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Socialism from below

Dan Swain discusses the contested ambitions and leaderships within our movements. This article was originally published in the Summer 2015 issue of the rs21 magazine.

Throughout the history of socialist movements and ideas, the fundamental divide is between Socialism-from-Above and Socialism-from-Below

So argues Hal Draper’s 1966 pamphlet The Two Souls of Socialism. In it, he distinguishes two different broad trends in the socialist movement. Socialism from above had dominated – and would continue to dominate – the 20th century, in the form of Stalinism in the East and social democracy in the West. Both of these, despite their apparent differences, shared a belief that socialism could be handed down by the right kind of government, without the active participation of those who live under it. To these Draper added, perhaps somewhat unfairly, the anarchist movements, influential on US campuses at the time, who were committed to a kind of insurrectionary politics in which a small, well-organised group could bring about change through militant direct action.

Against all of these, Draper defended socialism from below, a commitment, traced back to Marx, that “socialism can be realised only through the self-emancipation of activised masses in motion, reaching out for freedom with their own hands mobilised from below in a struggle to take charge of their own destiny, as actors (not merely subjects) on the stage of history.”

But what does this mean today, in the 21st century? Draper’s pamphlet begins with the claim that “for the first time in the history of the world, very likely the majority of its people label themselves ‘socialist’ in one sense or another”. This is painfully untrue today. Stalinism has largely disappeared, and social democracy has abandoned the idea of socialism as any sort of goal. The most that historic social democratic parties offer now is a managed capitalism. Moreover, it might be argued that the ‘from above’ and ‘from below’ distinction seems increasingly unable to capture the complexities of contemporary politics – social movements from below in Spain, Greece and Scotland, feed directly into political parties that promise reforms ‘from above’. What’s the point, in these circumstances, of banging on about socialism from below?

I want to suggest three contexts in which it is still possible and valuable to talk about socialism from below as a way of doing politics. I stress this is a way of doing politics, rather than a set of hard and fast principles. It won’t give you all the answers in any situation, but it can help to guide actions. It also helps identify what its opposite is. Politics ‘from above’ is how we are encouraged to think of politics. It is politics primarily understood as the administration and management of people – well-meaning management perhaps, but still management. It is part of how we are encouraged to think of our social world – as something so complex it can only be understood and managed by a set of experts (as I write, the Guardian website carries a banner advert saying “Dear Bill Gates, will you lead us in the fight against climate change”). Because of this, it is a default, it is easy. By contrast, socialism from below is difficult. It is a cluster of problems and challenges, which stem from the belief that if socialism is to be anything, if it is to be a world worth living in, it has to be the product of the collective, participative struggles of large numbers. This is so much harder than politics as usual.

Democracy

The first arena where socialism from below matters is the question of democracy. There has historically been, and to a certain extent there still is, a way of talking about socialism as being concerned first and foremost with material comfort and a more equal distribution of wealth and resources. To the extent that democracy fits into this it is often as an optional extra, a ‘good thing’, but not strictly part of the picture. Socialism from below rejects this, and re-asserts democracy as an integral part of socialism. Socialism from below follows from a commitment to democracy in socialism in the following way: If your goal is just material comfort, or a better distribution of resources, you don’t need mass participation. You don’t need to involve, engage and mobilise a movement. Or rather, you do, but only temporarily, only in order to back up demands and policies, put pressure on those in power. If, on the other hand, your goal is a society in which the overwhelming majority are capable of participating in the running of society, you have to be concerned with empowering them to do so, and this empowerment requires a level of democracy.

Democracy is thus not merely a vital part of the goal of socialism, it is also a vital part of the means of getting there. Socialism from below means being concerned with those forms of activity and organisation that empower people, which allow them to develop the confidence, ideas and skills which might allow them to actively participate in the democratic management of society. This is not to say that we have to ‘be the change we want to see’, or that the rules for democratic management of production ought to be implemented in your Capital reading group or housing campaign. But if social movements and political organisations give no space for participants to even glimpse what democratic self-organisation might involve, they are unlikely to contribute to socialism.

The state

The second dimension is the state. In Draper’s account, one characteristic feature of socialism from above is a naïve approach to the state, a belief that if only the state can be captured, state power can be wielded to achieve socialism. It is probably this approach that has done most to devalue the idea of socialism in the minds of contemporary anti-capitalists. Many believe this focus on the state has led to betrayals or tyranny, and instead we should seek to avoid it, hold it at arm’s length and build independent spaces in capitalism’s ‘gaps’.

If socialism is just about taking control of the existing state, it is understandable that many are suspicious of it. But socialism from below implies a different approach. It argues that the institutions of the state are structured in a way that denies popular control. Alongside the formally ‘democratic’ pieces of the state – where those exist – are a series of hierarchically organised bodies, the police, army, judiciary, civil service etc., that limit the space for democracy. These are a block on the possibility of extending democratic control in society. These institutions must be removed and replaced. This is the lesson Marx learnt from the Paris Commune: “the working class cannot simply lay hold of ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” Rather, they must build their own, democratically controlled, institutions to perform the few positive functions of modern states.

But if socialism from below does not believe that the state can be used to deliver socialism, nor does it believe it can be ignored. Firstly, when it comes to organisations like the police and the army, you can ignore these institutions as much as you like, but they will not ignore you. Rather, any movements that challenge the existing order will be brought into conflict with these forces, and needs to be capable of organising to defeat them.

Secondly, socialists must be prepared to support and participate in movements that make demands upon existing states – demands for reforms and improvements in people’s lives. This is not because we believe that these reforms will add up to socialism. Rather, it is because it is through these movements that people are brought into collective action, through which they develop confidence, organisation and experiences that allow them to see the possibility of organising society differently. Demanding and defending reforms, and the conflicts that they lead to, help bring forward Draper’s actors on the stage of history. This may include running elections, but always with the understanding that our goal is to strengthen movements from below.

Leadership

The final question I want to address is leadership. By leadership, I don’t just mean the formal leadership of organisations, but a whole set of relationships within movements and organisations, in which some people ‘lead’ and attempt to get others to ‘follow’. Again, it is worth saying that it is difficult in the same way that the alternative is easy. A socialism from above leader knows best, tells people what to do, gives out the orders. A socialism from below leader is motivated by a desire to empower others, and ultimately make themselves irrelevant.

An important question here is the dynamic between ‘mobilising’ and ‘empowering’ people. Mobilising people to take action is a vital part of any ‘leadership’ and it is just as vital to socialism from above as socialism from below. No mass movement can come into existence if people are not motivated and brought into action. But what best mobilises people in the short term may not be the best for empowering them in the long term. People can be sparked into action by all sorts of methods, but not all of these help empower them to become agents of their own emancipation.

Take a concrete example here: the deal that the Syriza government agreed with the ECB was clearly a defeat. Whether you agree or not that it was the only option, it clearly was a set-back for the Greek people and Syriza as an organisation. It involved going back on key elements of Syriza’s programme, and only marginal improvements on previous deals. Yet Tsipras, and much of the Syriza leadership, declared it a victory. You can understand why they did – they were no doubt terrified of admitting limitations, of demobilising and demoralising their followers. However, calling a defeat a victory, and not acknowledging the way they had been forced to retreat, risks disempowering and alienating their support base, and in the long run makes even short term mobilisation harder.

Trotsky, in a debate on socialist morality (usually interpreted as justifying anything in service of the revolution), recognises this point: “The liberation of the workers can come only through the workers themselves. There is, therefore, no greater crime than deceiving the masses, palming off defeats as victories, friends as enemies, bribing workers’ leaders, fabricating legends, staging false trials… These means can serve only one end: lengthening the domination of a clique already condemned by history. But they cannot serve to liberate the masses.” If the goal is just mobilising people, there are all manner of ways of doing that, including actively deceiving them. On the other hand, if your goal is to empower them to become actors in their own emancipation, deceiving them is a pretty poor start. It may be true that anything goes that serves the revolution, but if the revolution is to be ‘from below’, not everything serves it.

But if lying and deceiving the masses is ruled out, there remain a host of other things that are surely both permissible and necessary. Rhetoric, polemic, encouragement, imagination, all of these can change people’s conceptions of what is possible, and inspire them into activity which can expand horizons still further. But these must be backed up by rigorous attention to what actually empowers people in the long term. What this boils down to is the simple point: the ‘leader’ from below may want to change the world, but they also believe that they can do it only with others (and a great many others), and these others must learn in practice that another world is possible.

If socialism from below is to mean anything today, it is as a guiding thread that runs through our political practice, one that constantly reminds us to ask whether and how what we do empowers people to become agents of their own emancipation. To achieve this truly would be ‘doing politics differently’ – differently from the capitalist parties, broken social democracy, and, sadly, so many revolutionary groups that have gone before. The devil, as ever, is in the detail; but no one said it was going to be easy.

July 17, 2015
Same-Sex Marriage: An Ambiguous Victory

In the summer of 1994, my partner and I happened to be on vacation in Stockholm for the Pride celebration, so we joined in. I remember it as a rather modest, subdued affair compared to the ebullient marches I remembered from New York and San Francisco. But what struck me most was the lesbian/gay federation’s emphasis on legal recognition for same-sex partnerships, at a time when Sweden banned sex in gay bathhouses. I thought these were upside-down priorities. Swedish same-sex couples would win in fact the right to register for partnership benefits in 1995, while the ban on bathhouse sex stayed on the books until 2004. What a curious country this is, I remember thinking.

Little did I know. With the US Supreme Court’s ruling on June 26 establishing a nationwide right to same-sex marriage, tens of millions of people in the 28 states without laws against discrimination based on sexual orientation are now free to marry someone of the same sex – and be fired or thrown out of their homes if their bosses or landlords find out and disapprove. The stage is set for countless repetitions of the plot of the 2014 film Love Is Strange, where two gay men who get married after decades together end up broke and homeless as a result – though that story is set in New York City, where both city and state anti-discrimination laws make an exception (as is usual) for “faith-based” employers like Catholic schools.

How did we end up in this peculiar situation? The fight for partnership rights originally gathered steam as a reaction against glaring injustices. Especially during the height of the AIDS epidemic, the trauma of a partner’s sickness and death was compounded for thousands of gay men by having their hospital visits barred and being thrown out of apartments that were in their dead partners’ names. We can only rejoice at the spread of protections that have safeguarded health insurance, housing rights, immigration rights, tax equality and more for people in same-sex relationships. In this sense, the Supreme Court’s ruling is the culmination of a positive trend.

But at the same time, the lesbian/gay movement’s increasing focus on marriage has reflected a negative trend. From the 1970s to the 1990s, the leadership of US LGBT movements was largely in the hands of the left. Its high points were the national marches in 1979, 1987 and 1994, which were organized through a painstakingly inclusive, democratic process and championed a broad range of progressive demands. The balance of LGBT forces shifted dramatically with the Millennium March on Washington in 2000, organized from the top down by the right-leaning Human Rights Campaign and the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (a gay-founded Protestant denomination). Although the National Equality March in 2009 was more broad-based, the movement has never fully returned to the left-leaning agenda of the previous century.

The emphasis on marriage has been an ambiguous legacy of the movement’s political shift. Wherever in today’s world same-sex marriage is won, it is a victory for equality – and at the same time a contribution to growing inequality. It is a victory for equality, because it allows millions of same-sex partners to enjoy basic rights that cross-sex spouses take for granted, like not being thrown out of your home when your partner dies. It is a contribution to growing inequality, because it allows the state to pursue the neoliberal agenda of transferring its social responsibilities for people in need to their families. In return for the rights they are granted, same-sex couples pledge to form stable, difficult-to-dissolve households that bear the burden of supporting their members when they are unemployed, disabled or sick. And in fact, initial studies have shown that same-sex marriage helps increase inequality in LGBT communities. Well-off lesbians and gay men gain from it, notably from lower inheritance taxes. Low-income LGBT people often lose out on average, particularly where poor people’s social benefits are slashed when they have an earning spouse.

This helps explain a paradox of sexual politics: marriage equality has been making rapid, relatively easy gains, while abortion rights remains a hard-fought battle. As Katha Pollitt has pointed out, “Marriage equality has cross-class appeal [whereas it’s] low-income women who suffer the most from abortion restrictions – and since when have their issues been at the top of the middle and upper classes’ to-do list?” Furthermore, “Marriage equality costs society nothing [but] reproductive rights come with a price tag.”

For at least a decade now, there has been a steady drumbeat of criticism of the one-sided focus on marriage from progressive LGBT veteran activists and intellectuals. A high point was the 2006 statement “Beyond Marriage,” which urged “alternative forms of household recognition beyond one-size-fits-all marriage,” access “for all, regardless of marital or citizenship status, to vital government support programs,” an end to all “state regulation of our sexual lives,” a push for a “caring civil society” instead of privatization of social services, and LGBT movement strategies that speak to the “widespread hunger for authentic and just community.”

As long as marriage equality offered a simple approach and a prospect of fast, easy victories, support for progressive alternatives has been limited. Now, however, more and more same-sex couples will be experiencing joys of marriage that have previously been a monopoly of cross-sex couples, from tensions over sexual exclusiveness and the division of housework to custody and alimony fights. Especially if the broader left gains more support in response to economic crisis, wars and racist violence, a big audience may yet be won for a radical vision of domestic equality.

*Peter Drucker is an activist in the Netherlands and an advisory editor of Against the Current. His most recent book, Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism, is just out in paperback from Haymarket.

July 13, 2015
AFT's endorsement of Clinton: An undemocratic decision that should be reversed

           On July 11 the AFT announced its Executive Council “overwhelmingly” endorsed Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for President. It did so, the official announcement reported, on the basis of interviews (not released to members) and the results of a poll. This is a terribly wrong decision for the union. Members should demand the Executive Council rescind it, replacing this hierarchical, premature decision with a totally different process: a referendum of members that follows and is informed by debate in union outlets. Every local should be charged by the Executive Council with providing space and place for members to air their opinions. The national union should encourage use of its magazine and website for this debate. In this discussion the leadership will have the opportunity to persuade members that endorsing Clinton is the wisest choice but it will be obligated to carry out the will of the membership as expressed in the referendum.

            What is most destructive in AFT’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton is that it has disempowered members at the historical moment when we most need revitalized teachers unions to save public education and its critical function in a society that identifies itself as democratic. The questions and answers about the process offer few specifics except that the national union conducted polls of members and interviews with (some) candidates. According to the union, the Executive Council endorsement was made based on this information, though people who know Washington politics have been aware for many years of the public love fest between AFT President Weingarten and Clinton. The process of seeking member opinion was an embarrassingly transparent cover for Weingarten’s longstanding decision that Clinton would be the AFT’s candidate.

            Not all Executive Council members approved the endorsement, though how individuals voted has not been revealed to members as it should be. While Weingarten holds much responsibility for handling this endorsement as if it were hers to make, the Executive Council members are equally responsible. Those who voted for the endorsement voted on behalf of members without having consulted their own constituencies, let alone the national union membership. They should also be called to account for their shamefully undemocratic action.

            On the blogosphere Bernie Sanders’ teacher supporters are probably the most outraged by AFT’s endorsement of Clinton. They understand that Clinton endorses the bipartisan policies that have deprofessionalized teaching and made public education a profit-center for transnational corporations. Sanders’ supporters are working for a candidate they believe will fight for progressive policies the union should (but does not) endorse. They are right about Sanders being a Left alternative to Clinton, and that we very much need politicians to push hard against privatization and testing, as well as defending labor, the environment, and progressive economic policies. While Sanders is far better than Clinton, I question whether supporting any Democrat is going to be sufficient to save public education.

            Still, even those who think the AFT is right to support Clinton should be disturbed by this endorsement because it undercuts the union’s power, regardless of which candidate we endorse. A fully democratic endorsement process would truly inform and mobilize members, strengthening the union nationally and locally, making us stronger in the election and beyond. Weingarten and too many members think we can rely on cozy personal relationships with politicians and "access" to powerful elites to defend our schools, our jobs, and democracy. We can’t. Only an educated, active membership that understands the profound crisis public education faces is going to be able to turn back our opponents – who include Hillary Clinton and her Wall Street supporters.

           Another reason US teacher union members need vigorous, thoughtful debate followed by a referendum about whom to endorse in this coming presidential election because the endorsement’s impact extends well beyond the US. Washington in effect sets education policy in international finance organizations, like the World Bank, and teachers and students elsewhere are seeing public education systems dismantled with astounding rapidity and violence. We have a moral and political obligation to our students, our profession, our communities, and our colleagues in the rest of the world to insist that AFT Executive Council members stand up for a different kind of unionism. To have teachers unions that can fight – and win – we need members to understand that they make policy. The union is theirs.

A version of this article appears in The Jacobin.

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July 13, 2015
The Catholic Church versus the IRA Hunger Strikers of 1923

In the Ireland of 1922, a civil war tore through the land and in its path it ripped apart families and friendships. It also created a deeper wedge in an unstable society where the church grappled for top position in an emerging new state.

The Irish Republican Army had fought a War of Independence against British rule for over three years and, led by the young enigmatic Michael Collins, it managed to push the British government to the negotiating table.

Hopes of achieving a free and united Irish republic were dashed when negotiations resulted in six counties of the northern part of the island staying with Britain and the remaining 26 counties of the south gaining home rule under the guise of an Irish Free State.

It split the Irish republican movement in two halves between those who favoured an Irish Free State and those who wanted to continue the fight for an Irish Republic. What followed was the most unsavoury of wars; a civil war.

It was a short lived campaign but a bitter and bloody one. It was a war that saw brothers fighting against brothers and comrades who had fought together during the War of Independence now on opposing sides.

The Irish Free State won the Civil War and as it came to an official end in May 1923, republican prisoners remained incarcerated. To protest at their continued imprisonment, IRA prisoners carried out a hunger strike.

The act of Irish republican prisoners going on hunger strike had been used during the War of Independence and continued to be used during the Civil War when twenty three members of the women’s wing of the IRA, Cumann na mBan, who were imprisoned in Dublin’s Mountjoy jail, conducted a hunger strike in February 1923. After 34 days the women were released, including Nellie Ryan who was a sister-in-law of the Free State Minister of Defence Richard Mulcahy.

Although hostilities had come to an end in spring 1923, internment without trial became a common aspect of Free State tactics against republicans and this led to IRA prisoners taking to another hunger strike in late 1923.

The Free State government used various tactics to break this hunger strike, including supplying prisoners with forged orders from IRA headquarters to call off the strike. The government also had the overwhelming support of the Catholic Church which was also used as a tool to break the strike.

