relieve tensions in the capital Beirut and spared the more gentrified neighbourhoods. Until today, no solution has been found to the crisis of the accumulation of waste, most of Lebanon’s streets are now filled with garbage.

    The bourgeois and sectarian ruling class also attempts to split the profits from the privatization of garbage pickups depending on sectarian and geographical lines. Especially the links between Averda, the company managing Sukleen and the powerful Hariri family. Close to the former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, assassinated in 2005, Maysarah Sukkar established Averda a few months before getting his first contract in Lebanon. With a turnover of $20000 dollars, he was then granted the multibillon waste market of Beirut and Mount Lebanon, without public bids. The contract was renewed several times in the general opacity.

    Averda contract finally expired on July 17 2015. Without any political agreement found on a new space where to bury the waste, Sukleen trucks began dumping them in rivers, open spaces or in the port of Beirut.

    The campaign “You stink” initially demanded an ecological solution to the waste crisis, but later as we will explain it the movement was radicalized to condemn the Lebanese sectarian and bourgeois regime as a whole.

    At the first mobilization in the framework of this campaign Saturday August 22, more than 10,000 protesters demonstrated in the streets of Beirut. The demonstrators were challenging all the sectarian and bourgeois political parties of March 8 and 14 in the waste crisis and the corruption poisoning the country.

    During these first protests, the repression of the army and the police was very violent. They tried to push the demonstrators off the roads leading to the city centre of Beirut, shooting live ammunition in the air and targeting protesters with tear gas and water cannons. The police also attacked the demonstrators with batons, wounding more than 75 persons.

    Despite the fierce repression, new mobilisations were organised the next day as a challenge to the police, with about 20,000 people in the streets of Beirut. One could read on the walls of the luxurious downtown invested by the protesters, graphitis such as “Down with capitalism” and “Downtown Beirut belongs to the people”, “No to homophobia, racism, sexism and classism” and “Revolution”.

    The various Lebanese media, all at the service of the sectarian and bourgeois political parties, with the collaboration of security services and even some members of the campaign “you stink” that did not want a radicalization of the movement and the the challenging of the sectarian regime, tried to discredit the movement as a whole, by notably particularly characterizing young people from Beirut poor suburbs who had joined the movement as “infiltrators” “rioters” and “saboteurs” … A false propaganda, which by using similar terms, reminded for many protesters the propaganda of the Assad regime in Syria against the peaceful demonstrators at the beginning of the revolution in 2011.

    Mobilizations and sit-ins were held throughout the week despite the continuation of the repression that resulted in the hospitalization of more than 400 people.

    Other demonstrations took place in other parts of the country, but particularly in the Akkar region, which is located in the North of Lebanon and is the poorest and the least provided in public services [2]. People mobilized under the slogan “Akkar is not a dustbin” after the government’s proposal to transport the waste in this region. In return and to try to convince the people of the region of this measure, the government decided to allocate $ 100 million to the development of Akkar and 200 million already allocated were made available for road infrastructure and sewers.

    A group of municipalities in the Akkar valley has also launched a campaign called “Tamartouna bifadlikoum” (You have buried us by your largesse) who refuses the barter principle of disposing of Lebanon’s waste in Akkar and to guarantee in return the development of the region.

    In the same region of Akkar, the residents of the village of Ersal to prevent the creation of a garbage dump area in the locality launched a petition.

    The trade unions of the General Confederation of Lebanese Workers (known as the CGTL) called to join the movement following the events of August 22 and 23 August, but because of their weaknesses and their submissions to sectarian and bourgeois Lebanese political parties, their calls are in many ways just rhetorical.

    On Saturday August 29, a new massive demonstration was organised in the capital Beirut gathering between 60 000 and 100 000 people. The youth was very much present and the demonstrations were highly dynamics.

    One could read and hear the following messages in the protests: “Revolution against the ruling class, against sectarianism, against racism, and against patriarcat”; “Secularism, equality and social justice”; “From Douma to Beirut the people is one and does not die”; “From Baghdad to Damscus and Beirut and Palestine, one revolution”, “the people want the fall of the sectarian regime”, etc…

    Numerous protesters were condemning also the corruption of the political elites of March 8 and 14, as well as the neo liberal and privatization policies that impoverished the popular classes of the country and led to the destruction of public services.

    In these mobilisations, a new front was established gathering various leftist and progressive movements, in which we can found at its heart the Socialist Forum, called “the people want” under the slogan “secularism, equality and social justice”. This progressive coalition demands notably: the liberation of all the protesters arrested during the demonstrations “you stink” and the end of the repressive campaigns of the State; the establishment of a Constituent Assembly on the basis of a non sectarian proportional election and with Lebanon as a single district; resignation of the Environment Minister and the sidelining of the Council of Development and Reconstruction on the waste issue; prosecution for all those involved in the business of privatization and waste management; an investigation on all those involved in the violence in recent protests, that is to say the political and security officials, headed by the Interior Minister, Nohad Machnouk; etc …

    The multiple and various attempts of the sectarian and bourgeois political parties of March 8 and 14 to co-opt the movement for its own political benefit and opportunist interests are for now still a failure.

    The mobilizations in Lebanon, such as the continuing ones in Iraq that also gathered hundreds of thousands of protesters on Friday August 28, show us that the shock wave of the revolutionary processes that began in the region in 2011 are very far from being finished, despite the various counter revolutionary offensives. We must give our support to these new uprisings in Lebanon and Iraq while continuing to support the revolutionaries in Syria, Bahrain, Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Palestine, etc … fighting for the initial objectives (democracy, social justice and equality) of the revolutionary processes and against all forms of the counter revolution.

    As we have said before and despite the significant and multiple difficulties, the revolutionary processes are not dead…

    30/08/2015

    [1] The March 8 coalition is linked to Syria and Iran, and includes Hezbollah, the other Shi’a party Amal and the Free Patriotic Movement (Christian) led by General Aoun. On the other side, March 14, supported by the US and Saudi Arabia, gathers the Future Movement led by Saad Hariri (Sunni), the Lebanese Forces and Kataeb (Christians).

