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  • Bernie Sanders's Presidential Bid Represents a Long Tradition of American Socialism

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    This article is republished here with the permission of the author, Peter Dreier, and of American Prospect.

    Now that Bernie Sanders has entered the contest for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, Americans are going to hear a lot about socialism, because the 73-year-old U.S. senator from Vermont describes himself as a “democratic socialist.”

    “Ever since I was a kid I never liked to see people without money or connections get put down or pushed around,” Sanders explained in making his announcement. “When I came to Congress I tried to be a voice for people who did not have a voice—the elderly, the children, the sick, and the poor. And that is what I will be doing as a candidate for president.”

    We can expect the right-wing echo chamber—including Fox News hosts, Tea Party politicians, and Rush Limbaugh—to attack Sanders for espousing an ideology that they’ll likely describe as foreign, European, and un-American.

    But Sanders’s views are in sync with a longstanding American socialist tradition. Throughout our history, some of the nation’s most influential activists and thinkers, such as Jane Addams, John Dewey, Helen Keller, W.E.B. DuBois, Albert Einstein, Walter Reuther, Martin Luther King, and Gloria Steinem, embraced socialism.   

    Of course, America’s right-wingers say there’s already a socialist in the White House. For the past seven years, Barack Obama’s opponents—the Republican Party, the Tea Party, the right-wing blogosphere, and conservative media gurus like Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh—labeled anything Obama proposed, including his modest health-care reforms and his efforts to restore regulations on Wall Street, as “socialism.”

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    In March 2009, two months after Obama took office, the ultra-conservative National Review put a picture of the new president on its cover over the headline, “Our Socialist Future.” In 2010, Newt Gingrich authored To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine. Stanley Kurtz, a regular contributor to conservative publications and frequent guest on Fox News, published Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism. These are only a few of the many right-wingers fulminating against Obama’s alleged socialist views.

    Obama joked about this in his recent speech at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. “I like Bernie. Bernie’s an interesting guy,” said Obama, referring to Sanders. “Apparently, some folks want to see a pot-smoking socialist in the White House. We could get a third Obama term after all.”

    President Franklin Roosevelt faced similar allegations. His conservative enemies, including some members of Congress, consistently called him a socialist. In a speech defending his New Deal goals, FDR said: “A few timid people, who fear progress, will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing. Sometimes they will call it ‘Fascism,’ sometimes ‘Communism,’ sometimes ‘Regimentation,’ sometimes ‘Socialism’. But, in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple and very practical.”

    When big business and conservatives attacked FDR as a radical, FDR boasted: “They are unanimous in their hate for me. And I welcome their hatred.”

    Labeling someone a “socialist” has long been conservatives’ convenient way of attacking anyone who espouses even liberal views. In Sanders’s case, however, the label fits. He is a socialist. But don’t expect him to call for government ownership of banks and drug companies. His views fall squarely within the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, similar to those of his Senate colleagues Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, and Barbara Boxer of California and the late Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. 

    In fact, times have changed. Most Americans, even if they’re not socialists themselves, don’t have the same knee-jerk, vitriolic hostility to the idea that was widespread during the hysteria of the Cold War. 

    A Pew Research Center survey  recently found that while only 31 percent of Americans had a positive reaction to the word “socialism,” barely 50 percent of Americans had a positive view of capitalism, and 40 percent had a negative response. That’s hardly a ringing endorsement.

    The Pew poll found that young Americans are about equally divided in their attitudes toward socialism and capitalism. Among 18-to-29 year olds, 49 percent had a positive view of socialism, while 47 percent had a positive view of capitalism. Similarly, only 43 percent had a negative view of socialism, compared with 47 percent who had a negative view of capitalism.

    “Many young people associate capitalism with inequality, big corporations, and poverty,” Joseph Schwartz, a Temple University political scientist, told me in an interview. 

    “During the Cold War, socialism was identified with Communism, which meant totalitarianism and dictatorship. It wasn’t a very positive image,” said Schwartz. “But things have changed since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. If people now in their 20s and 30s have any image of socialism at all, it is probably northern Europe, particularly Scandinavia. They know that northern Europe has less poverty, more equality, and more social mobility. And they know that Canada, which has a strong socialist party [called the New Democratic Party], is a more equal and humane society than the United States.”

    Dick Flacks, a sociologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, thinks that right-wing attacks on Obama may have backfired, especially among the Millennial generation, which gave Obama 66 percent of its vote in 2008, and 60 percent four years later.

    “Young people generally like Obama, even if they are somewhat disappointed in what he’s been able to accomplish in the face of such strong Republican opposition in Congress,” said Flacks. “So when Republicans and conservative radio talk show jocks attack Obama as a socialist, many young people react by saying, ‘Well, then maybe socialism can’t be that bad,’ and it makes them at least skeptical of those who demonize the word socialism.”

    Still, such lukewarm feelings toward capitalism haven’t led to a groundswell of socialist activism. Few Americans consider themselves socialists. But a majority share Sanders’s outrage about the growing concentration of wealth and income, excessive executive compensation and corporate profits side-by-side with the epidemic of layoffs and foreclosures, and the undue political influence of billionaires like the Koch brothers, the Walton family, and Rupert Murdoch.

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    The Pew Research Center pollsters found that most Americans (77 percent)—including a majority (53 percent) of Republicans—agreed that “there is too much power in the hands of a few rich people and corporations.” (Not surprisingly, 83 percent of 18-to-29 year olds shared that view.) Pew also discovered that 61 percent of Americans believed that “the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy.” A significant majority (57 percent) thought that wealthy people don’t pay their fair share of taxes.

    In light of those views, Sanders believes he can tap into Americans’ growing frustrations with our political and economic troubles and offer bold ideas to address our declining standard of living and the role of big money in politics.

    He made a calculated decision to run in the Democratic primaries rather than as an independent third party candidate. He does not want to be seen as another Ralph Nader, whose third party campaign in 2000 took crucial votes away from Democratic nominee Al Gore and helped elect George W. Bush. By running in the Democratic primaries, Sanders will be able to debate Hillary Clinton on national television and gain wide exposure for his populist views about the undue political influence of what he calls America’s corporate “plutocracy.”

    Sanders hopes to appeal to liberal Democrats who are dissatisfied with Hillary Clinton’s ties to Wall Street, her reluctance to support strong government regulations to protect consumers, workers, and the environmental from irresponsible corporations, higher taxes on the super-rich, and her support for U.S. military adventures overseas.

    The Vermont senator pledged to run a positive campaign. The former mayor of Burlington (1981 to 1989), who was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1990 and the Senate in 2006, said that he has never run a negative ad in any of his campaigns.

    Sanders won’t have anything close to Clinton’s war chest to pay for TV ads, consultants, and campaign staff. The major liberal constituency groups—labor unions, environmental groups, and organizations promoting the rights of women and LGBT people—are unlikely to pour big bucks into his campaign. As an organized political force, America’s socialist movement won’t be much help. Democratic Socialists of America, the nation’s largest socialist organization, has only 6,500 dues-paying members.

    But within a day after Sanders announced his candidacy, more than 100,000 people signed up as supporters on Sanders’s website; 35,000 made contributions, and the candidate raised $1.5 million. That’s more than Senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul raised in their campaigns first 24 hours.

    Sanders knows that his candidacy is a long shot. But his campaign will certainly help inject his progressive ideas into the public debate, influence public opinion and media coverage, and push Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee, to the left. In this, Sanders is part of America’s long-standing radical tradition. Since the early 1900s, few American socialists have been elected to office, but their ideas—and the movements they’ve helped organize—have been influential nevertheless.

    When the Socialist Party was formed in 1901, many Americans were outraged by the widening gap between rich and poor, and the behavior of corporate robber barons who were exploiting workers, gouging consumers, and corrupting politics with their money. Workers were organizing unions. Farmers joined forces in the Populist movement to leash the power of banks, railroads and utility companies. Progressive reformers fought for child labor laws, against slum housing and in favor of women's suffrage.   

    Socialists played influential roles in all these Progressive Era movements and gained many new converts. Among them were labor leader Eugene V. Debs, philosopher and educator John Dewey, Francis Bellamy (the Protestant minister from Boston who wrote the “Pledge of Allegiance” in 1892), settlement house founder and peace activist Jane Addams, novelist Jack London, sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois, poet Katherine Lee Bates (who penned “America the Beautiful”), journalist Walter Lippmann, public health pioneer Alice Hamilton, working women’s rights activist Florence Kelley, crusading attorney Clarence Darrow, feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood), and “Big Bill” Haywood (leader of the miners’ union). Helen Keller (1880-1968) is best known for overcoming her blindness, but she was also a lifelong radical. She connected the mistreatment of the blind to the oppression of workers, women, and other groups, leading her to embrace socialism, feminism, and pacifism.  

    Other prominent socialists included muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens (who exposed municipal corruption in his articles in McClure’s Magazine, collected in The Shame of the Cities), writer Upton Sinclair (whose 1906 novel The Jungle, about the harsh conditions among Chicago’s meatpacking workers, led to the enactment of the first consumer protection law, the Meat Inspection Act), and Lewis Hine, whose photographs exposed the brutal conditions faced by child laborers to an outraged public. Two socialist newspapers—The Appeal to Reason (based in Kansas) and the Jewish Daily Forward (based in New York)—each reached at least a quarter of a million readers around the country. New York, Milwaukee, Chicago, and other cities had their own weekly socialist papers.

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    In 1912, Debs, the Socialists’ presidential candidate, won more than 900,000 votes, 6 percent of the total. He would have garnered more, but two other candidates—Democrat Woodrow Wilson and Progressive Party candidate (and former president) Theodore Roosevelt—stole some of the Socialists’ thunder, diverting the votes of workers, women, and consumers with promises of such progressive reforms as women’s suffrage, child labor laws, and workers’ right to organize unions.

