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  • Sanders and the Middle East

    ImageRegardless 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.

  • Assessing the Sanders Campaign

    ImageHow 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.

  • Over 1,000 local union leaders and members back Bernie Sanders for President

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    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

     

  • The Meaning of the Election in Turkey

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    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.

  • 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.

  • On Critical Theory, Value Theory, and So-Called Traditional Marxism

    ImageWerner 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.

     

  • Mexican President and his Party Victorious in Election; Left Divided and Defeated

    Despite widespread dImageisillusionment 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.

  • Sanders and Independent Politics

    ImageDespite 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.

  • Tiananmen Mothers Urge Leaders to Take Historical Responsibility for June Fourth

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    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.

  • What Went Wrong–and Why

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    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.

     

  • Violence and Protests Derail Mexican Elections as Left Divided

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    Mexico’s latest elections are threatened by drug cartel violence, social protests, and the mass resignation of election officials. The left, which in the past has succeeded in rallying a third or more of the nation’s voters for a single party, goes into this election deeply divided, prompting expectations of a win for the ruling party.

    A hurricane is barreling down on Baja California threatening to interfere with Mexico’s June 7 elections on the peninsula, but the far greater storm is the combination of criminal violence and widespread social protests, which could disrupt and possibly prevent the election in several states.

    Already at least 20 pre-candidates, candidates, and campaign managers have been killed while there have been dozens of other violent attacks on other candidates, campaign events, and party offices. Drug cartels are believed to be responsible for the murders of candidates who presumably threatened their interests, further fuelling uncertainty about what the cartels might do on election day. 

    However, the larger threat to the Mexican government’s election plans comes from social and political protest movements. Teachers, indigenous groups, peasant communities, and armed "self-defense" organizations in various states say that Mexico's political system and parties are corrupt and that voters should abstain from participating. Some groups announced plans to disrupt the election altogether.  

    President Enrique Peña Nieto’s government has rebuffed the threats, vowing that voting will continue without disruption and calling for the political parties to assist in ensuring the election take place. 

    Teacher and Student Protests 

    The National Coordinating Committee (la CNTE), a militant caucus within the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE) which has been leading the resistance to the Education Reform Law passed by the Mexican Congress, has not only called for a boycott of the election, but intends to enforce a boycott in some states.  

    In several states—Chiapas, Guerrero, Michoacán, Oaxaca, and Zacatecas—teachers have blocked highways, seized toll booths, taken over the district office of National Electoral Institute (INE), and in some areas seized Mexican Petroleum Company (PEMEX) refineries, leading to some conflicts with the police.  Peña Nieto’s government agreed to suspend teacher evaluations, which are at the heart of the Education Reform law, and to guarantee the teachers’ job security, but teachers continue to protest, demanding that the entire law be rescinded entirely. In Oaxaca, teachers not only seized the INE offices but also burned election materials, in an effort to obstruct the election process.  

    In some states such as Michoacán, where the government has agreed to negotiate, the teachers have temporarily lifted their siege of the INE. But in other parts of Michoacán, armed "self-defense" organizations (auto-defensas)—some made up of indigenous community members, some organized by wealthy farmers and businessmen, some allegedly linked to the cartels, and some incorporated into the state or federal police—may also work to prevent the election because of their specific grievances. 

    Protests have been ongoing in Mexico ever since September 2014,when police allegedly cooperating with gangsters, killed six, injured at least 25, and forcibly disappeared 43 students of Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College in the town of Iguala, Guerrero.  Families of the murdered or disappeared students, together with fellow students and teachers burned the town hall and the headquarters of the left-of-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) months ago, and since then they have been seizing government buildings and blocking highways protesting what they say is government complicity in the murders, the impunity of the murderers, and the failure of the government to seek justice. Angry over the students’ deaths and disappearances and furious over the Education Reform Law, teachers and community activist are attempting to make the election impossible in Guerrero. 

    Meanwhile, thousands of election officials have resigned to protest racist remarks made by the President of the INE, Lorenzo Córdova. A recording of a telephone conversation by Córdova ridiculing the speech of an indigenous man was released in late May and widely distributed on Twitter and other social media. Córdova apologized, but there were widespread demands for his resignation and thousands refuse to work for him. 

    The Left Divided 

    The Mexican left is divided more today than since the early 1980s as nearly 80 million Mexican voters will go to the polls on June 7 to elect 500 federal representatives, nine governors, 641 state legislators, 993 mayors and 16 borough chiefs for Mexico City. Governors are up for reelection in Baja California Sur, Sonora, Nuevo Leon, San Luis Potosí, Querétaro, Michoacán, Guerrero, Campeche.  

    Four rival leftist parties will be competing for votes—the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the Workers Party (PT), the Citizens Movement (MC), and the Movement for National Regeneration Party (MORENA). Some parties may ally with others, including the two dominant parties: the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) or the National Action Party (PAN). The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), one of the country’s important left organizations, remains opposed to elections as always and has joined the call for boycotts.  

    But the left is fractured largely because the PRD joined President Peña Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party's (PRI) Pact for Mexico shortly after his election in 2012. He enticed both the PAN and the PRD as well as other parties to join the pact, creating a semi-national unity government to pass a series of right-wing, pro-business “counter-reforms” in the areas of education, labor, energy, and telecommunications.  

    The PRD’s alliance with the PRI and PAN appalled many on the left, leading to resignations or desertions to MORENA. Among those who left the PRD are its leading founder and former presidential candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, former Mexico City mayors Alejandro Encinas and Marcelo Ebrard, and most significantly Andrés Manuel López Obrador, another former presidential candidate and a founder of MORENA.  

    The PRI, which ruled Mexico for 75 years, then lost to the PAN in 2000 and 2006, returned to power in 2012. The PRI currently has a plurality in both the Senate and the House and, according to polls, is expected to be the biggest winner on election day with about a third of the vote. Various polls suggest that the PRI—together with its allies the Green Party (PVEM), the New Alliance Party (PANAL), the party of the teachers union, and the new Social Encounter Party—should win a clear majority in both houses. The conservative PAN is expected to come in second with 25 percent of the vote, while the PRD and MORENA are expected to divide the left vote with about 13 and 10 percent respectively. The PT and MC will get less than five percent each and there is some chance they could lose their ballot status.  

    Additionally, thousands of pre-marked ballots favoring PRI have been discovered, but the ruling party claims it the revelation is a "dirty trick" by rival parties. 

    The election has reportedly cost officials 9.3 billion pesos ($594 million U.S. dollars) to get voters to the polls for various parties and candidates, yet some 40 percent or more of the Mexican electorate may sit out the election, many of them, according to academics studying the campaigns, disgusted by the mud-slinging on the thousands of television advertisements.  

    While the election is in jeopardy in half a dozen states, the government is likely to continue to spearhead voting, despite sporadic cartel violence and social protests.  

    Dan La Botz is the editor of Mexican Labor News and Analysis, a co-editor of New Politics, and the author of several books on labor and social movements in Mexico and the United States.

    This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address: 
    http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Violence-and-Protests-Derail-Mexican-Elections-as-Left-Divided—20150605-0009.html.

  • Bernie Sanders as I've Known Him

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    I haven’‘t had a chance yet to write up my own view of the Bernie Sanders campaign, but I want to give some background, going back to 1980, on what I know about the man.

    In 1980 I was in Vermont trying to get on the ballot for the Presidential campaign – seeking the line of Liberty Union, a minor party which had hoped to become a ‘‘second party” in Vermont.

    Liberty Union’s own history goes back to the late 1960’s when there was an effort in several states, at the height of the Vietnam War, to get alternative radical views on the ballot. The main base for this effort was in California, with the Peace and Freedom Party which, in 1968, nominated Eldridge Cleaver for President. (I ran for Congress in Lower Manhattan on that ticket that year, picking up the endorsement of the Village Voice and getting nearly 5% of the vote).

    Liberty Union was founded in Vermont in 1970.  Wikipedia lists the three original founders as former Congressman William H. Meyer, Peter Diamondstone and Dennis Morrisseau. Bernie Sanders joined Liberty Union in 1971 and was a candidate for several offices before deciding to run as an independent.

    The man who has provided the glue to hold Liberty Union together was Peter Dimondstone, who may still be in the Socialist Party. His home outside of Burlington reminds one of the old movie “You Can’t Take it With You” – the backyard has maple trees which can be tapped for syrup, and the front yard has a collection of broken cars, making up almost an informal study in decay. The house is large, and when I was last there housed one huge (friendly) dog, and at least one cat. 

    Liberty Union has one major asset that some of you may have encountered – this is Jerry Levy, who puts on a remarkable one man performance of “Marx in Soho,” Howard Zinn’s play.  Leaving politics aside for the moment (as if, in the context of this play, one could), I give that play five stars and urge anyone interested in a view of old Karl as a human being, in London’‘s Soho district, to find out when Jerry is coming your way – and book him.

    When I was there in 1980 I met Bernie, who was just then in the process of disengaging himself from Liberty Union. Bernie was a great fan of Debs and I have a memory of him working on something to do with Debs, perhaps a collection of his speeches.

    Bernie was determined to enter the arena of “serious politics” (which, even at the most generous, was not where Liberty Union was going). In 1981 he was elected Mayor of Burlington. After several terms he went on to run for Vermont’s one Congressional seat. He lost the first time, by a narrow margin, and was chided by In These Times for not having entered the Democratic Party primary.

    Ignoring that advice, he ran again as an independent, won, and went on to become one of Vermont’s two Senators. Within the Senate he blocks with the Democratic Party.

    In 1983 he came down to New York City to speak to the Socialist Party’s national convention, so he was politically at home in the democratic left and was endorsed by the SP in his later races.

    Bernie Sanders takes his socialism seriously – and it is, I think, the old Debsian form of socialism, with more in common with the socialist movements in the Nordic countries.

    His race for President is not a case of a “left Democrat” but of a truly independent socialist.

    On the question of his current race, and my feelings on that, I’ll comment later and at some length since more is involved than Sanders but also the problem of democratic radicals confronting the two-party system.

    Sanders does not have what I would call a “perfect voting record.” He has been cautious about Israel and on foreign policy he can’t be called a pacifist. As with any successful politician he has made compromises – one thinks of the career of Vito Marcantonio in New York City.

    But Bernie has had an honorable career in the Congress and one watches in fascination as he draws the crowds in Iowa which Hillary must envy.

    * David McReynolds is a democratic socialist and pacifist activist who described himself as "a peace movement bureaucrat" during his 40-year career with Liberation magazine and the War Resisters League. He lives in New York City.

  • A Socialist FAQ on Bernie Sanders and the Left

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    The following introduction is by the editors of SocialistWorker.org where this FAQ was originally published.

    Bernie Sanders kicked off his campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination with a large and enthusiastic rally in Burlington, Vermont, on May 26.

    Sanders’ candidacy has prompted discussion and debate among a left shaped by recent struggles such as Occupy Wall Street, the Chicago teachers strike, Fight for 15, Black Lives Matter and the climate justice movement. Many radicals, publications and organizations either support Sanders’ Democratic Party run outright or believe his campaign can be used to build the infrastructure for a stronger left. By contrast, SocialistWorker.org has argued Sanders’ campaign will serve to corral and co-opt the emerging left into supporting the Democratic Party–and make it harder, not easier, to build an independent, left-wing alternative.