The Catholic hierarchy had a keen interest in the formation of the new Irish Free state thus becoming a staunch supporter of its government. The Church established a strong opposition to the IRA and this can be clearly seen in its attitude to the republican hunger strikers of 1923.

Large numbers of IRA prisoners went on hunger strike in the early winter of 1923, but it did not stir the government into action. Neither did the Church flinch; it saw the republican movement as subversives. The Church instead solidified its full support for the Irish Free State with its bourgeoisie interests and stern opposition to left wing politics.

The Church had mildly supported the IRA during the War of Independence but, during the Civil War it had changed its outlook.

From the start of the Civil War in 1922, IRA volunteers were instantly condemned from the pulpit while some priests even refused family members of hunger strikers to enter a Church or even light a candle for their loved one. Such tactics would increase as the year went on.

Without any release in sight for the many IRA prisoners still incarcerated after the end of the war in 1923, 300 republicans prisoners in Mountjoy jail started a hunger strike in October. The hunger strike soon spread to other institutions of incarceration resulting in over 7,000 prisoners going on hunger strike across Ireland.

Days before the hunger strike began, the Catholic hierarchy released a statement declaring their opposition to the IRA. The statement called on excommunication for IRA members who partook in the war against the Free State. This attitude of the church hardened as the IRA hunger strike began.

The total tally of hunger strikers in Mountjoy was 462 while in Cork jail they numbered at 70. The Curragh prison camp had the highest proportion of hunger strikers with 3,390 while in the Newbridge camp they totalled at 1,700. In Kilkenny jail there were 350 hunger strikers while 711 prisoners went on strike in Gormanstown camp. In Dundalk jail there were 200 hunger strikers and in Harepark camp there were 100. Members of Cumann na mBan also joined the strike and had 50 of its members on hunger strike in the North Dublin union.

Conditions in these places were appalling while the treatment handed out to the hunger strikers was calculated to break the strike and most importantly their morale. Medical attention was nil regarding the prisoners while simple things such as clothing and bedding were denied to many. Lice, fleas and rats infested the jails and conditions worsened as the Winter wore on.

The hunger strike of 1923 lasted for 41 days and tragedy rather than victory was to be the outcome.

Two IRA members from Cork died on hunger strike just days apart. The first was Denis ‘Dinny’ Barry from Riverstick who died on November 20 while Andrew O’ Sullivan from Mallow died two days later and even though death had occurred, the stance of both the government and church did not soften towards the prisoners.

Denis Barry was a member of the first Cork brigade and had been politically active in Sinn Fein. In 1917 he became election agent for W.T. Cosgrave in the Kilkenny by-election, one in which Cosgrave was successfully elected, but just six years later Barry would find himself imprisoned by the government Cosgrave was in charge of.

In 1922 Barry was imprisoned in Newbridge camp in Kildare and took part in the hunger strike of 1923. After 34 days protesting against the harsh regime and undignified conditions, Barry died but even in death he was still refused dignity.

The body of Denis Barry was not released to his family and was instead, on the orders of Minister of Defence Richard Mulcahy, buried in the grounds of Newbridge prison camp. The Barry family took legal action against this and eventually achieved the body of their loved one but their stress did not end there.

Upon returning back to Cork with the body of the dead hunger striker, the Bishop of Cork Daniel Cohalan, instructed his priests not to allow Barry’s funeral in any church. Ironically just a few short years before, Bishop Cohalan had been a strong vocal supporter of Terrence McSwiney the Sinn Fein lord mayor of Cork who died on hunger strike in Brixton prison, but shortly after McSwiney’s death bishop Cohalan’s attitude towards the IRA changed.

Not long after MacSwiney’s death, Bishop Cohalan issued a decree condemning the IRA in which he stated that: ‘Anyone who shall within the diocese of Cork organise or take part in an ambush or in kidnapping or otherwise shall be guilty of murder or attempted murder and shall incur by the very fact the censure of excommunication.’

Bishop Cohalan was the perfect example of Catholic hierarchy hostility towards the Republican movement. It was a hostility based on the interests of the church which wanted a strong grasp on an emerging new country, one which would be conservative and Catholic both socially and politically.

On December 10 1922 the bishop had preached publicly his support for the Anglo Irish treaty which set up the Irish Free State and he urged his flock to do the same. This led to an even greater wedge between the Catholic church and many IRA members, yet it would be the incident with Denis Barry that would seriously taint the Bishop of Cork and the Catholic church in republican eyes.

Because of Bishop Cohalan’s stern objection to Barry’s body being let into a Catholic church, the dead hunger striker had to lay in state in the Cork Sinn Fein headquarters on the Grand Parade in Cork city. Barry was then taken in a funeral procession to St.Finbarr’s cemetery where he was buried in the Republican plot next to Terrence MacSwiney whose funeral Bishop Cohalan presided over three years previously.

In place of a priest was David Kent, Sinn Fein Teachta Dála (representative) for Cork and brother of Thomas Kent who was executed for his part in the 1916 Rising. Kent gave an oration, recited the rosary and sprinkled holy water on the grave.

On November 28th 1923, the day Barry was buried, Cohalan sent an open letter to the Cork Examiner newspaper publicly denying a Christian burial for Denis Barry and urging all men of the cloth to stay away from any such attempts for a funeral for the dead hunger striker. Bishop Cohalan went so far as to write to the Bishop of Kildare Dr. Patrick Foley to enquire about Barry getting the last sacraments. Denis Barry did indeed receive the last rites from a Fr. Doyle who was serving as prison chaplain and this did not impress the Bishop of Cork.

Two days after Barry’s death another IRA prisoner from Cork died. Andrew O’ Sullivan died on November 22nd and the strike was called off the day after.

The attitude of the Catholic Church towards the IRA and those imprisoned and on hunger strike during the Civil War sums up the position the church took in the aftermath of the conflict.

Once the Free State was established the Church saw an opportunity to position itself in a seat of power. Although many priests and some bishops continued to sympathise with the Republican movement post War of Independence, the majority followed the middle class patterns the provisional government were knitting out.

When the hunger strike came to an end, only women prisoners were released. The men remained in prison until the following year which would see some of them granted their freedom in drips and drabs. By then the Irish Free State was fully set up through a bedrock of conservative Catholicism.

The Church hierarchy decided to support those who represented the haves rather than the have nots and the total disregard for anyone who opposed them can be summed up in incidents such as Bishop Cohalan’s opposition to a Christian burial for Denis Barry in Cork.

The photo is Dennis Barry, the first hunger striker to die.

*Lily Murphy lives and writes in Cork, Ireland.

July 11, 2015
Bigotry 101: Why Haters Gonna Hate

A review of The Bigot: Why Prejudice Persists, by Stephen Eric Bronner, Yale University Press, 2014.

Late last year in Florida, following a federal court’s overturning the state law banning same-sex marriage, footage aired on MSNBC of protesters demanding that the odious law be restored. One clip showed a dorky Walter Mitty type getting up in the face of a gay Florida couple filing marriage papers. “Two men and two women can’t marry. It’s perversion,” he shouted. “Don’t you understand that it’s perversion?”

Here in New York, more than a few of our neighbors have been willing to blame Eric Garner for his death-by-cops, allegedly deserved because he was selling loosies on a Staten Island street corner and put his hands in the air when cops sought to arrest him. In letters to the editor of the Daily News, usually the less rancid of the city’s two tabloids, there was a clear subtext that New York is full of lesser breeds whose control is the police’s job, no questions asked. Some letter writers weren’t even subtle, saying that “they” can’t control themselves or their kids, and that New York’s Finest needed respect, not second-guessing about officers’ proclivities for murder.

Where does this animus toward “the other” come from?

In The Bigot: Why Prejudice Persists, Rutgers University political theorist Stephen Eric Bronner displays a keen understanding of the aggrieved if damaging psychology of the subjects of his book.

For Bronner, the bigot’s style “is not a derivative matter, but is instead part of his character. The bigot senses that modernity is undermining his belief system and his ability to make sense of himself … The bigot always directs his hatred against those who threaten (or might threaten) his privileges, his existential worth and the (imaginary) world in which he was once at home … Once the beneficiary of social privilege, the bigot now views himself as a loser … it is always about him and never about his victims.”

So bigotry for Bronner has less to do with philosophy or a studied point of view and more to do with anger at “them” getting something “they” don’t deserve because “they,” well, they ain’t “us” and “why don’t we benefit more?” Anything that smacks of redistribution, especially to people of color and even low-income whites, is proscribed.

Bronner’s emphasis on “privileges” and “victims” reveals both the book’s enormous strengths and some weakness. Its strengths lie in looking for a concrete explanation for bigotry that goes beyond bad attitudes of rotten people to suggest that benefits are derived from racial, ethnic and gender oppression. Its key weakness: the text doesn’t distinguish between actual privileges, which mostly relate to class, and ascribed privileges, which are social and may be no less detrimental ideologically and culturally but lie in what Marxists name “false consciousness.” There’s a relationship there — one of course informs the other, but they are not the same.

From the days of Ronald Reagan, the past 35 years have shown that a Republican program fits a bigot’s needs. However, a “blame the other, but never the rich” framework is not peculiar to the United States. Far-right nationalist and even openly fascist parties are growing throughout Europe, largely over opposition to immigrants, even as sweeping austerity policies have been key to damaging the well-being of millions of working people and no palpable inconvenience has been caused by migrant labor.

Instead of massing against capital and its political enablers, go blame the outsider for the lack of jobs and a perceived degrading of national culture. The racist siren song doesn’t have to deliver, but the left parties do. Since many of these have ceased to provide any sort of credible opposition to a deregulated free-market capitalism, it’s little wonder that, purely for opportunistic reasons, French Socialists and the British Labor Party are borrowing from the right’s hymnbook, echoing right-wing noises about unassimilated immigrants running amok.

Defining bigots politically as those who are often the least able to ward off the effects of economic crisis and are susceptible to blaming the narrowing of their own life chances on a despised other explains much about why the strategy has legs. As Bronner writes, “securing policies favorable to capital requires conditional support from other larger classes or disunity among those who might offer resistance to any given policies. This gives the bigot a card to play,” especially when the U.S. Left and its opposite numbers in Europe find themselves struggling to offer a counter-narrative, let alone force better policies and build movements.

Bronner isn’t the first theorist to tackle the dangerous salience of racial and ethnic hatred. Wilhelm’s Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) and Theodor Adorno, et. al.’s The Authoritarian Personality (1950) are in their own ways well-regarded classics, too. Add Bronner’s to that must-read list.

We’ve been warned.

Michael Hirsch is an editorial board member of New Politics. This article first appeared in the July 2015 issue of The Indypendent. # 207

July 11, 2015
The Crises of Colonial Capitalism: Video Interview on Puerto Rico's Debt

In this TeleSur interview with Rafael Bernabe, the spokesperson for the Puerto Rican Working Peoples Party advocates for a moratorium on the debt. Bernabe has written an extensive article in the current Summer 2015 issue of New Politics.

July 9, 2015
Britain's End Austerity Now: Revival of Radical Political Left

On Saturday, June 20, a quarter of a million people marched in London from the Bank of England to the Houses of Parliament in order to protest against the Conservative government’s planned spending cuts to public services. This was the largest single demonstration against austerity to date and reflected to a degree the revival of a radical political left in Britain after decades in the wilderness.

Austerity

Austerity refers to government cuts back on spending to try to reduce a budget deficit, the gap between what the government spends and what it earns in a single year, in order to “balance the books.” This is especially the case during a recession or during a period of slow economic growth (as has been seen in Britain and the entirety of Europe over the past seven years). Of course this period of slow growth can be traced back to the 2007-08 sub-prime mortgage crisis and the subsequent recession that followed – it has in fact been referred to as an epic recession by political economist Jack Rasmus, on account of the extended period of time during which debt, default, and depression defined the economy.

Austerity is presented as an economic necessity – a belt-buckling exercise for a bloated public service sector that has been living beyond its means. This language of economic necessity forms the framework through which more visceral moral arguments are built. Because it is taken as given that there is only one economic reality, the choices are limited and thus morally charged (hence economic realism forms something of a religion in its unwavering commitment to a singular doctrine). This moralism presented itself in the form of sacrificial fairness, with the Tory-led coalition government’s mantra of “We’re all in it together” prefacing just about every announcement of spending cuts. But of course we haven't all been in it together. Britain is reaching Victorian levels of inequality, with the richest thousand families more than doubling their wealth since 2009, and owning more than the poorest 40 percent of British households).

It's society's most vulnerable who have been "in it." There has been the usual demonization of the poor and especially benefits claimants, despite the fact that only £1.2 billion was fraudulently claimed in 2011-12 compared to £70 billion lost through illegal tax evasion in the same year. Further spending cuts have inflicted damage on firefighters, the National Health Service, children’s mental health (and mental health in general), child benefit, social care, legal aid, services devoted to victims of domestic violence, housing benefit, and – perhaps most damaging of all – the scrapping of the ILF (independent living fund) which allows people with disabilities to live in their communities rather than in residential care. In brief, government-spending cuts have targeted the weakest and poorest in society in order to meet government targets for reduction in spending.

The anger that austerity provokes is very much a result of a perception of gross unfairness on the side of the government – which is why they are so keen to diffuse anger through Orwellian moral arguments (we’re all in this together), nonsense economics (debunked in a letter from a group of high profile economists saying that proposed government spending cuts have no basis in economics), or shifting public anger onto society's weakest . This is seen as grossly unfair because while these savage cuts decimate programs of unequivocal social benefit, they do so as a result of a recession that many believe to have been caused by excessive financial deregulation and the high-risk behavior of the financial sector in general. In fact it was excessive private debt fueled by financial speculation which became unpayable, that caused the financial crisis. Furthermore, the hike in government debt in the crisis's aftermath was principally as a result of the "bail-out" of the banking sector, with the estimated cost to the taxpayer of £124 billion. And there was no subsequent financial regulation, imprisoned bankers, or higher taxes on the rich.

All in all then, austerity makes people angry because it is an ideologically driven program of public spending cuts which punishes the weakest in society, and takes the side of the powerful (the rich, the financial sector, the 1%, creditors). It’s an age-old story then which has been made confusing because of an aggressive and unrelenting public relations campaign supported by a right-wing media which has passed economic incoherence off as doctrine, diverted public anger towards immigrants and benefits claimants, and created a sense of constant uncertainty from which no coherent opposition can be drawn.

The demonstration

The march was organized by The People’s Assembly Against Austerity – an organization which describes itself as “a broad united national campaign against austerity.” It is a loose conglomeration of groups from all over Britain who share a commitment to resisting austerity, cuts, and privatization in workplaces, as well as community and welfare services. They have no direct affiliation with any political party and aim to supplement rather than supplant trade union, student, pensioner and community opposition to austerity measures. In other words, The People’s Assembly provides a platform from which a plurality of anti-austerity views can be presented in a nonhierarchical manner without itself forming a cohesive political faction. The march on the 20^th was an attempt to bring together the campaign’s multifarious groups into a single, collective demonstration.

The protest could be seen as a reflection of the political context of Britain today. This was very much a general "protest of the left," with an infinitely diverse crowd being formed of thousands of separate groups with vastly different aims and ambitions but united in their opposition to the continued Tory austerity program. There were student groups, sections of the anti-austerity Green Party, trade unions, housing groups, public sector workers, environmentalists, communists, and even members of the anti-fascist football team the Clapton Ultras. It was refreshing to see so many people of all different walks of life come together to stand against the powerful.

The atmosphere was something of a carnival, with the sound of drums, horns, whistles and music providing the march with a constant buzz of noise. There was also an eclectic series of costumes and signs summing feelings up anger and discontent in a series of witty statements. Interestingly the march was saturated with a number of homemade signs that reflected the absolute anger and disillusionment of many people, articulated through a frustrated outburst of swearing – unable to express anything other than an explosion of anger and exacerbation; “Fuck the Fucking Fuckers” and “Why don’t you all just Fuck Off” summed up the feelings of a furious population which is still to develop a suitably effective vocabulary with which to critique an odious austerity program while simultaneously imagining a better world. This is a reflection of a broader existential problem within the movement at large – a campaign characterized almost entirely by its opposition to Conservative rule, rather than a viable alternative. However, there is reason for hope. The demonstration showed that an increasingly angry and disillusioned British society is pregnant with an exciting radical potential, from which a new world can be built. Bubbling under the surface a number of groups are making steps towards articulating a new language of the left from which a more coherent ideal can be established.

A long but enjoyable march to Parliament Square ended with a number of impassioned speeches – the most notable of which came from Welsh singer-songwriter Charlotte Church who managed to combine clarity, anger and grace into a short speech that received a roar of approval from the crowd. Once the march itself had finished however, the effervescent energy one is filled with when moving with a crowd dissipated rather quickly. Tiredness set in as each speaker took his or her turn on the stage and over time the crowd settled down until the speeches came to an end. Getting the Tube home gave me a moment’s pause to reflect on the day; I was tired but filled with a nervous hope that once the fiery energy of the day had begun to dwindle there would be left a hardened remnant of resistance from which we can move forward.

Afterthoughts

The demonstration was incredibly refreshing in the sense that it literally embodied resistance to socially corrosive cuts in government spending. It showed that people do still care passionately about the society in which they live, as well as for the weakest and most vulnerable in society. The anger and disillusionment felt raw and unfocused, but there appears to be a dormant potential lying beneath the surface of British society. The carefully constructed myths surrounding the illusion of austerity appear to be crumbling ever so slightly as people are beginning to question the true power at the heart of this ideologically-driven political project. Inspired by what is happening on the continent, a more radical politics is beginning to emerge after decades in the wilderness – it will be interesting to see what effect it will have.

*Aidan Harper of Wealth Equality is 24 years old and from London

Photo by Hayley Bruford.

July 9, 2015
The Poverty of Hatred and the Hatred of Poverty: The Ideology of American Progressivism

“Rich people are the fucking worst.” This is the premise and title of Sean Illing’s recent Salon.com article (June 22, 2015). While I agree with his sentiment, the argument that follows this provocative title leaves a lot—too much—to be desired. Illing is a self-professed progressive, and the purpose of his article was to discuss the various “new” ways the rich are expressing disgust for the poor or anyone who isn’t rich, in the context of the on-going drought in California. While I completely agree that “rich people are the fucking worst,” Illing misses the proper target of critique. Rich people do indeed suck. However, progressivism itself sucks, and here’s why: it misses the systemic root problem. The rich suck, because capitalism encourages them to suck.