    That year, Milwaukee voters elected Socialist Victor Berger to Congress; two years later, he was joined by another Socialist, Meyer London of New York. Berger sponsored bills providing the abolition of child labor, self-government for the District of Columbia, a system of public works for relief of the unemployed and federal ownership of the railroads, the withdrawal of federal troops from the Mexican border, and women’s suffrage. Berger also sponsored the first bill to create “old age pensions.” To promote the Socialists’ campaign for direct election of U.S. Senators (who were then chosen by state legislators), Berger called for the abolition of the upper chamber, which he and others labeled the “millionaires’ club.”

    At the Socialist Party’s high point in 1912, about 1,200 party members held public office in 340 cities, including 79 mayors in cities such as Milwaukee, Buffalo, Minneapolis, Reading, and Schenectady. In office, they pushed for public ownership of utilities and transportation facilities; the expansion of parks, libraries, playgrounds, and other services; a living wage for workers, and a friendlier attitude toward unions, especially in time of strikes.

    Milwaukee was the center of American socialism in the early 1900s. Dominated by the brewery industry, the city was home to many Polish, German, and other immigrant workers who made up the movement’s rank and file. In 1910 Milwaukee voters elected Emil Seidel, a former patternmaker, as their mayor, gave Socialists a majority of the seats on the city council and the county board, and selected Socialists for the school board and as city treasurer, city attorney, comptroller, and two civil judgeships.

    In office, the Socialists expanded Milwaukee’s parks and library system and improved the public schools. They granted municipal employees an eight-hour day. They adopted tough factory and building regulations. They reined in police brutality against striking workers and improved working conditions for rank-and-file cops. They improved the harbor, built municipal housing, and sponsored public markets. The Socialists had their own local newspaper and sponsored carnivals, picnics, singing societies, and even Sunday schools. Under pressure from city officials, the local railway and electricity companies—which operated with municipal licenses—reduced their rates.

    Grateful for these programs, Milwaukee voters kept Socialists in office. They elected Daniel Hoan as mayor from 1916 to 1940, under whom Milwaukee was so frequently cited for its clean, efficient management practices that they boastfully called themselves “sewer socialists.” Milwaukee voters elected another Socialist, Frank Zeidler, as their mayor in 1948, and, remarkably, he remained in office for 12 years at the height of the Cold War.

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    In 1932, in the depths of the Depression, Norman Thomas, a Protestant minister, ran for president on a Socialist Party platform that called for old-age pensions, public works projects, a more progressive income tax, unemployment insurance, relief for farmers, subsidized housing for working families, a shorter workweek, and the nationalization of banks and basic industries. Thomas figured that in such desperate times, his message would appeal to voters. But many voters who may have agreed with Thomas’s views did not want to “waste” their vote on a Socialist who had no chance to win and who might even take enough votes away from the Democratic candidate, Franklin D. Roosevelt, to keep Republican Herbert Hoover in office. Thomas had little regard for FDR, whom he considered a wealthy dilettante and a lackluster governor of New York. He believed FDR’s 1932 platform offered few specifics except vague promises of a “New Deal.”

    Thomas did not expect to win, but he was disappointed that while FDR garnered 22.8 million votes (57 percent), he had to settle for 884,781 (2 percent). When friends expressed delight that FDR was carrying out some of the Socialist platform, Thomas responded that it was being carried out “on a stretcher.” He viewed the New Deal as patching, rather than fixing, a broken system.

    Following the success of his popular muckraking book, The Jungle, Upton Sinclair moved to California and ran on the Socialist Party ticket for the House of Representatives (1920),  the Senate (1922), and for governor (1926 and 1930), winning few votes. In 1934, Sinclair figured he might have more influence running for office as a Democrat. He wrote a 64-page pamphlet outlining his economic plan—I, Governor of California and How I Ended Poverty—and entered the California Democratic gubernatorial primary.

    Much to Sinclair’s surprise, his pamphlet became a bestseller across California. His campaign turned into a popular grassroots movement. Thousands of people volunteered for his campaign, organizing End Poverty in California (EPIC) clubs across the state. The campaign’s weekly newspaper, the EPIC News, reached a circulation of nearly one million by primary day in August 1934. The campaign allowed Sinclair to present his socialist ideas as commonsense solutions to California’s harsh economic conditions.

    Sinclair shocked California’s political establishment (and himself) by winning the Democratic primary. Fearing a Sinclair victory, California’s powerful business groups joined forces and mobilized an expensive and effective dirty-tricks campaign against him. On election day, Sinclair got 37 percent of the vote—twice the total for any Democrat in the state’s history. Sinclair’s ideas pushed the New Deal to the left. After the Democrats won a landslide midterm election in Congress that year, FDR launched the so-called Second New Deal, including Social Security, major public works programs, and the National Labor Relations Act, which gave workers the right to unionize.

    During the red scare of the 1950s, American socialism fell on hard times. Few Americans distinguished between the European social welfare systems and the communism of the Soviet Union or China. Across the nation, universities, labor unions, public schools, movie studios, and other major institutions purged themselves of their left-wingers. 

    But some socialists keep alive their radical critique of American militarism, big business, and racial injustice. In a 1961 article for Mademoiselle magazine titled “Who Are the Student Boat-Rockers?”, Tom Hayden, a leader of the burgeoning student New Left, listed the three people over 30 whom young radicals most admired. All were socialists—Norman Thomas (a principled anti-war radical and labor ally who headed the Socialist Party), C. Wright Mills (the maverick Columbia University sociologist whose many books, including The Power Elite and The Causes of World War Three, exposed America's power structure and warned about the dangers of the Cold War arms race), and Michael Harrington (whose book The Other America inspired President Kennedy and then Lyndon Johnson to wage a war on poverty).

    As the civil rights movement gained momentum, Southern racists and right-wing groups like the John Birch Society insisted that the movement was led by Communists, in whose ranks they included Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.  On that count, they were wrong; King was no Communist. But he was a socialist. Growing up in a solidly middle-class family in Atlanta, King saw the widespread human suffering caused by the Depression, particularly in the black community. In 1950, while in graduate school, he wrote an essay describing the “anti-capitalistic feelings” he experienced as a result of seeing unemployed people standing in breadlines. In 1964, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, King observed that the United States could learn much from Scandinavian “democratic socialism.” He began talking openly about the need to confront “class issues,” which he described as “the gulf between the haves and the have-nots.”

    “There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism,” King told his staff in 1966.

    Since then, only a handful of elected officials and prominent public figures have identified themselves as socialists, but their radical views continue to influence public opinion.

    A few years ago, when a small group of New York radicals took over Zuccotti Park and the Occupy Wall Street movement quickly spread to cities and small town around the country, Frank Luntz, an influential GOP pollster, spoke at a Republican Governors Association meeting.  He warned: “I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death. They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”

    Luntz offered tips for fighting back and framing the issues that the Occupiers have raised. For example, he urged Republican politicians to avoid using the word “capitalism.”

    “I’m trying to get that word removed and we’re replacing it with either ‘economic freedom’ or ‘free market,’” Luntz said. “The public still prefers capitalism to socialism, but they think capitalism is immoral. And if we’re seen as defenders of ‘Wall Street, we’ve got a problem.”

    On that point, at least, Bernie Sanders and Frank Luntz agree.

     

  • Deflategate: What Does it Tell Us about America?

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    Deflategate has driven virtually every other story off of the news shows and talk shows for several days now. At the center of the controversy is Tom Brady, quarterback of the New England Patriots, who, a National Football League report says, very likely knew that Patriot employees were involved in deflating several footballs to give Brady and the Patriots an advantage in the American Football Conference Championship Game of the 2014 season. Pundits have called the Brady and his team ”cheaters” and “liars,” though interestingly Governor Chris Christie—also accused of being a cheater and a liar—defends Brady, saying people are just jealous of those whose lives seem so perfect.

    Why do the media and so many Americans find Deflategate so fascinating and become so passionate about the issue? Perhaps the strongest strand of the American ideology of democratic capitalism is the notion of equality of opportunity. We often say that there should be a “level playing field” so that all have a fair change, so no one has to run uphill. And on that playing field Americans believe that everyone should be using a football inflated to exactly the same pounds-per-square-inch. No one should have a ball that’s easier to handle, otherwise the game will not reveal who is really the best. As in football, so in society, Americans believe we should all go down on the field to compete as equals.

    So the Deflategate controversy and the criticism of Brady and the Patriots are really an affirmation of the American ideology of democratic capitalism, but ironically the level playing field and the equally inflated footballs are only for the sports world. In American society, we know, not only the 1% but a much larger percent of prosperous people, go into the game with all sorts of advantages: greater assets, higher incomes, disproportionately lower taxes, better school, more higher education, personal, social and political connections. We are all well aware that the field is titled, that their balls are so soft that you can grab them like they had a handle, while most people’s balls are so hard that one can hardly get or keep a grip on them at all. 

    Would that some of the concern about fairness in sports would spill over into a concern about fairness in American society. Equality of opportunity would be a good starting point for a better society, if not a democratic socialist ideal.

    We as socialists, no fans of economic and social competition, want not only equality of opportunity but also equality of outcomes. Everyone should know that whether or not they are the strongest, smartest, or the wiliest, they will get a fine education, have good housing, and excellent health care, a stable climate and a healthy environment. We should go down on the field of life, not to win, but to play the game and enjoy it, making it a wonderful experience for all who play and great entertainment for all who watch.

    Americans don't criticize Brady out of envy, as Christy suggests. We criticize him and his team because we believe in fairness. Let's see the same indignation the next time we hear about a plant closing and a mass layoff, about home foreclosures and evictions, about the police using racist violence against young Black men. No cheaters, no liars. Fairness. An even playing field and all the balls equally inflated. Let’s start there.

  • Bernie for President

    ImageWe should welcome Bernie Sanders' run, while being aware of its limits.