    Here, Ashley Smith and Alan Maass respond to some of the questions and disagreements posed by SocialistWorker.org readers during the course of the discussion so far.

    Q. There may be problems with Bernie Sanders, but he is also putting forward ideas and proposals that socialists agree with. Isn’t it being a “purist” to object to participation in the Sanders campaign?

    A. Socialists who criticize the Sanders campaign aren’t just being “purists.”

    We do support many of Sanders’ proposals for reform, like free higher education, the breakup of the mega-banks, a green jobs program to promote alternative energy and stop climate change, and measures to challenge corporate domination of the political system. We also disagree with Sanders’ support for apartheid Israel and his failure to consistently challenge U.S. imperialism, his weak position on the issue of racist police violence, and his support for restrictions on immigrant rights.

    But the question for us isn’t mostly about the “purity” of Sanders’ political positions. The crux of our objection is Sanders’ decision to run for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, and to promise in advance that he will endorse the mainstream Democrat who will all but certainly defeat him. This decision is the culmination of Sanders’ increasingly close and collaborative relationship with the Democrats, despite the fact that he promotes radical political ideas, labels himself an independent in the U.S. Senate and calls himself a democratic socialist.

    Socialist Worker and its publisher, the International Socialist Organization, have supported independent candidates in the past, even when we had political disagreements. We supported Ralph Nader’s independent presidential campaigns, for example, while maintaining our criticisms of some positions he took and calling on him to change them. The most important point was Nader’s determination to run a campaign that was independent of the Democratic Party, with the aim of building an alternative to the two-party system.

    This independence is precisely what Sanders is abandoning by running for the Democratic presidential nomination and pledging to support the eventual Democratic nominee.

    The biggest problem is Sanders’ relationship to the Democratic Party. It poses as the “party of the people,” but it is, in fact, a capitalist party, funded and controlled by Corporate America and the political elite. The party establishment tolerates liberals and even radicals in their midst, so long as they don’t represent a significant threat. The liberal and progressive faces of the party are, in fact, immensely valuable in winning support from the voting base of the Democrats among the working class and the oppressed.

    The real fear of party leaders isn’t that someone like Sanders will raise uncomfortably progressive ideas within the party primaries, but that a threat could arise outside their ranks and build a socialist, labor or Green Party that would challenge the two-party system.

    Q. Isn’t running in the Democratic Party the only realistic way for Sanders to win?

    A. The opposite is the case. Sanders has no chance of winning the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.

    As he readily admits, the two-party system has been rigged by corporate power to exclude any real challenge to its agenda–and that includes the Democratic Party. Elections are a big business, where corporations sell brands (a.k.a. candidates) to consumers (a.k.a. voters).

    This reality led two professors from Princeton and Northwestern Universities to declare in a recent study that the U.S. is not actually a democracy, but an oligarchy: “[E]conomic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

    Despite the liberal rhetoric we’ll hear even from the most conventional of Democratic candidates, Hillary Clinton, this applies to the Democratic Party primaries, too. Clinton is aiming to raise close to $2.5 billion for her campaign. With that kind of war chest, she can hire an Astroturf army to give the appearance of grassroots support, dominate the media, and keep the political agenda on her terms. Sanders hopes to raise around 2 percent of Clinton’s haul: $50 million. Even with a larger and far more enthusiastic core of volunteers, he is entering the battle with a squirt gun against Clinton’s howitzer.

    Even if, by some miracle, Sanders can threaten Clinton’s status as the presumptive nominee–she is, after all, a terrible candidate with a pile of skeletons in her closet–he still has very little chance of being nominated. As a look at the history of the Democrats–especially during the tumultuous period of the 1960s and ‘70s–shows, the party’s corporate backers have plenty of tricks up their sleeve to maintain their power.

    Sanders’ run inside the Democratic Party is not only doomed to lose the party’s presidential nomination. It represents a capitulation to the two-party status quo and capitalist domination of elections. Sanders rejected a campaign outside the Democrats because of the very real obstacles to getting on the ballot as an independent, the lack of nationwide left infrastructure to support such a run–but most of all because he didn’t want to be accused of being “spoiler” who might win votes away from the Democratic candidate.

    As Ralph Nader said repeatedly during his campaigns, you can’t spoil a spoiled system. It has to be changed instead. And you can’t do that by participating in one of the two capitalist parties that dominates the system. Yes, there are huge obstacles to building a left-wing, independent alternative. But Sanders’ decision to jump into the Democratic Party presidential race is a guarantee of losing.

    Q. But can’t Sanders at least articulate our issues and pull the Democrats to the left?

    A. Sanders will, indeed, talk about progressive policies and proposals that the Democratic Party’s base overwhelmingly supports, but that get short shrift in the mainstream political discussion. To his credit, Sanders doesn’t back away from his identification as a “socialist.” If the media bother to cover his campaign, that at least will be a breath of fresh air.

    But beyond this, there is little reason to hope that Sanders’ campaign can pull either the Democrats or mainstream politics to the left.

    It’s worth pointing out that even mainstream Democrats speak out of the liberal side of their mouths during party primaries. In reaction to the Baltimore Rebellion, for example, Hillary Clinton criticized the New Jim Crow and called for an end to mass incarceration–a more radical position than Sanders adopted, in fact. Of course, Clinton will do nothing of the sort if she does become president. She is following the time-honored pattern of Democrats: Talk left during the primary campaign to win votes from the base, before “turning to the center” in the general election.

    There is a reason why the Democratic Party establishment isn’t angry, but relieved that Sanders is running for the party’s presidential nomination. For one thing, his campaign has come along with a promise that he won’t be an independent, third party candidate in November. But beyond this, the Democrats face a legitimacy problem with their base–and Sanders could help them rebuild some support.

    Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was built around creating hope and expectations after eight long years of George Bush in the White House. But very quickly,“hope” has turned into “nope.”

    In many respects, Obama has continued the policies of Bush’s second term. He bailed out Wall Street and the banks, but not homeowners facing foreclosure; he expanded the war in Afghanistan; he junked his promises to labor; he presided over the largest number of deportations in history; and he did nothing for African Americans even as racist police brutality and mass incarceration intensified.

    And Obama’s most significant “reform”–the Affordable Care Act–has been a huge disappointment for millions of people who hoped the government would finally step in and fix the health care crisis. The long-awaited regulations imposed on insurance companies, such as the ban on rejecting patients with “pre-existing conditions,” were far outweighed by the mandate for the uninsured to buy the overpriced, defective products of the insurers, thus pumping up the industry’s bottom line.

    As a result of all this, the Democrats went from control of both houses of Congress at the start of Obama’s first term to control of none after two successive big wins for Republicans in midterm elections. Both mainstream parties are suffering a downward spiral in popularity. A new Pew Research Center poll found that the congressional Democratic leadership’s dismal 33 percent approval rating was only outdone by the Republican leadership’s woeful 22 percent rating.

    The underwhelming “news” that Hillary Clinton would run again for the nomination has done nothing to revitalize the appeal of the Democrats, despite her conversion to what journalist Matt Taibbi rightly called ”fake populism.” Her record speaks for itself, and the party’s supporters know it, by and large.

    So the Democrats desperately need their liberal champions like Elizabeth Warren, Bill de Blasio and now Bernie Sanders to give Democratic voters a reason to turn out and cast a ballot for a party that has disappointed them at every turn.

    This is why Hillary Clinton welcomed Sanders into the race. She doesn’t fear him as a serious rival, but she knows he can help her campaign and the party in general to continue its masquerade as the “party of the people.” When Sanders does raise issues the left cares about, Clinton will be able to say, “Yes, you’re right, Bernie, but I have a realistic plan, instead of just talking about them.”

    This is the problem with welcoming a Sanders campaign because it will “articulate our issues”–it will do so in the service of building support for the Democratic Party, which is committed to the exact opposite.

    If the media do report on the substance of what Sanders talks about, it will be a nice change of pace to hear, for example, an unqualified defense of Social Security and a national health care system. But the ultimate beneficiaries will be not the left, but Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party.

    Q. WHAT’S THE harm of participating in formations like People for Bernie to meet other radicals and progressives drawn to the Sanders campaign, with the aim of building the infrastructure of a new left?

    A. This is the implication of the position put forward by the group Socialist Alternative, which has welcomed the Sanders presidential campaign, while calling on him to “run all the way to November 2016 as an independent”–as if Sanders hasn’t ruled out exactly this.

    The appeal of the Socialist Alternative argument is the contention that socialists can engage with people attracted to Sanders’ progressive politics and win them to building a broader left after he loses. But the Sanders campaign is not a movement–it is an electoral campaign run within the Democratic Party. The aim of such campaigns is not to generate discussion and collaboration among the left, but generate votes and support for the candidate. And that candidate is already on the record promising to urge a vote for whoever the Democrats nominate.

    This is not the first time radicals have hoped that participation in an outsider, liberal presidential primary campaign could aid the left.

    In the 1980s, Jesse Jackson’s campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination even produced an organization–the National Rainbow Coalition–that some activists hoped might break from the Democratic Party if Jackson lost the nomination. But Jackson himself remained loyal to the party, and the Rainbow Coalition never took on a life beyond the orbit of Democratic Party politics.

    Some of the radicals whose hopes were dashed by Jackson returned to independent politics, though with nothing to show for the energy they had expended on the Jackson campaign. But there were others who were drawn permanently out of independent politics and into the Democratic Party.

    That’s the “harm.”

    A similar dynamic took place in the 2000s with Dennis Kucinich’s failed campaign in the presidential primaries. Kucinich energized a section of the antiwar movement, but he himself was explicit about his intention to co-opt activists. “My job in this election is to bring them in, and I will do that,” he admitted. He continued, “What I’m trying to do is to go back to the big tent so that everyone who felt alienated could come back through my candidacy.”

    Kucinich didn’t win that much support in the 2004 primaries, but what he did, he delivered to the pro-war candidate John Kerry. Once he lost, Kucinich abandoned criticism of the party’s nominee, declaring, “Unless we have a firm and unshakeable resolve for John Kerry, we will have no opportunity to take America in a new direction.”

    Sanders promises to do exactly the same when he loses. He has pledged to support whatever mainstream Democrat wins the nomination, but that is no surprise–he has done the same in every presidential election since the 1980s, including when Ralph Nader was running the strongest left-wing third party campaigns since the middle of the 20th century.

    Sanders will argue for the left to “have a firm and unshakeable resolve” for whoever the lesser evil turns out to be, and vote for them against the greater-evil Republican. Instead of his campaign aiding the development of the infrastructure of a new left that is better prepared to struggle for fundamental change, he will bolster the Democratic Party’s infrastructure of co-optation.

    Q. ARE YOU saying that the left should abstain from voting and elections?

    A. MARXISTS have always argued that we need to help build the class struggle on every possible front, from the economic to the political and ideological. If we leave any battleground uncontested, the capitalist class will fill the vacuum and hijack the workers movement. That means participating in elections wherever possible–but on the basis of principled independence from the two-party system.