    [2] The north of Lebanon and its capital Tripoli represents 20.7% of the inhabitants of the country, but 46% of the extremely poor and 38% of the poor. The area is also the least equipped at the medical level, while dropout rates, unemployment and female illiteracy are among the highest. No large-scale development project has also occurred since the 1990s. The number of business establishments do not exceed 17 000, of which the vast majority are small family businesses with less than five employees, in the governorate of North Lebanon, while we found in Mount Lebanon and Beirut up to 73 000 and 72 000 business establishements.

    Joseph Daher, member of the Syrian revolutionary Left, is a PhD student and assistant at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. Co-founder of the blog Cafe Thawra and founder of the Syria Freedom blog, he is co-author (with John Rees) of The People Demand: A Short History of the Arab Revolutions (Counterfire: London, 2011).

    This article originally appeared at International Viewpoint.

     

  • Education International? Never heard of it? More important than you may realize

      ImageThe Education International (EI), the international confederation of teachers unions, held its seventh World Congress in Ottawa over the summer.  Though most teachers don’t know this organization exists, and few people write about its activity, what it does affects students, parents, and teachers around the world very directly. The EI speaks for teachers unions in meetings with international finance organizations, the World Bank and the OECD especially, that have established what Susan Robertson terms the “global governance agenda” for schools.  As Robertson explains, this agenda is shaping how teachers are evaluated, what students need to know, how schools will be funded and who will control them. It is a decidedly undemocratic process pushing an agenda that marginalizes non-Western cultures, disempowers communities, and deprofessionalizes teaching.

                In reading materials on EI’s website, including its own reports — or rather, the absence of them about the implications of its actions — one can see the lack of both transparency and democracy in its operations, from its abnegation of policies voted on by its quadrennial policy-making conferences, to control of the conference and apparatus by the AFT and the NEA, the two U.S. affiliates. This democratic deficit at the heart of the global federation has got to be tackled if it is to become a vehicle of authentic global teacher solidarity. The contradiction between the desires of the U.S. unions and needs of teachers in the global South is probably most apparent in foreign policy issues that might create tension between the U.S. unions and our government. The AFT and NEA carefully orchestrate EI policy to be sure it hews to U.S. government foreign policy desires, as I explain elsewhere.

                Informal reports I’ve received about the Ottawa conference indicate that it has become even more undemocratic, with passage of changes in the way the conference agenda is set.  The planning committee was previously elected. That seems to have posed too many risks to AFT and NEA control so the elected committee has been replaced by one the leadership selects.

                EI has adopted the reasoning that “sitting at the table” when governments make plans to destroy the union and teaching profession is better than not being there. Yet the conference showed increased resistance to this strategy, led by European affiliates being hammered by austerity and the “global governance agenda.” They are undercut by the EI’s cozy relationship with international finance organizations, primarily the OECD and the World Bank. The conference passed a measure to delete the World Bank from the list of international organizations with which EI collaborates.  An interesting note here is that the motion passed in part because AFT and NEA split their votes, with AFT voting for and NEA against. Why? My hunch is that the NEA did not want to lose its “seat at the table” while AFT can jettison this formal collaboration with international finance organizations dominated by the U.S. because the AFT accomplishes its goal of supporting U.S. capitalism and the US State Department through the Shanker Institute.

                Delegates voted to have the EI go on record opposing “Performance Related Pay” (so-called “merit” pay, tied to students’ standardized test scores). They pushed the international confederation to go on record opposing the system of evaluation and pay that few teachers, anywhere in the world, would say is fair or an accurate measure of their work.

                Does any of this really make a political difference? Am I being too critical? Recently I was told by an activist who does work with U.S. teacher unions that the EI is mostly irrelevant and that AFT’s collaboration with foreign governments does little or no harm.

                Tell that to Mexican teachers fighting, literally, for their lives as well as their livelihoods and the continued existence of public education in their country.  At the Ottawa conference, Randi Weingarten, AFT President and the individual who probably more than any other individual sets the direction of the EI, called the leader of SNTE, Mexico’s notoriously corrupt, undemocratic teachers union, to the microphone to embrace him, warmly. During the conference, the Mexican government sent 7000 troops into Oaxaca to force through its education policies. This brutal repression was acknowledged neither by those on the platform nor by the SNTE delegates from the floor. AFT and SNTE had previously issued a joint press release about their shared values.

                On a hopeful note, AFT joined the UK's National Union of Teachers and the unions representing Australia, New Zealand and South Africa in running an “anti-privatization” booth outside the conference hall’s formal proceedings. It drew enthusiastic crowds and indicates resolve among many unions that this struggle is not going to be won by trying to make peace with people who aim to destroy what teachers and teachers unions must defend, in their own interest as well as the well-being of children throughout the world.

    You can follow me on Twitter and Facebook as well as my blog here at New Politics.

  • Occupy Needs a Methodology: Review of Michael Gould-Wartofsky's "The Occupiers"

    Image

    Review of Michael Gould-Wartofsky, The Occupiers. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

    Occupy was the largest political mobilization of my lifetime. The explosion of energy it produced gave the feeling of perpetuity, with thousands of volunteers supporting each other through donations of food and standing together in solidarity against the police. But as the encampments became rooted, many had to check their excitement with a growing sense of disillusionment. It was clear that the Occupy strategy, and how it played out in practice, was rife with weaknesses that were ultimately exploited by those who sought to destroy Occupy and the discourse that it created.

    The Occupiers: The making of the 99 percent movement is a post-Occupy analysis of the movement from an on-the-ground first-person perspective. The author, Michael A. Gould-Watofsky, is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at New York University, studying social movements. While the text presents many facts to help us analyze Occupy, Gould-Wartofsky's findings rest on a contradictory methodology that is characteristic of sloppy social science.

                Gould-Wartofsky sets out to answer a series of questions by dissecting Occupy from the inside-out, beginning his inquiry with the historical root of the occupy strategy. Birthed from the devastation of the global financial crisis and nurtured in an Internet age that allowed for the easy reproduction of memes, the occupation of Zuccotti Park stood on the shoulders of the occupations that came before it in Egypt, Spain, and Wisconsin. Taking Zuccotti as his case, Gould-Wartofsky's questions ask what sorts of politics were birthed inside the occupied squares, and how those political ideologies operated in practice. The final chapters aim to explore the relationships that the Occupiers had nurtured (or neglected) with activist institutions at-large on the local, national, and international levels. (5)

                The methodology chosen to answer these questions is ethnography. Gould-Wartofsky's self advertised strength is his proximity to the subject, as he “joined the occupiers in Liberty Square…listening to their stories, observing their everyday practices, and occupying…as an embedded researcher, ethnographer, and photographer.” (3) His methods are two-fold, one year of participant observation, and another year (post-Occupy) of collecting semi-structured interviews with various occupiers in New York City and around the world.