    "I am not a capitalist soldier. I am a proletarian revolutionist. . . . I am opposed to every war but one.” So said Senator Bernie Sanders in 1979, reciting a speech from five-time Socialist Party of America presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs for a Folkways Records collection. 

    The language was out of place in a country about to enter the Reagan revolution, where even the modest accomplishments of the American welfare state would come under attack. Yet two years later, Sanders became mayor of Vermont’s largest city. The Vermont Vanguard Press celebrated the “People’s Republic of Burlington” with a special issue. Sanders put up a portrait of Debs in his new office — a portrait that now hangs in his Capitol Hill office.

    Sanders is technically an independent who caucuses with the Democrats. And his own variant of socialism is more reminiscent of former Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, a fellow social democrat, than the Bolshevik-sympathizing Debs. Sanders likes to compare the accomplishments of the Scandinavian welfare state with the inequity of American society, highlighting our childhood poverty and lack of affordable health care. His solutions — progressive taxation and robust public services — are not too far out of step with those of his most liberal Senate colleagues, like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

    For Sanders, the socialist mantle is more than anything a nod to America’s rich history of radicals and reformers, those largely erased from the story of national progress by forces of conservatism at home and the Cold War abroad. Sanders’s own voting patterns align closely with progressive Democrats. As Howard Dean said on Meet the Pressin 2005, “He is basically a liberal Democrat. . . . The bottom line is that Bernie Sanders votes with the Democrats 98 percent of the time.”

    Rank-and-file Democrats agree. For years they’ve prevented their party from splitting the vote and running candidates against him in Vermont — another sign that the socialist label no longer conjures images of breadlines and gulags.

    Sanders doesn’t offer the sweeping emancipatory vision or principled anti-imperialist politics that we should demand on the Left, but his full-throated defense of the welfare state stands in marked contrast to frontrunner Hillary Clinton’s business-friendly policies. And with Elizabeth Warren likely not contesting in 2016, only Sanders can push primary season to the left — forcing Clinton to make the kind of bold commitments to appease (and later alienate when they go unfulfilled) a disgruntled progressive base.

    Unlike most of Europe, the United States never developed a mass labor party that vied for power and built a generous welfare state. But for most of the twentieth century, many within the Democratic Party were able build the fragments of one within its tent.

    The constituencies that played this role — labor unions, civil rights organizations, and community groups — are still around. But because they lack structural control of a party that fundamentally represents the interests of capital, they are easily tossed aside. As the gap between them and the policies pursued by party leaders like Barack Obama becomes more evident, it’s no surprise they are starting to make their voices heard.

    Hillary Clinton is deeply rooted in the New Democrat tradition, and played a role in creating the set of policies that have become the party’s common sense. New Democrats rallied together under the auspices of the now defunct Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) in the late 1980s. Their platform was a direct response to the Reagan-era triumph of conservatism. With tax-and-spend liberalism appearing electorally unviable, Democrats were supposed to promote a leaner and less obtrusive government (even while tinkering with some progressive social policy at the margins).

    The Clintons’s role in transforming the Democratic Party at a national level throughout the 1990s (winning short-term electoral payoffs in the process) is undeniable. After all, it was President Clinton — not Ronald Reagan — who balanced the budget and ended “welfare as we know it.” And it was Hillary Clinton, then the first lady, who strongly supported landmark, DLC-backed achievements like the 1996 welfare reform bill.

    President Obama, despite his promises of change and 2008 primary battle with Clinton, hasn’t deviated from the DLC agenda. Yet most traditional liberals have opposed New Democratic policies, as well as Clinton’s inaction on climate change and aggressive foreign policy that included support for the Iraq War.

    In recent years, the political tides have continued to move against the Clintons, especially in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. A politically engaged and active Tea Party movement on the Right has garnered more headlines, but the Occupy movement, labor insurgencies such as the Chicago Teachers Union strike, fast-food worker activity, movements against police violence, and increased attention to income inequality all point to the incipient reemergence of the American left.

    Electorally, an eclectic mix of personalities has vied to fill the space that grassroots action has opened up, from New York Mayor Bill de Blasio to Senate populists like Warren. But aside from Sanders, none of these figures are prepared to run in 2016.

    Sanders has described his potential run as an attempt to build organization and pressure from the left: “If I run, my job is to help bring together the kind of coalition that can win, that can transform politics.” It would be the most profound attempt to do so within the Democratic Party since the electric Jesse Jackson campaigns of the 1980s.

    Sanders can only dream of mustering the political forces that Jackson drew on, and the reasons why mainstream liberals want Clinton to win the primaries are easy to understand. Nationally, she’s the most well-known and popular Democratic figure in the race, and she can sustain the party’s popularity among women. Quite simply, she’s tough to beat, and a big victory in 2016 could pave the way for a Democratic Congress.

    But polling has indicated that just as Republicans lurch rightward, self-described Democrats are becoming more coherently and uniformly progressive. At the heart of the potential base for a Sanders campaign is the increasing divide between the centrist leadership of the Democratic Party and those voters who still cling to the vision of the Democrats as the party of the New Deal and Great Society.

    Perhaps as a response to renewed fervor on the Right, more Democrats say they’re for an activist government, capable of regulating business and providing social services. This group of liberals sees Obama’s few successes — health care reform, for instance — as insufficient wonkery at best, and wholesale corporate giveaways at worst. The absence of a vehicle like the Tea Party to give these sentiments political articulation opens a space for Sanders to solidify progressives into a coherent voting bloc.

    Meanwhile, as Politico has reported, Clinton is seen by some large liberal donors as too centrist to warrant support. Even those who don’t share Sanders’s social-democratic politics want her challenged from the left, and see Sanders as a potential wedge to drive the Democratic Party back from the center-right.

    Sanders is more likely to alter the tone and substance of the debate than someone like Dennis Kucinich, the Ohio congressman who served as the lone progressive voice in recent presidential primaries but never gained any measure of mass support. Sanders is also taken seriously by voters. He has the credibility, and the baggage, that comes from being a sitting senator, and he’s a forceful voice for wealth redistribution.

    In an era of economic stagnation, frustrations that were once muted can boil over into outright antipathy. There are enough people on the left of the Democratic coalition to create headaches for a Clinton campaign. Plans to move to the center to boost general election prospects as soon as possible will no doubt be derailed a bit by Sanders’s emergence.

    It clearly won’t be enough to win this time. But, seen as an opportunity for movement building, Sanders’s candidacy could strengthen the Left in the long run. The tensions among Democrats are serious and raise the possibility for the realignment of progressive forces on a totally different basis.

    This is a different project than the attempts of Michael Harrington(and others) to turn the Democrats into a more traditional social democratic party by pushing it leftward. Our goal must be to transcend the Democratic Party entirely.

    It’s far from a failsafe plan, but in this moment the best bet for the Left in the electoral arena is to support both independent political campaigns and insurgent primary runs by socialists and other radicals. Having Sanders openly defend socialism, and contest the New Democrat record before a national audience, is a baby step in the right direction.

    To be sure, there are dangers in a Sanders bid for president. Historically, attempts to grow social movements through outsider primary runs — like the 1980s Jackson campaigns — were dead-ends, and possibly even weakened independent political efforts.

    But Sanders’s candidacy doesn’t have to channel left forces into what will likely be a Clinton nomination. Instead, it could be a way for socialists to regroup, organize together, and articulate the kind of politics that speaks to the needs and aspirations of the vast majority of people. And it could begin to legitimate the word “socialist,” and spark a conversation around it, even if Sanders’s welfare-state socialism doesn’t go far enough.

    A vibrant Sanders campaign would be a sign that bleak job prospects and the squeezing of American workers are creating a political constituency for change. When he fails, there’s every reason to believe that radical voices can take his place, carrying the memory of Debs back into the political mainstream.

    *Bhaskar Sunkara is the Editor of Jacobin, where this article originally appeared. He is also a member of the editorial board of New Politics.

  • Bernie Sanders’s Presidential candidacy— an auspicious development for the left

    ImageIt’s all over the news, mainstream and left/alternative alike, as well as social media, and is certainly one of the most important items of political news of recent vintage: after much consideration and testing of the political waters, Bernie Sanders (whom only the staid New York Times refers to as “Bernard”!), Independent Senator from Vermont and self-proclaimed “democratic socialist,” is running for the Democratic Presidential nomination.

    This makes Sanders the first candidate so far to challenge the inevitable shoo-in of Hillary Clinton. (Unless we consider the clown show of declared Republican Presidential candidates, of course.) This is a very auspicious development for the left for a number of reasons I will elaborate on; for I consider the Sanders candidacy auspicious and positive even for those of us of the left (myself included) who feel that “in principle” there can be no truck with the Democratic Party. But, as I hope to show, sometimes we have to “transcend” the rottenness of the Democratic Party when an exceptional individual candidate comes along and gives us a long-awaited opportunity.

    Sanders insists that this will be a serious campaign, and he has a necessary fundraising strategy for this, a strategy as populist, as grassroots advocacy, as he is, and in stark contrast to Clinton and the usual gaggle of big-money donors and aspiring officeholders groveling before them. Rather than rely on such donors (“Billionaires do not flock to my campaign,” Sanders quips correctly [Quoted by Matt Taibbi, “Give ‘Em Hell, Bernie,” April 29, 2015, Rolling Stone]), he wants, instead, 3,000 ordinary individuals who will contribute $100 each. The contrast between his approach and that of the declared Republican candidates, as well as Clinton herself, who is expected to raise $2 billion, is as stark as the difference between twelve o’clock noon and twelve o’clock midnight. And already an auspicious sign that a Sanders Presidential campaign will not go the way of “politics as usual.”