    Because of the hegemony of lesser-evilism on the U.S. left, there have been very few working-class challenges to the two capitalist parties. In the early years of the twentieth century, there was just such a challenge led by the man Sanders calls his hero: Eugene V. Debs of the Socialist Party. In stark contrast to Sanders today, Debs proclaimed in the opening speech of his 1904 presidential campaign:

    The Republican and Democratic Parties, or, to be more exact, the Republican-Democratic Party, represent the capitalist class in the class struggle. They are the political wings of the capitalist system and such differences as arise between them relate to spoils and not to principles. With either of those parties in power, one thing is always certain, and that is that the capitalist class is in the saddle and the working class under the saddle.

    There are no independent challenges to the two-party system on this scale today. But the left has experienced some successes that Socialist Worker and the ISO have been proud to support.

    We participated in Ralph Nader’s early 2000s presidential campaigns, which gave a political shape to the then-growing global justice movement. In the past few years, there was Socialist Alternative candidate Kshama Sawant’s election to the Seattle City Council. Last November, the New York state Green Party ticket of Howie Hawkins and Brian Jonesran against incumbent Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo and scored the best statewide vote total for an independent candidate in generations.

    We have a long way to go to build an ongoing national alternative, but such campaigns are a valuable starting point–in challenging the two-party system and opening the space to begin building such an alternative. Thus, we don’t have to abstain from the 2016 elections, including the presidential vote. There will certainly be challengers to the two capitalist parties among the Greens, socialists and radicals, and building on these alternatives will be important for the struggles to come.

    Q. Won’t your opposition to the Sanders campaign leave you on the sidelines, unable to relate to people who attracted to the effort?

    A. Socialists have a chance to engage with Sanders’ supporters in many ways, without supporting or in any way building illusions in his campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

    We can be in discussions with Sanders supporters about all the questions that his campaign puts on the table–about what socialism is and is not, the class nature of political parties, and what strategy the left should follow in elections. This will be an important process for developing a stronger left that is capable of debating, while still collaborating in struggle.

    We should organize discussions of the left about Sanders campaign, its strategy of participating in the Democratic Party, and how this can help or hinder the building of a left alternative.

    And, of course, politics won’t consist only of elections for the next 18 months until November 2016. We should also reach out to those attracted to the Sanders campaign to participate in the class and social movements emerging across the country. The widespread political and social discontent in the U.S. has been given voice by a variety of struggles, including Black Lives Matter, Fight for 15, the climate justice movement and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction campaign against Israeli apartheid. The course of these struggles will contribute significantly to the development of a new challenge to the two capitalist parties.

    When Sanders has clearly lost the nomination by early next year, it will be important to urge his supporters–against the proclamations of the candidate–not to back the eventual nominee as a lesser evil. We can use the words of Sanders’ hero from a century ago. “I’d rather vote for something 
I want and not get it,” said Eugene Debs, “than vote 
for something I don’t want,
 and get it.”

    We can say this much for the Sanders campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination: Its launching has crystallized the terms of a longstanding debate on the U.S. left about democracy, elections and the Democratic Party. The discussion that has already taken place has been valuable and clarifying–and there is more to come.

     

  • EU’s Military Strategy to Deepen Mediterranean Tragedies

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    More than 800 migrants died on April 19 this year when their overcrowded boat capsized in the Mediterranean Sea off the Libyan coast. The tragedy sent soaring this year's Mediterranean death toll which was by then around 1,500 – 10 times the deaths during the same period last year.

    According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), between 23,000 and 24,000 migrants had tried to cross over to Italy since the beginning of the year, while just under 21,000 migrants made the same journey between January and April 2014. While the number of migrants rose to some extent, migrants perishing at sea have hit the roof.

    Things are bound to get worse before getting better. It is estimated that in 2015, between 500,000 and one million refugees will cross the Mediterranean and land in the European Union. So far some 1,600 people have died during crossing. These figures are the known cases, many more having died in undetected vessels. The numbers are on the rise. In 2011, 58,000 people tried to enter the EU across the waters, while the figure grew to 218,000 in 2014.

    Most of the migrants crossing the Mediterranean in fact are not Libyans. They come from as far as the Sudan, Central African Republic, Nigeria, Eritrea, Somalia, Senegal and Ghana, running for their lives due to either sectarian conflicts at home or pervasive poverty. 

    They scraped together US$ 2,000 for the trip across the sea on wobbly vessels, run by gangs of human traffickers. Many more come from Syria. These are the countries that face serious internal crises intensified by western military interference.

    Italy, Malta and Greece coastguards have rescued thousands of such migrants from the hazard of Mediterranean Sea. They have been feeling isolated and left alone to deal with what they termed “the cemetery of the Mediterranean Sea.”

    European Union (EU) put forward a proposal to rescue the African migrants, but the suggestion went under with a deadlock as to who is going to “share the burden”. The proposals included joint search-and-rescue patrols, establishing resettlement quotas. 

    Some EU members such as France, Spain, and Britain rejected the idea of quotas for sharing migrants among them, while others suggested deploying military forces to Libya to keep migrants as far away from Europe as possible.

    European Commission reacted to the boat tragedy with plans to set up of offshore camps in Libya and Tunisia, to lock up and pre-empt asylum seekers before they cross the Mediterranean. It has been described ingenuously as “outsourcing border control and containment mechanisms to prevent departures.”

    Italy's foreign minister even called for air strikes in Libya against ISIL positions there.

    The general agreement among EU is that something needs to be done and their first proposal was to send more ships to the Mediterranean so as to ensure that fewer people die due to unseaworthy vessels crammed with their human cargo.

    On the other hand, some European bureaucrats are toying with the idea of military strikes to destroy smuggling vessels before they leave Libya. However, they have been cautioned by activists that the last thing the African refugees need is more assaults and bombing—especially coming from the very countries that they expect to beg for asylum.

    EU ministers sanctioned a plan for a new naval force to intercept smugglers before their boats reach Europe. It was reported that the EU parliament was drafting a United Nations resolution to authorize the deployment of military off the coast of Libya in order to “capture” and “destroy” the boats. 

    The problem is that two rival ‘governments’ in Libya have indicated their rejection to the plan, saying any deployment of troops to Libyan waters would be a violation of the country's sovereignty.  

    Meanwhile, some European political parties have embarked on their anti-immigrant and xenophobic tendencies to obstruct immigrants from entering their countries while deporting those who managed to sneak in. Italy’s ultra-nationalist Northern League called on the authorities to stop “by any means” any accommodation of further refugees. The party said it ‘was ready’ to take steps to prevent their arrival.

    Similarly, Germany refugee centers have been targeted with fire bombings, while ultra-right groups such as Pegida have conducted racist campaigns, attacking immigrants as ‘social spongers’.

    Such right-wing ultra nationalist groups have even received implicit sympathy from governing parties such as Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Social Democratic Party (SPD).

    Meanwhile, it is revealed that EU is planning military strategy against the refugee transport networks in the Mediterranean. Documents disseminated by WikiLeaks say the operation contains “detailed plans to conduct military operations to destroy boats used for transporting migrants and refugees in Libyan territory, thereby preventing them from reaching Europe,”

    The whistle-blower website exposed two classified documents, with the plan being approved by delegates of all 28 EU member states on May 18. The project has no well-defined “political end state” which means they are looking at a sweeping military operation without an unambiguous end goal.

    In reaction to this, more than 300 European migration academics and scholars have condemned the EU’s envisioned use of military might against migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean. They have come out against the EU's plan of military intervention against the boats crossing the Mediterranean.

    The academics argued that any attempt to justify military intervention by comparing the Mediterranean boats with the 18th century clampdown on the slave trade is “entirely self-serving” and based on “a parody of history.” 

    It is widely believed that military option will do nothing to curtail the flow of immigrants escaping conflicts in their destabilized countries or looking for jobs. For them the long-term solution lies in social development of the countries they come from.

    What is needed is a total prohibition on the sale of weaponry to these countries. EU countries have to criminalize the arms trade, thus abolishing wars in countries such as Syria. It means investment in sustainable development, an end to plundering of resources. It means better education systems, better medical system and better shelters.

    Europe and NATO countries have to take responsibility because they have in one way or another created the current turmoil. They can find money for global warfare yet they can’t find the money to rescue the refugees running away from the war zones.  

    Apart from the influx of migrants from Africa, we have also to look at those coming from the Middle East. This is the direct result of the military invasion carried out by the US, and its NATO allies. 

    They have sustained and shared the military operations in Iraq, Libya, Syria and now Yemen. As a result the Middle East and large portion of Africa has plunged into disarray and disorder. By 2014, it is estimated that two million of the six million inhabitants of Libya fled the country, as a result of US-French-British bombardments.

    The current US-led drive at regime change in Syria has immersed the country into total disarray, disorder and deaths, with subsequent exit of estimated four million refugees. Most of them fled to the neighboring countries, while many others take the difficult and deadly path to Europe. 

    A new theater is unfolding with the US and Saudi Arabia embarking on a new battlefront in Yemen. This is bound to lead to a great number of refugees seeking asylum.

    Meanwhile, as increasing number of distressed citizens seek sanctuary in Europe, the EU is converting the Mediterranean into a graveyard, hoping that this will serve as deterrent to others.  

    ©Nizar Visram

    *Nizar Visram, a free-lance writer and retired lecturer of Development Studies, is Tanzanian citizen, born in Zanzibar and currently in Ottawa. He can be reached at: nizar1941@gmail.com.

  • Bernie Sanders is no Eugene Debs

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    Bernie Sanders’ entry into the Democratic presidential primaries should be seen as his final decisive step away from the democratic socialism he professes to support. He will raise some progressive demands in the primaries and then endorse the corporate Democrat, Hillary Clinton. Nothing changes.

    Sanders is violating the first principle of socialist politics: class independence. The socialist movement learned that principle long ago when the business classes sold out the workers in the democratic revolutions of 1848 that swept across Europe and parts of Latin America.

    Drawing out the lesson from these failed revolutions that the middle-class proprietors and professionals could not be trusted as allies of the workers in the battle for democracy and workers’ rights, Karl Marx told exiled German revolutionaries in London in 1850 that the workers needed to form their own party to look out for their own interests:

    Even where there is no prospect whatsoever of them being elected, the workers must put up their own candidates in order to preserve their independence, to count their forces and to bring before the public their own revolutionary attitude and party standpoint. In this connection, they must not allow themselves to be seduced by such arguments as, for example, that by so doing they are splitting the Democratic Party and making it possible for the reactionaries to win. The ultimate intention of all such phrases is to dupe the proletariat. The advance which the proletarian party is bound to make by such independent action is infinitely more important than the disadvantages that might be incurred by the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body.

    The Democratic Party that Marx was referring to in his 1850 speech was the most pro-democracy of the German parties based in the business and professional classes, which were fighting for universal suffrage against the ruling feudal landed aristocracy, but stopped fighting for workers' rights once propertied men had the vote. But the argument applies just as well to the Democratic Party in the U.S. today–a party that poses as the champion of working people, but serves business interests.

    Sanders has now gone into coalition with the billionaire class he professes to oppose and that finances the Democratic party. Sanders won't see the billionaire's money. But he has made it crystal clear that he will support their candidate by promising to support the winner of the Democratic presidential nomination.

    – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

    Unfortunately, too many self-professed socialists in the U.S. have abandoned the socialist principle of independent political action. They argue instead that whether or not to support a Democrat or an independent candidate is a question of tactics, not principle.