                On the micro-level, Gould-Wartofsky's research does a fine job in presenting us with a first person account of the issues of Occupy. Considering the threats to validity that stem from full immersion, I was impressed by his critical stance towards the occupation. The text lays out a dense web of facts about the occupation of Zuccotti Park and how it was run—dispelling rumors that were untrue while adding to the arsenal of critiques of all ideological persuasions. Countering the myth of supposed leaderlessness within the encampments, Gould-Wartofsky demonstrates how occupiers who held significant social capital in the form of membership in various unaccountable decision making bodies, free time, and/or an attractive 'radical' politics, were able to influence the horizontal democratic process and assert their power by creating a de facto ruling class. In describing the discontents of the occupiers' political ideology, Gould-Wartofsky notes,

                “Other forms of coordination emerged from behind closed doors, where ad hoc 'affinity groups' met in secret to 'make things happen.' The most influential of them met regularly in a private apartment on the Lower East Side. Its membership was made up of some of the most socially networked occupiers and the most politically skilled organizers.” (123)

    This gap between theory and practice on behalf of the occupiers made up a worldview that would effect their efforts to organize cohesively.

                The schism within the occupiers ran deep. Detailing how political ideologies operated within the square, Gould-Wartofsky categorizes the competing groups as the 'Ninjas' who “were avowedly anarchist and anti-capitalist, opposed to the making of demands, and oriented toward the reoccupation of urban space,” (166) and the 'Recidivists', supporters of “a more pragmatist, populist politics, centered on coalition-building and community organizing for political and economic reform.” (166) It was this trend that brewed beneath the surface of the occupation's relationships with civil society groups and unions, allowing the struggle for resources within Zuccotti to influence the decisions of how Occupy would relate to other institutional actors. Unable to present a clear message, their alliance with organized labor would ultimately crumble, as portrayed by Gould-Wartofsky in the attempt by West Coast occupiers to shut down Pacific Coast ports with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), “the occupiers…had neglected to consult the very unions on whose behalf they claimed to be speaking.” (179) The discussion sheds light on the politics or, perhaps more accurately, anti-politics, of autonomy. This is most clearly stated by Boots Riley, a hip-hop artist interviewed by Gould-Wartofsky, who stated, “[autonomous actors] didn't like the idea of a mass movement in the first place. Their idea of a mass movement is a lot of people that agree with them.” (179)

                It is obvious that the Occupy encampments were congested with contentions: problems of political ideology, issues of operation and praxis, and a competition for resources that engendered a naive strategy. The facts that Gould-Wartofsky presents tell this story; the elephant in the room is the role of social science in radical politics, a role that I contend is not one of simply gathering facts but rather a role that influences what one chooses to do with the facts. What kinds of trends, findings, and observations can be derived from the facts, and how can they be organized in a way that leads to a richer understanding of social phenomena? Otherwise, there is nothing that separates a well researched work of political journalism from the insight into social life that we entrust to social scientists. It is a critical reflection on methodology, and what sorts of evidence one hopes to generate from their choice of methods, that divides the two mutually beneficial yet distinct genres.

                One of Gould-Wartofsky's methodological failings is that he does not discuss whether or not he has any intention of establishing a scope to his research, or if he believes that his findings could be extrapolated to a larger social structure. In other words, does one write about Occupy strictly from the perspective of what happened inside the encampments, or do the actions and activities of the encampments open up a window into a deeper insight of the operation of social movements in the 21st century? If not, then my critique is an ontological one—I believe there is a reality that exists outside of the subject being studied that can influence the subject and ethnography is a tool to study how the subject encapsulates the norms, cognitive patterns, language, and beliefs of that wider reality. If yes, then there are serious questions as to whether he has been able to extend his scope outward enough to encompass the roots of the movement and structural and causal mechanisms that have influenced it.

                So how does Gould-Wartofsky feel about method? To justify his use of participant observation, and to explain his methodological choice, he cites three works which contradict each other. The first, Ethnography Unbound: Power and Resistance in the Modern Metropolis edited by Marxist sociologist and ethnographer Michael Burawoy, is a collection of participant observation studies from a graduate course that Burawoy taught on the topic. The introduction and final chapter of the text are crucial insights into a methodological debate regarding not only Burawoy's own 'extended case method' approach, but also how Burawoy differentiates his approach from others.

                “The extended case method…seeks to uncover the macro foundations of a microsociology. It takes the social situation as the point of empirical examination and works with given general concepts and laws about states, economies, legal orders, and the like to understand how those micro situations are shaped by wider structures.” (282)

    In other words, while Zuccotti Park is the area where Gould-Wartofsky has conducted his participant observation, the purpose of the method is to reveal the influences on how and why people act the way they do in that particular context by zooming out and observing the role of social, historical, and political forces.

                The next citation is a collection edited by Jeffrey Juris and Alex Khasnabish titled Insurgent Encounters: Transnational Activism, Ethnography, and the Political. The introduction, co-written by the editors, states, “this approach to transnational social movements does not search for universal laws or test already formulated theories. Rather it generates new concepts and analyses in the process of ethnographic engagement.” (9) This is essentially a summary of grounded theory, an inductivist method within participant observation which seeks to take empirical data as the point of departure and construct theory from that data rather than begin a study with a research question and a hypothesis. It is the methodological stance that Burawoy places on the opposite end of the spectrum from his own extended case method. Gould-Wartofsky engages with some aspects of grounded theory as when, for example, he poses a series of working hypotheses that he generates after his immersion into Zuccotti rather than frameworks that he used to think about the issues a priori. (44) However, it is precisely Gould-Wartofsky's framing through research questions that might cause controversy among grounded theory supporters.