     

    Certainly Sanders’s campaign message will not be “politics as usual.” He has already built himself a base, garnered influence, and made a name for himself as an outspoken and fiery advocate for those of us Occupy called “the 99%.” Not only did he endorse the Occupy Wall Street sit-in and the Occupy movement, he has also spoken out extensively and plainly against the oligarchs and plutocrats who dominate and pillage today’s U.S. politics and economy; he has actively denounced the rampant economic inequality and economic gains of more employment and productivity going only to those at the very top, pointedly noting that 99% of new wealth created goes only to the top 1% of income-holders; he has actively supported a raise in the minimum wage to a livable $15 an hour; firmly supports the rights of labor and unions so much under attack, and has frequently spoken at labor and minimum wage-increase rallies; calls for a single-payer healthcare system and expansion of Social Security; wishes to put people back to work at decent wages rebuilding the country’s devastated infrastructure; and has frequently noted publicly that underneath the often touted “official” unemployment statistics is the “real” unemployment rate hidden in the Bureau of Labor Statistics data, which shows an actual unemployment and underemployment rate nearly double the “official” one. He also wants to give relief to students crushed under onerous debt, and calls for a tuition-free four-year college education for all. Sanders is also one of the strongest environmentalists in Congress, has regularly warned of the dangers of climate change and the need for action, and voted against the Keystone XL pipeline. He openly supports same-sex marriage and abortion rights as well. Moreover, he’s in the opposition forefront against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), another spurious “trade deal” that works only for the corporations and against the workers, the environment, and human rights.

    Obviously these are not the “ordinary political fare” of “mainstream” political discourse. Yet these are the programs and issues that Bernie Sanders speaks on widely, directly, and regularly, and with a bluntness that does not fudge, obfuscate, or try to straddle fences—something that clearly marks him as a rare genuine Tribune of the People, a populist champion of the “ordinary person” articulating a clearly left-wing program we who read New Politics can certainly feel comfortable with.

    Matt Taibbi wrote of him glowingly:

    He is the rarest of Washington animals, a completely honest person. If he's motivated by anything other than a desire to use his influence to protect people who can't protect themselves, I've never seen it. Bernie Sanders is the kind of person who goes to bed at night thinking about how to increase the heating-oil aid program for the poor.

    Certainly this domestic political program of Bernie Sanders outlined above, as well as Taibbi’s remarks on the personality and character of Sanders himself, give the left good political reasons to both admire Bernie Sanders personally and support programmatically his understanding of “democratic socialism” in action, an understanding he will raise on the candidate’s podium now that he’s declared himself. One good reason to support Bernie Sanders’s run for the Presidency. His left populist, deeply egalitarian program can now reach millions, and even directly challenge Democratic Presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton and her desired political agenda. In some ways he already has.

    Sanders, who officially announced his candidacy April 30, though it had been unofficially reported a few days earlier, has already garnered endorsements from Progressive Democrats of America (PDA), Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the social-democratic newsmagazine and website In These Times, and several former leaders of Occupy Wall Street, who have set up websites on his behalf, and are committing the Occupy name on his behalf—a first for Occupy, which had previously eschewed involvement in electoral politics. Even the business newspaper Bloomberg View thinks editorially that a Sanders candidacy could be a good thing in sparking political debate! (“What is a Sanders Democrat?”)

    The chief problematic for the left in a Sanders candidacy is his intention to run, not as an independent, but as a Democrat. Sanders has always previously run and won elections as an independent, all the way back to his election as Mayor of Burlington, Vermont, then Vermont’s Congressional Representative for 16 years, and now its Senator since 2006. However, he did seriously consider running as an independent, but decided against it—I think for realistic reasons. As a Democratic candidate he will automatically be taken seriously by the media, and will be able to participate in the candidates’ debates, something he could not do it he ran as an independent. He will thus be able to reach millions on his issues, not the mere thousands he would reach solely as an independent. That is simply the reality of having to play by the rules of the “two-party shell game” that is de rigueur as “serious” politics in the U.S. today. And even if certain comrades feel they cannot support the Democratic Party as a party (and that includes a lot of us, including myself), they should certainly consider, as a matter of simple realism, the necessity of supporting certain individual candidates who choose to run as Democrats. Simply because there really is no other realistic choice in most electoral races, and no truly viable left third party exists, nor is likely to exist in the foreseeable future.

    The hapless nature of Jill Stein’s run as President on the Green ticket in 2012 should be a tocsin for us all—try as she might, she could not get invited to any of the “significant” candidates’ debates; the best she was able to do was participate in a “third party debate” that was scheduled in the summer of 2012, a token effort at “inclusiveness” that pitted Stein against such ultra-wingnuts as the Presidential nominee of the Constitution Party, a far-right splinter off the “too liberal” Libertarians! As it was, she was only able to garner 0.3% of the vote, or about 400,000 votes, only a tenth of what Ralph Nader had gotten in 2000, when his 2.7% of the vote cast him as the “spoiler” who made George W. Bush President! But as a Democratic candidate Sanders will be on the ballot in all the Democratic primaries, have to be acknowledged as a candidate at all the Democratic state caucuses and conventions, and be able to debate and confront Clinton and all the Republican challengers on the issues, be heard and listened to, and at least given respect as a “serious” candidate; something that Jill Stein was never able to achieve.

    Not that he’s expected to win the nomination—but he will be a force to be reckoned with in terms of policy and issues. Already Hillary Clinton’s new-found “populism” is a sign of that. The Sanders candidacy will amplify the voice of liberals, leftists and progressives in U.S. politics, and realistically that’s all we can hope for. Despite the new ferment and unrest that’s emerged, first through Occupy, then through the protests that erupted in places such as Ferguson and Baltimore, left forces are very small, and programs and proposals almost nonexistent. Anger and disgust are there, certainly, but they in themselves do not constitute a political force, much less an effective one. We are stuck with the system of two-party dominance for the foreseeable future, and we of the left need to find ways to effectively work with or around it as we can. Sometimes that even means joining “the ranks of the enemy,” as Sanders is doing. Unfortunately, there is no viable alternative.

    All of this is very “Leninist”: “Leninist” as in Lenin’s own admonition to the Bolshevik Central Committee when the Left Communists wished to continue the fight against the invading Germans while the Russian soldiers were “voting with their feet” and deserting en masse. Lenin reminded the members then, “Politics begin where the masses are, not where there are thousands, but millions.” A theme he also reiterates throughout one of his most important works, “Left-Wing” Communism, an Infantile Disorder. And in the U.S. today, the millions of our fellow citizens are not considering third parties of the left, certainly not in national elections. For better or worse, they are wedded to the Republican and Democratic Parties as the only choices, and only handfuls will even consider voting for an independent or third-party candidacy. More good reasons for the left to look favorably upon the Sanders Presidential run.

    To be sure, Bernie Sanders is not a “perfect” candidate; no candidate who is actually capable of running for and holding office is, is or is likely to be. And there are positions of Sanders which we of the left would take exception. But even here, Bernie Sanders is better than what the “mainstream” proffers as “acceptable;” even when Sanders is allegedly “accommodating capitalism and imperialism,” as certain ultra-leftists would have it. Simply because this “accommodation” by Sanders is still “fringe” by “mainstream” political standards, still generally “too far left” for “mainstream” tastes. For example, though Sanders supports the need for a military, he also wants to drastically cut spending on “defense” and shift the funds to social programs that benefit ordinary people. Even as he supported the establishment of F-35 fighter bases in Vermont, his “accommodation” could properly be seen as a “necessary evil” to bring jobs to his state by one of the few avenues realistically open. And yes, Sanders did support Bill Clinton’s military foray in Kosovo, which gave rise on the left to the notion of “humanitarian imperialism”—but which also caused the left to give a blind eye to the atrocities of “socialist” Milosevic. Yes, he’s supported Democrats over other independent candidates even as he is an independent who but caucuses (until now) with the Democrats, so his “political soul is not pure”—but he is in office and able to get things done! And yes, he supports Israel; but he has also sternly criticized Israeli policies in Gaza as unjustified overreaction, and was the first Senator to declare he would boycott Netanyahu’s speech before a joint session of Congress. Which he did. Sanders also voted against the Bush’s war in Iraq, and while originally voting for the war in Afghanistan (shortly after 9/11, let us remember), he also wanted the U.S. out of Afghanistan sooner and more permanently than did Obama.

    So “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders is not the “perfect” socialist candidate. So what? He is still an admirable candidate by socialist standards, advocates for his domestic populist political program as an example of applied socialism, and his program put into action in the U.S. would certainly be a boon to actual workers caught up in the living hell that 35 years of neoliberalism have foisted upon us. And can we actually name a better candidate that would be viable, and not just an ideological token proffered forth out of a senseless devotion to purity? Being politically realistic means working with what’s available, and though Bernie Sanders actually even getting the Democratic nomination is an extreme long shot at best, what he could actually accomplish as a candidate overcomes by far whatever “shortcomings” his Democratic Presidential run entails.

    It is delusory to think that we of the left must only do “pure” ideological propaganda, only engage in “pure socialist” politics, lest we fool the working people from “seeing the light.” Yes, we of the left must work only to fulfill the magical “long run” of history, something which would somehow be shorted by supporting a Sanders candidacy. But maybe it’s better to recall the pointed but trenchant words of a brilliant “liberal economist,” John Maynard Keynes: “In the long run, we are all dead.” Let’s face it, fellow comrades of the left, we have been waiting for the magical Revolution longer than the protagonists in Samuel Beckett’s famous play have been waiting for Godot! To this writer, Bernie Sanders’s Presidential campaign has so many good things going for it it’s time to be “right opportunist” and positively embrace it (critically, it that’s the way some feel) as an auspicious opening for the left we haven’t had in a very long time. Work on behalf of Bernie Sanders, not the Democratic Party! That’s a way forward for our immediate time.

    George Fish is a socialist writer living in Indianapolis.

     

  • The Problem with Bernie Sanders

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    The upcoming presidential contest was shaping up to be one of the most underwhelming in electoral history. An heir to the Bush dynasty, real estate magnate Jeb, looked like the safest bet to become the Republican presidential nominee, and challenge the anointed frontrunner from the Democrats' leading dynasty, corporate drone Hilary Clinton.