    That was not the case when the United States had a viable Socialist Party. The political independence of the Socialist Party is a major reason why it was viable, why it had power, why it elected many of its candidates, why it was central to the political dialogue of the country. After the demoralizing and self-defeating experience of fusion (cross-endorsing the more progressive Democratic and Republican candidates) that undermined and ultimately destroyed the Greenback Labor and People's Parties of the recently past Populist era, the Socialist Party of America put into its constitution a ban against endorsing the candidates of the capitalist parties.

    In his opening campaign speech as the party's 1904 presidential candidate, Eugene Debs said:

    The Republican and Democratic parties, or, to be more exact, the Republican-Democratic party, represent the capitalist class in the class struggle. They are the political wings of the capitalist system and such differences as arise between them relate to spoils and not to principles. With either of those parties in power, one thing is always certain, and that is that the capitalist class is in the saddle and the working class under the saddle.

    As a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sanders does a disservice to Debs' memory and his commitment to working-class political independence by displaying a Debs portrait in his office. By choosing to run for president in the Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders has shown he is no Eugene Debs.

    Sanders is confusing people about what socialism is. Socialism is not so much a social theory, a platform of policies or social ownership of the means of production. Socialism is, above all, the movement of the working class for their own freedom and power in a full democracy.

    Sanders' policies are pretty good on working-class economic justice demands and climate action, and not so good on foreign policy and militarism. But his positions on the issues is secondary to the question of whether his politics are helping the working class act for itself or subsume itself under the big business interests in charge of the Democratic Party. By entering the Democratic primaries with the promise of supporting Clinton as the lesser evil to the Republicans, Sanders is not helping the working class to organize, speak and act for itself.

    As Frederick Engels told socialists in the U.S. when the labor movement in New York City nominated the non-socialist but progressive reformer Henry George for mayor in 1886:

    The first great step of importance for every country newly entering into the movement is always the organization of the workers as an independent political party, no matter how, so long as it is a distinct workers' party. And this step has been taken, far more rapidly than we had a right to hope, and that is the main thing. That the first program of this party is still confused and highly deficient, that it has set up the banner of Henry George, these are inevitable evils but also only transitory ones. The masses must have time and opportunity to develop, and they can only have the opportunity when they have their own movement–no matter in what form, so long as it is only their own movement–in which they are driven further by their own mistakes and learn wisdom by hurting themselves.

    – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

    The independent left was a force to be reckoned with in U.S. politics from the 1840s through the 1930s. The Liberty Party, the Free Soil Party and the Radical Republicans carried the banners of abolition, land reform, labor rights and Reconstruction from the 1840s through 1870s. With the post-Civil War industrialization and rapid expansion of industrial workers, the surviving radicals of the pre-war reform movements formed the populist farmer-labor Greenback Labor and People's Parties of the 1880s and 1890s.

    With collapse of Populism into the Democratic Party, its radicals were central to the formation of the Socialist Party of America, as well as regionally based Labor, Farmer-Labor and Progressive Parties between 1900 and 1936, which came close to establishing a major third party on the left with a farmer-labor popular base. Together, they elected hundreds of local officials, scores of state officials and dozens of members of Congress. The Farmer-Labor and Progressive parties of the Upper Midwest in the 1930s had two governors, three U.S. Senators, 12 members of the House, and scores of state and local elected officials.

    Those successes fueled widespread agitation for an independent labor party based on unions, which reached a peak as the 1936 election approached. Unfortunately, the unions and the Communist Party's Popular Front policy led most of labor and the left into the Democratic Party's New Deal Coalition in 1936–from which they never emerged afterward in a major way.

    By failing to act on its own and speak for itself in U.S. elections, the left committed political suicide. It lost its independent voice and its platform from which to be heard. The public doesn't hear from the left in elections. They only hear from pro-capitalist Democrats, who most of “the left” promotes as the lesser evil to the Republicans.

    By trying to get Democratic politicians to say and do what the left wants them to say and do, the left has been engaged in a pathetic and hopeless attempt at political ventriloquism. It is dependent politics, powerless politics. It has been 80 years–20 presidential election cycles–since the left largely disappeared itself into the Democratic Party. It is way past time to draw the lesson of this experience: the left won't regain power and public significance until it breaks with the Democrats and acts independently for itself.

    – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

    Sanders has attracted significant money and energy from progressives. In the first 24 hours after his announcement, his campaign reported raising $1.5 million from 35,000 donors and signing up over 100,000 volunteers. So the independent left is now debating how to relate to the Sanders campaign.

    Some argue that we should just build movements outside the electoral arena for now, and that when they get big enough, an independent left party will emerge from them. Social movements making demands on the system are simply lobbying the Democrats in the absence of an independent left electoral alternative. An independent left party is needed so the Democrats are forced to respond to movement demands or lose votes to the left. Movements ebb and flow. A party is needed to keep activists organized and engaged during the downturns in social movements and provide organized support and perspectives when movements expand.

    Some even argue that the Sanders campaign is a movement. We've heard that claim before with the candidacies of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Dennis Kucinich and Barack Obama. Bruce Dixon of Black Agenda Report aptly described these candidates as “sheepdogs…charged with herding activists and voters back into the Democratic fold who might otherwise drift leftward and outside of the Democratic party.”

    No self-activating movements or organizations came out of these campaigns, and there is no reason to expect the Sanders campaign will be any different. The Sanders campaign is enlisting people in an election campaign, not an ongoing political organization. The Sanders campaign may be a bridge for some to positions as Democratic operatives, as it was for some in previous sheepdog campaigns. But it is not building a political organization that is independent and opposed to the capitalist parties.

    The group Socialist Alternative has welcomed Sanders' Democratic candidacy, while calling on him to continue running as an independent after the Democratic primaries. Socialist Alternative's position is naïve at best–or worse, deliberately misleading. There is no way that Sanders will break with the Democrats on the presidential race. We should take him at his word: he's backing the Democratic candidate. Sanders has a long record of supporting Democrats for president, including Gore, Kerry and Obama, while harshly criticizing independent challengers on the left like Ralph Nader.

    It's one thing to tell Sanders supporters they need a Plan B–an independent left candidate–when he loses the primaries. It's another to spread illusions that Sanders can be persuaded to be that candidate.

    If Sanders wanted to do it, he would have paid petitioners out now getting him independent ballot lines in the 50 states and D.C. He doesn't, and he won't. If he did, the Democrats would bar him from the debates and primary ballots for being disloyal to the Democrats. Some states, such as Michigan, have sore-loser provisions that would prevent him from running as an independent after running as a Democrat. It's disappointing to see Socialist Alternative spread illusions that Sanders will ever break with Clinton after the primaries, or that he even could do so as a practical matter of getting on the ballot.

    From an independent socialist point of view, all the money and time going into Sanders' handoff to Clinton is time and money that could be going into getting Jill Stein's Green Party candidacy on every ballot in the country–the only independent left campaign in 2016 with any prospect for doing so. The Greens have 21 ballot lines already and most of the rest can be secured by petitioning in 2015. Doing so now would leave 2016 for campaigning.

    One of the weaknesses of recent independent campaigns by Ralph Nader and the Greens is that the ballot access drive did not really begin until the year of the election, making the campaign mostly a desperate scramble to simply get on the ballot. With most ballot lines secured in 2015, the campaign could focus in 2016 on broadcasting its message and on field organizing to build local organizations, register new voters, identify supporting voters, pull them to the polls on Election Day, and continue after the election with local movement and electoral activity.

    – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

    The independent left should be talking to progressives who have decided to support Sanders. We should talk about why independent politics is the best way to build progressive power, about the Democratic Party as the historic graveyard of progressive movements, and about the need in 2016 for a progressive alternative when Sanders folds and endorses Clinton. I don't expect many will be persuaded to quit the Sanders campaign before the primaries. But I do expect that many of them will want a Plan B, a progressive alternative to Clinton, after the primaries.

    I had a similar scenario develop in during my 2014 Green Party campaign for governor of New York. Zephyr Teachout, a liberal Democrat running a primary challenge against the more conservative Democratic incumbent Andrew Cuomo, attracted the support of progressives in the Democratic Party and won a respectable 34 percent of the primary vote. Analysis of the general election results shows that about half of Teachout's vote came to the Greens in the general election, and that it constituted about half of the Green vote. Our 5 percent showing was the best ever in New York for an independent left candidate for governor, except for the Socialists, who received 5.7 percent in 1918 and 5.6 percent in 1920.

    If Stein's Green campaign can draw a significant segment of Sanders supporters to it after the primaries, it could help the Green Party to make a quantum leap in the vote it receives in 2016 over previous elections. That would provide momentum for local, state and congressional elections in the coming years.

    While the Debsian Socialists of a century ago were clear about their independence from the Democratic Party, they were also clear about wanting to draw progressives in the Democratic Party into the Socialist Party. As Debs stated in that same 1904 opening campaign speech quoted above:

    Where but to the Socialist Party can these progressive people turn? They are now without a party and the only genuine Democratic Party in the field is the Socialist Party, and every true Democrat should thank Wall Street for driving him out of a party that is democratic in name only, and into one that is democratic in fact.

    Progressives in the Democratic Party are going to need a Plan B after Bernie Sanders throws his support to Clinton in about 10 months, after the March primaries seal the nomination for her. We should be building Plan B now.

    * Howie Hawkins is a veteran activist, working Teamster and leader of the Green Party nationally and in his home state of New York. Last November, his campaign for governor against incumbent Democrat Andrew Cuomo won 200,000 votes, nearly 5 percent of the total–the most successful left-wing independent campaign in New York in more than 50 years.

    This article originally appeared in Socialist Worker and is reprinted with permission of the author.

  • The Sanders Campaign and the Democratic “Party”

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    I appreciate the nonsectarian tone of the piece on Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign by my longtime fellow New Politics editorial board member and friend Barry Finger. I think he has a better, more sophisticated understanding of the peculiarities of the Democratic Party (DP) and the U.S. electoral system than do many on the radical left that refuse to support any DP candidate regardless of that candidate’s personal political platform. However, I think that Barry still suffers from certain misunderstandings regarding just how different the big two U.S. political parties are from political parties that exist anywhere else in the world, and this means there are defects in his suggestions as to how left-wing socialists should relate to the Sanders campaign.

    Barry writes:

    “The totality with which socialists have traditionally viewed the Democratic Party has been this. The agenda of the Democratic Party is determined by its corporate financiers. It is they who keep the party competitive, who write and prioritize legislation and it is they who provide lucrative post-electoral revolving door employment opportunities for faithful party standard bearers. The two parties provide a full spectrum career subculture, designed to incentivize, entice and indoctrinate candidates and office holders to ruling class perspectives. Its base, organized as voting blocks, has no membership privileges.

    “Indeed, the two parties are not private, voluntary organizations sustained by membership fees, but political utilities of the ruling class, which, like other public utilities, are internally regulated by the state and protected from outside competition by upstart third parties through a dense network of legal encumbrances to market entry. Because the DP is sustained and disciplined by the mobilization of outside capitalist wealth, the voting blocs aligned to the Democrats cannot compete for influence on this terrain.  Their power is limited primarily to the threat of abstention from electoral participation.”