                Lastly, Gould-Wartofsky cites a working paper on a digital forum co-hosted by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), by Manissa McCleave Maharawal and Zoltan Glück, which argues that the participatory nature of Occupy requires ethnographers who are studying it to fully immerse themselves. “Because of the structure and process of Occupy, ethnography becomes a practice through which the researcher is inscribed in the movement.” It argues that Occupy, as a political body, requires the participation of all in attendance due to its consensus model, therefore the researcher is required to participate if they are to have an accurate look into the everyday life of the encampments. This paper argues for the dissolution of the distinction between participant and observer, holding the extreme position on the spectrum between full participant and complete observer. This seems at odds with Burawoy who states, in the introduction of Ethnography Unbound, that participant observation should not be reduced to postmodern concerns of textual analysis, what he likens to literary criticism. “Here scientific theories are exposed as simply another world view, this time that of the observer, in no way superior to the world view of the participant.” (3)

                Gould-Wartofsky uses a model of full participation; he states that he was an activist before Occupy and therefore he was already connected with the lead organizers before the event. This has, arguably, given him unprecedented access into the occupations, and allows for a considerable amount of rapport with gatekeepers. The issue not discussed by Gould-Wartofsky or the authors of the SSRC working paper, is that the structural mechanisms of consensus operate both ways; on the one hand consensus forces all participants (and participant-observers) to become engaged with the decision-making process, while on the other hand it disallows the neutrality necessary to counter bias. This is a consequence of the political problems associated with consensus—minorities are not able to make a reasoned dissent and both sides must compromise on their own principles. While it's impossible to be both a full participant and a detached observer, a discussion on the merits between the two are crucial for ethnographic reflexivity.

                It's clear that Gould-Wartofsky is picking and choosing from an assortment of qualitative and ethnographic methods to develop a toolbox, which in theory is perfectly acceptable. A mixed method approach that is crafted in the debate between epistemological and ontological viewpoints is always useful in order to be creative with the ways that a researcher seeks to encounter and understand social phenomenon, instead of being a slave to a partisan methodological viewpoint. He generalizes between occupations when interviewing actors from different encampments, in the tradition of the extended case method, but does not observe how super-structural causes could have affected Occupy. He generates concepts from empirical data, ethnographic immersion, and participant observation, in the tradition of grounded theory, but also poses research questions a priori. He is a full participant in Occupy, in the tradition of total immersion, but does not reflect on bias.

                In blending methods, what must be clear from the onset is what the researcher is doing, what are the pros and cons of the method, and a reflection and critical engagement with why the researcher chose the method they did. Otherwise, it is unclear as to whether Gould-Wartoksky imagines himself to be a social scientist on the ground writing journalism, or if this is supposed to be a work of social science.

                Ethnography is a methodology of spectra. Focusing on the researcher's distance, on one end is the full participation in the phenomenon, and on the other a total detachment. Each node on the spectrum requires a discussion on bias and validity; every position will carry its own strengths and weaknesses. And it is this very discussion that is completely lacking from The Occupiers — the term 'valid' does not appear once, while 'bias' appears twice, but never about Gould-Wartofsky's own research bias: first in relation to the bias that Gould-Wartofsky seeks to correct from previous studies (12), and second referring to the counteraction of racial bias within the encampment. (99)

                Without a clear take on how Gould-Wartofsky feels about the role of a participant observer and the context in which to study Occupy, we are left with an unclear analysis. There is no way to discern how Gould-Wartofsky seeks to posit and discuss occupy in relation to historical, political, and social influences. Whether a researcher chooses full participation or none, to generalize outward or to focus on particulars, to seek causation in the macro or interpret from the micro is a question of technique. What holds them all in common within a methodology is the critical thought that a researcher must engage in with her methods in order to come to the conclusions she comes to. To trace the root of an analysis, the reader must be able to discern what kind of a lens the ethnographer is working through. This requires a conversation that this text lacks.

                It is this conversation that Occupy also seemed to lack. After the coordinated crackdown by national and local government actors on Occupy encampments across the country, the occupiers dispersed and dozens of side projects were born in its wake. But their resistance to engaging in debates around the merits of competing political methods continued, often undermining them when they tried to assist the communities most affected by the financial crisis. Gould-Wartofsky, in a concluding chapter dedicated to tracing the activities of the occupiers post-mortem, describes a group of occupiers who allied themselves with housing activists in East New York to take back foreclosed homes by occupying them. With the best of intentions, the action ultimately devolved into chaos when the occupiers lost “control of the space itself to a growing population of squatters, many of them homeless exiles from Zuccotti Park who had come to replace the Glasgow-Carrasquillos in the occupied house.” (174) It is in these moments that I see a similarity between Occupy's inability to engage in a discussion on the political methods they chose and their repercussions, and The Occupiers lack of a critical methodological appendix. Both seem to lack discipline because they mistakenly believe that being precise equates to being authoritarian, and that holding the privileged position of researcher is a form of power so brutal that it is equivalent to the power held by capital and the neoliberal state.

                As Max Weber noted in his essays on methodology, “there is no absolutely 'objective' scientific analysis of culture…of 'social phenomena' independent of special and 'one-sided' viewpoints according to which…they are selected, analysed and organised for expository purposes.” Ethnographic methodology, and the rigor that has characterized ethnographers in discerning that methodology and toolbox, exists for the purpose of understanding how participant-observers, ethnographers, and qualitative researchers come to the conclusions they come to and what influences their interpretive lenses. With this knowledge, the reader is able to make a judgement on where the research fits in the collection of viewpoints that Weber describes. Without this rigor, without clarity, without an engagement in the debate of ‘who I am, why and how I am doing what I am doing, how I am interpreting what I am seeing and how I am entering into a space that I perhaps may not even understand’, anyone can write anything they want and mask it behind the title of social science.

     

    Riad Azar is a doctoral student in Sociology at the London School of Economics and a member of the New Politics editorial board. 

    This review was originally published in Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture

  • Bernie Sanders and #BLM: A Response to Dan La Botz

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    In a recent New Politics essay, Dan La Botz argues that “the debate between” Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and the Black Lives Matter (#BLM) movement is “one of the most important discussions of our time.”  It is “a great debate about the priorities and the program of the American people” that “could lead to the construction of a new analysis and lay the basis for a new and broad social movement” that helps us “find a new way forward against both capitalism and racism” – “a new movement that combines the fight for greater economic equality with demand for racial justice, perhaps a movement for socialism.”