    Few people on the left or even among liberals could manage any excitement or conviction about getting "Ready for Hillary Clinton," the former Walmart board member, regardless of the populist veneer she is trying to put forward as her campaign gets underway.

    Thus, for many, the decision of Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders to challenge Clinton for the Democratic nomination offers an alternative. For example, Jacobinmagazine's founding editor Bhaskar Sunkara argued, "Sanders' candidacy could strengthen the left in the long run. The tensions among Democrats are serious and raise the possibility for the realignment of progressive forces on a totally different basis."

    Sunkara joined more than 50 activists, mainly from the Occupy Wall Street movement, in forming People for Sanders. Their founding statement says, "[W]e support Bernie Sanders in his bid to become the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party. We stand firmly behind Senator Sanders as the strongest progressive possibility in the race right now. His commitment to our values is one of longstanding commitment. Sanders is the bold alternative."

    But in running for the Democratic presidential nomination as the liberal outsider with almost no chance of winning, Sanders isn't very "bold"–no more so than the fizzled campaigns of Dennis Kucinich in past presidential election years. And by steering liberal and left supporters into a Democratic Party whose policies and politics he claims to disagree with, Sanders–no matter how critical he might be of Hillary Clinton–is acting as the opposite of an "alternative."

    – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

    SANDERS HAS positioned himself as a hero of America's downtrodden workers. He doesn't run from the label "socialist," but instead embraces it in his condemnations of corporate greed. He even has a portrait of the great Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs hanging in his office.

    Certainly Sanders will bring all sorts of issues to the Democratic primaries that Clinton would prefer to tiptoe around or avoid altogether. He has promised to call attention to inequality in the U.S., the corporate hijacking of American politics and the imminent crisis of climate change.

    With refreshing bluntness, he told George Stephanopoulos on ABC News' This Week, "We need a political revolution in this country involving millions of people who are prepared to stand up and say "Enough is enough," and I want to help lead that effort."

    But if Sanders really wanted to participate in mobilizing millions to resist the status quo in U.S. politics, he had other options to launching himself into the circus of a Democratic presidential campaign as the designated marginal renegade. And he rejected them.

    For one, he could have set a very different example, with a far greater chance of success, if he ran for governor in Vermont against the Democratic Party's incumbent Peter Shumlin, who has betrayed promises to implement a single-payer health care system, create green, union jobs and much more.

    Faced with a budget crisis, Shumlin and the state's Democrats refused to raise taxes on the rich to fulfill their promises. Instead, they imposed cuts in social services, education, and environmental programs, and laid off scores of state workers. Shumlin even went so far as to call for the banning of teachers' right to strike.

    Sanders is Vermont's most popular politician. With the backing of the Progressive Party, he could have run for governor as an independent and easily defeated both the Democratic and Republican nominees, and never faced the accusation of being a spoiler that is inevitably thrown at any third-party challenger.

    A victory for a truly independent campaign by Sanders would have been even bigger than Kshama Sawant's election to the Seattle City Council as an open socialist. In so doing, Sanders could have built momentum for a national third party alternative to represent workers and the oppressed.

    If Sanders had his heart set on national politics, he could have run for president like Ralph Nader as an independent, opposing both capitalist parties, the Democrats and Republicans. He would have been appealing for a protest vote, rather than any real chance to win, but Sanders rejected this possibility out of hand for a different reason. "No matter what I do," Sanders said in January, "I will not be a spoiler. I will not play that role in helping to elect some right-wing Republican as president of the United States."

    In other words, Sanders refused to consider an independent presidential campaign not because he had little chance of winning, but because he didn't want to compete for vote with the Democrats' eventual nominee. There's no reason to believe he will be a "bold alternative" at the end of his doomed campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

    In jumping into the Democratic Party primaries, Sanders appointed a quintessential corporate party insider, Ted Devine, to be his campaign manager. Devine has worked for a series of Democratic presidential campaigns, stretching back to Walter Mondale and running through to John Kerry.

    – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

    THE DEMOCRATIC establishment can breathe a collective sigh of relief. It doesn't, in fact, fear liberal Democrats like Kucinich or Sanders, but third-party challenges like Nader's that have the prospect of breaking their stranglehold on votes from workers and the oppressed, as several local and statewide campaigns have shown over the last few years.

    Hillary Clinton certainly doesn't regard Sanders as a threat. She knows that the election business follows the golden rule: Whoever has more gold, wins. Clinton is expected to amass a war chest of more than $1 billion, mostly from Wall Street and Corporate America, to pay for advertising, an army of paid staff and Astroturf support. This will overwhelm Sanders' fundraising goal of $50 million and his underdeveloped volunteer infrastructure.

    In fact, Clinton regards Sanders as an asset to her campaign. He will bring enthusiasm and attention to Democratic primaries that promised to be lackluster at best. He will also help her frame the election on populist terms that have widespread support. That benefits the Democrats and undermines the Republicans, who have little to say about inequality, except that they like it.

    As liberal writer Paul Waldman wrote in the Washington Post:

    Bernie Sanders isn't going to pull her to the left because she was already moving that way. She's talking about issues like inequality and criminal justice reform in terms that she might not have used 10 or 20 years ago…Talking about them in more liberal terms isn't just good for her in the primaries, it's good for her in the general elections.

    No wonder Clinton celebrated Sander's entry into the race. "I agree with Bernie," she wrote on Twitter. "Focus must be on helping America's middle class. GOP would hold them back. I welcome him to the race."

    You can expect that Clinton will agree with Sanders during the campaign, rearticulating some of his themes in a "more realistic" fashion and occasionally chiding him for taking things too far. Sanders can be counted on to concentrate most of his fire on the Republicans, the Koch brothers and their reactionary positions, as he has been doing for years.

    Sanders admitted the truth in what was perhaps a Freudian slip: "If I decide to run, I'm not running against Hillary Clinton. I'm running for a declining middle class."

    At this stage, Clinton is the overwhelming favorite to emerge as the Democratic nominee. If she stumbles in some irreversible way, the corporate establishment that controls the Democratic Party will come up with another more mainstream candidate, like Obama in 2008. Either way, the eventual Democratic presidential nominee will toe the capitalist line.

    However much he disagrees with that candidate, Sanders will agitate for trade unionists and social movement activists to vote for the lesser of two evils. The result is that he will help corral people on the left from taking any steps toward building a genuine alternative to the two-party status quo.

    Thus, Sanders will follow the well-trodden path of other liberals like Kucinich. In the 2004 Democratic primaries, Kucinich excoriated Kerry and other candidates for voting for George W. Bush's wars, implementing neoliberal trade agreements like NAFTA, and supporting the racist death penalty.

    But Kucinich was very conscious of keeping the left and liberals from building a third party. At one point during the campaign, he said: "The Democratic Party created third parties by running to the middle. 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 thus became the bait on the hook for the Democrats to catch their liberal base. After he lost the primaries, he called on his supporters to support the very candidate he had roundly criticized.

    Sanders' campaign will serve the same function. He is already serving that function by luring people on the left, like the Occupy activists who launched People for Bernie, into a Democratic Party campaign when they might have concentrated their energies on politics outside the Democrats.

    This is especially ironic when you remember that the Occupy Wall Street encampments were attacked and cleared on orders from Democratic Party mayors–many of them known for being liberals–from Boston to Chicago to Portland to Oakland.

    – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

    SANDERS' DECISION to jump into Democratic Party presidential politics represents a decisive break from the man he calls his hero: Eugene V. Debs. Debs spent his whole life building the Socialist Party as an alternative to the two capitalist parties. Year in and year out, he insisted that "[t]he differences between the Republican and Democratic Parties involve no issue, no principle in which the working class have any interest."

    Debs understood that his call for working class people to break with the two capitalist parties meant supporting a political alternative that might not win–but he believed this was a necessary challenge to a two-party system that offered nothing to workers. "I'd rather vote for something I want and not get it," Debs once wrote, "than vote for something I don't want and get it."

    Sanders' retreat is based on a liberal strategy of attempting to transform the Democratic Party from within that has failed for generations. Instead of shifting the Democrats to the left, the leftists who join the Democrats get dragged to the right. Sanders himself is, in many ways, a prime example of this process.

    Back in the 1980s, as mayor of Burlington–the largest city in Vermont, known back then as "the People's Republic"–Sanders did genuinely challenge the two-party system. He went so far as to build solidarity with the left-wing Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua at a time when Republicans and Democrats were supporting the Reagan administration's dirty wars in Central America.

    In the 1990s, however, Sanders set his sites on higher office–not by building an alternative party, but by running as an independent who maintained a collaborative relationship with the Democrats.

    Once ensconced in Washington as a member of the House and Senate, he abandoned his principled opposition to the two-party system. As Vermont Democrat Howard Dean–a former candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination himself–stated, "He is basically a liberal Democrat, and he is a Democrat at that–he runs as an Independent because he doesn't like the structure and money that gets involved…The bottom line is that Bernie Sanders votes with the Democrats 98 percent of the time."

    Since he made his arrangement with the Democrats, Sanders has uncritically supported them in Vermont elections. As a result, when his ally, Gov. Peter Shumlin, declared war on state workers, Sanders didn't even issue a statement in opposition. His silence led many in Vermont to ask: "Where's Bernie?"

    Nationally, Sanders supported Barack Obama in both of the last two elections, despite the president's betrayal of his progressive promises and his record of continuity with many Bush policies, from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the bailout of Wall Street.

    And the Democrats have rewarded Sanders. They instructed their Vermont candidates not to oppose him and sent corporate lackeys like Sens. Charles Schumer and Barbara Boxer to campaign for him. Even worse, Sanders accepted a $10,000 donation from Hillary Clinton's Hillpac back in 2006, during his first run for Senate.