    Much of this is true. Regardless of their origins, today the Democrats and Republicans aren’t real, “European-style” political parties, and haven’t been for decades. The political machines with their party bosses that used to control who could run for office on which party label are overwhelmingly a thing of the past. They are state-run ballot lines, whose “membership” consists of registered voters rather than dues-payers. It is the state, not the party, which controls who can register as a Democrat or a Republican (or any other party, including the Green Party).

    Barry seems to understand this. But his analysis goes awry when he says that the entire DP is “sustained and disciplined by the mobilization of outside capitalist wealth.” Were this true, it’s unlikely that Bernie Sanders–with his radical  platform and his promise to take no money from “the billionaire class”–would be able to run for president in the Democratic primary in the first place. Barry seems to think that every single elected Democrat is taking cash from “outside capitalist wealth.” But this is not the case. What corporate Political Action Committee would be fool enough to provide campaign funds to John Conyers, to Keith Ellison, to Barbara Lee? Obviously most elected Democrats represent the ruling class. But some do not – precisely because the DP, like the Republican Party (RP), is now a state-run ballot line rather than a real political party. (This change in the structure of the DP and RP didn’t happen all at once but its evolution has been steady at least since the 1930s.)

    Barry seems to recognize that parties which can’t control who is “in” the party or who runs on the party ballot line aren’t real parties. But he doesn’t draw what to me is the obvious conclusion: when genuine left-liberals or radical leftists win office on the DP ballot line, the DP is not simply a “political utility of the ruling class.” It would be if the neoliberal, bourgeois leadership of the DP could impose parliamentary discipline on the leftmost elected Democrats, but there really is very little that they can do. In fact, it’s impossible to get thrown out of the DP or RP once one is elected on those lines. At most, one can get kicked off of Congressional committees for disloyalty. (People can get kicked out of DP or RP clubs – but as those have no real power over what the elected officials do, they don’t really count.)

    So contrary to what Barry and others might think, the DP can’t always and everywhere be a “company union” party – because it’s not a party. There are, if you will, Democrats who represent the ruling class and Democrats who (imperfectly – they’re very rarely revolutionaries) represent the working class. I see nothing class-collaborationist in opposing the former and (critically) supporting the latter. Yes, ruling class politicians usually win Democratic primaries simply because they raise more campaign funds, have name recognition, and are incumbents, etc. – but not always. (Only the DP fundraising committees are pure shills for corporate America – but left-liberals and leftists running as Democrats aren’t required to take any money from those committees.)

    It’s an unfortunate fact that class-struggle politics in the electoral arena has become far more complex in the United States than it is anywhere else in the world. I agree with most American socialists that a labor party based on the unions should’ve been formed at least by 1948, when 35% of the U.S. workforce was unionized, and the United Auto Workers in particular was a real power in the country. But Walter Reuther didn't do what he should’ve done, and today we are where we are. With organized labor at its lowest ebb ever, it’s hard to believe that a mass independent workers’ party – which would require union support – is forthcoming in the near future. I genuinely wish it was otherwise.

    So, given our extremely restrictive electoral system as well as the state-run-ballot-line status of our “parties,” and given that the electoral realignment of the 1930s has still not yet been totally overturned, when leftists run for office, they’re often (not always) going to have to do so as dissident, disloyal Democrats in partisan elections – at least if they intend to win the offices they’re running for. Barring massive changes in campaign finance laws, at the very least, there will never be enough such Democrats to realize Michael Harrington’s old dream of turning the whole Democratic Party into a Social Democratic Party – but it doesn’t follow that running for office as a Democrat necessarily turns one into a lackey of the ruling class. 

    Contrary to the “Bernie Sanders as sheepdog for Hillary Clinton” argument, there’s hardly anyone at all to “sheepdog” – no quasi-mass movement for a left-wing third party. If there was, my judgement of Sanders running in a Democratic primary would be quite different. Barry seems to agree with me. And I very much like his invoking of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in 1964. I certainly would have been on the side of Fannie Lou Hamer and her comrades against Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Bayard Rustin, et al. But it’s important to note that Hamer never stopped being a registered Democrat – even as she never compromised her radicalism, particularly her militant opposition to the Vietnam War – and the MFDP did succeed, by 1968, in replacing the segregationist “regular” Mississippi Democratic Party. So an “MFDP moment,” should it happen, might not end up being what Barry thinks it would be.

    Of course, one must acknowledge that Ted Kennedy in 1980, Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988, Dennis Kucinich in 2004, John Edwards in 2008 – all of them ended up endorsing the corporate-funded victor in their respective Democratic presidential primaries. And they should not have done so. But it’s important to realize that they weren’t required by party laws to do so in the first place. Most have forgotten this, but Jerry Brown did not endorse Bill Clinton in 1992. More recently, look at Ron Paul. He very openly didn’t support John McCain in 2008 or Mitt Romney in 2012; he supported minor right-wing party presidential candidates. And yet he remained an elected Republican. Look at the Seattle Democratic officials that have endorsed Kshama Sawant’s re-election campaign. Such a thing is simply not possible anywhere else in the world – try to imagine Canadian Liberals endorsing New Democratic Party candidates for office! – and it further proves that our “parties” aren’t real parties because they lack party discipline.

    Sanders has already said he would endorse Hillary Clinton if he loses to her in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary. But Sanders, as explained above, isn’t required to do this. Contrary to what Barry believes, there are no “Democratic Party rules that prohibit him in advance from harming the DP.” So, socialists should pressure Sanders to “pull a Ron Paul” – at the very least he should not encourage his voters to support Clinton – and if he refuses, we socialists should criticize him. But the only way we can effectively apply such pressure is if we are active in his presidential campaign. Pressure from the outside, I suspect, simply won’t work. By all means, let’s relentlessly attack Hillary Clinton and her ilk who dominate the DP. One can do this just as easily as a registered Democrat rather than a registered Green or independent. No one can silence you, just like Fannie Lou Hamer couldn’t be silenced. (By the way, I’ve voted for more Greens than Democrats over the past several years – despite being a registered Democrat – but I can’t claim that my votes have been, in practice, anything more than protest votes, given that the Greens never win in New York City.)

    Yes, we must, as Barry says, “hold Sanders’ feet to the flames if he wavers or weakens his stance against the Party establishment.” But to do this effectively we have to actively support him, not abstain from his campaign. Both the “critical” and “support” in “critical support” are very important in this case should Sanders begin to capitulate under the pressure of the ruling class. It’s also the only way to get those already involved in Sanders’ campaign–most of whom know nothing of Marxism or the organized socialist left– to take us seriously. Criticism – even constructive criticism – of “the DP orientation” is likely to fall on deaf ears if we aren’t working with such people to get Sanders elected, however distant a prospect that may seem.

    Barry argues that “If the Sanders campaign is competently run, Hillary Clinton and the DP establishment will be confronting an incipient rank-and-file mutiny demanding the complete overhaul and repudiation of what the party currently stands for. An increasingly politically conscious grassroots movement motivated by a militant and credible anti-austerity message heralds the development in the foreseeable future of ‘split’ situation in the Democratic Party when these demands are blocked, watered down, frustrated or compromised with, as they invariably must.”

    I hope this split occurs – as I said earlier, I am skeptical. But if it’s in fact possible, we need to be in the Sanders campaign to help make it happen – and, as our friend and lifetime class-warrior-unionist Steve Early has said, we need to get the unions to support Sanders and not Clinton (either in the primary or the general election – Clinton is not even a lesser evil!). And we’ll need the leftmost elected Democrats – the ones who support social-democratic reform and don’t take corporate cash – to “jump ship” to this potential new party – which means critically supporting them as well. (I see this as no worse than voting for the reformist workers’ party wing of a popular front – which revolutionaries certainly did in the past – and the DP today is more like a popular front unto itself than a genuine political party.)

    Yes, this is all very messy stuff, and I wish we Marxists could simply stand outside Democratic Party politics entirely and convince the toiling masses to “break with the elephant, break with the ass, build a party of the working class.” But decades of revolutionary socialists doing precisely this has been no more successful than the attempt in the 1970s by the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee – predecessor of today’s Democratic Socialists of America (yes, I’m a member) – to realign the whole of the DP into a social democratic party. The Sanders campaign represents the best opportunity to build a much larger socialist movement – and, yes, possibly a split from the DP which results in an independent leftist party – that I’ve seen in my lifetime. But being a sympathetic outside critic does not strike me as a viable way to make that movement, or party, a reality. Yes, most elected Democrats are ruling class politicians; yes, the DP was once the party (a real party) of white supremacy in the U.S.; hence any involvement in DP primaries involves “dirty hands” to some extent. But, to paraphrase a French philosopher, “it is easy to have clean hands if you have no hands.” Better dirty hands than no hands.

    *Jason Schulman is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Political Science at Lehman College, CUNY and Senior Lecturer at St. Francis College. He is on the editorial board of New Politics and his articles have appeared in Jacobin, Logos, Democratic Left, and New Political Science. He edited Rosa Luxemburg: Her Life and Legacy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and is the author of Neoliberal Labour Governments and the Union Response: The Politics of the End of Labourism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

    Image:  (Image: flickr / cc / DonkeyHotey)

  • The Left Divided as Mexicans go to the Polls on June 7

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    The Mexican left is more divided than at any time since the early 1980s as some 80 million Mexican voters will go to the polls on June 7 to elect 500 federal representatives, nine governors 641 state legislators, 993 mayor and 16 borough chiefs in Mexico City.

    Four rival leftist parties will be competing for votes—the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the Workers Party (PT), the Citizens Movement (MC), and the Movement for National Regeneration Party (MORENA)—though is some cases they will ally with each other and in others with one of the two dominant parties: the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) or the National Action Party (PAN). The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), one of the country’s important left organizations, remains opposed to elections as always. Some in the Ayotzinapa protest movement—protesting over the killing of six and disappearance of 43 students at a rural teachers college in Guerrero–have called upon voters to abstain altogether.

    Why is the left split? Principally because after Enrique Peña Nieto won the presidential election in 2012, he enticed both the PAN and the PRD as well as other parties to join his Pact for Mexico, creating a kind of government of national unity to pass what some have called his rightwing, pro-business “counter-reforms” in the area of education, labor, energy, and telecommunications. The PRD’s alliance with the PRI and PAN disgusted many on the left, leading to resignations or desertions to MORENA.

    The deeper issue, however, is that the PRD, founded in 1989 as an alliance between former PRI leaders and leftists, always remained divided into several hard factions and then became involved in old-style corrupt political arrangements at many levels. Many walked away. Among those who left the party are its leading founder and former presidential candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, former Mexico City mayors Alejandro Encinas and Marcelo Ebrard, and most significantly Andrés Manuel López Obrador, another former presidential candidate who left to found MORENA.

    Why haven’t the social movements been able to push politics to the left and push the left toward unity? While there were widespread protests over Ayotzinapa throughout all of Mexico, the protests have not been large enough, sustained enough, or cohesive enough to result in the transformation of a spontaneous social movement into political power. They are now largely over. Similarly with the recent farm worker strike in San Quintín, Baja California which, after a spectacular beginning, was quickly defeated. The most important movement remains that of the dissident teachers. The National Coordinating Committee (la CNTE) of the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE), while it commands the allegiance of tens of thousands of teachers in Chiapas, Oaxaca, Guerrero, Michoacán, and Mexico City and has significant power at the state and local level, does not wield power at the national level. While some in these movements hate the PRI and the PAN, many are now deeply disappointed with the PRD and some have reservations about Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his MORENA party. Yet, for many, abstention is not a very attractive option either. They want to cast a vote against “bad government,” but for whom to vote?