       As the old saying goes, if something looks too good to be true, it probably is. I’m all for the analysis and movement that La Botz want to see. (I’ve been working to advance both for years).  In and of itself, however, the Sanders-#BLM ruckus does not strike me as a particularly productive sparkplug for the desired developments.  At the same time, I think tough and radical criticism of the Sanders campaign, major party electoralism, the #BLM’s tactics, and the Sanders-#BLM affair could provide a valuable educational moment on the path to the analysis and movement we seek. In what follows I will advance such criticisms in a spirit of solidarity with La Botz and with all others who are waging the good fights for a socialist and non-racist, non-imperialist (and non-eco-cial and non-sexist) America.

    Circling the Democratic Black Hole

    What do the confrontations that have occurred between #BLM activists and the Sanders campaign (and the Hillary Clinton and Martin OMalley campaigns) really amount to at the end of the day?  There is nothing particularly progressive about Black (or white, Latino, or Asian) activists coming without specific or radical demands to petition Democratic Party (or Republican) presidential candidates for policy ideas and (supposedly) heartfelt statements of concern for social and racial justice. The Democratic Party, LaBotz notes, “represents the American corporations and the capitalist system.”  It is, he writes, “a party that can never resolve the issues of economic inequality, racism, militarism, and imperialism.” Indeed. That would seem to make its leading presidential hopefuls poor candidates for a useful discussion about how to develop a path “beyond both capitalism and racism.”

    Certainly, the #BLM interventions at Sanders, Clinton, and OMalley’s campaign events are nothing to write home about when it comes to advancing anti-capitalism and anti-racism.  The activists’ tactic of beseeching white Democratic politicians for their thoughts and feelings about and against racism suggests that (for all their “revolutionary” imagery) they have failed to grasp one of the fundamental historical lessons of U.S. social movement and Black history: the Democratic Party and the broader U.S. major party electoral system are graveyards of grassroots struggle and radical aspirations. In a recent harsh reflection published by the indispensable Black radical zine Black Agenda Report, the incisive commentator and veteran Black activist Glen Ford puts things very well:

    “The greatest asset of the [longstanding elite movement to coopt independent Black politics and struggle] is the Democratic Party,…an institution that thoroughly dominates Black politics at every level…Two generations after the disbanding of the Black grassroots movement and the independent politics that grew out of that movement [in the 1950s and 1960s], the Democratic Party permeates political discourse in Black America. And the Democratic Party is where progressive movements go to die…If the emerging movement allows itself to be sucked into Democratic Party politics, it is doomed. Yet, the #BlackLivesMatter organization…is now circling the event-horizon of the Democratic Black Hole. …#BlackLivesMatter activists may convince themselves that they are confronting the ruling class electoral duopoly by disrupting presidential candidates’ speeches, but the tactic leads straight to cooptation. What is the purpose? If #BLM’s goal is to push the candidates to adopt better positions on criminal justice reform, what happens afterwards? The logic of the tactic leads to either a direct or indirect, implicit endorsement of the more responsive candidate(s). Otherwise, why should #BLM – or the candidates – go through the exercise?”

    Seeking Truth From Power

    To be sure, Marissa Johnson, one of the Seattle #BLM militants who disrupted Sanders explained later that "I don't have faith in politicians. I don't have faith in the electoral process. It's well documented that that doesn't work for us…So my gaze is not toward politicians and getting them to do something in particular.” Still, it seems that for a larger number of #BLM activists, solicitation of reform proposals from the two reigning state-capitalist-racist-imperialist parties “constitutes a kind of demand.  The group,” Ford notes, “doesn’t even require that candidates endorse #BLM’s own posed reformist demands.”  This isn’t even “speaking truth to power” – a futile and counterproductive endeavor and slogan for egalitarians, as Noam Chomsky reminded us long ago.  It’s more like seeking truth from power.

    The feckless futility of this approach was laid graphically bare after #BLM activists attempted to disrupt Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire.  As Ford comments, the video of #BLM’s subsequent closed-door meeting with Mrs. Clinton should be used in “future political education classes” as “a model of what happens when would-be movement leaders enter the lion’s den unarmed with political demands: they are humiliated and eaten alive.” The conservative Wall Street Democrat Clinton ended up lecturing the “radical” activists on the need to formulate concrete demands.

    After being hit by #BLM in Phoenix, Martin OMalley brought forth a “comprehensive” proposal for criminal justice reform.  How seriously are we supposed to take such a plan from a white former Baltimore Mayor and Maryland governor who undertook the mass arrest and incarceration of hundreds of thousands of Black citizens/ex-citizens during his years in office? 

    And how seriously are we supposed to take the anti-racist revolutionary posing of #BLM activists who have yet to undertake significant protests against the reactionary, white-pleasing Obama administration?  Obama has offered no real presidential counterweight to the deepening of the nation’ savage racial disparities or to the “New Jim Crow” system of racist mass arrest, incarceration, and felony marking that exists to enforce and deepen the nation’s still separate and unequal system of racial disparity and apartheid. “Under the Obama administration,” the left writer and activist John Halle recently reminded me, “aggregate African American wealth suffered its largest drop in history. Can you imagine how this would be interpreted if it had occurred under a Republican administration? It would be understood, correctly, as an expression of vicious, unreconstructed racism. Why do [‘left’ activists] apply a different standard to the current administration?” The main answer to Halle’s question is pure and simple racial identity politics, which encourages #BLM activists to protest white presidential candidates but not a deeply conservative commander-in-chief who happens to be Black. (One of #BLM’s most high profile agitators, DeRay McKesson, is a former Obama field organizer and Teach for America volunteer who likes to post Obama family vacation pictures). Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would not be impressed. Neither, of course, would Malcolm X or the Black Panthers.

    “The Democratic Party, likes its Republican duopoly cousin,” Ford notes, “is a criminal enterprise, polluting the politics of Black America.  Any sustained Black movement must, of necessity, be in opposition to the Democratic Party and its civil society annexes [that is, the NAACP, the National Urban League, most politically active Black churches, fraternities and sororities].  They are the enemies within, the people who have facilitated the Black mass incarceration regime for two generations.”

    Great White Hope or Great White Hype?

    What about the racial justice record of the nominal socialist and longstanding de facto Democrat Bernie Sanders? “What’s wrong with those people,” a young liberal white campus town (Iowa City) woman – a big environmentalist – said to me two months ago. “Don’t they know that Bernie is their best hope?” It was a chilling a statement – all too typical of the smug, racially insensitive liberalism one hears from white urban and university- and college-town progressives across the country.