    Sanders, the supposed independent, was a bitter opponent of third-party challenges Ralph Nader's campaigns against Al Gore and John Kerry. In 2004, he announced, "Not only am I going to vote for John Kerry, I am going to run around this country and do everything I can to dissuade people from voting for Ralph Nader…I am going to do everything I can, while I have differences with John Kerry, to make sure that he is elected."

    – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

    WITH HIS slide into becoming a Democrat in everything but name, Sanders became less and less radical on a host of issues, including cherished ones like class inequality. For example, Sanders rightly denounces the minimum wage as a "starvation wage," but he doesn't support the low-wage workers' movement demand for $15 now. Instead, he proposes a more "realistic" increase to $15 "over a period of years, not tomorrow."

    Sanders has similarly moderate positions on many social issues. While he boasts a good voting record on the rights of oppressed groups, it doesn't stand out among most other liberal Democrats.

    In fact, on the decisive issue today of racist police brutality, Hillary Clinton is actually posturing to Sanders' left. She has raised questions about the drug war and ending mass incarceration–though, of course, largely to cover her complicity with Bill Clinton's vast expansion of both. By contrast, in a recent CNN interview, Sanders, after expressing sympathy for cops' supposedly "difficult job," managed to call only for jobs and community policing.

    His foreign policy positions are to the right of many liberal Democrats. Sanders voted in favor of George W. Bush's original Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution that gave the administration a green light to launch the war on Afghanistan. While he did vote against Bush's invasion of Iraq, he repeatedly supported funding resolutions for both U.S. occupations. He is also a Zionist who supports Israel consistently, even after its recent escalations of the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.

    Sanders' backing of U.S. imperialism compromises his support for workers' rights. For example, Sanders supports the basing of the new F-35 warplane at Burlington's airport, despite the fact that the fighter-bomber's ear-shattering noise made scores of working class housing unsafe for habitation.

    – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

    LIKE MANY leftists before him, the Democratic Party has co-opted and changed Bernie Sanders, using him to help hinder the development of a genuine alternative to the capitalist parties.

    His campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination will be, at best, a re-run of Jesse Jackson's primary runs in 1984 and 1988. Jackson's campaigns galvanized an entire section of the left, channeled it toward the Democratic Party and directed its remnants to vote for a succession of corporate candidates like Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis.

    Based on his experience as Dennis Kucinich's former press secretary, David Swanson has drawn the conclusion that the left should not support Sanders. "The best place to put our resources is into uncorrupted, principle, policy-driven, nonviolent, creative activism–including activism needed to create fair, open, verifiable elections," Swanson wrote.

    He's right. As the great socialist historian Howard Zinn argued, "The really critical thing isn't who is sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in–in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating–those are the things that determine what happens."

    The recent uprising in Baltimore proves this. Without that revolt, the Baltimore state's attorney would never have charged the six cops who killed Freddie Gray. Without more struggle, they will certainly not be convicted.

    At the same time, the left shouldn't abandon the electoral arena to the two capitalist parties. If we do, we create a vacuum that the Democrats will fill, co-opting movement activists, demobilizing unions and social movements, and redirecting their precious time, money and energy into electing candidates who then betray workers and the oppressed.

    We need to win the new left born out of Occupy, public-sector union struggles and the Black Lives Matter movement to breaking with the Democratic Party and building an electoral alternative as a complement to struggle from below. Bernie Sanders' campaign inside the Democratic Party is an obstacle to that project.

    *Ashley Smith is a member of the International Socialist Organization (ISO). This article originally appeared in Socialist Worker.

  • Left, Independent Political Action Conference: Unprecedented Cooperation

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    Some 200 political activists from a variety of independent political organizations, as well as individual activists, carried out a rich discussion and an amicable debate about how to collaborate in the work of building a large political alternative to the left of the Democratic Party. Participating in the Future of the Left/Independent Politics Conference, in an unprecedented spirit of cooperation, national, state, and local candidates and activists, as well as elected officials from the Green Party, the Peace and Freedom Party, the Richmond Progressive Alliance, Socialist Alternative, and the Vermont Progressive Party discussed the challenges of campaigning and the difficulties of actually holding office while trying to both build movements and push progressive policies. Also at the conference were members of Progressive Democrats of America and the Justice Party.

    A number of the leading figures of independent politics in America participated. Kshama Sawant of Socialist Alternative, a member of the Seattle City Council, spoke to the group via video. Former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and former Green Party vice-presidential candidate Rosa Clemente spoke, as did 2014 New York gubernatorial candidate Howie Hawkins. Other speakers included Gayle McLaughlin of the Richmond Progressive Alliance and Richmond City Council member, Susan Sadlowski Garza, who was recently elected to the Chicago City Council, and Angela Walker who ran for sheriff in Milwaukee as an independent socialist.

    Though not part of the formal agenda, the just-announced campaign of Bernie Sanders, an independent and self-identified socialist who will run for the Democratic Party presidential nomination–and who had sent greetings to the conference–became a topic of discussion in several sessions. While some said they would support a Sanders campaign because it would raise the important issues and contribute to activism, others felt—as Bruce Dixon of the Georgia Green Party put it—that Sanders was a sheep dog whose job was like that of Rev. Jesse Jackson and Congressman Dennis Kucinich in earlier elections, to round up folks who had strayed to the left in response to the Democratic Party’s retrograde domestic and foreign policies and to bring them back to the Party.

    Responding to the country’s pervasive economic and social crisis, to widespread public support for movements such as Occupy, Black Lives Matters, and Fight for $15, and to recent successes in independent left campaigns, the conference expressed a sense of optimism about the possibilities for not only running left candidates, and winning elections, but also for building a larger left political presence while both expressing and helping to organize and expand the social movements. While this was a conference about political action, the organizers made it clear through panels on the Black Lives Matter movement and the Fight for $15 that politics must be about building and giving voice to such movements.

    Robert Caldwell of Solidarity, one of the chief organizers of the event, and Debra Reiger, the chair of the California Peace and Freedom Party and also one of the organizers, told the gathering in a final report that the number of participants, the spirit of collaboration, and the richness of the discussion exceeded the organizers’ expectations. During an evaluation period, many speakers rose to commend the spirit of mutual respect, cooperation, and solidarity that the conference had engendered. Speaking for the organizing committee—which includes representatives of most of the participating parties, together with the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Socialist Alternative, and Solidarity, as well as Black Agenda Report—Caldwell and Reiger announced that a continuations committee would take up the question of now to keep alive the network established by the conference. They also recognized the need for greater diversity, for greater involvement of African American and Latino activists, and for simply casting a wider net and drawing in others involved in such political campaigns.

    Panels and Workshops

    While this was a conference of the American independent left, there was also an international element. Søren Søndergaard of the Danish Red-Green Alliance offered international greetings, while Sascha Nemseff Villagrán, a member of the Spanish Podemos Party, and Alan Akrivos of Socialist Alternative and the Greek Syriza, discussed the challenges facing these two parties which stand at the moment at the center of the fight between capital and labor over austerity in Europe.

    Aware that we are building on political efforts of the past, there were various discussions of earlier movements and their experiences. Lance Selfa of the International Socialist Organization, and author of The Democrats: A Critical History, opened the conference by providing an overview of today’s two-party system. Prof. Mark Lause, a longtime Green Party activist, discussed the history of the Socialist Party and the Progressive Party in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. New York Green Party leader Gloria Mattera discussed the history of the Labor Party of the United States that was founded in 1996, and of the Green Party. Unfortunately sudden illness and hospitalization kept Kali Akuno of the Malcolm X Grass Roots Movement (MXGM) and the Chokwe Lumumba campaign from talking about electoral politics and Black liberation. There were also talks by Bruce Dixon on the Black Panther Party, by Jesus “Chuy” Negrete on the La Raza Unida Party, and by Guy Miller on the Socialist Worker Party campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s.

    Many of the participants brought years of experience in organizing independent political campaigns, so naturally the nuts-and-bolts of organizing were also on the agenda, as were the challenges of actually holding office. Several speakers from various parties talked about ballot access and the fight for inclusion in debate, while others discussed fundraising, field operations, and voter registration. Marsha Rummel of Progressive Dane (County) and Madison City Councilperson and Gayle McLaughlin of the Richmond City Council discussed the difficulties of holding office while trying to fight for progressive change and simultaneously build the movements.

    During the next year and a half, the question of how we relate to the Sanders campaign, which has the potential to reach and involve millions of progressives, will be challenging. Even those who opposed endorsing Sanders suggested that advocates of independent political action should maintain a friendly attitude to Sanders supporters. When the seemingly inevitable nomination of Hillary Clinton occurs, it may be possible to win over many of these people to an independent, left, third party perspective.

    The Future of the Left/Independent Politics Conference represented an important step forward not only for independent politics but also for cooperation on the left. The challenge now will be to find ways for the organizations and individuals involved in this conference to keep alive the network we have founded, while continuing our work in local movements and independent political campaigns.

    Dan La Botz is a member of Solidarity and a co-editor of New Politics, both of which endorsed The Future of Left/Independent Action in the United States Conference. He served on the conference organizing committee.

  • The Elections in Chicago – A View From Chuy’s Base Area

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    This is the fifth in a series of articles about the Chicago mayor and council elections. Scroll down to find others. – Eds. 

    Chicago hasn’t seen such electoral contention since the days of Dick and Jane – and Harold. Even in defeat, the Jesús “Chuy” Garcia challenge brought a familiar spirit back to the city by the lake. No one expected the immigrant from Durango to challenge the abrasive Rahm in a run off. Nor could we have have predicted the surprising synergy that would result from over a dozen insurgent ward campaigns and Chuy’s crusade. In the 12th ward on the Southwest side, we learned that politics is local.

    Following a spontaneous and wildly successful petition drive which netted 62,000 names in less than a month, passion in wards north, south and west threatened to ignite a city-wide blaze.