    The PRI is Likely to Win

    The PRI—the party of President Enrique Peña Nieto—currently has a plurality in both the Senate and the House and, according to polls, is expected to be the biggest winner on election day with about a third of the vote. The PRI’s allies—the Green Party (PVEM), the New Alliance Party (PANAL), the party of the teachers union, and the new Social Encounter Party—should give it a clear majority in both houses. The conservative PAN is expected to come in second with 25 percent of the vote, while the PRD and MORENA are expected to divide the left vote about 13 and 10 percent respectively. The PT and MC will get less than five percent each and there is some chance they could lose their ballot status.

    A rule of thumb is that the Mexican electorate is divided into three large slices with the PRI, the PAN, and the PRD each having about a third in one election or another over the last twenty-five years. Now the left’s piece of pie (formerly represented by the PRD) has crumbled into cobbler. At the same time the PAN’s piece of pie has shrunk to a smaller slice because of the failure of the Vicente Fox presidency and disaster of the Felipe Calderón administration. So the PRI has the best chance.

    Why will the PRI win? While fraud will of course play its party, the PRI has strong support from the corporate TV duopoly: Televisa and TV Azteca as well as a strong party organization in most regions of the country. Though it is true that neoliberalism and the privatization of industry and the breakdown of the ejido (collective farms) have undermined the old organization, still the PRI is effective in maintaining clientelistic relationships. The PAN, whose base is found historically in the financial elite, the active Catholic vote, and in the middle class, will despite the failures of Fox and Calderón probably do well several regions: the North, a few of the Central states, and possibly in Yucatan. The PRD will do well in Mexico City, Michoacán, and Tabasco, its historic bases, though it will lose some votes to MORENA. For MORENA, this is its first run and it remains to be seen how strongly it can both pull from the PRD and win disgruntled voters from the major parties.

    While MORENA will generally be running alone, the PRD will in various states enter into alliances with the PRI, the PAN, the PT, the PVEM, and PANAL. These are just the sort of opportunistic arrangements that have led PRD leaders and rank-and-file members to leave the party. Some of them will surely vote for MORENA.

    The Extra-Parliamentary Left

    The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) has made it clear since it appeared on the national scene with the Chiapas Uprising of 1994 that it has nothing but contempt for Mexico’s political system, for its parties, and for its politicians. As EZLN spokesman, Subcomandante Marcos particularly aimed his fire at the PRD and its candidates, calling for a rejection not only of the parties but also of elections. In 2006 the EZLN organized “The Other Campaign,” a national speaking tour calling not for voting in the elections, but rather for the overthrow of capitalism. When it was clear that the government had stolen the vote from López Obrador of the PRD, the EZLN refused to join the protests, a sectarian position that undermined its credibility and appeal in much of the Mexican left. The People’s Revolutionary Army, a small, underground guerrilla group, argues in the latest issue of its newspaper El Insurgente for “conscious political abstencionism,” rejecting elections in Mexico at this time.

    The Ayotzinapa movement in Guerrero and some other parts of Mexico also calls for abstention. The Organization of the People and the Workers (OPT), which had been attempting to build a radical, left-labor party, appears to have adopted this posture as well. One Mexican radical argues that voting “will only restore some of the damaged legitimacy of the regime and the PRI government.” On the other hand, Raúl Vera López, the influential, left-of-center Catholic Bishop of Saltillo who has been calling for a Constituent Assembly to write a new Constitution and refound the country, is urging people to vote.

    Will the campaign for abstention have any effect? In 2012, voters participated at a higher rate than usual as some 63 percent of voters cast ballots in both the presidential and legislative elections. We would expect the vote this time to be between 57 and 60 percent of the electorate if there were no campaign. Another important factor, however, is the high level of violence in states such as Guerrero and Tamaulipas which could interfere with the elections. At least two candidates and one campaign manager have been killed already.

    Ironically, despite the national sense of horror at Ayotzinapa and the indignation at the “white house” scandal involving the President and his wife buying a house on favorable terms through a government contractor, it is most likely that the PRI will win. The movements are too weak and the left too divided to have any impact.

    One has the impression that with the PRD/MORENA split we are at a major turning point in left politics in Mexico. The PRD represented a uniquely Mexican combination of social democracy and populism, and with its passing from dominance perhaps to marginality, the question is: What new force on the left might arise? At this point it is not clear.

  • Campaigning With Bernie, Then and Now: Why Labor Should Give Sanders Strong Primary Election Support

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    When I first met Brooklyn-born Bernie Sanders, he was a pretty marginal figure in his adopted state of Vermont. It was 1976 and he was running, unsuccessfully and for the fourth time, as a candidate of the Liberty Union Party (LUP).

    Never heard of it? Well that’s understandable because only Vermonters are still afflicted with its enduring flakiness. Liberty Union (LUP) was a radical third party spearheaded by opponents of the Vietnam War who had, like Bernie, washed up in the Green Mountain State as “the Sixties” subsided.

    At its historic peak, the LUP garnered maybe 5 or 6 percent of the statewide vote for some of its more presentable candidates. In short, nothing like the winning margins racked up in recent years, in state legislative races, by the far more savvy and effective Vermont Progressive Party (VPP). The VPP now boasts a ten-member delegation in Montpelier, the state capital, and attracts growing union support.  (See http://inthesetimes.com/article/13092/out_of_the_margins_into_the_fray)

    During Bernie’s quixotic mid-70s bid to become governor, I accompanied him to a meeting of local granite cutters, teamsters, and electrical workers. This was not a “flatlander” crowd, nor one dominated by full-time union officials. His audience was native-Vermonters, some of them Republican, who were still punching a clock at local quarries, trucking companies, and machine tool factories in an era when the future home state of Ben & Jerry’s and Vermont Teddy Bear Co. still had impressive blue collar union density.

    These local union delegates had come together to make candidate endorsements under the banner of the Vermont Labor Forum, a coalition of non-AFL-CIO unions. So Bernie delivered what is now known– due to its unchanging nature over the last four decades—as “The Speech.” (For one of its longer iterations, in hard copy form, see his 2011 book by the same name.) Sanders’ message to the Labor Forum was that corporations were too powerful, workers were getting screwed, and both major parties were beholden to “the bosses” (or, as Bernie might call them today, “the billionaire class,” a social category not yet invented forty years ago).

    Lesser Evilism, Then and Now

    Sanders’ appeal for working class support in 1976 seemed most persuasive to rank-and-file representatives of the United Electrical Workers (UE). They were, of course, members of a left-led national organization, which had long favored “independent political action.” However, in deference to their more cautious colleagues, the UE members politely went along with the Labor Forum majority, which, per usual, voted to endorse Vermont Democrats that year, despite Liberty Union’s far greater degree of union friendliness.

     This labor tendency to gravitate, in conservative fashion, toward the least problematic of the two major parties is still with us today, of course. Every election cycle—in every part of the country—AFL-CIO unions and unaffiliated labor organizations make pragmatic calculations about who to endorse and spend money on. Rarely do they take a chance on third party candidates, no matter how ardent their support for labor causes. Even a union rank-and-filer who runs against a corporate Democrat (for example, Howie Hawkins, the blue-collar Green who challenged Andrew Cuomo for governor of New York last year) finds it hard to collect labor endorsements.

     A few union leaders have issued recent threats to withhold future support from Democrats who back President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership deal but Hillary Clinton certainly won’t be punished in that fashion. By the 2016 general election—and much sooner, in the case of some national unions—organized labor will be in full “lesser evil” mode once again. The only place in the nation next year where union members will have viable, pro-labor third party candidates to support, at least at the state and local level, is Vermont. And, for that, the U.S. labor movement has Bernie Sanders and other Vermont Progressives to thank.

    When Sanders comes knocking on their door, looking for support in his presidential primary challenge, trade unionists in other states should remember his long history of helping Vermont workers get their act together, in politics, organizing, and contract strikes. It’s a track record that few “friends of labor” can match.

    A Choice, Not An Echo

    Bernie got his own electoral act together by “going local” in 1981. Instead of persisting as a fringe candidate in futile statewide races, he joined a four-way contest for mayor of Burlington, Vermont’s largest city. His successful campaign was backed by the Burlington Police Officers Association, which provided a key endorsement and funding after a contract dispute with the incumbent mayor, a five-term Democrat. Sanders won by ten votes.

    As mayor, Bernie immediately hired a new human resources director for Burlington. This union-friendly lawyer worked to improve relations between city hall and local cops, firefighters, and other municipal workers represented by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). During his four terms in Burlington, Sanders continued to champion the cause of workers, tenants, the poor, and unemployed, while revitalizing the city.

    “I was fighting for working families,” he recalled in a 2014 interview. “We were paying attention to low and moderate income neighborhoods rather than just downtown or the big-money interests. In fact, I went to war with virtually every part of the ruling class in Burlington during my years as mayor. “ The result, according to Sanders, was that  “large numbers of people who previously had not participated in the political process got involved.”  Sanders supporters won up to six seats on the city council and campaigned as the Progressive Coalition, forerunner of the statewide Progressive Party founded in 1999.

    National Union Hesitancy

    But even a left-wing independent with a laudable record of labor advocacy, at the municipal level, found it hard to attract national union backing for higher-level challenges to both major parties. In 1988, major unions ignored Sanders when he ran for Congress against a Democrat and Republican. The latter won, but two years later, Bernie ran again and ousted the GOP incumbent, with more union support this time. Only gradually and very slowly has the country’s longest serving independent in Congress received the kind of national union funding that he should have gotten from the very beginning. (For details and a useful comparison with Hillary Clinton’s top donors, see http://www.vox.com/2015/4/30/8522019/bernie-sanders-hillary-donors.)

    On Capitol Hill, Sanders blazed a trail not followed since Vito Marcantonio served six terms in Congress as the lonely tribune of the NYC-based American Labor Party in the 1940s. Fifty years later, Sanders helped create a left pole for mainstream labor’s soon-to-be-thwarted campaign to reform the National Labor Relations Act during the Clinton Administration. He introduced a “’Workplace Democracy Act’ to comprehensively reform and strengthen workers’ rights…to improve living standards for American workers, which have fallen precipitously.” Sanders also promoted the idea of “economic conversion”—converting Pentagon-dependent manufacturing firms into producers of socially useful goods–a cause since downplayed or abandoned by major industrial unions themselves.

    Back in Vermont, Bernie used his Congressional office to help workers get better organized, in their workplaces and communities, even when the labor movement lagged behind in both areas. Sanders not only urged Vermonters to “Vote Yes” in union representation elections, he actually convened annual meetings of local labor activists to help them develop more successful organizing and bargaining strategies, in the private and public sector. To stimulate new rank-and-file thinking, Sanders and his staff invited out-of-state labor speakers who were part of national efforts to revitalize organized labor. He has been a staunch and longtime ally of the Vermont Workers Center, the statewide community-labor coalition that fights for single payer healthcare, immigrants’ rights, paid sick leave, and other working class causes in the Green Mountain State.