    By “those people,” the young lady meant Black people, who she had recently read were not showing a lot of support (in polls) for Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. This was well before the recent incident in Seattle, where a Sanders speech was interrupted by #BLM activists. It was also prior to a similar disruption of Sanders by #BLM activist at the NetRoots conference in Phoenix.

    Black Americans with time and inclination to follow the inside baseball of U.S. legislative history can be forgiven for not seeing Sanders as their great white hope. As a member of the US House of Representatives, Sanders voted for Bill Clinton’s deeply racist 1994 “three strikes” crime bill. The legislation imposed tougher sentences, put thousands of more police on the streets and helped fund the building of extra prisons. It was known for its sadistic “three strikes” provision, which consigned “violent offenders” to lifetime imprisonment for a third criminal conviction, including for minor parole violations and drug addiction. Backed by congressional Republicans, the bill helped to dramatically expand the nation’s globally unmatched and wildly race-disparate mass incarceration system – this while crime was falling. As a Senator, moreover. Sanders voted for a measure that has advanced urban school privatization, deepened educational race disparities, and strengthened the hold of deadening standardized testing pedagogy over minority students: the No Child Left Behind Act. He has been a supporter of the state and federal Common Core States Initiative, another key part of the neoliberal-racist schools agenda.

    As a White House contender presidential candidate boasting his Civil Rights past (literally half a century ago) and launching a campaign in the wake of a significant Black struggle against an epidemic of racist white police shootings, Sanders has been slow to put racial justice anywhere near the center of his campaign. He has upped his rhetoric against racial inequality and institutional racism in recent weeks, under pressure from #BLM activists, it is true, but he has done so in a way that underestimates both the depth and degree of racial oppression in the contemporary US and the necessity of undertaking specifically anti-racist struggles against distinctively racist institutions and ideologies. He has exaggerated the extent to which contemporary US racial inequality and oppression can be addressed and overcome with color-blind economic populism. He has not turned against Washington’s racist and imperialist Pentagon System, which eats up 54 percent of the United States’ federal discretionary spending and accounts for nearly half of all military spending on the planet. He hasn’t called for that system’s dismantling and the use of the funds released to launch a domestic Marshall Plan to overcome the massive and crushing poverty that plagues Black America thanks to two and half centuries of slavery, a century plus of Jim Crow, a century of urban ghettoization, decades of liberal social policies that actually deepened racial inequality (see below), and four decades of racist mass incarceration. He has not apologized for his terrible “Three Strikes” vote (even Bill Clinton himself now calls the draconian and racist 1994 crime bill a “mistake”) or renounced his attachment to the miserable, Dickensian, racially problematic NCLB. He has not denounced or even noticed the intimate and toxic relationship between the United States’ racist global empire and the militarization of the local U.S. police departments that regularly harass and even gun-down unarmed Black Americans while gathering up vast swaths of those Americans people to function as the critical, multiply disenfranchised raw material for the nation’s globally unmatched and racially hyper-disparate mass incarceration and felony-marking system. And one really has to question the sincerity of his claims to be anti-racist when he has repeatedly made excuses for the vicious apartheid state of Israel’s terrible racist murders of Palestinian children in Gaza.

    There is no doubt that Sanders’ progressive domestic economic policy agenda – including single-payer national health insurance and major federal green jobs and infrastructure programs – would likely bring significant benefits to poor and working and middle-class Black Americans.  Cornel West is certainly right to tell CNN recently that Sanders is the best major party presidential candidate in the race so far for Black America. But so what? The same was true for Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards at this time in 2007. The Democratic Party (history’s second most enthusiastic capitalist and imperialist party) is no less of a toxic force in Black America (and indeed the U.S. and the world today) than it was then and Sanders is a considerably bigger longshot to attain the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination (the expert election prognosticator Nate Silver give Sanders an at best 5 percent chance) than was Edwards in the late summer of 2007 (months before his campaign imploded in a sex scandal). Glassy-eyed progressive Democrats who now regularly make electability analogies between Barack Obama in the summer of 2007 and Bernie Sanders in the summer of 2015 betray shocking ignorance of key differences between the former and fake-progressive non-Hillary candidate (Obama) and the latter and actually progressive non-Hillary candidate (Sanders). Obama 2007-2008 enjoyed remarkable corporate media approval.  He began accumulating what would be a record setting Wall Street-funded campaign war chest more than five years prior to the 2008 presidential election).  And he wore the deceptive but popular (with the Democratic primary base) mantle of being the “antiwar candidate.”  Sanders is far less favorably situated, to say the least.

    “For Anything That Pulls People Further Left”

    Should leftists participate in any and all debates that might contribute to the creation of an analysis and even a movement that links the struggle against class inequality to the fight against racial oppression?  Of course. Do the recent Sanders-#BLM incidents and the broader discussion they have sparked potentially contribute to such welcome developments? Perhaps so, to some degree. I think the discussions should include an honest and radical critique of the quadrennial candidate-centered major party “election madness” (Howard Zinn in March of 2008) and its recurrent longstanding negative impact on the rank-and-file-day-to-day social movement politics that have proven far more effective than electoral politics in advancing justice throughout U.S, history. If and when the new class/race analysis, national discussion, and movement that leftists rightly want emerges, my sense is that it will arise from forces and developments that go much deeper and further than Black activists’ engagement with the passing Sanders phenomenon. 

    The new civil rights movement that has emerged in the wake of the police murder of Mike Brown is here to stay for some time.  It still enjoys rich potential for learning and further radical development and sophistication for its diverse membership. “Some people that are involved [in #BLM],” one correspondent recently wrote me, “are objectionable opportunistic Democrats, many are leftists, others still don't hold very coherent political positions at all and are simply expressing legitimate outrage at the institutional racism inherent in our society.” Here’s to the possibility that Marissa Johnson’s perspective – properly skeptical about the promises of politicians and the utility of electoral politics for advancing racial and broader social justice and equality –gains traction in #BLM.