As bad as that is, capitalism also encourages the poor to hate themselves. It is only through the rejection of capitalism, if not through revolution then through ground-up radical reforms, that both the currently rich and poor can collectively live emancipated lives without this poverty of hatred. We can and should maintain a hatred of poverty, without ever hating the poor. Hate the rich, but hate them productively by viewing them as the product and beneficiaries of an unjust, exploitative system. Though thinkers like Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, the foremost Freudo-Marxists of the twentieth-century, often disagreed with one another, their theories coincide around the idea that capitalism encourages a certain kind of psychological disposition and even specific manifestations of that psychology, which tend to reproduce and normalize capitalist relations of production. We can hate the rich, but blaming individuals for deeply normative beliefs is precisely what the forces of capitalism count on. Go ahead, blame individuals, but the system gets to keep on going.

Illing claims that the top 1% suck and this specific kind of sucking is “new.” Rich people suck, but why do they suck and for how long have they sucked? Let’s take the second question first. The answer is: nearly forever. Since before feudalism, the elites have sucked. They have talked down to the poor, to put it mildly. They have always attempted to express how their privileged position warrants special desert (and dessert). Even if this “war” on the poor were new (it isn’t), this perspective of the wealthy deserving more privilege and are simply better has not been silent recently in any way, as Illing seems to imply. Are we really surprised to hear random rich people like Steve Yuhas and Gay Butler expressing so much disdain for the poor when we hear such nonsense from public figures, elected leaders or even Supreme Court justices on a daily basis? Scott Walker has reinvigorated the war on labor and teachers of all stripes. Tom Perkins has suggested that the rich are under similar threat that the Jews were under the Nazis, and equally unjustifiably. He also suggested that the richer you are the more votes you should get. Mitt Romney’s comment on the 47% of people who mooch of the government fits well in this barrel of class warfare rhetoric aimed at the lower classes. Even a cursory examination of the rhetoric on Fox News exposes the fact that the hatred of the poor across all classes is pervasive and loud.

In the United States, this hatred of the poor—this unjustified, repulsive elitism—is hardly limited to the super-rich or even the conventionally rich. Our middle class despises the poor. The poor despise the poor. This is the function of ideology, and it is a product of the system we live in: (neoliberal) capitalism. My argument is hardly novel though. From Marx to the early Frankfurt School thinkers like Theodor Adorno, to the aforementioned Fromm and Marcuse, there has been no shortage of theorists pointing to this counterrevolutionary, status-quo affirming, justice-defacing mentality perpetuated under capitalism—the longer it persists, the worse this seems to get. Contemporary cultural critics like Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek have taken up the mantle of this tradition in various ways.

From this socialist perspective, the problem is not that the rich suck (though they certainly do). The real problem is that, for the most part, we all suck. We all suck, because capitalism sucks (marginally less that feudalism and its predecessor systems). The subjects of capitalism, particularly the subjects of late, neoliberal, market-masturbatory, consumeristic capitalism, are psychologically conditioned by the ideological forces of the system they are raised in and learn to become “respectable adults” within. The belief in the laziness or unworthiness of the poor (even among the poor) is a direct result of the forces of capitalism. The only difference between the rich and the poor in this regard is that the rich benefit ridiculously more from the arrangement, but their hatred of the poor has its origins in the same place as the poor’s hatred of themselves and one another—the ideological apparatuses of capitalism. The rich suck. The poor suck. We all suck, because capitalism sucks.

Yes, the rich also have greater institutional capacity to deal with these larger structural, systemic problems, but their psychological conditioning largely prevents them, or seriously inhibits their desire to do anything about it. They are told by other rich people, themselves perpetuating these ideological clichés (which is why Lukács suggested that the bourgeoisie could never attain class consciousness without renunciating their own existence). This is not to let the rich off the hook. Psychological conditioning is hardly absolute, especially with their access to the best schools and university education in the world. This social conditioning is deeply influential though, especially in a society that, regardless of class, exhibits such a minimal capacity for the practices of self-reflection and self-criticism.

Sean Illing is not the source of the problem, and I am a bit unhappy with myself for feeling the need to criticize a person who is at least attempting to point out the massive issues we are facing as human beings rooted in the massive wealth and income inequality in the US and the world. He is actually fairly close to pointing the finger in the right direction. However, my critique is necessary because it speaks to the larger failure of American progressivism, namely its complicity with the system of capitalism. Now, I am not suggesting that because outlets like Salon.com or thinkers like Illing live within capitalism they cannot criticize it honestly (though they typically don’t). What I am saying is that the progressivism they represent actually supports capitalism. With lines like “Wealth…isn’t the enemy. The problem is the attitude of the wealthy…” “To be rich is no crime.” “[T]o profit at the expense of others, is quite another thing – and it’s all too common these days.” These lines represent the true error of progressive liberalism in the United States.

While it is certainly true that there is plenty of industrial capacity to provide more than decent lives for everyone in this country and probably the world if production capacity and resources were reorganized justly, it is very unlikely that there would be any group of people who could justifiably be rich, under such a reorganized system. The rich are the enemy of the people, but they are also victims of the ideology of capitalism. The poor are subjected to and internalize this ideological narrative regarding the unworthiness of the poor as well—and suffer all the more for it. Capitalism is based on the pursuit of profit at the expense of others. Without this “all too common” practice, there would be no capitalism. Illing and those center-Leftists of his ilk are ignoring the truth that capitalism undermines the progressive goals of justice, equality, and freedom. Progressives, and even many socialists and Marxists, seem to ignore how what remains of the middle class and the poor are taught to hate to the poor as much as the rich clearly do.

I recently saw a friend of a friend’s post on Facebook. A young soldier posted a side-by-side picture of his grocery cart alongside the grocery cart of the woman in front of him (for the purposes of anonymity, the names and images have been left out—who he is, is irrelevant. He is simply a representative of what I am speaking about). The other person’s cart was full to the brim. A few steaks and slices of fish are visible. His cart has some cherries, a few frozen meals, a loaf of bread, peanut butter, jelly, and not much else. The caption for the picture said “I hate people who don’t work and get to eat like kings for free when I work hard every day and these are the only groceries I can afford for me and my family of four… “ Apparently, the person in front of him paid for her groceries with an EBT card and then took her groceries to her brand-new Hyundai Genesis. The comments on this picture from his friends ranged from shared hatred to limited sympathy for his tough situation. A couple comments were nearly genocidal in terms of their proposals for what we should do with people who refuse to work but expect to eat “like kings.” Ignoring the fact that this solider himself is probably eligible for some sort of government assistance if his situation is truly that bad, his wild assumptions about the person in front of him (who was, for the record, black and the original poster was white) are entirely off-base.

First, he assumes this woman is unemployed because she is using an EBT card. Thousands of people who receive government benefits on EBT cards are in fact employed (usually in jobs that do not provide a living wage for a single person, never mind a family). Second, he was buying his groceries for about a week: how do we know this person was not buying her family’s groceries for a month? How do we even know that the EBT card used contained welfare or SNAP benefits (food stamps)? Child support can be given on EBT cards when done through the court, in additional to other categories of government benefits. Regardless, this young soldier is poor. We should feel sympathy for him and his family, but he is publicly expressing hatred for someone he probably should be feeling solidarity with. He is justifiably angry for the injustice that he is experiencing, but the woman in front of him (even if all of his assumptions were correct—doubtfully though, because only 10% of people who receive government benefits are estimated to be “gaming” the system. Even if that number were double or triple, that would leave 70-80% of recipients rightfully needing and deserving those benefits.). Yet to this young man, the woman in front of him is an object of hatred.

Due to the mystification of the actual relations of production and consumption within capitalism, this young soldier has no other choice, it seems, but to hate the poor. He eventually even posts, in response to all the other comments, that he feels terrible about himself for not being able to better support his family. His story is hardly unique, nor is his reaction. When the poor are repeated told by the “leaders” of this country to put themselves up by their boot straps, how could they be expected to take the time to see through this flaccid rhetoric? Working two to three jobs (if people are able get even one) to support a family doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for ideologiekritik and neither does shopping all day for the best new Jimmy Choo shoes and Louis Vuitton purses on Rodeo Drive— both to the benefit of the status quo. The only similarity between these two counterrevolutionary lifestyles is that the prevailing ideological narratives go unquestioned in both. It is an important similarity though.

Does it do any good to hate the rich, when the poor are also guilty of hating the poor? Probably not, but it does feel like the right thing to do. It is. We all really should hate the rich. Illing is quite right to say that “the rich are the fucking worst.” Capitalism is the root of that problem though. Our system of wealth is inherently based on the pursuit of profits at the expense of the working and non-working classes. Capitalism requires at least some degree of inequality and in practice has produced extremely high degrees of it. Hating the rich though, only does so much if that hatred is not coupled with an even greater hatred of capitalism. Those of us on the Left need to be wary of the kind of progressivism that fails to locate the true enemy of progress and justice. Sure, hate the rich, but don’t forget to hate capitalism more. Absent this hatred of capitalism, the rich—and everyone else—will continue to hate the poor while failing to sow the seeds of a kind of society that can develop a hatred of poverty absent a hatred of the poor.

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

July 9, 2015
IUF Statement: What Is Really at Stake in the Greek Crisis

The following is a statement on the Greek Crisis issued by the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Association (IUF) on July 1, 2105.

A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of a democratic alternative to austerity. The Syriza government of Greece incarnates that alternative, which is why the European Commission and the European Central Bank (ECB) have allied with the IMF to exorcise the challenge it represents. With few exceptions, political parties of every persuasion have tacitly or actively supported the anti-Syriza coalition.

Since its election victory in January, Syriza has fruitlessly sought to negotiate relief from the ruinous austerity imposed on previous governments, a program which has wreaked levels of economic and social destruction normally associated only with wartime, postponed recovery to a distant future and added to the burden of debt.

The government, despite its electoral pledges to end austerity, scoured the country for all available cash, slashed expenditure to achieve a budget surplus and met its payments to creditors. The Commission, the ECB and the IMF (now known as 'the institutions' rather than the Troika) made it clear from day one that debt reduction, the only realistic solution to the enduring crisis, was not on the table. While the government patiently sought to negotiate, and even agreed to a continuation of the ruinous bailout on terms which would have sucked additional billions of euros out of the economy, their proposals met with dismissal, contempt and insults.

The 'institutions' cynically refuse all responsibility for the predictably massive economic collapse. Limited government measures to ensure basic nutrition and continued access to electricity for the most vulnerable parts of the population were denounced as unacceptable 'unilateralism'. For Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker, whose previous claim to distinction was consolidating Luxembourg as a tax haven for multinational corporations, no Greek tax proposal was regressive enough. Government proposals to maintain skeletal systems of collective bargaining and social protection were repeatedly condemned. The ECB orchestrated capital flight and a run on the banks by limiting Greek banks' access to loans while spooning out just enough emergency liquidity to maintain permanent pressure.

Now the 'institutions' have taken new measures to sink the Greek economy in response to the government's decision to call a July 5 referendum on the bailout terms. The goal is to reinforce rule by banks and so-called technocrats (who are in fact highly political) and remind the citizens of Greece they must never imagine they might challenge the power of finance.

The simple truth is that the social savagery called austerity [1] could never produce the result it was ostensibly intended to deliver.

The negotiations were never about economics, but about regime change – and eliminating possible political contagion elsewhere in Europe.

In 1953, the London conference of Germany's creditors agreed to write off half of Germany's sizeable pre-war debt and made payment of the remainder contingent on Germany's ability to pay by running a trade surplus. No surplus, no payments. The London Agreement was political; it was intended to fortify Germany's position in the Cold War. The decision to undermine a government of the left in Greece is equally political. The assertion, endlessly repeated during 6 months of negotiations, that Europe can weather a Greek default and exit from the euro, can be turned on its head. Europe can digest a substantial write-down of Greek debt – in fact it would be beneficial to everyone – but the 'institutions' are determined to deliver a political lesson, and not just to Greece.

Throughout the negotiations, the government has defended its position patiently, at times eloquently. Its proposals for limited measures to defend workers, pensioners and the poor from the ravages of an unprecedented depression would have appeared as the most moderate Keynesianism three decades ago. That they are now denounced as a threat to the European order tells us a great deal about that order and about the underlying crisis of European and global politics. Syriza's election victory has shown the potential power of a broad movement of the Left which is prepared to contest the status quo. Solidarity is crucial, now more than ever, for Syriza to continue fighting. Unions should be organizing that solidarity.

July 7, 2015
A Response to Riad Azar on Sanders' Foreign Policy

I find it odd that my friend and fellow New Politics board member Riad Azar should center his criticism of Bernie Sanders’ foreign policy on Sanders’ supposed “irresponsible” “isolationism.”

It seems to me that a critique of Bernie’s foreign policy should begin by criticizing him for voting for the Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution that paved the way for U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan, and for refusing to unequivocally condemn Israel’s shameful 2014 war on the people of Gaza. These positions might or might not be sufficient to preclude support for Bernie if he or someone like him ran as an independent — to my mind that would depend on the overall dynamic and trajectory of the campaign — but in any case they represent Bernie’s deep failure to consistently break with U.S. global imperialism and Israeli repression, and should form the central part of a critical assessment of his foreign policy stance.

Riad writes, “Pulling out of the Middle East and leaving the ‘Muslim nations,’ as Sanders calls them, to go through their own version of the European Reformation is as irresponsible as it is inaccurate. Even if the United States were to completely withdraw from the Muslim world, US support for sub-imperialist powers in the Muslim world is enough to make us responsible for what happens there in the future. In other words, one cannot plan to withdraw from the region while continuing support for Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan, and hold the belief that the support of these nations does not amount to interference.”

What is Riad driving at here? Of course progressives should demand that the U.S. embrace a consistent, democratic, non-militaristic foreign policy committed to social justice everywhere, and that it stop supporting Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan in the face of their violent anti-democratic actions. But does Riad think it would be a negative development if American popular opinion, crystallized by anti-war activists, were to succeed in pressuring Washington to end its military interventions in the Middle East if the underlying imperial nature of U.S. foreign policy has not yet been successfully dismantled? Riad seems to imply it would be meaningless, and perhaps dangerous, when he writes “Retraction from the Muslim world without a critique and reevaluation of these relationships and alliances is useless.” This is a strange sort of purism, suggesting that if the left doesn’t gain an immediate total, comprehensive victory against U.S. empire, its success in forcing Washington to retreat from specific military ventures should not be supported and celebrated. In fact, however, the opposite is the case: whenever we succeed in forcing the U.S. not to intervene militarily in one country or another, it removes one (though certainly not the only) major obstacle to the emergence and victory of grassroots democratic movements in those countries, and it strengthens the anti-war movement here at home for future and broader domestic and foreign policy battles.

So yes, Bernie should be criticized for his failure to advocate a fundamentally new U.S. foreign policy, but he shouldn’t be condemned as an irresponsible isolationist for the steps he has taken to oppose US military intervention, such as his opposition to the war on Iraq.

*Joanne Landy is Co-Director of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy and a member of the New Politics editorial board.

July 6, 2015
Explaining Acquiescence

Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015)

All of us on the left are all too familiar with the capitalist offensive of the past forty years. Under the banner of “neo-liberalism” capital has rolled back almost every gain working people across the world have made since the 1930s. All sorts of public industries, services and institutions have been privatized, social welfare programs that protected workers from the worst insecurities of the labor-market have been rolled back or simply abolished and unions and working class political parties that had traditionally organized and represented working people have been severely weakened.

The result has been both growing impoverishment of formerly “stable” layers of the working class (an increase in the US minimum wage to $15 an hour would raise the wages of auto workers hired since 2008) and the sharpest levels of social inequality since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Many in the US refer to a second “Gilded Age”, drawing parallels with the era of robber barons and precarious workers in the 1870s and 1880s.

However, unlike the “Gilded Age”–or the era before the mid-1970s–there have been relatively low levels of working class resistance to capital. The 1870s and 1880s saw waves of mass strikes, most unsuccessful, which laid the basis for the growth of mass working class parties and unions in the quarter of a century before the First World War. The “Red Years” of 1917-1923 gave birth to revolutionary Russia, near revolutions in Italy and Germany and a massive strike wave across the capitalist world. The late 1930s again produced revolutionary upsurges in Spain and France, and factory occupations in most other industrialized societies. The “long 1960s” (1965-1975) was marked not only by massive revolts by people of color, women and queer folks, but-despite predictions of the “end of the working class”–waves of unofficial (“wild-cat”) strikes in Japan, Western Europe and North America.

In contrast, the capitalist offensive has met little sustained resistance since the mid-1970s. Clearly, there have been major battles (the British miners' strike of 1984-1985, the PATCO strike in the US in 1980-81), sporadic upsurges of protest like the Occupy movement, and some top-down controlled one-day general strikes in Canada and Europe. Most of these struggles have either been defeated, and have not sparked the massive struggles that those of us on the left have hoped for.

In no other country is the level of resistance as low as in the heartland of modern capitalism-the United States. Still the only major capitalist society without an even timidly reformist independent workers' party, the working class and the oppressed in the US have mounted little sustained opposition to the deterioration of their social and economic position.

Resistance and Acquiescence

Steve Fraser, a noted labor historian, attempts to unravel why there has been so little popular resistance to the new “Gilded Age” in the US in his new book The Age of Acquiescence. The great strength of the book is its detailed accounts of levels of both working class resistance and acquiescence to an aggressive capitalist class before and after the 1930s and 1940s.

Fraser's reconstruction of the myriad forms of opposition in the period before the 1930s is a welcome alternative to the all too common notion that the US working class lacked a tradition of class warfare. Fraser detail waves of strikes, often involving pitched battles with the force of state and private repression and the seizure of workplaces, and pro-working class resistance among farmers and people of color.

Even more importantly, he documents how anti-capitalist politics were the “common sense” of a significant minority of working people from the 1870s through the 1930s. From the Knights of Labor to the Wobblies, Socialists and Communists before the Second World War, Fraser demonstrates that “class war” and the vision of a democratic and collectivist order beyond capitalism were part and parcel of the politics of a minority of workers in the US.

The contrast with the post-World War II period-and especially the neo-liberal era since the 1980s-is marked and painful. For Fraser, the decline of radicalism and militancy began during the 1940s, as the new industrial union became increasingly embedded in the institution of US capitalist democracy. While he rejects any attempt to attribute the de-radicalization of the labor movement simply to the machinations of the labor officialdom, Fraser believes that working people traded any alternative to capitalism for “full citizenship” in the US polity and society.