    To our chagrin, the wind in our city could not propel enough burning embers across the Dan Ryan and the Eisenhower. In the posh areas of the new economy, condo dwellers stamped out the sparks with their tony boots. They rushed to the polls as if panicking in a lakefront fire drill. Municipal employees and pensioners tried to nurture the flame out southwest and northwest. But suspicious property owners turned on their sprinklers in spite of distaste for mayor one percent. Constant TV attack ads paid for with Rahm’s millions were the showers that fell harder on some neighborhoods than others.

    Jesús “Chuy” Garcia awoke long dormant alliances. Young activists stepped forward and exchanged skills with veteran organizers.  Hundreds worked to create new mechanisms for electoral struggle. Aldermanic candidates emerged to give leadership to progressive ward organizations. Terms like “privatization”, “community policing”, “progressive taxation”, “participatory budgeting”, and “the neighborhoods” became familiar topics.

    When the votes were all counted, we were not the kind of movement that could topple Rahm Emanuel’s coterie of global power brokers. We are a populace fragmented by the cunning of the one percent. We rose up to fight back. We lost. And yet we gained a lot.

    At the risk of over simplification, the mayor’s tactic was to arouse suspicion of a Mexican American populist. To whites, the message, encoded in dog whistles, was that Chuy is a nice, but naïve, Mexican boy. His call for audits of city corruption was spun as an evasion of fiscal responsibility. At a more sinister level, the unspoken message called for unity to keep the burgeoning Latino community in its place – at the precarious margins of progress.  Fearful of dire warnings of municipal bankruptcy, many white voters sided with the one percent. Chuy’s biggest strength is his unapologetic compassion and his defense of the undocumented. In the minds of a beleaguered middle class, this roughly translated as “keep them in their place, scrambling at the bottom alongside the Blacks”.

    And to African Americans, many of whom have been pushed even beyond the margin, there was not a deep enough reservoir of solidarity. Competition for jobs and economic opportunity between Blacks and Latinos has created a divide. The rivalry, often downplayed in polite discussion, is nonetheless real. It’s the most recent iteration of the age-old scenario – not unlike the divisions set up at the turn of the previous century when southern sharecroppers were imported as replacement workers in the stockyards.

    More than anything else, the race hinged on race.

    Yet we gave them a scare, flexed some political muscle, won a handful of new aldermanic seats, learned a lot, increased our numbers, and projected an example for similar coalitions and struggles nationwide.

    The key was a grass roots approach. Some purists missed this important dynamic. They stood on the sidelines calling Chuy a corporate neo-liberal in disguise. They predicted that Chuy would enact austerity budgets.  They feared that his campaign was not radical enough to energize those who have lost hope. They jumped on weaknesses in outreach to African American communities as a deal breaker. The campaign’s call for hiring of 1000 police officers was cited as an indication of treachery.

    In the near southwest 12th ward, we didn’t even try to influence the citywide campaign over which we had little control. We felt that, if everything fell into place, we might be able to replicate the minority-led Harold Washington inter-regnum of thirty years ago. But, more realistically, we were fighting for power at the ward level and to defend our people. As things stand, neo-liberal schemes define the political landscape. Rahm Emanuel personifies this perfidy along the predominantly Latino Archer corridor.  Transfer of wealth proceeds apace.

    The elevation of Commissioner Garcia as our standard bearer at first seemed accidental – driven, as it was, by Karen Lewis’ brain tumor and County Board President Toni Preckwinkle’s refusal to accept the challenge.

    But it is not random chance that reform’s most credible and trustworthy candidate arose from the Latino political movement.  Commissioner Garcia has positioned himself as an honest independent. He has been steady in opposition to each successive re-incarnation of machine politics. He got his start as a pioneer for Chicano empowerment in the late seventies. The ward organization, which he helped form in Little Village, is the only opposition precinct apparatus which has stayed intact over this span. The man has displayed courage several times in his career – from his willingness to stand in for his assassinated compadre, Rudy Lozano, to his recent acceptance of the torch from Ms. Lewis, the outspoken leader of the teacher’s union.

    Chuy’s campaign meme was that Rahm takes from the neighborhoods and rewards the rich. The gleaming center versus decaying ghettos and barrios was a fundamental metaphor.  Specifics in regards to safety, education, revenue generation, and services were plentiful.  Problems with the mix of issues, the way they were broadcast, difficulties in creating a citywide campaign, and missed alliances do not alter the key point – Chuy was articulating a broad populist message.

    With regard to Chuy’s strongest base of support, critics should own up to their own blind spot. He unapologetically spoke for a large, multi-class base in a Latino community that is marginalized and becoming more so. It is almost too obvious to state that Latinos are overwhelmingly members of the working class. The dynamism of the Latino fabric in Chicago is hard to ignore.

    Correctly and in keeping with his longstanding approach, Chuy subsumed his Chicano politics within a call for class justice. Unions were his financial bedrock. Class was a unifying blanket. Good government was a broad appeal. But the speakers of Spanish, the people whose names end in “ez” and “ño”, the Latinos of Chicago, were his reliable electoral base.

    In our work in McKinley Park, we were struck by the Latino solidarity. Every precinct produced vote percentages coinciding almost exactly with the percent of Latino voters. Of course there are small remnants of the discredited Hispanic Democratic Organization (HDO). In my own precinct, there are four reliable Rahm votes in the household of machine-backed, State Senator, Tony Muñoz. And, of course, we know white and Chinese voters who went with Chuy. But the general pattern holds.

    Significantly the Latino community in Chicago supports a relatively vibrant commercial class. Their interest is strongly with the economic well-being and the secure residency status of all Spanish speakers. They along with Latino professionals – both public and private — were totally on board. It was never hard to solicit botanas and comidas for Garcia events. Rahm Emanuel photo ops with Latino elected officials, who called themselves the Rahmtinos, elicited derision in all Southwest side barrios.

    In the run off, Latino turnout, while elevated and enthusiastic, did not cascade to the mighty levels that we experienced with African Americans voting for Harold Washington or Barak Obama. Social and historical reasons prevail. A huge cohort of noncitizens intermingles with many who are not registered or feel culturally and linguistically alienated.

    Similarly, the hoped for re-unification of the Black-Brown alliance of the 1980s, was not spectacular. Emanuel’s money produced saturation attack ads, street level pay offs, misleading promises, and appeals to racial divisions by proxy publicists.  Some lingering loyalty to Rahm as an emissary from President Obama depressed the African American turnout significantly. Rahm pulled down majorities in the mid-50s to mid-60s in African American precincts.

    Long known as a united voting bloc, African Americans were divided and confused. Could the Garcia campaign have said the magic words and repaired a historic divide? Weaknesses in the commissioner’s campaign were a reflection of something broader. He could not create on-the-ground leadership and proof of good faith for such an alliance in a matter of weeks. Stubborn realities of segregation, alternating tactics of favoritism and neglect, gerrymandering, and economic competition have chilled the dialogue among the two communities.

    Chuy’s history is replete with efforts to reach out and champion the Black agenda. He was a swing vote for Harold Washington in council wars.  He has stood against discriminatory landlords and segregated high school boundaries. More so than any current elected official in Chicago, he has worked to create working multi-ethnic and multi-issue coalitions. When he was in the Illinois Senate, he was a member of the Black caucus. In contrast, the incumbent one percenter used guile to fashion relatively cheap and insignificant gestures as a lifeline to African Americans.

    In the 12th ward, Pete DeMay’s aldermanic campaign intermingled with Chuy’s mayoral crusade.  Like Chuy, Pete stepped forward when no one else was willing. He entered a one-on-one bout with machine regular, George Cardenas.

    Pete was an anomaly – a white guy with credibility as a United Autoworkers organizer, fluent in Spanish and with organizing experience in Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Tennessee. He was a hard-working and combative campaigner. He united with an existing core of activists in the McKinley Park neighborhood and attracted an expanded following.  His platform centered on education, end to regressive revenue measures, as well as more equitable public safety and ward services.

    It is here, at the deepest level of political activity, that the elections of 2015 are interesting and instructive.  In the precincts, we mixed the battle for local accountability with the broader, city-wide effort. We went toe to toe against a well-funded, entrenched machine. We stood upright in the middle of the ring. We were surprised to see a Latino cheering section for the güero against a man who has a surname evocative of Mexican radicalism.  So effective was the challenge, that Cardenas appealed to a home town referee – Rahm’s Chicago Board of Elections. Ruling on preposterous legal pretexts, the board declared a technical knockout. Pete was stricken from the ballot. We were down for the count before we could finish the first round.

    We’ll never know if Pete’s aggressive campaign could have ridden Chuy’s coat tails to victory against a Latino apologist for neo-liberalism. His spunk and organization touched a nerve. Even without his name on the ballot, we netted an unprecedented 20 to 25 percent write-in count in the municipal general election.

    The use of legal shenanigans to derail Pete’s challenge was as obvious as it was odious. The required number of nominating signatures was 473. We collected over 2100. Of these, 1400 were invalidated in challenges. The majority were stricken based on overly precise requirements that the signatures match exactly with their original applications. One hundred and fifty names were ruled “out of district” by a computer program that was obviously flawed. Each in-district address that was rejected was clearly within the boundaries.

    Then, with a remaining cushion of 300 above the needed level, Cardenas’ election lawyer submitted witnesses and affidavits supposedly proving a pattern of fraud. The alderman’s staff had gone around the ward during work hours to badger signers into recanting their names on Pete’s petitions. On the basis of 47 coerced affidavits and 3 suspect witnesses, the hearing examiner declared all sheets turned in by Pete himself to be inadmissible. Our signature total fell to 407 and we were off the ballot.