    Which Side Are We On?

    When Verizon workers that I represented in Vermont opposed the company’s sale of its northern New England landline operations in 2006, Bernie was campaigning for the U.S. Senate seat that he now holds. He held a public forum highlighting the reasons for our “Stop The Sale” campaign and brokered a meeting with the proposed buyer, FairPoint Communications, that enabled us to confront its top managers about their company’s record of anti-unionism elsewhere. More recently, as labor opponents of the sale predicted, Verizon’s successor has floundered financially and tried to impose contract concessions on its workforce of several thousand. During their four-month strike last year, FairPoint union members had no stronger political ally, in public and behind the scenes, than Bernie Sanders.

    Bernie’s four decades of active engagement with workers’ struggles in Vermont has provided a model for the Vermont Progressive Party’s own strong labor orientation. The VPP’s elected steering committee now includes key union activists in Vermont; its public office holders–on the Burlington City Council and in the state legislature—regularly join union members at strike picket-lines, rallies, and press conferences where Democrats and Republicans are, of course, rarely to be found. Members of my own union and others have been recruited to run as candidates for what has become the country’s most successful state-level third party. (For more on this trend, see: http://www.progressiveparty.org/media/2014/union-member-recruitment-vermont-progressives)

    It’s an axiom of labor solidarity that help received, in a period of need, will be reciprocated, down the road, in similar fashion. Vermont union members learned long ago that the mutual benefit derived from their work with and for Bernie Sanders goes far beyond the results of labor’s usual (and sometimes tawdry) transactional relationships with public office holders. That’s why trade unionists in Vermont have turned out for Sanders as much as he’s been there for them over the years. Let’s hope that their union brothers and sisters, in other Democratic primary states, will be able to figure out which side they should be on, without the benefit of such long personal association.

    It’s promising that many rank-and-file activists have already signed up to join the “Labor Campaign for Bernie” at:http://goo.gl/forms/nJXhQY9PMr) . And, of course, the Vermont State Labor Council is urging the national AFL-CIO to support him as “the strongest candidate articulating our issues.”

    But, if the rest of organized labor just plays it cautious and safe, jumping on the Clinton bandwagon instead of rallying around Bernie, it will be one more sign of diminished union capacity for mounting any kind of worker self-defense, on the job or in politics.

    *Steve Early began writing about Vermont politics in 1968. Between 1980 and 2007, he was a New England organizer for the Communications Workers of America. He is the author, most recently, of Save Our Unions from Monthly Review Press, which describes the emergence of labor-based independent political action in Vermont and the singular career of its democratic socialist Senator, Bernie Sanders. Early can be reached at:Lsupport@aol.com. See more at: http://www.progressiveparty.org/media/(SteSt2014/union-member-recruitment-vermont-progressive

     

  • Further Reflections on the Sanders Campaign

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    As proponents of independent political action, we believe that the Democratic Party is a deathtrap for progressives and that history has demonstrated time and again that progressive movements immersed in the DP are stripped of their potential political power. Nevertheless, we cannot judge the potential of the Sanders’ movement solely by our attitude towards the Democratic Party, any more than we can evaluate the Democratic Party by the enormous potential contribution an unshackled Sanders movement may yet contribute to fundamental political change.

    The totality with which socialists have traditionally viewed the Democratic Party has been this. The agenda of the Democratic Party is determined by its corporate financiers. It is they who keep the party competitive, who write and prioritize legislation and it is they who provide lucrative post-electoral revolving door employment opportunities for faithful party standard bearers. The two parties provide a full spectrum career subculture, designed to incentivize, entice and indoctrinate candidates and office holders to ruling class perspectives. Its base, organized as voting blocks, has no membership privileges.

    Indeed, the two parties are not private, voluntary organizations sustained by membership fees, but political utilities of the ruling class, which, like other public utilities, are internally regulated by the state and protected from outside competition by upstart third parties through a dense network of legal encumbrances to market entry. Because the DP is sustained and disciplined by the mobilization of outside capitalist wealth, the voting blocs aligned to the Democrats cannot compete for influence on this terrain.  Their power is limited primarily to the threat of abstention from electoral participation.

    As socialists we compromise the content of our politics – which revolve around the working class and its natural allies and the independent role they must play in remaking society — by supporting candidates irrevocably tied to the apparatus of the status quo. That they – the DPs voting base– have, for a variety of outmoded historical reasons, remained tied to a “company union” party, providing nominal representation while committed to the wellbeing of capitalist accumulation, cannot determine our attitude toward that party. No more than say, working class and minority backing for imperialist wars and interventions can establish our attitude towards such conflicts. This is not a sectarian insistence on retention of ideological purity, but a substantive reflection arising from our understanding of how the political process preserves capitalism, an insight that defines and distinguishes us as socialists.

    Militant opposition to the power structure cannot flourish in the party of the power structure or on a purely ideological basis without a party of its own. It is obvious that even under the most propitious of circumstances the trade union movement and its allies are not going to transition from a capitalist party to a highly sophisticated socialist ideology in one lurch. What we aspire towards instead is an independent framework in which socialists can be a loyal—or if not loyal, at least a tolerated—opposition, a framework conducive to exposing the dynamic that governs a capitalist world view as detrimental to the interests of the oppressed and exploited. And this urgently requires a fracturing away of the Democratic Party mass base.

    If, in the past, the Democratic Party could parade itself as a lesser evil and appeal to its base on that level, on the defining issue of our time – austerity – this is simply no longer the case. The industrial deregulation momentum begun under the Carter administration came to full fruition under Clinton. Deregulation was extended to the financial sector, supplementing workplace exploitation with ever more robust commercial exploitation. Welfare was effectively eliminated; union power decimated. Trade agreements which offshore jobs, enhance profit margins, and place additional corporate restrictions over democratic mandates have and are being systematically imposed as hallmark Democratic templates. And a balanced budget fetish has replaced social spending as the bragging point of successful Democratic governance in woeful indifference to the depth of the 2000 recession it so mightily exacerbated and to the tepid recovery from the Great Recession to which it so miserably contributed.

    Austerity fundamentalism has overhauled the Democratic Party. It is its organizing principle. The entire difference between the two parties on this issue now boils down to this. The Democrats demand we ingest the same dose of poison in three gulps that the Republicans would have us swallow in one.

    This means that the Democratic Party is vulnerable. As an austerity-first party, its traditional role as the political agency through which the ruling class implements its programs and through which – by presenting itself as a progressive alternative – it can continue to placate its base and coopt its opponents has lost its allure.

    But if Democratic lesser-evilism with respect to austerity no longer has feet, what are we to make of Sanders’ bid for nomination? How do we assess his abandonment of independent politics? History is not devoid of lessons. But lessons are contingent on context. To repeat the arguments of 1968 and 1972, when a mass social insurgency existed exterior to the Democratic Party, and where support for liberal politicians in a bourgeois party could only manage to set back the momentum of independent politics, seems now bizarrely inapt. The Kennedy and McGovern campaigns reconsolidated key voting blocs whose loyalties were wavering under the deafening sound of street thunder. To invoke this argument today against Sanders, in the glaring absence of mass alternative poles of political attraction, suggests little more than a sectarian incantation for preserving the cadre in the remote hope that this inspired few may yet ignite a political fuse.

    For those who make this argument it is perpetually a Peace and Freedom Party moment. But, if the Sanders campaign catches momentum by challenging austerity and reviving rank-and-file activism by placing that challenge at the center of his insurgency, he may yet just spark a Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party moment. If so, the Sanders movement will, as did its historical precedent, ultimately face a defining dilemma: capitulate to the Democratic Party establishment behind some face saving blandishments or break away and chart an independent course.

    Sanders himself is far from the perfect candidate, and a less than inspiring “socialist” leader for this struggle. By entering the fray as a Democrat, he seemingly repudiated and renounced precisely that aspect of his career that was most attractive – his singular independence from either of the two parties of capitalism.

    Even his public statements are far from encouraging as they suggest that he aspires to play a Fannie Lou Hamer role, but will not rule out being the future Bayard Rustin to his own movement.

    Yet, consider this. His chief economist, Stephanie Kelton, is an advocate of the most far ranging challenge to austerity on the horizon. She advocates a guaranteed basic income; federal jobs for anyone on demand at a living wage and the pre-distribution of resources – consistent for instance, with a federally funded bank account for each child. She is a consistent champion of single payer. Her heterodox economic co-thinkers and associates have demanded the financial sector be reined in and banksters jailed.  And she has consistently argued that government surpluses are actively destructive and balancing the budget is generally pernicious. If these proposals were implemented, the fight for 15 would be comprehensively transcended. Wages would be set at the federal level as private employers would have to bid workers away from decent paying federal jobs.

    This is not your friendly, respectable Keynesianism. It is not Krugman and not Stiglitz. It is a rejection of all prevailing economic orthodoxies. It is a powerful anti-poverty program based on full employment, not piecemeal remediation. And it is one that offers a level of plebian economic security – and therefore a breakdown of social discipline based on want — that could only instill the fear of god into the ruling class. It will be a lightning rod for all the forces of reaction, from the Democratic mainstream no less than from the Republican right.

    If the Sanders campaign is competently run, Hillary Clinton and the DP establishment will be confronting an incipient rank-and-file mutiny demanding the complete overhaul and repudiation of what the party currently stands for. An increasingly politically conscious grassroots movement motivated by a militant and credible anti-austerity message heralds the development in the foreseeable future of “split” situation in the Democratic Party when these demands are blocked, watered down, frustrated or compromised with, as they invariably must.

    As socialists, we should welcome that split and assist from the outside in hastening the conditions under which that split may become more likely. We believe that only by joining forces with those outside the Democratic Party on an independent basis can the Sanders movement make a lasting contribution to the development of an oppositional current in American politics.

    This does not mean approaching the Sanders’ rank-and-file movement in a spirit of opprobrium. Even less, does it require us to calumniate the movement as “sheep” and its leader as a “sheep dog” for its immediate failure to adopt our independent perspective.  The Sanders movement, or key sections of it, will only find its path to independent politics through struggle, a struggle we should enthusiastically embrace. People are won to ideas not by the logic of the ideas themselves, but by the creation of a political force that generates the need for an organized alternative that can make those ideas effective.

    The Sanders constituency needs to convince itself that the Democratic Party cannot be that alternative, because the DP cannot and will not reform itself into the antithesis of what the ruling class requires it to be.

    We can assist them in reaching this understanding. We can address the Sanders movement by emphasizing our support for their struggle against austerity and indicate our willingness to work on issues they raise. We can organize joint forums, debates and meetings to discuss the way forward for progressive and radical politics. But in so doing, we should take the opportunity accorded by these gatherings to emphasize our conviction that the DP orientation, based on analysis born of historical experience, is a dead end and to impart the sense of an alternative direction to the Sanders’ activists.

     

     But engaging with the Sanders campaign cannot mean joining the Democratic Party or participating in its primary struggles. As independent socialists, radicals and progressive activists,, we best assist the Sanders movement by relentlessly attacking the existing Democratic Party, its commitments to austerity and its pervasive hostility to the grassroots it ever more anachronistically claims to defend. We need to keep our focus on the duplicity of Clinton and hold Sanders’ feet to the flames if he wavers or weakens his stance against the Party establishment. That is, we are most useful as allies of the DP insurgency when, from the outside, we urge it to be relentless in its confrontation with entrenched power and emphasize the unbridgeable gulf that exists between the Party they seek to attain and the DP as it actually exists. 