Not only did this effectively “tame” labor as a potential challenger to capital, but it set limits on the potential radicalism of the movements of people of color, women and LGBT folks in the 1960s and 1970s. In contemporary America, large segments of working people embrace “fables” that undermine resistance: capitalists as rebels, stock ownership democratizing the economy, and contract work as liberation.

Rooting Working Class Radicalism in Non-Capitalist Relations

While Fraser's depiction of the rise and fall of popular opposition to capitalism in the US is quite compelling, his explanation of the historic shift leaves much to be desired. Buried in the mass of detailed description is the claim that anti-capitalist radicalism in the US-and by extension other capitalist societies-is rooted in the collective experience and memory of non-capitalist social relations.

The experience of artisanal and rural household production, where producers organized their own and their families' labor independently of capital allowed workers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century to easily imagine a world beyond capitalism. This radical vision, combined with the experience of the successful struggle against slavery, fueled their belief that “another world” was not only imaginable, but possible.

As capitalism established itself through the destruction of independent production-the process of primitive accumulation-the ability of working people to envision a different world declined, leaving them open to integration into capitalism through the promise of citizenship and increased consumption.

The notion that working class radicalism is rooted in the experience of non-capitalist relations and that radicalism necessarily declines as capitalism destroys non-capitalist social relations has a long history. It is also, historically inaccurate.

While it is true that the early workers' movements in many industrialized countries appealed to a romantic vision of pre-capitalist society, radical and revolutionary working class movements survived for a considerable time after the consolidation of capitalism. Germany, perhaps the most capitalist society on Continental Europe before World War I, produced the largest Marxist workers' organizations-both social-democratic and communist-in the world.

In addition, the workers who made up the bulk of the membership of radical and revolutionary organizations in the twentieth century were not those who were new to capitalist industry. Workers who had recently been independent artisans or farmers tended to be attracted to more reformist variants of labor politics, while it was second and third generation industrial workers-in particular skilled workers-who were drawn to revolutionary syndicalism, left-wing social democracy and communism.

Most importantly, workers in the post-World War II period displayed the capacity for militancy in the face of capital. Fraser tends to give extremely short shrift to the wave of strikes, many of them “wild-cats” which shook US industry between 1965 and 1975. These were part of a wave of mass strikes, often led by younger, second and third generation workers, which swept the global North. In almost all of these struggles, workers were able to not only resist speed-up and deskilling of work, but won substantial workplace and political concessions from capital, while actually threatening capitalist rule in France in 1968 and Portugal in 1974-75.

The Militant Minority

Despite Fraser's mistaken identification of a pre-capitalist past with working class anti-capitalism, his claim that the decline of anti-capitalist radicalism is central to understanding the decline of working class resistance is substantially correct.

Conflicts over strategy and tactics mark every wave of working class struggle in the history of capitalism. On one side is a layer of workers who have become the full-time officials of the labor movement-the social layer that systematically promotes the limitation of working class struggle and the integration of workers organizations into the capitalist economy and state. On the other is the “militant minority”-the real workers' vanguard-who agitated for militancy against capital, for democracy and solidarity among workers and who were the mass audience for radical and revolutionary politics in the global North before World War II.

The success of working class struggles often hinged on the ability of the militant minority to win workers to their vision rather than the officialdom's strategy at crucial moments. One could argue that the decline of resistance in the past three decades is the result of the weakening of a substantial layer of radical, anti-capitalist workers since the late 1930s. [1]

However, this was the result not of the destruction of non-capitalist relations in the global North, but the historic shift in the political and social orientation of the workers' vanguard.

In the wake of the Russian Revolution, the bulk of the militant minority joined the new revolutionary Communist Parties. These parties, over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, became instruments of the foreign policy of the Soviet bureaucratic ruling class and their political strategy and tactics shifted in line with these needs rather than the class struggle in their own country.

In the late 1930s, as the Soviet rulers sought an enduring military alliance with the capitalist democracies against fascist Germany and Italy, the Communist parties adopted the “popular front” strategy-an essentially reformist orientation of long-term alliances with 'progressive' union officials, social-democratic leaders and “democratic” capitalists. This shift not only ideologically disoriented the ranks of the Communist Parties, but led to their integration into the trade union officialdom.

Put simply, the independent militant minority that had historically posed an alternative to the politics of the labor officialdom at key junctures of the class struggle was socially and politically disorganized. The weakening of the workers vanguard-and its almost complete disappearance in the US-accounts for the ability of the labor bureaucracy to so easily derail working class resistance over the past forty years. In order to revive infrastructures of resistance and successful struggles against the current neoliberal offensive, the left will need to prioritize the rebuilding and reorganization of the militant minority.

*Charlie Post is a long-time socialist and labor activist who teaches sociology in New York City.

This article originally appeared in New Socialist at: http://www.newsocialist.org/797-explaining-acquiescence

NOTES

[1] For a more detailed discussion of this history see C. Post and K.A. Wainer, Socialist Organization Today (Detroit, MI: Solidarity Pamphlets, 2005) ; and C. Post “What's Left of Leninism: New European Left Parties in Historical Perspective,” in G. Albo, L. Panitch and V. Chibber (eds.), Socialist Register 2013: The Question of Strategy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014), pp. 175-187.

July 6, 2015
Sanders and the Middle East
Regardless of one's views on whether or not the socialist left should support Bernie Sanders in his race for the White House, the momentum behind the self-described “democratic socialist” has been impressive. Beginning at 2% in April, his popularity grew to 14% in May and at last check was 32% in New Hampshire. The swelling crowds he draws in primary states are noteworthy, and his ability to connect with Americans despite his identification as a socialist is inspiring. However Bernie falls woefully short on issues of foreign policy, issues that I believe (contrary to many) will be significant factors in the Democratic primary and the General Election. If Bernie can speak truth to power on the economy, he must speak truthfully about the U.S. government's foreign policy catastrophe.

It appears that the strategy of the Sanders campaign is to focus strongly on domestic issues. A quick visit to the “issues” section of the Sanders website shows no mention of foreign policy; tackling climate change is the closest reference to a problem of global scope. This is not surprising. Sanders has tended to focus on domestic issues like getting tough with banks, transnational corporations and big money, and has rarely discussed foreign policy.

His public statements present us with either (a) an opportunity for him to jab Hillary Clinton on her voting record in favor of the Iraq war, which arguably was a successful tactic that Obama used against her to secure the nomination in 2008, or (b) a narrow isolationism akin to that of a left wing Ron Paul. On the first point, I think this strategy is inadequate; it won't work twice. On the second, I think it's unrealistic. Pulling out of the Middle East and leaving the “Muslim nations,” as Sanders calls them, to go through their own version of the European Reformation is as irresponsible as it is inaccurate. Even if the United States were to completely withdraw from the Muslim world, US support for sub-imperialist powers in the Muslim world is enough to make us responsible for what happens there in the future. In other words, one cannot plan to withdraw from the region while continuing support for Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan, and hold the belief that the support of these nations does not amount to interference.

But why does this matter? On the primary level, Clinton is known as the foreign policy hawk. Her foreign policy experience was used against Obama in 2007 to strike fear into the hearts of voters with the infamous “3 a.m. phone call” advertisement. These types of attacks matter; we should not dismiss them regardless of how inaccurate or propagandistic they are. In the case of a Sanders primary victory, the Republicans already know that they will lose if they do not at least pay lip service to income inequality. Their response has been to either (a) disavow the economic policy of the Republican establishment and become populists, like Rand Paul or Rick Santorum or (b) assert their foreign policy credentials in a world that looks increasingly threatening to the average American, to highlight other supposed strengths. Another terrorist attack, a major victory by ISIS (say, by capturing Baghdad or Damascus), and/or a buildup of military forces along the Russian border will be all it takes to rally the American people behind a candidate who they believe to be a strong commander-in-chief. While I believe these scenarios to be unlikely, I do not dismiss the propagandistic trumpeting of the mainstream media. This has been a neoliberal tactic since Thatcher and the Falklands War: ignore domestic issues by focusing on perceived foreign threats.

This comes at a time when Democrats are already feeling the sting of watching their old foreign policy guard go into retirement. As Erin McPike recently reported for the Huffington Post, John Kerry and Joe Biden will be moving into “some form of retirement” after the Obama administration. She also points out how other Democrats who focused on foreign policy have retired: Daniel Akaka of Hawaii, Carl Levin of Michigan, and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. For the record, I do not agree with any of the above mentioned senators on foreign policy (or much else).

But I do see an opportunity for the left to push a progressive foreign policy that does not mistakenly focus on the illusion of isolationism and the false hope of “letting them deal with it themselves.” This does not mean a reoccupation of Iraq, Syria, or any country. It does mean a complete revolutionizing in how the U.S. government should conduct foreign policy along principles such as those stated by the Campaign for Peace and Democracy, whose statement of purpose reads, “The Campaign for Peace and Democracy works to advance a new, progressive and non-militaristic U.S. foreign policy — one that encourages democracy and social justice by promoting solidarity with activists and progressive movements throughout the world. We stand in opposition to existing U.S. foreign policy, which is based on domination, militarism, fear of popular struggles, enforcement of an inequitable and cruel global economy, and — despite the democratic rhetoric — persistent support for authoritarian regimes.”

If Bernie does not have a strong grasp on foreign policy, while Clinton and the Republicans appear to have that grasp (however wrong I believe they are), and the political calculus changes to include foreign policy issues in the primary or general election, the chance that Sanders has to raise public consciousness about an alternative to US foreign policy in the Middle East (or, in the best of all possible worlds, to win an election) will be completely extinguished.

So what should Sanders say when it comes to foreign policy in the Middle East? I believe that just as Sanders speaks truth to power on the economy, so should he make public how the U.S. government's alliances with certain countries in the Middle East have failed them and created the conditions the U.S. sees itself entangled in today. These alliances exist to cement U.S. imperial power and to assuage the accumulation of greenhouse gas emitting natural resources that have become the bedrock of the capitalist global economy. I have four particular cases in mind:
- First, a critique of U.S. support for the Israeli government, an apartheid state with a record for the inhuman treatment of Palestinians both in Israel as well as in the occupied territories. The Israel-Palestine conflict has empowered Islamic extremists for decades, and automatically associates the U.S. with each horror that Israel commits, whether this is abstractly through its unquestioning support for Israel, or concretely through the use of American products to bulldoze Palestinian homes and American weapons to kill Palestinian civilians.
- Second, focusing on the U.S. alliance with Saudi Arabia. It is obvious that ISIS and the Saudi royal family have more in common than not. Saudi Arabia is a dictatorship based on Wahhabism, an orthodox and extremist interpretation of Islam, the texts of which ISIS holds as its central governing philosophy. The wealthy elite of Saudi Arabia have funded themselves into a disaster by funneling millions of dollars into jihadist groups, and only stopping when they realized that ISIS's next target is the kingdom itself. They did this to assert dominance in the region by attempting to control the arena created by the Syrian civil war. And it is not unusual for Saudi Arabia to use jihadist groups to assert its influence abroad. The 28 redacted pages of the 9/11 Commission report seem to suggest the hand of Saudi Arabia, or at a minimum the involvement of prominent Saudi families, in the attacks of 9/11.
  Saudi Arabia's influence in the region also affects Islamic doctrine, with many imams around the world struggling to support mosques that do not preach Wahhabism, while some must capitulate to Saudi-inspired dogma to keep their religious institutions afloat with Saudi cash.
- Third, Turkey, a state that to this day denies the genocide committed on its Armenian population, and continues to repress other minorities such as the Kurds. Besides allowing jihadists to travel across their border so that they too could have influence in the Syrian arena, they police the border when it comes to allowing Kurdish resistance fighters from entering into Syria to liberate Kurdish villages from the Islamic State. A progressive critique of American foreign policy must demand that Washington pressure its Turkish ally to keep its hands off the Kurds, the most left-wing secular armed force doing battle in the Middle East today.
- And fourth, Pakistan. The relationship between the Pakistani intelligence services (ISI) and jihadist groups operating within Pakistan's borders is at best porous and at worst not a relationship at all, but an indistinguishable whole. Pakistan opportunistically funds and empowers jihadists to wage guerrilla war in its long term feud with India, and allows fundamentalist Islamists a free pass into Afghanistan. The United States understood this most glaringly when discovering that the ISI was housing Osama Bin Laden in a fortified complex since 2006. A progressive critique of American foreign policy must recognize that Washington is indirectly funding the groups who it battles with in other countries.
Leftists should not believe that sectarianism and fundamentalist Islamic extremism is the way that the Middle East naturally “is”. The line of “well, they've been fighting each other for 1000 years” is as ignorant as it is stale. Rather, these phenomena should be regarded as modern creations, and almost entirely the fault of the United States and the colonial Western European powers that preceded the U.S. presence in the region. U.S. imperialism actively empowers sub-imperialist actors in the region to shape the chaos in their benefit, using, funding, and empowering proto-fascist jihadist groups as their means. Retraction from the Muslim world without a critique and reevaluation of these relationships and alliances is useless.

Can Sanders act on these critiques? Maybe, maybe not, but they must at least be recognized so that his foreign policy is cohesive and not solely a defensive isolationism. Will he be committing political suicide? Probably, but has he not already by taking a stand against Wall Street, the financial industry, and big money? It doesn't seem like he has much to lose. If he adopts these critiques into his foreign policy platform, he gives himself something to stand on when it comes time for Clinton and the Republicans to attack him on issues of foreign policy, and his perceived lack of interest in it. Part of what makes Sanders such an exciting candidate is his willingness to lay a systemic critique on the economic system, rather than blame the problems away on individuals and bad actors. He should translate this critique into his foreign policy.

Riad Azar is a member of the New Politics editorial board.
July 3, 2015
Assessing the Sanders Campaign

How are we to assess the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign?

There are three reasons that one runs a candidate for president. One is the hope of winning, second is to influence other candidates to modify their views, and third is to use the campaign to build for the future, either educationally or organizationally.

Though there are some who do not rule out the possibility that Sanders could win, I consider that chance to be remote and so for me the question is what the Sanders campaign might accomplish assuming he doesn't win. I will first consider possible educational benefits.

The educational value of a campaign depends on several factors. One relates to the positions that the candidate takes. The better the candidate's positions, the more the American people come to understand what's wrong with current policy and what better policies could be. Sanders has many admirable positions, on inequality, campaign financing, the environment, and much more. However, quite a few of his foreign policy stances, especially on Israel-Palestine, have been poor (on the liberal end of Senate opinion, but still poor). He doesn't even list foreign policy on the issues page of his presidential website. His position on gun control (no doubt a result of his representing rural Vermont) is weak. And while he takes the right nominal positions on racial and gender issues, he downplays these and has often been content to rely on economic justice as the cure-all (race and gender are also absent from the issues page of his website). And his connection to African-American movements has been rather limited. So any leftist support for Sanders, if it's to have a positive educational impact, will need to push him and criticize him on these issues.

Another aspect of what people might learn from a Sanders campaign is the exposure that left ideas will get in the mainstream. Of course, socialists of one kind or another have run in every U.S. election for more than a hundred years. But as minor party candidates, these socialists have rarely been able to reach many Americans with their messages. Because Sanders is running as a Democrat, he is assured a degree of coverage that far exceeds what third party candidates have generally been able to receive. The media attention draws crowds which attracts more media attention and drives up polls (he's now in a dead heat with Clinton in New Hampshire), which attracts still more media attention. When Sanders can go on Late Night with Seth Meyers and explain why socialism is not a dirty word and get his host to more or less accept his argument, this is a real boon for the left.

One indication of how the Sanders campaign has broadened the conversation for the general public was a remarkable editorial in the largest circulation newspaper in New Jersey. The Star Ledger of Newark is a liberal paper: it takes progressive positions on most issues (with the usual exception of Palestine) and with the glaring exception of its hatred of public employee unions, which led it to its horrendous endorsement (to its eternal embarrassment) of Chris Christie for governor in 2013. But here is what they said in a June 15 editorial — not an op-ed, but an editorial — titled Like it or not, Sanders' socialism is mainstream:

On Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), said that "in virtually every instance, what I'm saying is supported by a significant majority of the American people," which is a bold claim for someone who has been broadly labeled a "socialist" candidate in Democratic camouflage.

But it makes this a good time to consider whether that term is being applied accurately in the early innings of this 2016 campaign, rather than as a pejorative to dismiss Sanders' ideas.

Because so far, the Senator is showing the electorate that a rejection of this "socialism" – the concept, not the brainless epithet – is something that most voters would probably find unthinkable.

And if you consult the polls, Sanders' claim is not only right, he is positively mainstream.

And then the editors listed Sanders' positions that were supported by the majority of the American people: raise taxes on the rich, take money out of politics, reducing student debt, fighting global warming, a $15 federal minimum wage, and shrinking Wall Street banks.

A lot of Americans realize, said the Star Ledger, that "socialist precepts, in large part, represent the civic and cultural foundation of our nation." In fact, "[m]any things we take for granted today were conceived by leftist coalitions that included Socialists and other Progressives, such as the eight-hour workday, women's suffrage, Medicare, and Social Security."

Now of course many of us socialists consider socialism to mean something far more radical than these valuable reforms. But where neoliberalism and unregulated capitalism have seemed for so long as the only political options in mainstream discourse in the United States, Sanders has been able to deliver an alternative message to more people than has been the case in many years. And he is likely to have greater access to televised debates than any socialist in U.S. history.

Allowing the public to hear a debate on the real questions before us cannot fail to push politics in a favorable direction.

There is said to be one other educational outcome of the Sanders campaign — a negative one. Because Sanders is running as a Democrat, some argue, people will learn the false lesson that the Democratic Party offers us hope, that real social change is possible through this party that in fact represents the liberal wing of capital. As Jason Schulman has argued, there are good reasons to think that the Democratic Party is not the same sort of ideologically-determined organization as political parties are in most other countries of the world. Voting for one of the two dominant parties in the United States doesn't commit you to anything; indeed, running as the candidate of one of these parties doesn't commit you to anything. (Recall those Republican presidential candidates who explicitly disagree with their own party's platform.) But in any event, the concern expressed here — that the experience of supporting Bernie in the primaries and losing will convince people that Hillary should be supported — doesn't seem very realistic.