    The nominally socialist Sanders phenomenon, by contrast, is already slated for history’s dustbin (along with Gene McCarthy, George McGovern, Reverend Jesse Jackson, Dennis Kucinich, Howard Dean, and even John Edwards) by next spring, consistent with the candidate’s advance promise to support Hillary Clinton (or perhaps now Joe Biden) in the general election (with nothing demanded in return).  Here we can only hope that a Clinton or Biden victory in November of 2016 will give #BLM activists yet another lesson that the American System continues to be racist as well as capitalist, eco-cidal, patriarchal, and imperialist when the White House is occupied by a Democrat – even a Black or female Democrat – no less than when it is held down by a white male Republican. A Republican presidency always encourages droves of progressives to indulge in the lazy habit of blaming the nation’s problems on the terrible right wing GOP rather than on the deeper systemic issues that need to addressed and that cut across the two dominant parties that function as “two wings of the same bird of prey” (Upton Sinclair, 1904). It’s easier for Leftists to argue that the system is the problem when Democrats hold nominal power in elected office. The fact the Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden are unambiguously white may help Black activists act more effectively on the lesson than they have under a technically Black presidency.

    In the meantime, as Sanders himself partly suggests on the campaign trail, the essential task for left progressives remains the same before and after the seemingly endless presidential election spectacle, whatever its outcome: to develop popular militant grassroots movements strong enough to move the nation’s policy and political culture in a more just and democratic direction. Ultimately, the goal is to overthrow the nation’s racist and imperial plutocracy.

    “I'm not for any politician,” Ms. Johnson explained in Seattle after interrupting the white Scandinavia-praising candidate that some white progressives think Black Americans should see as their “great hope.” “But I'm definitely for anything that pulls people further left,” Johnson added, “anything that gets people asking more questions, and gets us closer to actually dismantling the system that has never, ever, ever, ever done anything for black people and never will. So I'm really trying to see my people get free by any means possible.” 

    There is of course no doctrinal road map laying out in advance how we get a movement that takes on all of Dr. King’s “triple evils that are interrelated”: class inequality, racial oppression, and military imperialism (today we must add to King’s great triplet at the very least patriarchy and eco-cide).  Get there we must, and soon – thanks to the environmental crisis spawned by “the triple [or quintuple] evils.”  If I am shown to be mistaken in my skepticism about the relevance of the Sanders campaign and its recent engagements with #BLM for the sparking of such a movement – and about the electability of Sanders – I will be happy to stand corrected by history.  Beggars for revolutionary catalysts can’t be choosers in a time when it is becoming clear that it is “socialism or barbarism if we’re lucky” (Istvan Meszaros).

    *Paul Street is a writer and activist in Iowa City, Iowa.  He is former Vice President for Research and Planning at The Chicago Urban League and a frequent contributor to teleSur English, Black Agenda Report, Counterpunch, ZNet, and Z Magazine.  His many books include Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (Rowman&Littlefield, 2007); The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Paradigm, 2010); and They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014).

  • A Response to Jean Batou on Ukraine

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    Jean Batou’s article Putin, The War in the Ukraine, and the Far Right in Volume XV No. 3 of New Politics, despite briefly acknowledging in its final paragraphs the role of NATO in the Ukrainian crisis, basically echoes the party-line apologists for NATO and American imperialism.

    In fact, the establishment press, the New York Times and the Guardian among others, have mentioned some of the details that undermine this party line even if they have not emphasized them. In particular, Batou ignores the fact that what precipitated the crisis was the insistence of the IMF that Yanukovich agree to an austerity program similar to the ones that have devastated Greece and Spain. And the principal victims of such a program would have been the Russian-speaking inhabitants of the eastern Ukraine. It was this industrial and mining area that would have become the next Greece.

    Batou spends a good deal of his article on Lenin’s denunciation of Czarist imperialism and Stalin’s resurrection of it. But Lenin’s defense of the right of self-determination was not confined to victims of Czarism. The fundamental issue in the present crisis is: do the Russian-speaking people of the Crimea and the Eastern Ukraine have the right to self-determination or not?

    In one paragraph of his article Batou states “… the Kiev powers endorsed an elementary democratic demand — the integrity of the Ukrainian nation…” A few paragraphs later he refers favorably to the Dayton Accord which dissolved the Yugoslav nation. How can the defenders of NATO and its fronts like the IMF and the OSCE defend the right to self-determination of Croats and Bosniaks while denying that right to the Russian speaking inhabitants of the Crimea and the Eastern Ukraine? The hypocrisy of NATO’s defenders was made even more blatant when Croatian nationalists, with the aid of the CIA, ethnically cleansed the Serbs of Krajina. For that matter, I have not seen any mention in the establishment press that the Russian-speaking majority of the Crimea became Ukrainian citizens in 1954 when Nikita Khrushchev without any vote ceded the area to the Ukraine. While Khrushchev was himself of Ukrainian origin, he most likely intended this act as a bribe to keep the Ukrainian party leaders in the Soviet Union.

    I assume that Batou’s article is aimed at the fringe left that is sympathetic to Putin. But in fact it is apologists for NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe who are Putin’s real friends. Putin’s popularity is at an all-time high as a result when, only a few years ago, the opposition movement was growing. It is the Russian people, especially on the border of Ukraine, who feel threatened by NATO expansionism.

    An interview by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times of May 2, 1998 put it best:

    I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.

    What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was. I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don't people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.

    And Russia's democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we've just signed up to defend from Russia, It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are — but this is just wrong.

    The person interviewed was George F. Kennan, one of the principle architects of NATO. 

  • George Bush (Still) Doesn’t Care about Black People

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    I was sitting in a one-bedroom apartment watching the telethon for Hurricane Katrina when it happened. After a commercial break, Kanye West stood nervously looking like he was about to do something that would end his career. He was fidgety and sweating when he said it: “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” It was a transcendent moment for Black America.

    Kanye articulated what we’d all felt watching the aftermath of Katrina: neglect. It was impactful, but also deeply misunderstood. Kanye West was ridiculed. Bush called it a nadir of his presidency. The backlash to his statement never diminished this unmistakable fact: Mr. West was right.

    Kanye's assertion "George Bush doesn't care about Black People" is misunderstood if you read it as a statement only about Bush, the man. Kanye's statement comes from a democratic understanding of the president as the face of the American Empire. Historically (and in that moment), America drags its feet when responding to calamities suffered by people of color; that is, if it responds at all. There has been much hand wringing about the death of black people at the hands of the police, but that is not the only thing that ails black America.