    The position that the Sanders movement articulates – of opposition to the prevailing austerity orthodoxy in current disregard for the task of breaking with the Democrats – is at length self-defeating and cannot be sustained.  Once an anti-austerity movement coalesces around Sanders, the movement will rapidly assume a half-in, half-out posture towards the DP as it tries to expand its base in the teeth of fierce bipartisan resistance. If Sanders, for opportunistic and career considerations, abandons the anti-austerity movement to reconcile himself with the party royalists, he will also have abandoned a newly seasoned coterie of left-moving liberals and progressives. Or, if, as we believe, the DP establishment defeats the Sanders’ campaign for nomination and he can’t or won’t run as an independent or feels constrained by Democratic Party rules that prohibit him in advance from harming the DP, the movement will be faced with the MFDP dilemma: reconcile with Hillary Clinton, on the basis of minimal face-saving concessions; or refuse to backtrack to the DP, and adhere instead to its progressive principles. If so, it can bring a wealth of experience in organizing and coordinating a large scale, national electoral operation in service to independent campaigns that are already in full swing, most likely the Green Party.

    We should, in short, see our role as contributing to the radical resolution of the pull between the Democratic Party and the fallout possibilities of an emerging

    anti-austerity movement in favor of the latter. Radicals should encourage it 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.

    *Barry Finger is a member of the editorial board of New Politics.

  • Ireland Says "Yes" to an Equal Society

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    On May 23, 2015 Ireland finally threw off the shackles of a conservative Catholic past and voted in favor of social equality.

    The Irish electorate was asked to vote in a referendum to include gay marriage in our constitution and we agreed in great numbers to this proposal.

    Many young people who had to leave Ireland in recent years due to austerity, managed to make the journey back home to vote yes. They sailed home and flew home under the hash tag “home to vote” which lit up Twitter and many had aspirations of returning for good once the land of their birth shakes off its recessionary hangover, but for the meantime they can proudly boast they took part in creating a Irish society everyone can live in.

    While the youth turnout at polling stations generated a buzz, there were many older voters who also voted yes. These people are of a generation who grew up in a Catholic conservative state, a generation suffocated by stringent Church laws that prohibited an equal society. This was their chance to reject something that had blighted most of their lives, a chance to turn the tables on the Catholic Church.

    The margin of victory for the yes side in the gay marriage referendum showed modern Irish people’s rejection of church morals. Some 62.1% of the electorate voted in favor of marriage equality compared to 37.9% who voted against.

    All political parties in the country supported the introduction of gay marriage which left the no side backed up by conservative Christian groups and the Catholic Church who ran a campaign on fear. Posters from the no side were adorned with children that played up to the “normal” family nucleus. One poster from the no side depicted a baby with a man and woman; its slogan was: “Children deserve a mother and a father.”

    The referendum had nothing to do with children; it was a marriage referendum, yet the no side ran their campaign on the fear of what may happen to children. They cried foul of the prospect of two men or two women raising children, which is rather ironic when you look at the history the Catholic Church has with children in Ireland. Where were these same people to speak out for the many children who had to spend miserable childhoods in church run industrial schools across the land? Where were they when unmarried pregnant women were sent to the dreadful Magdalene laundries and then had their babies taken from them and sold to the highest bidders in America and elsewhere? Where were these people when so many children were abused by the likes of the Christian brothers in schools and churches across the country?

    Those times thankfully and hopefully are gone. With the overwhelming acceptance of gay marriage, the people of Ireland sent a message to those who want to keep us in a backwater.

    On that fine day in May, as count centers across the country began the process of counting the votes, a surge of anticipation was bubbling up across social media and on the ground. By early evening the country was heaving in celebrations.

    At the main count center in Dublin castle, thousands thronged in its courtyard to listen to results coming in. The place was awash with rainbow flags, singing, dancing, happy people young and old, mothers, fathers, children, all there to be part of history.

    While the streets burst with jubilation, a number of people made their way to a quiet park outside the city center at Fairview where they lay their “Yes to Equality” badges and rainbow flags on a bench in solemn dignity.

    In 1982 a gay airport worker in his early 30s called Declan Flynn sat on that very bench when he was set upon by a gang of thugs and beaten to death. It was a time when gay people were hunted down by such bigoted bastards and little was done to prevent it. Church and state turned a blind eye to such activity and while the men who carried out the murder of Declan Flynn were arrested, they later received suspended sentences.

    This was an Ireland where gay people were treated as second class citizens while the Catholic hierarchy lorded over its flock with menace but, now Ireland has changed utterly. Ireland has voted in favor of equality. Ireland has rejected hate. Ireland has emerged as a leading light in what can be a very dark world.

     

  • The Future of Podemos

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    Podemos can still change Spain for the better. But it won’t do so by chasing the political center.

    The strategic debate inside Podemos has become a public issue. Pablo Iglesias, the leader of the Spanish party, even recently jumped into the discussionwith an article explicitly inspired by Antonio Gramsci. But beyond the direct leadership of the party, the strategy debate involves something that pertains to everyone — to the scores of people and social sectors who desire a profound transformation of the Spanish political reality.

    What started as background noise after the steamrolling of Vista Alegre has become an uproar. The populist strategy of the blitzkrieg-style “electoral war machine,” determined as it was to affect a quick and devastating victory, has turned out to be mistaken on its own terms. The very battlefield such a strategy was designed to navigate — that of electoral polls and political marketing — has turned the blitzkrieg against itself.

    It would behoove us to remember the high cost of this strategy: surrendering the original form of the party — at its height in the post-15M moment — capable as it was then of providing an organic, geographically coherent, cross-sectoral feeling, that led to circumstances of overflowing voluntary participation. More than a thousand citizens’ “circles” appeared far and wide across the country in only a few months and tens of thousands of people were drawn to this new party whose name evoked action.

    Despite all this, from the point of view of the strategic blitzkrieg, the circles were flagged as a “militant obstacle.” Because they had real weight in the organization — so it was said — they impeded wider communications with the unmobilized majority.

    The Podemos strategists gestured toward these social strata, where the political experts have spent years tracking the largest voting reserves. And from this stereotyped dichotomy between “the militants” and “the citizenry” (or in a less caffeinated form, simply, “the people”), the circles were subordinated for the sake of a supposedly unmediated communion with the agitated “normal people.” Concurrently, those critical of this model were cast out one after another with the same accusation: the complacent taste of the minoritarian and fear of taking power.

    The catch, or one of them, as was well understood by the mass movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is that organizations that flow from the grassroots upward are not only more democratic, but also provide direct sources of information about the political landscape and how to navigate it.

    Starting with the work of Karl Marx and ending with the revolutionary syndicalism of the early twentieth century, transformational movements have always understood that direct information about social phenomena and the political situation is required — at least if you want to build and organize emerging political realities, and not simply reproduce the most static ideological elements of the moment.

    In other words, an organization that draws its information and decisions from below doesn’t only reflect a taste for democracy. It becomes indispensable for a party movement that is the catalyst for transformation rather than its gatekeeper.

    Voluntarily sequestered from its organizational base, Podemos has made a succession of decisions based solely on opinion polls, talk shows, and electoral polling. The biggest problem with this strategy is that in complex and fragmented societies, this ideology of direct communication with “the people,” which presumably transforms their inherent agitation into electoral hegemony, is little more than an illusion.

    One does not have to go far to find examples, different though the contexts may be. In the ascendant phase of the mid-2000s economic bubble, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero‘s government also employed this method to maintain the illusion of cultural progress until the economic crisis, simply put, crushed it.

    Ultimately, the Podemos strategy is circling towards a political center that nowadays can only revive the political categories that were decisive before 15M destabilized them. The subjective declaration “I am a moderate” comes to mean the same thing as “I am middle class,” and makes little sense in a context in which the material conditions of the middle class are being demolished.

    This gesture is even more calamitous in a party whose own principal success, up to today, continues to be the audacity of having broken with the political impasse it met after the 15M. If the movement’s founders had had their eyes glued to the polls during that time, Podemos would not exist.

    After reaching the peak of their growth around January 2015, Podemos has entered a stage of stagnation followed by another of decline. But what’s worse, the movement of discourse towards the center that’s accompanied this electoral strategy has created the conditions for the rise of Ciudadanos as the regenerative political force of the old regime. No other formation could have entered without the space Podemos opened.

    The paradox is that opening such a gap created the conditions for others to fill it. The insistence on not defining itself in programmatic terms, on using corruption as a central term of battle — with its marked tendency to fixate on individuals, opening the door to the interchangeability of elites and reformism — and on avoiding the fractures that exist between myriad sectors and social fragments that compose “the people,” have all helped spur the rise of a party/huckster like Ciudananos who, with its greater agility in this terrain, has managed to accomplish the difficult task of getting people to the polls to vote for it. Simply put, “the people” prefer the original to the copy.

    In light of these results, nothing said so far can pass for an underground critique of the Podemos mainstream. Like it or not we are facing a strategic debate. The stunning resignation of Podemos cofounder Juan Carlos Monedero last month, after a few declarations distilling the mood of criticisms of the populist/centrist strategy, has forcibly, and irreversibly, broken down the debate.

    Following this, we might doubt the authenticity of Monedero’s declarations, keeping in mind that he himself was one of the most enthusiastic proponents of the Vista Alegre model. But it would be a mistake to center him in the discussion.

    In fact, the worst that could happen to Podemos in this moment would be for this singular political opportunity to be misunderstood as a squabble among notables. Of course there are big names in the mix, but unlike the battles between Susana Díaz and Pedro Sánchez in the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, in Podemos two strategic options lie in the sand. It’s not simply a power play for control of the party.

    Seizing this moment to launch an organized and pluralistic debate out of which a new Podemos can be salvaged — that strategically and organizationally develops the force of confrontation and rupture held within the original Podemos — seems like the real option. At least if we don’t want cry over spilt milk and spoil this historic opportunity for change.

    Given this, one might wonder, in line with the same logic that has brought Podemos to this point, whether betting on a process of reorientation during election season is an adventure that will cost too many votes.

    “Nothing turns the voter off more than an internal division” is one of those commonsense statements (similar to “the political center must be won over”) with which conventional political science and electoral sociology have been hammering us for years. But these statements gesture, once again, toward stable political, economic, and political times, times past, which are very different from the ones in which we now live.

    The speed of change that has allowed snake-oil salesmen like Ciudananos, dressed up by recycled right-wingers and political climbers of every stripe, to burst through in barely four months, also make it possible for a new Podemos to reclaim their ability to confront the oligarchic government.

    Only then, after the May elections, is it correct to gamble on another constituency for the party. In the framework of this new civil assembly, revising and democratizing the organizational model is needed, as is defining the strategic discussion in new terms. Only in this way can we reclaim the vision of change which attracted so many social classes, and reclaim Podemos as the tool of transformation and popular empowerment that is needed to win elections — and going forward, to force a rupture with the post-Franco Regime of ’78.

    This article is reprinted with the permission of Jacobin where it was first published.