Some who support and vote for Sanders in the primaries will vote for the Democratic nominee — presumably Clinton — in November. But they won't be doing so because Sanders told them to. They will be following their own inclinations to support the lesser evil. (To be sure, some exaggerate the difference between the Democrats and Republicans. But it's also true that many leftists minimize these differences — claiming, for example, that Obama turned out to be "Bush on steroids" — which leads many of those who benefit from those differences to become alienated from the left.) Others will vote for Clinton because their original reason for voting for Sanders in the primary was to push Clinton to the left. But the question is whether there are very many people who were originally inclined to support a third party candidate in the general election but who will vote for Hillary because Sanders challenged her in the primaries. I can't imagine why this would be so. Why would anyone who voted for a Ralph Nader in 2000 or a Jill Stein in 2012 vote for Clinton in 2016 just because Sanders ran and lost in the Democratic primaries? On the contrary, the opposite seems rather more likely. Someone who considers themselves a good Democrat might be convinced by the Sanders campaign that the times call for significant change, and when the Democratic Party, by nominating Clinton, precludes that change, they might feel bitter and betrayed and seek some other outlet for their desire for change.

The exception would be if the dynamics of the primary campaign forced Clinton sufficiently to the left that dissident Democrats were won over to her new positions. This might strengthen the Democrats among progressive voters. But if Clinton did adopt some significant aspect of Sanders' program, that would represent a victory for the left — influencing other candidates in a positive direction is one of the reasons one runs a campaign. Obviously she would be doing this as a way to defeat the threat from her left, but the left can't very well object to this. Hoping that the major parties offer the most reactionary candidates so that voters will have no choice but to cast votes for a socialist is not something that strengthens the left in the long run.

Note that if one's sole goal is to push Clinton to the left, a Sanders challenge in the Democratic primary is likely to be more effective than a Sanders third party challenge. Why? Because in an electoral system (like that of the United States) that uses a first-past-the-post plurality voting system a third party challenge in the general election will always be plagued by the "spoiler" problem; voting for the third party could really end up helping the Republican candidate. So Clinton can safely ignore the threat from the third party. On the other hand, in the Democratic primary there is far less risk that voting for your preferred candidate will benefit the worst candidate. If the preferred candidate wins, great. But if not, you haven't ended up helping the Republican. So the primary challenger is likely to be a greater threat to Clinton, and hence one that puts greater pressure on her to move left. I think this is what explains a good deal of the labor support for Sanders (such as the endorsement by the South Carolina AFL-CIO): not that Sanders has brought them into the Democratic Party, but that Sanders' presence in the Democratic primary allows them to try to pressure the frontrunner to take more pro-labor positions.

A close election campaign will raise tough problems for progressive voters in swing states. But I would expect a failed Sanders campaign to lead to more third party votes than we've seen in comparably competitive elections — regardless of whether Sanders ultimately endorses Clinton.

Consider what happened in New York State in 2014. There was a left challenge to Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary for governor by Zephyr Teachout. After she lost, many of her supporters voted for Howie Hawkins of the Greens, more than tripling Hawkins' vote total over 2010. (Teachout did not endorse Cuomo, but nor did she endorse Hawkins.) Hawkins on the Green line got 50 percent more votes than Cuomo did on the Working Families line.

Obviously if the Greens or other leftists denounce those who support Sanders as dupes of the Democratic National Committee, this may disincline the Sanders voters from moving left after Sanders' defeat. But absent such sectarianism, I think the Sanders campaign will help propel more radical electoral movements in the future.

Had Sanders opted to run as an independent from the beginning, he would have given up certain advantages. In addition to losing support from those who are interested exclusively in pushing Clinton to the left, he would also have given up his much greater access to debates. (Obviously, justice demands that third party candidates be given access to debates. But as a practical matter, it's far easier to secure access to the Democratic primary debates when you are polling 20 percent plus among Democrats, than it is to secure access to the general election debates when you are polling around 5 percent nationally as a third party candidate.) But in return for these advantages, the advantage in Sanders' running as an independent is that he could have had a more positive impact organizationally, helping to build a party that could continue on after 2016, something that won't happen given his current course. This would by no means have been assured; many third party efforts have been one-off affairs that have left nothing in their wake. And of course many current Sanders supporters would not have offered their time and money to support a third party effort, since a considerable fraction of his volunteers and money come from folks who have not yet given up on the Democrats; it will take the defeat of Sanders in the primaries to convince some of them to jump ship. Nevertheless, some of the money and time invested in Sanders today could have directly contributed to building third party efforts for the future, more than will be the case with a Sanders primary run.

So should Sanders have run as an independent? I'm not sure. I think his current campaign will greatly advance the prospects for the left. It's also possible that had he run as an independent, his positive impact would have been greater. But it's also possible that an independent run would have resulted in less benefit. Like Michael Albert, I think modesty is required here. ("Before the fact, all outcomes are conceivable, and no outcome after the fact should be treated as having been inevitable, nor should those on the wrong side of the prediction be deemed less worthy than those on the right side.") The impact is hard to measure and we should not be denouncing those whose assessments (i.e., guesses) are different from our own.

Given that Sanders is running, I think it makes sense to critically support him. That means we continue to speak out on issues where his positions are problematic and that we push for the building of lasting organizational structures and activism during and after the primaries. It's those things that in the long run will be crucial for achieving real change.

June 29, 2015
Over 1,000 local union leaders and members back Bernie Sanders for President

Grassroots labor initiative urges Democratic primary support for Sanders by AFL-CIO and national unions.

Over 1,000 union activists from around the country today kicked off Labor for Bernie 2016.

Initiated by trade unionists who have worked closely with Senator Sanders for many years, the Labor for Bernie network includes elected officers, shop stewards, organizers, and rank-and-file members from all 50 states and 57 different labor organizations.

More than a third of these Sanders supporters belong to building trades' unions, (with 137 coming from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers alone). Other unions that showed significant membership support for Sanders’ presidential campaign include the Communications Workers of America, American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, Service Employees International Union, International Union of Operating Engineers, United Auto Workers, and International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

This diverse group of labor activists signed an on-line statement embracing Sanders as the only declared candidate, in either major party, “who challenges the billionaires who are trying to steal our pensions, our jobs, our homes, and what's left of our democracy.” The entire list of union supporters may be viewed on the new Labor for Bernie website at www.laborforbernie.org.

With more endorsers signing up every day, the Labor for Bernie network is urging the AFL-CIO, its affiliated national unions, and major unaffiliated labor organizations (NEA, SEIU, and IBT) to sponsor candidate forums and debates, at the grassroots level, before making any presidential endorsement decision of their own.

Labor for Bernie supporters include union members in key primary states (their union affiliation are listed only for identification purposes).

“Telephone workers in New England know Bernie well because he has walked our picket lines and supported our organizing efforts for years,” said Don Trementozzi, president of CWA Local 1400, based in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. “In our union's recent campaign against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Bernie was not on the fence—he was helping us lead the fight against a job-killing trade bill backed by Democrats and Republicans alike.”

“We need a presidential candidate willing to confront big money and its corrupting influence on American politics,” said Steve Abbott, president of CWA Local 7108 in Waterloo and head of the CWA's Iowa state council. “That kind of leadership is not going to come from someone trying to raise a billion dollars from Wall Street banks and other business interests. We need a voice of our own, not an echo of the Republicans.”

“Bernie is running on a record of real accomplishment for workers, farmers, veterans, and millions of other blue-collar Americans,” said Erin McKee, President of the South Carolina AFL-CIO. “But here's the real difference between him and all the rest: he's the candidate who truly believes in the power of grassroots organizing. Bernie has been to South Carolina over the past few years and some of our members got the chance to see that first hand when he met not only with labor unions but with the fast food workers fighting for $15 an hour and a union.”

“I think everyone is just sick and tired of hearing promises from politicians who say they'll fight 100 percent for people but then act for Wall Street,” said Mari Cordes, an RN from the University of Vermont Medical Center and Vice President of Healthcare for AFT-Vermont. “Bernie Sanders has never strayed from his working class roots. Not only has he been true to his word in Vermont for the last 35 years, he has rallied real hope across the country—as a four-term mayor, eight-term Congressman, and now two-term U.S. Senator. I stand strong for Bernie for President in 2016.”

“The reason I support Senator Sanders is simple: Bernie has a long track record of supporting workers and their right to unionize,” said John Murphy, a Carpenter's Local 40 steward from Lowell, Mass. “Just recently he was standing with FairPoint workers on their picket lines and offering them aid and support. When members ask me if Bernie can win, I tell them, that's up to us!”

Labor for Bernie 2016 is a volunteer effort neither funded nor directed by the Sanders for President campaign. To join this grassroots mobilization, download useful organizing materials, or learn more about Bernie's past and present support for workers and their unions, go to: www.laborforbernie.org

June 26, 2015
The Meaning of the Election in Turkey

In the weeks leading up to the June 7 parliamentary election in Turkey communities across the country were gripped with a mixture of excitement, anxiety, and fear. Though President Tayyip Recep Erdoğan was supposed to be above the fray of party politics, the former two-term prime minister and co-founder of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) made no secret of his hopes for an AKP victory, as he rallied and spoke continuously in the weeks and months before the election. 367 seats in the 550-member parliament would make possible Erdoğan’s desire to change the Turkish government from a parliamentary to a presidential system, thereby enhancing executive, and Erdoğan’s, grip on political power.

The main obstacle in Erdoğan’s quest for dictatorial power was the People’s Democracy Party (HDP), a party with roots in the Kurdish movement but that since its creation in 2012 has sought to appeal to a variety of leftist and civil society groups. HDP advocates for transparent politics, and is committed to representing labor, ecology, and women’s rights associations in addition to artists, writers, workers, different ethnic and religious groups, the unemployed, the retired, farmers, and those with disabilities. The party also emphasizes its grassroots, radical-democratic orientation: “Our organization starts from the streets and develops into local assemblies in our neighborhoods.”

The stakes in the election were especially high as a result of Turkey’s undemocratic system of representation, which requires parties to obtain 10 percent of the national vote to enter parliament. Though the HDP worked to appeal to broad sections of Turkish society, it was clear most of its support would come from the heavily Kurdish southeastern provinces. Were the HDP not to pass the 10 percent threshold, the southeastern parliamentary seats would go to the second-place finisher—the AKP. Thus if the HDP failed to obtain 10 percent, the AKP was certain to have a comfortable majority in parliament.

Adding to the challenges facing the HDP (and other opposition parties) from the AKP’s enormous financial and media advantages was the large-scale violence and intimidation directed against the party in the run-up to the election. Though the most dramatic violence directed against the HDP was a June 5 bombing of a massive rally in the Kurdish heartland of Diyarbakir that killed four and injured hundreds, on June 3 the Ankara-based Human Rights Association announced 168 attacks had taken place against HDP. Violence against the party (including the brutal execution of Hamdullah Öğe, a driver of one of the party’s election vehicles) continued in the days before the election, though amazingly—and to their eternal credit—party supporters did not retaliate against what were obvious attempts at provocation.

By Sunday evening on the day of the election, it was evident the HDP would cross the threshold easily, ending up with 13 percent of the overall vote. Erdoğan’s dreams of an executive system are (for now) dead in the water, the AKP’s hopes for a parliamentary majority have been dashed, and an explicitly anti-capitalist, radical democratic party established just three years ago will enter the Turkish parliament. In addition, there will now be 97 women deputies (30 of 80 HDP MP’s will be women) in the 550-member parliament; though only 18 percent of assembly members, this is an all-time high and a hugely important development.

While leftists in Turkey and throughout the world should celebrate the success of the HDP and the thwarting of Erdoğan’s authoritarian ambitions, enormous tasks lay ahead. The AKP still obtained more than 40 percent of the vote, far more than the main opposition People’s Republican Party (CHP), at just over 25 percent. The rightwing National Action Party (MHP) increased its share of the vote, from 13 percent in 2011 to 16.5 percent in 2015. This means that more than 56 percent of the Turkish electorate voted for parties of the right, and an AKP/MHP coalition government remains a frightening possibility. Should some sort of coalition government not be formed, early elections may be called, and Erdoğan could attempt to use a new election to again push for constitutional change.

Capital’s pernicious influence on national democratic politics was evident the day after the election, as markets were “spooked” by the supposed threat of political instability, and the value of the Turkish lira fell to new lows while the Turkish stock market fell by 8 percent. While EU elites celebrate the “strength of the Turkish democracy,” it is obvious the ability of domestic and international capital to manipulate the democratic process in the interests of profit constitutes a massive challenge to the formation of alternatives to the neoliberal order, in Turkey as elsewhere. Economic instability could further play into Erdoğan and the AKP’s hands, as worsening conditions will be used by the party to criticize the opposition and to call for a return to “normalcy.”

A huge question in the coming weeks, months, and years will be the extent to which the HDP can form alliances with the CHP, an ostensibly social democratic party that is also the party of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the Turkish Republic. Many traditional CHP supporters voted for the HDP with the primary aim of defeating Erdoğan and the AKP; whether, or the extent to which, they actually support the HDP agenda or ideology is an open question. Particularly challenging will of course be the “Kurdish question.” The HDP will remain committed to forwarding a stalled peace process regarding some form of democratic autonomy in the Kurdish provinces, while nationalist-oriented CHP MP’s will find it difficult to make common cause with a party many associate with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has waged an armed independence struggle against the Turkish state since 1984.

Equally important for the left is the question of the relationship between political parties and social movements. Many readers of New Politics will be familiar with the Gezi Park movement of 2013; some see the success of the HDP as one result of Gezi protesters’ demands for a reinvigorated and egalitarian democratic society. If so, observers who see the HDP as the Turkish equivalent to Syriza in Greece or Podemos in Spain may be proven correct. A major danger, as in Greece, Spain, and elsewhere, is that electoral success can breed apathy among activists and popular sectors, as parliamentary politics takes precedence over movement building and direct action. Social movement organizations must be energized by the election, and work to take offensive measures against what remains a deeply socially conservative state.

Notably, however, no political party—HDP included—took an outspoken stance on a number of large-scale labor uprisings over the past two years. While all parties lambasted the ruling AKP after the horrific industrial murder of more than 300 Turkish miners in May of 2014, strikes in the glass and steel industries that were quashed by the government on the pretext of national security were greeted by opposition parties with silence or indifference. Likewise, no party openly supported a recent series of wildcat strikes by thousands of auto workers at plants across Turkey—though HDP co-chair Selahattin Demirtaş sent a message of support to strikers. While many of the workers (protesting their own management-friendly union as well as owners) formerly supported the populist AKP, opposition parties failed to seriously reach out to this potentially radicalizing force. Whether MP’s of the ostensible left—HDP or CHP—work to advance the rights of workers in the current neoliberal wonderland of Turkey will be a crucial question moving forward.

Ultimately, if the HDP and the leftwing of the CHP fail to address the needs of the vulnerable and exploited Turkish working class, there is little reason for people in the vast Anatolian interior to support them. The AKP has established a system of patronage for the poor in Turkey that works to maintain control through dependence as well as to build political support, and the party’s appeal to the religious rural populace remains largely intact. In short, the only real hope for the left is social organization and education of the masses above and beyond formal politics.

Yet the possibilities for Turkey inaugurated by the success of the HDP in 2015 should not be minimized. The enthusiasm generated by the election among the left must be channeled into popular forms of democratic political engagement throughout the country.

*Daniel Johnson is a writer and historian.

June 25, 2015
Electoral Amnesia in Argentina

[Introduction by Todd Chretien: In the run-up to Argentina's national elections in October, a scramble for power has divided the incumbent Peronista party into warring factions. Founded by Juan Perón in 1946, the Partido Justicialista ruled through sometimes radical nationalism, state intervention in the economy, clientelist patronage and control over trade unions, and the loyalty of sections of the bourgeoisie and an elite political class of bureaucrats. After the dictatorship of the 1970s, the party emerged as the main beneficiary of the return to democracy, only to be buffeted by a severe depression in 2001, accompanied by the mass uprising known as the Argentinazo.

Nestor Kirchner's 2003 election restored the party to power, and the subsequent appointment and reelection of his widow, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner (popularly referred to as CFK) after his death in 2007 cemented Kirchnerismo's dominance over the party for more than a dozen years. But a series of scandals–including the mysterious death of Alberto Nisman, a special prosecutor who the right alleges planned to implicate CFK's administration in a cover of a terrorist bombing of a Jewish cultural center–and a slowing economy have cast a pall over the Kirchner's contribution to Latin America's "Pink Tide"–so named for the string of left and center-left governments that have ruled most of South America for more than a decade.

This year's election will present Argentine voters will a dizzying array of choices, especially at the local level, but also in the fight for the presidency. Daniel Scioli, whose career has included stints as a professional powerboat racer and Nestor Kirchner's vice president, hopes to carry on his political patron's administration under the Justicialista-led Front for Victory (FpV) electoral alliance. But a series of splits have divided the ruling party into a multitude of factions. One of the most successful is headed by one-time Kirchnerista Sergio Massa, who served as Chief of the Cabinet of Ministers in 2008 and 2009 for Fernandez de Kirchner. Massa is running on the dissident Justicialista Renewal Front.

On the right, the current mayor of Buenos Aires, Mauricio Macri, heads a coalition of strange bedfellows composed of Macri's own conservative PRO party (Propuesta Republicana) and the longstanding social democratic Radical Civic Union (Unión Cívica Radical, or UCR). The pact is justified on opposition to the Kirchnerismo's supposed authoritarian tendencies, but smacks of rank electoral opportunism.

Meanwhile, the collapse of any credible mainstream challenge to the left of Kirchnerismo has opened the door for the Left and Workers Front (Frente de la Izquierda y los Trabajadores, or FIT). This coalition came together in 2011 in response to a new electoral law raising the threshold for small parties to win seats in Argentina's generously proportional system. Initially composed of the Socialist Workers Party (Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas, PTS), the Workers Party (Partido Obrero, PO) and the smaller Socialist Left (Izquierda Socialista, IS), the Front won 2.5 percent of the presidential vote in 2011 and won three seats in the National Congress. The Front and its constituent groups command a significant following among students, workers and the poor. But it has incorporated only a minority of the existing revolutionary left organizations and is now engaged in a discussion about whether to open the coalition to broader left-wing forces–and if so, how.

In an article originally published at Rebelion.org and here abridged slightly in translation, Claudio Katz, widely published Argentine author and member of the Economists of the Left collective, dissects the economic and political landscape, putting the upcoming elections in the context of rising social tensions and the beginnings of a potentially historic political reorganization of the country's revolutionary left.]