    Poor healthcare, poverty, unequal sentencing, inadequate prison oversight, and de facto school segregation are all adverse conditions that disproportionately affect people of color in this country. There has been a great deal of talk about these ills, but aside from the Republican-contested Affordable Care Act, we have yet to see meaningful policy implemented to correct them. If the president is the face of America, then Kanye’s analysis still holds.

    George W. Bush recently returned to New Orleans. He was invited to attend a ceremony marking the ten-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. When he spoke about the disaster, he said, "The storm nearly destroyed New Orleans…” President Bush is as wrong in this statement as Kanye was right a decade before.

    The storm was not what nearly destroyed New Orleans. Poverty, racism, neglected levees, and Bush’s disastrous response was what nearly destroyed America’s most distinctive city.  While I suspect the levees have been repaired and response times have improved, poverty and racism are still very real features of life in New Orleans and America.

    George Bush was the face of America in 2005. He was ultimately responsible for the horrible response to the catastrophe that disproportionately impacted the lives of working-class black people in that city.  The slow response of the Bush presidency still affects black people in New Orleans. The black middle class has left, poverty is above the national average, and what has been called rebuilding is really gentrification at the expense of the poor.

    With that understanding, it is safe to say that Kanye was right. And because of the continued impact of Bush’s presidency, his words are relevant today.  George Bush (still) doesn’t care about black people.

     

    Lawrence Ware is a professor of philosophy and diversity coordinator for Oklahoma State University’s Ethics Center. A frequent contributor to Democratic Left and contributing editor RS: The Religious Left, he has also been a commentator on race for HuffPost Live, CNN, and NPR. 

  • Lessons from Greece: Leo Panitch and Richard Fidler debate SYRIZA

    This is a video of a recent debate between Leo Panitch and Richard Fidler who discuss their differing socialist analyses of the politics of SYRIZA.

    The debate was moderated by Susan Spronk.

    The video is from Links: Journal for International Socialist Renewal but the debate was organized by the Socialist Project (Canada).

    See related articles by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, and Richard Fidler.

  • SOA Watch Calls for Protests as Anniversary of Ayotzinapa Events Approaches

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    One month from today marks the first anniversary of the horrific state crime perpetrated against the students of the Ayotzinapa teachers' college in Mexico. 

    On September 26 and 27, 2014, Mexican police attacked protesting students from Ayotzinapa in the state of Guerrero. The police killed six people, including three students and three bystanders. They forcibly disappeared 43 Ayotzinapa students, who remain missing.

    In response to these heinous crimes, a protest movement erupted in Mexico where hundreds of thousands took to the streets and social media (#YaMeCanse, #FueElEstado) to demand justice for the Ayotzinapa 43 and all those affected by Drug War violence.

    In the United States protests were also held across the country and Mexican-American communities and allies continue to organize against Plan Merida and the U.S.-funded militarization that is destroying Mexico. Last month, a delegation of School of the America Watch (SOA Watch) activists visited Ayotzinapa to connect with family members and students to better inform our resistance and strengthen our solidarity with Mexico.

    This September 26, we at SOA Watch ask you to join an action taking place in cities across the U.S. to remember the Ayotzinapa 43 and to demand that the U.S. stop funding the militarization that is enabling human rights violations in Mexico. Click here for a list of actions taking place throughout the U.S. (which will continue to be updated).

    If there is not an action in your area, we urge you to organize one, make signs, print our Ayotzinapa posters, and demonstrate in a public space to raise awareness about the Ayotzinapa 43. Demand an end to the U.S. taxpayer-funded Drug War in Mexico!

    Events on or around the 1-year anniversary are also a great way to connect the dots around the bigger issue of U.S. militarization in Latin America, and a mobilization opportunity for our 25th Anniversary Vigil. Click here to order November Vigil palm cards to distribute on September 26! Ayotzinapa Vive, La Lucha Sigue!

    You also still have a few more days to order bulk boxes of !Presente!, the biannual, bilingual newsletter and Vigil mobilizing tool by clicking here.

    *Arturo J. Viscarra is the SOA Watch Advocacy Coordinator

     

  • May First/PeopleLink Under Attack!

    May First/People Link is being attacked in a Denial of Service attack that is unprecedented in its length and viciousness. We have been fighting off this attack for over three weeks now.

    We are convinced that the attack is political. We know how the attackers are targeting us, we know they are targeting the entire organization’s systems and we know that they are carefully monitoring our responses because they are quickly adapting to every move our technologists make to return us to service.

    We know they are sophisticated and capable. We do not know who they are and, while this started with our defending of our member The National Network of Abortion Funds (which was under DOS attack), we can’t be sure why precisely they are attacking us. In the end, however, that is not the important issue.

    Both the United States and Mexico (as is true of the entire world) are in profound, irreversible crisis. Fierce struggles are taking place. The rulers of our countries are searching for some strategy of self-protection and all their strategies will make people’s lives much harder. Repression is common and attacks on the resistance movements are more frequent.

    To resist that, our movements need the Internet and answering that need is our mission as an organization. May First has been the organization that combines actual technology service with the kind of activism that holds tech anc communications issues up. While we are not the only organization in the coalitions we work in, we are the only one with actual technology service experience. While we are not the only alternative provider, we are the one most active in concrete movement work around these issues.

    The disappearance of May First would constitute a huge blow to our movements of struggle. We do not intend to allow that to happen.

    Our technologists will not allow it. They have worked day and night for weeks fighting off this attack and keeping us on-line. They have forgone vacations, weekends and very often sleep to keep us functional.

    Our members will not allow it. Throughout the difficulties and crippled communications they have had to endure, our members have remained strong, committed and supportive. We have not had any member loss as a result of this attack and that, perhaps, is our greatest victory.

    Finally, our Leadership Committee will not allow it. We have been in constant consultation and held emergencies meetings about these attacks, made several decisions about it, executed an effective members and movement communications program to keep people up to date and have just approved yet another additional layer of protection for our organization.

    We think that attack is going to be the normal for us from now on. We are ready for that. Our enemies should know that successful resistance to those attacks, protection of our members services and data and constant outreach to our movement with innovative alternatives is our normal

    This is a battle we need to win and we intend to do just that.

    On behalf of our entire organization, we thank all our movement allies for your critically important support and the opportunity to continue working with you.

    The Leadership Committee

    May First/People Link
    237 Flatbush Ave, #278
    Brooklyn, NY 11217