ARGENTINA FINDS itself in the midst of an unusual electoral sequence. On very few occasions have there been so many opportunities to vote in so little time, and the electoral calendar isn't letting up. Between national, local and primary elections, people will go to the polls five or six times this year.

This succession of elections has involved lots of voting, but not much debate. The main candidates promote similar agendas and even look a lot alike. You have to use a magnifying glass to find the real differences between Mauricio Macri, Sergio Massa and Daniel Scioli. It has never been so clear that the three candidates in play are really all the same.

The presidential administrations of first Nestor Kirchner and then his widow Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner (popularly know as CFK) of the last decade are coming to a close at long last. They are ridden with merely artificial polarization and stacked with clearly right-wing proposals. The only thing that is in question is who will get to lead the conservative turn that is coming down the road.

The Trio's Similarities

The tremendous similarities between Scioli, Massa and Marci are confirmed by the stampede of political operatives racing from one camp to another. These sorts of jumps are common to Justicialismo, but the practice has now been extended across the political spectrum. Right up to the filing dates for candidates, it's been hunting season for party insiders and financiers.

Once in motion, the candidates competed over who could say the least in a flood of ads set to pop music. All of this has prompted laughter and thousands of jokes. This vacuous parade has stoked cynicism from many commentators who offer up the candidates' patent lies as the common sense of these electoral battles. Everyone assumes that former presidents Carlos Menem's or Fernando de la Rúa's broken promises would be repeated, and that no candidate would carry out their pledges once elected. The principles of bourgeois government are on full display.

Another indication of the charade was the rush to conjure up candidates. Publicists sought out well-known figures to attract votes. The precedent that was inaugurated when the Justicialistas recruited singer and actor Palito Ortega and Formula One racing star Carlos Reutemann to run for office and has now been adopted by all competing parties. And in the province of Buenos Aires, the ballot lines are headed by models, boxers and experts in frivolity.

Given all of this, Argentina's most popular TV host Marcello Tinelli set the tone for the campaign, making imitations, dancing around stage and sharing crude jokes prerequisites for any candidate wanting to appear presidential. A quick glance affirms that this clowning around tells you all you need to know about of our hopeful future heads of state. In fact, they have already been filtered through the establishment's selection process at the provincial or municipal level, and the only question left for the public is if they retain a certain degree of sympathy or charisma to win elections.

Cynics justify this circus by blaming society at large. They argue that the people "don't want to see reality," but they are forgetting how the powers that be (and not the people in general) manipulate the electoral choices available.

Their empty phrases are just another indication of the fraud underway. Scioli emphasizes "continuity," Macri stresses "change," and Massa promotes something in between which is equally indecipherable. Meanwhile, the men of the PRO drone on about the need for "dialogue in place of confrontation." They deploy all manner of bells and whistles, offering up happy thoughts to stamp out pessimism.

It's the same marketing that the Latin American right has used to reinvent itself based by inventing new social discourses, promises of assistance, and youthful candidate profiles. They emphasize the centrality of management and proclaim the dissolution of all ideologies.

This degradation of politics fits right in with PRO's plans, which looks to absorb not only the traditional right wing that organized the cacerolazos–the pot-banging protests against the Kirchners–but also the minions of the privatizing NGOs. These sectors are more comfortable with apolitical messages than with the old reactionary anti-communist line.

Massa's operators have opted for a suitably accommodating slogan "Change within continuity," which allows him to "preserve the positive" and "change the negative." He hopes to use these concepts to obscure his ultra-conservative stance, which he nonetheless put on full display during his visit to the United States.

Scioli doesn't need any advice on how to maneuver without saying anything of substance. He managed to climb to the highest posts in the Menem and Kirchner administrations without ever once speaking a single sentence that meant anything.

The government's publicists try to fill in this gaping hole with Scioli's main campaign message: defend what has been gained against a return to the 1990s. But this supposed contrast to the past must omit Scioli's whole political trajectory and his striking similarity to the other candidates, all of whom have traveled the same path designed by the establishment.

No one knows who will win the trophy in October. Most current opinion polls have been conducted by campaign operatives and offer unreliable data, leading to a constant reevaluation of who is out in front. Recently, the populist Massa's numbers have been in a free fall, and this is adding to pressure on him to drop out of the race. But reaching an agreement with right-wing Macri will be difficult because the posts up for grabs extend beyond the heads of each ticket.

The establishment finds itself in its traditional dilemma. Its most reliable man (Macri) isn't the person who will guarantee them their tightest control over the state (Scioli). Thus, the powers that be are handing out campaign contributions to both candidates, incentivizing Macri to converge with sections of the Justicialistas (Reutemann and Massa), while Scioli is encouraged to build bridges to the right-wing elite.

The real problem for these power brokers is not who is going to win, but how the eventual winner will deal with the social-economic crisis waiting in the wings.

Preparing for Economic Adjustment

The current government has managed to cover up the conservative economic turn it made this spring. By maintaining the link to the dollar (it would have risen by 15 percent) in the face of inflation (not less than 25 percent), consumption was restructured over the course of the year, and all adjustments have been passed along to the incoming administration.

This trick is par for the course and has been used before elections in the past. As this strategy required coming to rapid agreements with joint labor-management boards, government officials negotiated strict ceilings on wage increases with the union bureaucracy.

On the one hand, the union leaderships acceded to the wages lost during the year, but on the other hand, they stabilized purchasing power for the months leading up to the elections. The same end was accomplished by adjustments announced for taxes on profits, which provide benefits for the unemployed.

The cosmetics applied today only go to shield the blows that all three candidates are preparing tomorrow. All aim to reduce the fiscal deficit, reduce wages and apply steep tariffs on energy and transportation.

Their programs include devaluations to eliminate the currency black market. Macri wants to eliminate this immediately, Massa talks about doing it in 100 days, while Scioli suggests a longer period. This convergence of goals also extends to substituting investment for consumption as the government's priority. But this turn requires enticing the capitalists who supply the money and implies offering them bigger subsidies in a period of large budget cuts.

The trio plans to finance their new model with international borrowing. Fortunately for them, the current government has already headed down this path, signing agreements with the Paris Club, renationalizing part of Argentina's oil fields (Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales, or YPF) and settling disputes through the World Bank (specifically, the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes).

CFK has pursued this course by securing credit from China and issuing bonds on the international market. These new bond issues will not go to finance productive projects. They pay three times the interest offered by the rest of South America and are solely aimed at guaranteeing currency reserves and consumption during the election season.

The financing secured so far will also allow the winner in October to build a bridge to settle with the so-called vultures–U.S. speculators who have refused to settle outstanding Argentine debt, insisting on being repaid $5.4 billion for junk bonds.

An agreement with Thomas Griesa, the U.S. judge appointed to oversee restructuring of Argentinian debt, will be the precondition for a significant influx of dollars, which the incoming president will use to implement structural adjustment. This pending agreement, if it can be reached, will signal a truce with the markets. So far, the vultures have failed to block Argentina from obtaining credit, while the government has failed to win the change of venue to Buenos Aires to settle repayment of the bonds in dispute.

Macri, Massa and Scioli are all eager to settle this conflict, putting into practice some of the initiatives promoted by CFK (changing the law on guarantees, writing off part of the balance, issuing new bonds).

While preparing this turn, the candidates promise a flood of dollars that will make any adjustment painless, and they are competing to show who can sure up the most market confidence to accelerate the bonanza. But none of them explain what will be offered to the potential providers of all this foreign exchange.

Money never flows in because of sympathy with a new president. The lords of finance always first verify that the new head of state has the ability to bestow favors on their business. The great Argentine capitalists are eager to add to their fortunes under the next administration. They are hiding some $70 billion inside the country and another $300 billion abroad.

The failure of fiscal money laundering–tried again and again by the government–illustrates the shortcomings of amnesties in encouraging evaders to repatriate their money.

The rich require stronger official measures to guarantee capitalist profitability. Macri, Massa and Scioli are all disposed to offer them this protection, arguing that "we need their dollars," as if the lack of liquidity were somehow natural instead of arising from paying off illegitimate debts to the vultures and others, and tolerating currency flight.

All of this notwithstanding, the same government which allowed this offshoring will finish up its time in office by launching a parliamentary investigation into the illegal loss of these funds. During the elections, it will attempt to air some aspects of the fraud it has accepted for a decade, but don't hold your breath. A similar commission–which investigated financial maneuvers conducted during 2001-03–eventually shelved its conclusions.

At any rate, the bankers all have confidence in the services they will get from Macri, Massa and Sciola, which is why the price for both public bonds and private stocks are rising in all Argentine markets. They are especially hopeful for big business in the petroleum sector because of a new hydrocarbon bill which the government called on Chevron to design.

The partial nationalization of YPF will not allow the state to recover sub-soil profits; on the contrary, it reinforces the profitability of its associated companies by adjusting the prices, which the state enterprise sets. These additional profits have long been demanded by the companies that extract conventional crude oil, as well as those aspiring to exploit shale deposits. And this same trend holds for all projects in the pipeline, especially in the fields of communication, mining and soybeans.

There is a lot of talk about the speed of the coming adjustment. Some expect that Macri will aim for shock therapy, while others believe Scioli will proceed more gradually. But both will be forced to act under the conditions in which they find themselves upon taking office: one either defined by offers of international relief or one much less favorable. Experts are inclined towards the latter. Forecasts predict falling prices and shrinking export purchases, in a context of a rising dollar and interest rates.

Another critical factor will be the level of popular resistance. Each of the presidential candidates can be seen testing the waters when they appeal to "dialogue and negotiation." Some analysts foresee a pact with the trade union leadership, while others predict a coalition government.

However, unlike what occurred under presidents Raúl Alfonsín and Menem, no one expects a sharp economic collapse. The fiscal imbalance is limited, the banks are stable, and the international picture is even manageable.

Still, there is a strong pressure on the establishment to accelerate the adjustment. Not only is the massive Techint Group demanding wage reductions and the elimination of export taxes, but the Talibans of the bourgeoisie (economists such as Miguel Angel Broda, José Luis Espert, Carlos Melconian and Nicolás Dujovne) are talking about eliminating labor-management boards, reinstating the Domingo Cavallo team (the Minister of Economy under de la Rúa, who pegged the peso to the dollar), and cutting the fiscal deficit in half.

The electoral amnesia predominant today serves to make everyone forget these powerful players. But the same opinions can be heard from the economists advising the trio of presidential candidates (Miguel Bein, Roberto Lavagna and Rojelio Frigerio). They are careful to use moderate language and a strong dose of diplomacy, but they are all talking about the structural adjustment, which is in the making.

Repression as Temptation

Workers' ability to resist constitutes a major obstacle to the blows that Macri, Scioli and Mass are all preparing. The last general strike was an example of this potential force. It attained a level of cohesion greater than the three previous strikes. Unions pushed for a complete shutdown in the face of a government which didn't even try to persuade them not to.

The strike not only served as a warning to whoever becomes the next president, it also demonstrated the weakness of all the official arguments against the protests. The workers were not thrown off by the media's heavy artillery against "political strikes" that were only "hurting the poor," "helping the bureaucrats" and using "inappropriate methods."

Far from being a battle of the "labor aristocracy" to the detriment of the poorest workers, the strike's demand to raise the threshold on income taxes as part of wage negotiations will stimulate action by all of the oppressed. Because inflation is so high, workers who never before made nearly enough money to cross the threshold are now being forced to pay income taxes, even though their pay is simply being adjusted for inflation.

These strikes may help revive the old traditions of workers with higher salaries taking the lead, and they make the point that relief for the poorest should be financed from business taxes, and not based on taxing incomes of the better-paid employees.

The strikes against the tax, moreover, have clarified the real social situation in the country. If only 10 percent of employed workers are impacted by this tax, the immense majority of workers earn salaries less than what is required for subsistence. The 15,000 pesos threshold for this tax is barely more than the 12,000 pesos needed to meet a family's basic needs. That half of the population survives on incomes lower than 5,500 pesos is hardly compatible with the image of a winning decade.

Macri, Scioli and Mass have all necessarily decided to continue hiding this somber reality behind statistical smokescreens. After proclaiming that Argentina had arrived in the First World–eradicating indigence and reducing poverty to 4.7 percent–the National Institute of Statistics and the Census went silent about all other indices. In fact, poverty has remained at the same rates since the 1990s (around 25 percent), with two important differences: unemployment is not as high, and there is a high level of social spending on assistance to the poor.

At the same time, structural misery has consolidated social degradation and led to an increase in crime. No one even pretends to know the exact figures, but the rough crime numbers tell the story of an obvious multiplication in violent robberies, owing to the terrible marginalization that accompanies the drug trade.

The only response to this social drama on offer from the presidential trio is for the strong hand of the police. This means that security makes up a preeminent place in their campaigns, while they only differ over the nuances of the same punitive populism. All propose stiffer criminal sentences and promise to increase the prison population.

Macri, Scioli and Massa have all spent many years in office and know how crime works, as they have all arranged agreements granting police chiefs immunity in their own districts. These conspiracies are really responsible for reproducing crime, despite the chaos that drug trafficking has introduced.

An enormous ring of corruption surrounds the three candidates, including their close relations with the soccer hooligans who control local territory and engage in shady dealings. Macri is involved with the gangs in Boca, Massa with the same sorts around Tigre, and Sciolo deals with the mafia of the Tristán Suárez sports club.

The repressive inclinations of the establishment trio are obvious. All aim to criminalize social protest and legislate some variant of anti-picketing laws, which CFK tried to do without success. They all regularly proclaim that "protests may have been valid in the 1990s," but that is no longer the case in the current universe of well-being.

This turn towards authoritarianism has also been paved by the government. After presiding over cases of genocide, retrieving grandchildren and codifying significant democratic gains after the fall of the military dictatorship, CFK kept the accused torturer César Milani at the head of the army and delegated the management of security to the ultra right-wing Sergio Berni.

Hopes on the Left

The entrance of the Left and Workers Front (Frente de la Izquierda y de los Trabajadores, or FIT) onto the scene as a national force constitutes the most promising element in an otherwise grim electoral scene. Its advance can be explained by the significant presence of left-wing organizers in recent social struggles, successfully directing part of this resistance into the political arena.

Many analysts are surprised by the influence that the three Trotskyist forces who initiated the FIT have gained, pointing out that there is no equivalent situation anywhere in the world. Yet these foreign observers often misunderstand critical factors. For instance, it is important to keep in mind the specific history of Peronismo and the traditional left's (both socialist and communist) failure to understand this movement.

In the current circumstances, the FIT is resisting a polarization that has already ground down significant actors on the political spectrum. The results from the last elections confirm the Front's gravitational pull, even though it did not surpass those of 2013. But if upcoming elections produce merely similar results, then the great hopes for a large break to the left, away from Kirchnerismo, will remain unrealized.

Most evidence points to a right turn in the upcoming elections, based on a conservative reaction to the perceived onset of an economic slowdown and a rise in unemployment. There is fear that what has been gained over the last decade will be lost, and this sentiment leads to paralysis and reinforces loyalty to the status quo.

These reactions are stoked by the incumbent party's reviving memories of 2001, while their right-wing opponents offer an alternative imaginary tale. The latter attribute all the nation's ills to Kirchner's so-called progressive policies, divorced from what has happened in the rest of the world. Brazil's right wing is placing its hopes in a similar narrative.

Faced with these restricted electoral horizons, the left has captured a section of progressive, anti-Kirchner voters. Yet CFK has demonstrated a capacity to react to crises (the fight with the vultures, the mysterious death of special prosecutor Alberto Nisman, etc.). and Kirchnerismo has won the allegiance of an important part of the new militancy in the streets. These tendencies must be kept in mind in order to avoid the exaggerated expectation of the imminent "collapse of bourgeois nationalism."

Clearly, Peronismo has lost the loyalty and mythical status it enjoyed in the past, but this loss is more commonly felt in the hallways of the ministries than it is expressed in militant protests in the streets. And however one measures it, this weakness should not be equated with the extinction of Peronismo as the nation's main political structure of the past seventy years.

The sharp crises that periodically confront Peronismo at the close of each political cycle reopen the possibilities for building a large left-wing force. Various forces have sought to direct these energies in the past, and it is falling to the FIT to attempt this task today.

To do so, the sectarian legacy of orthodox Trotskyism in Argentina must be overcome. The first step past this obstacle was the conclusion of an agreement between the different parties within the FIT. The second step is being confirmed in practice as the old dogmatic rhetoric has vanished from the FIT's speeches, posters and messages directed to the general public.

However, the most controversial problem involves opening up the FIT beyond the closed agreement of the three initiating parties to other organizations and currents originating in different political traditions on the left.

This process has not really begun, and it remains to be seen if FIT will be capable of making this transition. Yet we must not write off this potential beforehand and must emphasize the positive role it has played in rebuilding the Argentine left, even as we point out some of the FIT's negative features–such as its hostility to the Bolivarian revolutionary process in Venezuela or to the Cuban Revolution.

The FIT occupies the vacuum left by political currents that decided to dissolve themselves into Justicialista or into the anti-Kirchnerismo center-left. If the path to returning to this space together is uncertain, then the alternative path of voting for Scioli or for Margerita Stolbizer (the centrist social democrat, currently with little traction in the polls) means political suicide. The Front doesn't provide easy answers for building revolutionary socialism in Latin America, but it does constitute the best chances for doing so up until now.

In the immediate future, a vote for the left is a mandate for resistance to abuses coming down the pike, and this is the chief argument for voting for the FIT. The more deputies and legislators the left wins, the stronger our armor will be when it comes to fighting the new government's plans for structural adjustment.

Translated by Todd Chretien

Reprinted with permission from Socialist Worker.

June 24, 2015
On Critical Theory, Value Theory, and So-Called Traditional Marxism

Werner Bonefeld, Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014, 246 pp.

This book by one of the main figures associated with the German “New Reading” of Marx (neue Marx-Lektüre)—a post-1968 phenomenon much indebted to the early Frankfurt School and Theodor Adorno in particular—is alternately frustrating and enlightening. We will begin with the frustrating aspects and end with the enlightening ones.

Bonefeld is an outspoken critic not merely of traditional political economy but of what he alternately terms “classical Marxism,” “traditional Marxism,” “worldview Marxism” and “structuralist Marxism” (though the last label may apply only to the tradition inaugurated by Louis Althusser and not to any Marxists of the Second and Third Internationals—Bonefeld does not quite make this clear). He argues that such Marxism “purports a dialectics between the trans-historically conceived forces of production and the historically specific relations of production” (p. 4), and as such does not escape traditional political economy’s presentation of its own categories as reflecting laws of nature. The New Reading, on the other hand, claims “that the critique of political economy amounts to a critique of ontological conceptions of economic categories, including the category of labour as a trans-historically conceived activity that defines the human metabolism with nature in abstraction from society” (p. 3). So Bonefeld’s book offers yet another critique of the view of history promulgated by the official Communist parties as the “automatic” unfolding of the development of the productive forces. This critique is correct. But one wonders why it needs to be offered yet again. There are few Marxists alive today who would define historical materialism in such fashion. Furthermore, actual classical Marxism, as represented by the leading thinkers of German Social Democracy during its healthiest period, was hardly as mechanical or undialectical or “Darwinian evolutionist” as legend would have it.[1] Aside from the usual “scientistic” examples from Friedrich Engels’ Anti-Dühring, Bonefeld provides no evidence that prominent theorists from what Leszek Kołakowski called “the Golden Age of Marxism” embraced a social theory that “transform[ed] social laws into laws of nature” (p. 5), rhetorical flourishes about the inevitability of proletarian revolution aside.

Of course, Bonefeld does grasp what “vulgar” or official Communist Marxism did not: that capitalist economic categories are not “historically specific manifestations of general historical laws” and that Marx’s critique of political economy is precisely a critique of those economic categories themselves, which is what makes it a critical social theory (p. 22). His chapter on “Political Economy and Social Constitution” is primarily concerned with stressing against the Althusserian tradition that Marx’s Capital is—among other things—an explanation of how “[i]n capitalism…the individuals are governed by the product of their own hands and what appears thus as economic nature is in fact a socially constituted nature that belongs to definite social relations. Social reality is thus an ‘objective appearance’: the social individual vanishes in her own social world only to reappear with a price tag, by which she is governed” (p. 27). But he goes overboard in suggesting that “traditional” Marxists such as David Harvey and Terry Eagleton have no understanding of this. For instance, Bonefeld attacks Eagleton for his suggestion that only socialism can overcome the “artificial” scarcity of capitalist society, arguing that his statements repeat “the illusion of the first and second Internationals that perceived capitalism as a transition to socialism” (p. 34). But obviously Marx himself played a prominent role in the First International (which was not itself “Marxist”), and capitalism is most certainly a transition to socialism inasmuch as it is distinguished by precisely what is necessary for a society of relative abundance—mass production. Marx and Engels made this clear as early as 1848 in The Communist Manifesto.

Moreover, despite the truth of what Bonefeld (invoking Adorno) labels “the ad hominem critique of capitalism, which says that the categories of capitalist political economy are the categories of definite social relations and that they are thus immanent to the actual relations of life” (p. 41), he is—again—essentially repeating what various Marxists have been saying for decades. For example, a recent book by Peter Hudis echoes Bonefeld in its emphasis on capitalism’s “inversion of subject and predicate, in which the products as well as the actions of people take on the form of an autonomous power that determine and constrain the will of the subjects that engender them.”[2] But Hudis is working in the primarily American tradition of the Marxist-Humanism of Raya Dunayevskaya, the origins of which predate the New Reading and which was developed without much (if any) interaction with German “New Readers” such as Hans Georg Backhaus, Helmut Reichelt or Michael Heinrich. British economist Diane Elson, too, already understood that Marx had a “value theory of labor” in which the supremacy of abstract labor (to oversimplify: the necessity of workers working at similar rates within their specific occupations for capitalism to function) characterizes a social formation in which the process of production dominates humanity, rather than the opposite.[3] And one can find analogous themes in Bertell Ollman’s Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), as noted by Bonefeld himself.

Other declarations by Bonefeld are also accurate and useful and yet not unique in their insights. It is true that Marxian dialectics is primarily a “critique of the entire system of economic categories” and not “a theology of history” nor “some magic wand” (p. 68); such was already made plain by Heinrich’s complaint that “more often than not, the grandiose rhetoric about dialectics is reducible to the simple fact that everything is dependent on everything else and is in a state of interaction and that’s all rather complicated—which is true in most cases, but doesn’t really say anything.”[4] Similarly, Bonefeld’s chapter on abstract labor (shrewdly titled “Time is money”), firmly within the tradition of “value-form theory,” is first-rate, but largely repeats the arguments of Isaak Rubin, Chris Arthur, and Heinrich against those who use “physiological” and “trans-historical” definitions of what Bonefeld deems “the pivotal concept of the critique of political economy” (p. 121).

More innovative, however, is Bonefeld’s understanding of primitive accumulation not as a period of transition towards capitalist society but the very foundation of capitalist production, “the centrifugal point around which revolves the specific capitalist form of social labour” (p. 83). Here the enlightening aspects of Bonefeld’s book appear, as he moves beyond notions of the permanence of primitive accumulation inspired by Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital (1913). What is truly permanent about primitive (ursprünglich) accumulation is capitalist ecconomic compulsion, “the freedom of ‘economic bondage’”—an abstract rather than personal form of dependency. Only from the standpoint of capitalist accumulation is ursprüngliche accumulation “primitive” (pp. 83-4). Bonefeld breaks here from the neue Marx-Lektüre for developing the value form as a conceptually closed system without making clear what conditions must be established for exchange relations to dominate human existence. It is class itself, he says, that “is the historical and logical premise of the value form. It entails the force of law-making violence within its concept. This force of law-making violence is the divorce of labour from the means of subsistence, which appears in the law of value in the form of economic compulsion” (p. 79). As such, class “is an objective category of a perverted system of wealth, and its production” rather than a theory of social stratification that categorizes “this or that social group according to some analytical criteria such as level of income, educational achievement, living standard, etc.” (pp. 102-3).[5] Recalling Rosa Luxemburg’s intuition[6] that the political power of capital rests upon the extent of organizational and ideological disunity among workers, Bonefeld explains that “class” has “a double meaning: it entails the notion of class unity as the manifestation of the…antagonism between the classes, and it entails class disunity as a competitive relationship between the sellers of labour power,” who do not experience competition as “some abstract economic law…[rather] it is experienced in the form of precarious labour markets and pressure to secure the profitability of [their] employers as the basis of sustained employment” (p. 107). This echoes Ellen Meiksins Wood’s recurring argument that the capitalist market is not an opportunity but an imperative for workers and capitalists alike.[7] But Bonefeld, via Adorno, deepens this insight through his contention that class itself is “the critical concept of the false society. Innate to its concept is the dispossessed labourer as a self-responsible personification of essentially unpaid labour time…on the one hand, a perverted social category and, on the other…the living premise of its own reified world” (p. 115).

Bonefeld also makes a strong case against Robert Cox’s “neo-Gramscian” theory of international relations through his understanding that “[t]he world market is…not coterminous with the sum of the many national economies. Rather it comprises the relations of capitalist social reproduction within, between and beyond national borders” (p. 149). His attempt at establishing a “correct” Marxist theory (and critique) of the state runs the risk of being misguided—as the classical texts are often unfinished, ambiguous, and even contradictory[8]—but the idea of the capitalist state as “the political form of the capitalist social relations” (p. 165), “the political force of the law of value” (p. 174), may prove a promising alternative to other theories (“instrumentalism,” “structuralism,” “derivationism,” etc.) provided that it can account for variations in this political form as well as provide a guide as to what should constitute working-class political action today. Equally powerful is the chapter on anti-Semitism, which invokes Adorno and Horkeimer’s line of reasoning from Dialectic of Enlightenment in order to critique the “solidarity with false friends” made by some contemporary leftists in the name of anti-imperialism or, at best, “anti-capitalism for the sake of anti-capitalism” (p. 203). Just as—for the anti-Semite—the Jew “has powers…that cannot be defined concretely,” the “abject violence used by the state of Israel in its dealings with the Palestinians has nothing to do with Jewishness” (pp. 204-5). State violence cannot be Jewish (or, for that matter, Islamist) in character—it can only be innate to “the state as the concentrated force of [capitalist] society” (p. 204). And that society, Bonefeld points out, can never be based purely on “industrious” productive capital as opposed to “parasitical” (“Jewish”) rentier capital, regardless of anti-Semitic delusions.

Frustrating features aside, Critical Theory is a rewarding read. If some of its propositions are overdrawn, it does very effectively reconnect the critique of political economy with, yes, critical theory, and ably defends much of the neue Marx-Lektüre against rival understandings of Marx’s project. Conceivably, it may help revitalize Marxist state theory. And if, as Bonefeld rightly affirms, the old “official Marxist” teleology is discredited, he is also right to demand that class struggle be “rediscovered as the laboratory of human emancipation” (p. 225).

[1] For proof, see Paul Blackledge, “Karl Kautsky and Marxist Historiography,” Science & Society, Vol. 70, No. 3 (2006), pp. 337-359. Works that might substantiate Bonefeld’s point, such as Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism, are not mentioned.

[2] Peter Hudis, Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket, 2013), p. 42.

[3] Diane Elson, “The Value Theory of Labour,” in Diane Elson, ed., Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism (London: CSE Books, 1979), pp. 115-80.

[4] Michael Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012), pp. 36-7.

[5] Curiously, Bonefeld claims that classical Marxists defined “the component classes of society…according to the source of their revenue” (p. 104). It is more accurate to say that classical Marxists fused three different aspects in their conception of the working class: the empirical (in practice, the industrial proletariat), the structural (those who sell their labor power), and the normative or political (class consciousness). See Stephen Eric Bronner, “Rosa Redux: A Reply to Alan Johnson and David Camfield,” in Jason Schulman, ed., Rosa Luxemburg: Her Life and Legacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 67.

[6] See Jason Schulman, “Reflections on Red Rosa: An Interview with Stephen Eric Bronner,” in Schulman, ed., p. 189.

[7] Originally in Ellen Meiksins Wood, “From Opportunity to Imperative: The History of the Market,” Monthly Review (July-August 1994), pp. 14-40.

[8] See Clyde W. Barrow, “The Marx Problem in Marxian State Theory,” Science and Society 64:1 (2000), pp. 87-118.

June 24, 2015
Mexican President and his Party Victorious in Election; Left Divided and Defeated

Despite widespread disillusionment with the political system, an organized attempt to prevent the election from taking place in a few states, and continuing economic doldrums, President Enrique Peña Nieto and his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) were the big winners in the Mexican election, followed by the conservative National Action Party (PAN). Both parties are committed to continuing the deepening of the country's neoliberal, free market economic reforms.

The Mexican left of all stripes lost, in some cases disastrously. The left parties that participated in the election saw their percentages of the national vote decline, while the left groups that attempted to prevent the election from taking place were successful in only some cities and towns and in only a few states. While more than half of all Mexicans did not vote, that seems to have been more a result of typical voter apathy or general disgust with the government and the parties than the result of the boycott or the campaign to prevent voting.

The PRI won 29 percent of the vote and the PAN 20 percent, while several competing leftist parties divided their vote, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) received 10.8, the Movement of National Regeneration (MORENA) 8.3 percent and the Citizens Movement, 5.9 percent, while the Workers Party (PT), received only 2.87 percent, too little to keep its registration and ballot status. MORENA took comfort from winning a majority of seats in the Mexico City legislature, surpassing its rival the PRD.

The PRI and its allied parties, such as the Green Ecological Party and the New Alliance Party, will have large pluralities in both house of the Mexican Congress.

The National Coordinating Committee (la CNTE), a dissident caucus within the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE)–arguing that the government, electoral authorities and the parties are utterly corrupt–prevented the National Electoral Institute (INE) from setting up hundreds of polling places in several cities and towns in Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Chiapas.

The teachers originally called for a boycott, but rather than attempting to persuade voters not to vote, they made it impossible wherever they could. In some places the teachers and their allies burned polling booths and ballots or in other ways discouraged or prevented their fellow citizens from voting.

In some towns the teachers found themselves at odds with locals who wanted to participate in the elections while in others they faced repression from the police. But in most of the other 32 states the election went as planned without substantial problems. The call for a national boycott of the election failed.

The Mexican left is now in the weakest position in electoral politics since the 1980s. Between the late-1980s and the 2010s the left united behind the PRD could generally win about one third of the vote. Now no left party has more than about 10 percent. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, leader of MORENA, has pledged that his party will not join in a coalition with the PRD in the coming presidential election in 2018.

June 14, 2015
Sanders and Independent Politics

Despite his relatively low poll numbers at the moment, Bernie Sanders’ bid for the Democratic presidential nomination is catching fire and will undoubtedly attract a great many more supporters in the months to come. For radicals, and especially for socialists in the “third camp” tradition (so called from the time of the Cold War, when our tendency stood for revolutionary opposition to both camps) this poses a challenge. As longtime advocates of independent political action, how should we relate to Sanders and his supporters? Barry Finger (“Further Reflections on the Sanders Campaign,” New Politics online, May 26) offers an approach that while emphasizing political hostility to the Democratic Party nevertheless goes partially astray on this issue, in my opinion.

As Barry notes, the issue is not ideological “purity.” Third camp socialists are often dismissed by other leftists as “purists” with impossibly high standards, because we have been opponents of Communist regimes, for example, and other authoritarian forces that don the mantle of socialism or anti-imperialism. What’s wrong with these regimes isn’t that they are “not good enough” on some scale of socialist virtue, but that they represent an alternative to socialism as we understand it – a system that maximizes the decision-making power that workers are able to exercise over their lives and governments. Similarly, any domestic political strategy that takes workers and other discontented elements back into the Democratic Party – which is fundamentally an arm of the ruling class, used to preserve the capitalist system and especially to discipline and neutralize those who might stray into opposition – points us in a different direction, away from class independence and mass empowerment.

More than in any other capitalist country, the left in the U.S. is marginal and, as far as most Americans are concerned, invisible. We tend to forget this when we attend large-scale events like the Left Forum, which are enlightening and often inspiring, but where we talk mainly to ourselves. Kshama Sawant’s election was a major breakthrough for socialist and independent radical politics, but still only at the local level. Apart from Seattle residents and committed leftists, relatively few Americans have even heard of Sawant, and that includes liberal-minded people who regularly keep up with the news. For most people in this country, socialism is still inextricably associated with utopian fantasy or totalitarianism. And as yet, few can imagine any significant change in the neoliberal status quo – much as they might wish for it.

The key to changing this, the only way in which the left can begin to influence the thinking and activity of millions of people, is to promote initiatives that have the possibility of detaching significant sections of the working and lower middle classes from their mostly passive, predetermined party preferences, mainly their preference for the Democrats. Only within such a movement could socialist ideas begin to “make sense” as a logical extension of what people have already done – declared their political independence. In all likelihood, the initial programmatic basis for an independent political formation would be non-socialist, left-liberal reformism. But socialists would be a loyal opposition, as Barry says – that is, loyal to the goal of consistent and principled independence from the Establishment. Until that happens, socialists and the left will continue to participate in struggles for justice and equality, of course, and there will be some victories; but as far as making real progress is concerned, we will be spinning our wheels for the most part — as we have for a long time now, while the ruling elite arrogantly revels in virtually unchallenged domination.

This last point is worth stressing. Today, as is often observed, socialist ideas are enjoying a currency they have not had for 70 years or more. But as yet, even among Americans who find the socialist critique of capitalism appealing, very few can imagine socialism as a viable, achievable alternative. Having a new party of the left would radically expand the parameters of what people can conceive as “practical.”

Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter offered startling glimpses of the potential for social upheaval that lies just below the surface. No one could have predicted Occupy or the emergence of the Fight for $15 campaigns, and the mushrooming protests of low wage workers. Police murders of Black people are nothing new, but the eruption of mass protest against these murders that has swept across the cities and towns of this country is unlike anything we have seen in decades. I’m not saying that anything and everything is possible. But neither do I think that independent political action initiatives must wait, or have no hope of gaining traction, until a mass nationwide social movement, like the antiwar movement of the 60s, appears. I also think that those who make this argument seriously underestimate the oppositional currents, both manifest and emerging, that exist today. Whatever one’s estimate of the level of struggle at this moment, it is imperative to organize a party-type formation as soon as possible, with whatever forces we have, so that we will be ready the next time an explosion, like that of Occupy, occurs. No matter how progressive Sanders’ program is, his campaign leads people in a different direction — away from political independence and back into the Democratic Party.

Barry claims that the Democratic Party can no longer portray itself convincingly, to its base, as a lesser evil – that its wholesale embrace of neoliberalism and austerity means that it can no longer perform its traditional function of coopting the left. It is true that the Democrats’ greater conservatism, their more blatant association with a corporate agenda, makes them more vulnerable to opposition from the left. And it may turn out that Hillary Clinton’s current impersonation of a populist will prove less convincing than previous performances by Democratic hopefuls. But Barry greatly underestimates the extent to which the Democrats can still maintain the allegiance of the left, however reluctant, on the basis of abortion rights, gay rights, Supreme Court nominations, climate change denial and, most centrally, the threat of right-wing Republican victories — notwithstanding the fact that the Democrats’ now complete abandonment of New Deal-style labor liberalism has actually helped create a climate in which reactionary extremism flourishes.

Barry is at pains to point out that 2015 is not 1968, mainly because there is no mass social insurgency, as there was back then. But I think he’s mistaken to argue that this difference alone requires us to have an orientation towards the Sanders campaign that is significantly different from the position we took on the Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy insurgencies. Even though there are today no movements in the streets or on the campuses that approach the scale of what we knew in the 60s, Americans in general are much more to the left than they were then. The gap between the policies of the political leadership and the preferences of the mass of ordinary people, as expressed in poll after poll, is immense; this was not so much the case in the 60s. Most importantly, after 30 years of neoliberalism and flagrant corporate domination, there is a far greater awareness of what’s wrong with the Democrats.

In 1968 we hoped the Peace and Freedom Party would attract those who opposed the Vietnam War, along with a substantial part of the Black community and its white allies. We opposed the McCarthy and Kennedy campaigns because they were meant to “set back the momentum of independent politics,” as Barry puts it. But we hoped to be able to draw McCarthy and Kennedy supporters towards independent political action, as long as we had a party structure in place and something politically attractive to offer them after Humphrey won the nomination at Chicago. As it turned out, the PFP essentially destroyed that momentum itself with the farcical campaign of Eldridge Cleaver and Jerry Rubin. It was a tragedy, and in my opinion a turning point in the degeneration and eventual collapse of the 60s New Left – which in turned played a role in the conservative turn taken by U.S. politics in the 70s.

Prior to that hoped-for breakthrough, the PFP was actually no larger than the Greens are today and not nearly as well organized or experienced. But of course Barry is referring to the larger context of social upheaval in the 60s, of which the PFP was only a small expression. Nonetheless, it is as true today as it was in 1968 that a progressive insurgency within the Democratic Party will “set back the momentum of independent politics.” If leftists and leftward-moving people are scooped up in a dead end fight to transform the Democratic Party, or influence whatever mainstream candidate emerges from the primaries in the convention, this will be a setback that leaves many activists disoriented.

A momentum towards a break with the Democrats and a breakthrough towards independent political action, even in the absence of a mass social upheaval like that of the 60s, has been gathering, even if only in fits and starts, since the 1990s. To create an alternative to the Sanders campaign, is not, as Barry charges, a “sectarian incantation for preserving the cadre in the remote hope that this inspired few may yet ignite a political fuse.” The hope may be remote — though I think it’s not as far-fetched as Barry seems to believe — but we should not suspend the fight for a party of the left because of that. Our task is not to “preserve the cadre,” but to maintain, unambiguously, and to argue consistently for the perspective of a new political party that can advance the goals of today’s and tomorrow’s progressive struggles.

Sanders’ social democratic program is in some respects to the left of European social-democratic parties. In other respects, as many of his supporters have acknowledged, his program is marred by some glaring omissions, chiefly a failure to call for massive reductions in military spending. This is quite extraordinary, and quite revealing. Cutting military spending and transferring the funding to social programs such as education and universal health care is actually popular among the general population, as polls show. But it is heresy among the political elite, very much including the Democratic political establishment. This is a position that someone like Hillary cannot endorse even vaguely and as part of the usual pre-election demagogy. A possible reason for Sander’s silence, at least in part, is that the military budget is a subject on which he does not want to distance himself too far from the Party leadership. Moreover, Sanders has had appallingly bad positions on many foreign policy issues, for example supporting the invasion of Afghanistan and Israel’s attack on Gaza. And he tends to submerge the fight against racism in a generalized class-based program – which means that he has little to offer to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Despite these glaring deficiencies, if Sanders had chosen to run as an independent, and if, as is highly unlikely, he eventually decides to break with the Party and run as an independent in the general election, a deeply compromised program would be no bar to supporting him, albeit very critically. As things stand, however, the Sanders insurgency amounts to considerably less than what Barry calls an “incipient rank and file mutiny,” if by that Barry means a mutiny against the neoliberal leadership of the Democratic Party. In the first place, what kind of a mutiny is it in which Fletcher Christian promises not even to criticize Captain Bligh and to rally around him if the mutiny fails? Recent news reports have Sanders implicitly criticizing Hillary Clinton, mainly on trade agreements, but only in response to audience questioning and accompanied by repeated assurances that he refuses to run a “negative personal” campaign. When pressed by reporters to criticize Hillary Clinton’s politics, Sanders again and again tries to change the subject to what’s wrong with the Republicans. At most he will admit to being “bewildered” by Clinton’s refusal so far, for example, to take a position on anti-worker trade deals. In other words, precisely when Hillary Clinton’s hypocrisy and demagogy need to be exposed and ripped apart, Sanders voluntarily ties his own hands.

Barry writes: “Radicals should encourage [the Sanders movement] to struggle into the primaries and beyond, into the fall elections and after, in the Democratic Party through the primaries and –when that fails – out, preferably with Sanders, but if need be, without.” He predicts the Sanders campaign “will rapidly assume a half-in, half-out posture towards the Democratic Party as it tries to expand its base in the teeth of fierce bipartisan resistance.” But it is wishful thinking to believe that Sanders supporters will move in this direction without the existence of an organized alternative outside the campaign that has been saying all along that fighting within the Democratic Party is self-defeating.

I agree with Barry that the Sanders movement can “make a lasting contribution to the development of an independent oppositional current in American politics – but only if it splits from the Democratic Party. He calls for holding Sanders’ “feet to the fire if he temporizes his stance against the Party establishment.” The trouble, as noted before, is that Sanders is only implicitly opposed to the Party establishment and persistently avoids taking on that establishment directly. Barry says that leftists working within the Sanders movement should “emphasize the unbridgeable gulf that exists between the Party they seek to attain and the Democratic Party as it actually exists.” But if the gulf is “unbridgeable” doesn’t that mean that the Sanders movement is fundamentally misdirected, and that we should say so?

Sanders is an appealing campaigner with a militant, even if limited, platform, at least on domestic issues. By suggesting through his action that the Democratic Party is reformable, he will bring disillusioned Americans back into its ranks. He will draw back to the Democratic fold activists who have become open to independent politics – in fact, he is already doing so, in a big way. After the Party selects its nominee, Sanders will likely make the case that there is no alternative to campaigning and voting for Hillary, or whoever, as the lesser evil to Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush or whatever fiend the Republicans put forward. After devoting more than a year to the Sanders campaign, it will be hard for his followers to change course. Because they are in effect accepting the idea that the Democratic Party is the only game in town, many are likely instead to dig in and create some sort of permanent inner-party left wing – that is until it fizzles out as all its predecessors have done or is absorbed into the feeble Progressive Caucus, thus misdirecting and ultimately neutralizing progressive energies for yet another historical period.

The die is not cast; we still have an opportunity to sway many of Sanders’ supporters to abandon the Democratic Party. But already it is clear that Sanders is re-legitimizing a reform-from-within strategy on the left. Liberal and leftist writers will portray his campaign as “a serious war for the soul of the party,” as Jacob Swenson-Lengyel put in In These Times (website, May 13, 2015). We are sure to see an avalanche of this stuff during the next 17 months.

That doesn’t mean that third party supporters should adopt a hostile attitude toward Sanders supporters and make peremptory “demands” on them, as Barry seems to think they are doing now. Demands always imply some sort of ultimatum; we make them on our enemies, the bosses and the capitalist state, not our friends. On the contrary, as people who share their goals we urge Sanders supporters to make themselves independent of the Democratic Party – with or without Sanders himself. This is the approach that Howie Hawkins’ Green Party campaign for governor of New York took toward Zephyr Teachout’s primary challenge to Andrew Cuomo. Hawkins did not denounce Teachout, much less her supporters, but instead explained that the only way to defeat the policies Cuomo stands for is to build an independent party. Should the Greens have suspended their campaign when Teachout entered the race? Should they not have urged Teachout’s supporters to break with the Democrats before she lost the primary? I think Hawkins and the Greens did exactly the right thing, including urging Teachout and her supporters to change course after the primary and support Hawkins – which Teachout refused to do, but about half of her voters did.

Sanders can and will educate people about corporate rule and progressive reforms. But what he cannot do is educate them about the Democratic Party itself. We absolutely must have clarity on the issue of building a new party, even if it takes years. Sanders is opposed to this at the moment and is highly unlikely to change. A great many independent party advocates have endorsed him and will work hard on his campaign; but they should remember that Sanders cannot endorse them and their goal of political independence as long as he pursues the course he is on.

So we should not be reluctant to say to Sanders supporters that what they are doing is self-defeating and therefore mistaken. But at the same time, we should say to them, in effect, “if you don’t agree with us, at least fight consistently and openly within the Sanders campaign for political independence by declaring now that you will not support a mainstream Democrat like Hillary Clinton after the convention and by calling on Sanders to do likewise.” In the meantime, we should urge them to actively support the Green Party’s efforts to get on the ballots of as many states as possible in order to put an infrastructure in place for an independent candidate in 2016.

June 14, 2015
Tiananmen Mothers Urge Leaders to Take Historical Responsibility for June Fourth

A quarter century has passed since the June Fourth Massacre that took place in Beijing, China’s capital, near the end of the last century. But the truth of this tragedy has to this day not been laid bare to the world, and the massacre victims, who have still not received justice, cannot rest in peace. This is a disgrace for the whole Chinese people, and a disgrace for all of civilized humanity!

For two long decades since year 1995, we, as victims and families of victims of the June Fourth tragedy, have been faithfully writing letters to the Two Congresses and the Chinese leaders—stating that the 1989 Tiananmen bloodshed was not a misdeed by the government, but a crime it committed against its people. We ask for a public and just resolution to the June Fourth issue and seek discussion and dialogue with the government concerning the remaining June Fourth issues. Our three demands are: reinvestigate June Fourth and make public the names and number of the deceased; provide an explanation and compensation to the family of each of the victims in accordance with the law; and prosecute those criminally responsible for the June Fourth tragedy. In summary, we seek truth, compensation, and accountability.

However, our appeals have met with no reply.

In the last century, many innocent people’s lives were lost—80 million (some say 60 million) under the rule of the Communist Party of China alone. During the Land Reform and Suppress the Counterrevolutionaries campaigns in the 1950s, many people were beaten to death or murdered; the Great Leap Forward from the late 1950s to the early 1960s (which was in fact the Great Famine) starved numerous people to death; from the 1960s to the 1970s, the nationwide and decade-long turmoil of the Cultural Revolution resulted in the suicide and murder of many people. And near the end of the century, the bloodshed of June 4, 1989 occurred, when the fully-armed field army entered Beijing to carry out the most gruesome massacre of students and other residents, spraying them with machine guns, and crushing their own compatriots with tanks. Exactly how many people died? The number has been tightly concealed to this day.

After the June Fourth bloodshed, we stood up from where our loved ones fell—one by one, we gathered group by group, and gradually we organized ourselves as the Tiananmen Mothers group. In the endless night of darkness, we struggled, lost, struggled, and lost again. Yet we have never stopped, never rested. We did not despair or become discouraged at each failure, did not retreat or disperse. Instead, we continued forward, attracting more and more of those who share the same fate to come to our group.

Two thousand fourteen marked the critical 25th anniversary of June Fourth, when the Tiananmen Mothers as a whole suffered a new level of strict surveillance and suppression. Originally, we had planned that beginning with the 10th anniversary of June Fourth, victims' families in Beijing would hold a collective memorial ceremony every five years. We would bring our deceased family members’ photos, gather in one of our homes, offer flowers, burn incense and light candles, play solemn music, and sprinkle wine to mourn our loved ones, so as to express our sorrows and comfort our loved ones’ souls.

In 1999, the 10th anniversary of June Fourth, we carried out our memorial ceremony under the tight surveillance of plainclothes police.

In 2004, the 15th anniversary, despite the wrongful treatment during the “T-shirt Incident”[1] in March, we still carried out our memorial ceremony under the watch of plainclothes police.

In 2009, the 20th anniversary, apart from Ding Zilin and her husband, who were under house arrest and could not participate, other victims’ families all held the memorial ceremony despite interference.

In 2014, the 25th anniversary of June Fourth, we had originally decided to hold the memorial ceremony in one of our homes on May 16. However, from Tomb-sweeping Day in April to around June 10, the majority of the Tiananmen Mothers in Beijing were visited by officials from the Municipal Public Security Bureau, State Security Brigade, district police sub-stations, and neighborhood committees to “have a talk.” Watch stations were set up outside their homes. And they were followed and watched when they went out. Therefore, the scheduled ceremony had to be abandoned. Even our annual statement on June Fourth could not be issued. In worse cases, some of our members’ homes were searched: Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau officials came to these members’ homes to have “talks” with them that lasted entire days, from morning until night, which ended only when they “voluntarily” surrendered all the documents stored on their personal computers. Ding Zilin and her husband were put under house arrest outside of Beijing from May 4 to June 5. They were, for the first time, not able to keep vigil with their son’s spirit (his ashes are kept in their Beijing home) on his birthday (June 2) and death anniversary (June 3), let alone hold a memorial ceremony at home.

Monitoring of the Tiananmen Mothers did not stop with the passing of the 25th anniversary of June Fourth. Instead, it has become an all-encompassing “new normal.” Previously, the authorities mainly tapped the landlines and mobile phones of some of our core members to keep track of our activities before taking actions. Since early this year, they went so far as installing a bugging device inside the homes of certain members of the Tiananmen Mothers. When members had discussions of matters we were all concerned about, they recorded our conversations—including the drafts of the documents we read out loud—and then intimidated them. The families of victims, filled with righteous anger, denounce such despicable practices

They killed our family members without any explanation; when we demand justice—there is none. There is only persecution and monitoring to shut our mouths, and this is getting worse and worse.

In March 2015, Premier Li Keqiang said at the Two Congresses’ press conference, “the leaders of a state not only inherit their predecessors’ successes, but should also bear historical responsibility for their predecessors’ crimes.” He was referring to the Japanese military imperialists’ war of aggression against China, and saying that today’s leaders of the Japanese government should bear historical responsibility for the catastrophe their predecessors created in China. By the same logic, shouldn’t today’s Chinese leaders bear responsibility for the series of crimes—manmade famine and slaughter—perpetrated in their own country by China’s leaders at the time: Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping? This is a certainty without a doubt and not easily changed. This is what “upholding a correct view of history, using history as a mirror [to look to the future]” means. The people will wait and see.

[The leaders] cannot impose a forced amnesia: remember whatever is beneficial to them and forget whatever is damaging to them. From June Fourth to now, each leadership [regime] in China has adopted selective forgetting about June Fourth. We have to unequivocally tell our leaders today that, relying on coerced selective forgetting can only succeed temporarily, and people’s silence cannot sustain over the long term. Debts must always be paid, and can neither be evaded nor reneged on.

The Chinese government’s concealment and deception about June Fourth since 1989 has rendered the whole society an empty shell, where every corner of society is shrouded in pervasive gloom, apathy, despair, and depravity, without fairness, justice, integrity, shame, reverence, remorse, tolerance, responsibility, compassion, or love. Post-June Fourth youth, in particular, cannot find anything about June Fourth in books, magazines, or online media. They cannot find anything about June Fourth victims, their families, or the Tiananmen Mothers. Even the entire history of June Fourth has become a blank for them. Whose fault is this?

Don’t forget what year this is—why people commemorate the 70th anniversary of the world’s victory against fascism, why we commemorate the 70th anniversary of China’s victory in the War of Resistance against Japan, why Taiwan commemorates the “228 ” suppression [of Taiwanese intellectuals], and why Korea commemorates the Gwangju Massacre each year. We ask: When, which day, which year will China also commemorate the tragic deaths of those innocents in the Land Reform and Suppress the Counterrevolutionaries campaigns, the ordinary people who starved to death during the Great Famine, the Chinese citizens tortured and persecuted to death during the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, and the victims of the June Fourth Massacre? People are all united in this belief and abide by this logic!

Signatories:

The list of signatories can be found at Human Rights in China (HRIC) where the statement was originally published.

June 7, 2015
What Went Wrong–and Why

So why did things go so wrong under the leadership of President Barack Obama? David Bromwich has written an informative and important critical article on the Obama presidency, critical one might say from the progressive point of view, titled “What Went Wrong: Assessing Obama’s Legacy” which appears in the June issue of Harper’s. Fundamentally, Bromwich sees Obama as a weak president who has consistently pursued the “path of least resistance” rather than the “path of courageous resistance.” He was, says Bromwich, a president who mistook talk for action, who avoided political conflict and struggle, and who missed opportunities that presented themselves, moments when he might have advanced a progressive agenda.

Obama came to the presidency, writes Bromwich, without any record of political struggle either as a community organizer, a state legislator, or a congressperson: “Obama came to the presidency as an unformed actor in politics.” Obama had no idea of how to fight for his ideas and no taste for doing so. He disdained politics and had no truck with Congress. He held few cabinet meetings. He did not “cultivate political friends or fraternize with comrades.” At the same time, he did not communicate to the public, did not argue for his positions on health care, Iraq, Syria, or Iran. Yet he took great pride in his friendship with Wall Street bankers. Bromwich’s article leaves us with the impression that it was this basic character flaw—weakness and lack of courage—that accounts for the Obama administration's failures.

Bromwich produces quite a list of the administrations problems: Obama’s failure to take advantage of the Democratic Party Congressional majority during the first two years of his first term to press his agenda. His failure to close the prison at Guantánamo. His failure to get out of Afghanistan when the opportunity presented itself. The failure of his Iraq policies. The error of putting Larry Summers at the head of his economic team. His expansion of the Drone war. The dropping of Palestine from his agenda. The confused humanitarian intervention in Libya. Foreign policies in Honduras, Ukraine, and Venezuela that seemed to escape his control. Obama filled his cabinet with people who generally opposed his views on war and surveillance, and, paying little attention to developments, let their decisions prevail. While he prioritized domestic over foreign policy: “Obama’s domestic policy has, for the most part, exhibited a pattern of intimation, postponement, and retreat.”

Obama’s administration, Bromwich suggests, shows us the power of the “Deep State—an entity that is real but difficult to define.” Then he defines it: “Bureaucracy, by its nature, is impersonal. It lacks an easily traceable collective will. But when a bureaucracy has grown big enough, then some of its actions may obstruct any attempt by an individual, no matter how powerful and well placed to counteract its overall drift.” The bureaucracy he refers to are the NSA and the CIA, the 2,000 private companies and 1,300 government organizations employed in counterterrorism, intelligence and surveillance, and the 854,000 Americans with top-secret security clearances. At the end of his essay Bromwich seems to suggest that Obama held the title while they governed, a point of view that lets the president off the hook, failed to hold him personally responsible, because he was so damned weak.

Bromwich is no doubt right that there is a Deep State—but it is not only the military and intelligence establishment. It includes the party leaders, Republican and Democrats and their top fundraisers and consultants.

The problem with Bromwich’s article is that it fails to recognize that weakness and lack of courage are also political choices. While it may be true that Obama preferred to talk rather than to lead political fights, organize and administer government, or follow through on his various proposals, still he chose those to whom he deferred. But Obama made the choice to place Larry Summers in charge of his economic program and to make Timothy F. Geithner and then Jacob J. Lew of Citigroup Secretaries of the Treasure. Obama made the choice to keep on Bush’s Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates; ahis three other appointees Leon Panetta, Chuck Hagel, and Ashton Carter were, of course part of the military-industrial establishment. That is Obama made the choice to turn over government to the banks, the corporations, and the military establishment that have historically formed the Deep State.

There have been other presidents who were weak and lacking in courage. One thinks of Warren Harding who sat in the chair but let others equally conservative, but more corrupt, and more politically vicious do the work of embezzling from the government and crushing the labor unions. Harding was no doubt a fool, but no matter whether a president is as foolish as Harding or as brilliant as Obama, the decision to let others governs, others who represent the interests of capital, militarism, and empire, is the president’s. Obama not only chose the path of least resistance, he chose the path of acquiescence to those powers, but he chose it years before he became president. He chose and he is responsible.

June 7, 2015