    Activists and constituents understood the cynical use of a municipal board to protect a favorite of Mayor Emanuel. The commissioner is a lawyer who has received over $200 million in municipal fees for billable hours in recent years. We made common cause with other campaigns who had suffered similarly egregious rulings. We rallied voters who saw these maneuvers as a sign of weakness by the incumbent and an affront to democracy. The commitment of the core tightened and the drive for write-in votes picked up steam.

    Chuy had surpassed all expectations and held Rahm to only 45%. With none of the five candidates receiving more than half, the mood at our 12th ward election night gathering was mixed. We had brought home landslide numbers in all our precincts for Chuy. We knew that write-in votes were accumulating in astonishing numbers but Pete’s defeat was seen as unavoidable. The obstacles were too great.

    Looking around the banquet room, the majority of Pete’s active campaigners where Latinos. They were union members. They were young people gaining their first taste of politics. They were from each section of a gerrymandered district. We all saw this cause as inseparable from the city wide crusade to “Take Back Chicago”.

    Precincts were the critical unit of geography. The goal was to staff each precinct with people who live there. Typically in our southwest campaigns, the stability of such teams has been uneven. Most often – especially when the turf is larger than a ward — volunteers show up for canvassing.  They are handed walk sheets based solely on the areas that have not yet been covered. In Pete’s campaign – because we had the added dynamism of working in concert with the Chuy mobilization – we had such a large base of volunteers that we were able to approximate the old style machine structure.

    Democratic ward armies of the past have been based on captain and patronage loyalists. These teams are in decline nowadays because of a shift from hiring clout to sub-contracting and privatizing. Our home grown teams were able to match up favorably with the diehards.  We held precinct meetings, put out specific flyers by neighborhood, and were able to allocate crews of watchers, passers, and runners at every polling place. Just as our ward was a battle ground in the mayoral, the precincts were key for Pete’s challenge.

    To grab and hold some power even at the ward level, this must be a continuing emphasis. We forged cooperation by local people of good will – from recreation and cultural leaders, to teachers and librarians, to retired and current union people, to the youth and the unemployed. Links to citywide issues and to the concerns of other neighborhoods are a priority. Of particular importance will be creating unity with African American communities.

    Here in the Latino southwest side, the progressives fought five aldermanic battles in addition to the overarching Garcia effort. Though they were not arrayed as an official slate, there was an informal alliance which benefited each local race and contributed to Chuy’s organizing. The various teams picked up tips from each other. Those which didn’t survive the first round joined in to help out those still in the field and to work side by side in the mayoral. Marching bands from two of our high schools led parades to early voting.

    The teams from various ward struggles and from the Chuy field offices now have an opportunity to forge tighter working unity.  We face stiff challenges as Rahm begins his next four year reign. We expect renewed attacks in ever changing forms.  That’s what it’s all about — learning from electoral efforts, gearing up for the next one, and directing a united front against inevitable attacks. 

  • Ayotzinapa Caravan43 Comes to New York

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    More than three hundred Mexican American community activists marched through New York City from Union Square to the United Nations on April 26, marking the seven-month anniversary of the killing of six and forced disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College in Guerrero, Mexico.

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    Led by parents and surviving students from Ayotzinapa, the marchers–mostly New Yorkers, but some from as far as San Diego, California–carried portraits of the slain students and poles bearing paper flowers that had been made by the missing students’ mothers. They marchers carried posters proclaiming in Spanish, “They were taken alive, and alive we want them back.”

    Parents have criticized the Mexican government for its failure to investigate the crime and for the complicity of governmental authorities and the police in the violence. Since September 26 when the killings and kidnappings occurred in Iguala, Guerrero, there have been scores of protests throughout Mexico, many of them large and militant, as well as demonstrations in South America, Europe, and the United States. Parents, surviving students, and community members have taken their cause to the European Union and the United Nations.

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    The New York march was part of Caravan43, a coalition of hundreds of Mexican American community organizations as well as other groups that brought some parents and surviving students to the United States in separate tours on the West Coast, in the Midwest, and on the East Coast. A group of parents of the Ayotzinapa victims are now planning on going on to South America and to Europe to continue to bring their cause before world public opinion. Image 

     

  • Why Marx Matters

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    It is extraordinary how relevant Marxist thought is becoming at a time of lingering financial crisis in the US and abroad. The financial debacle of 2008, and its continuous scourge, has at least meant that the words socialism and Marx are no longer distained but fashionable.  In fact, the conventional capitalist analysis of Marxism that sees it as nothing but totally irrelevant and not applicable to a modern free and liberal social order is now in question.

    To illustrate, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twentieth Century, has suddenly become a fevered topic, especially in America. Having for years dismissed the gaps between the have and have not, Americans, stung by the excesses of Wall Street, are suddenly talking about the rich and the desirability of income distribution.

    Often referred to as the modern successor to Karl Marx, Piketty is best described as a “soft Marx.” Piketty, responding to the gross income inequities, states that income disparities have risen sharply “since the late 70’s”. The most quoted statistic in his work is that “60% of US Income in the last 30 years after 1977 went to the top 1% of earned income.” This trend toward a greater wealth inequality is very likely to continue because returns from capital are apt to grow faster than the economy itself.

    Piketty maintains that this is the central contradiction of capitalism “when the entrepreneur inevitably becomes a rentier and more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labor…” In effect the core of his theses is that once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases, “the past devours the future.” This ominous anti-democratic trend is finally finding its way into public discourse and consciousness.

    Piketty, gives evidence of a long-term propensity, in capitalism, to increase inequality. Nevertheless, capitalism’s   leading to inequality is not a new concept. As Marx states “the accumulation of wealth at one pole and at the other pole is the immiseration of agony, toil, ignorance, slavery, and mental degradation.”

    Readers of Piketty’s book who wish it will provide a convincing analysis of why capitalism produces inequality on such a prodigious scale, will be disappointed, even more so those who hope to discover meaningful solutions to our rapacious economic system. Piketty is not however, interested in abolishing capitalism, but merely in reforming it; and moving it politically toward a more democratic form of socialism.

    Marxism, more than any other paradigm in the social sciences, is rich in approaches to studying social formations especially with respect to individual agents in history. It will be recalled how Marx revealed the basic contradictions inherent in the Capitalist system and how these dichotomies impact wages, labor, exploitation and the accelerating practice in capital of outsourcing American jobs.

    It is imperative that proponents of a more applied Marxism, deal with the fundamental contradictions inherent between individual freedom and “free-market” ideology. Consequently, it was the revolutionary implications of Hegel’s dialectic which gave expression to the idea that contradictions denote historical reality in its ever changing modes. Observed reality is changeful because it consists in its innermost the unstable coexistence and resolution (its synthesis) of incompatible forces.

    Marx convolutes Hegel’s earlier romantic idealism of man as a dynamic being by constructing a paradigm of man as a social and economic being dialectally related to nature and society. Premised here, in his dialectic, is the notion that man creates himself in a dialectical relation.  , (man) to a highly abstract condition called the “Absolute Spirit”; Hegel’s final synthesis.

    Marks’s formulation of the dialectic now becomes the development of man determined by external, material conditions. So, when undertaking to produce their means of subsistence, real men enter into definite relations that are indispensable, but dialectally independent of their will. It is at this point that definite classes  emerge  in corresponding to precise stages of a worker’s material powers of production The sum  total of the  relations of production constitute the  economic structure of society , or that society’s distinct Mode of Production. This concept used throughout Marx’s statements on historical change states that all of material life conditions social, political, and intellectual life process in general.

    Within this Marxist construct, relations of production are as they are because they promote economic productivity. The acknowledgement is that under capitalism significant strides were made in producing goods and services to the public. However, these relations change when new technologies arise to which individuals are poorly adaptive.

    Mode of production and its relations represent the seminal core of Marx’s general ideas about historical change. So his vision of the impending transformation of capitalism into socialism, like earlier epical transformations in economic form, from Feudal modes of exchange to Mercantilism, involved a process of “creative construction,” and its eventual supersession to Socialism.  It then emerges from its basis in capitalism’s development to become the new social ethos.

    So capitalism’s very success stimulates changes which facilitate the movement toward the imminence of socialism in new modes of production and its relations.  Thus, it interferes with the optimal functioning of the whole system, by unraveling the status quo that serves to preserve and maintain economic, political and social homeostasis.

    A Marxist model takes a holistic view of the whole capitalist system in promulgating the contention that capitalism is held together by the exercise of power; economic, political and social.  It then becomes necessary, in a good, but complex society, to act in delegitimizing this iron-clad consensus and   its claim to validity.

    History, in this sense, becomes a narrative of how social structures and arrangements adapt to economic and technological change.  Observers contend that Marx was not a fatalist about historical change, despite what people may think.  It is possible that even through politics and rational persuasion that we can crucially determine its direction. .  History changes when thoughts and desires give impetus to the development of productive forces–i.e. ideas.

    In our time, the Marxist project in evolving socialism, never materialized in its rigid deductive, organic structure. However, its contradictions and manifestations are clearly demonstrated in internal economic and social practices. And singularly indicated in today’s world. Imperialism itself is a product of capitalist development is most instrumental in the movement of capital, with no regard for boundaries, across the Globe.  In the Communist Manifesto Marx saw the modern structure of capitalism as the final phase of colonial expansion and domination. In Das Kapital again it is mentioned that imperialism was to be part of the pre-history of capitalist mode of production its primary purpose is economic exploitation Later, Lenin notes how Colonialism created imperialist rivalries.

    The classic formulation of capital penetration and monopolization of global markets centers on Lenin’s central theory in Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism written in 1916, in which he says that the era of industrial capital has ended and economic power has passed from industrialists to the bankers and financial investment groups. The final stage of capitalism is characterized by the end of the “free enterprise system” and the emergence of monopolistic control by cartels and syndicates.

    The most recent example of out- of- control imperial expansion is the  United States…President Obama’s push for fast-track congressional approval of the Transpacific Partnership free trade  accord exemplifies the total control major corporations have in, so-called, global free markets. It is extraordinary, how little opposition, let alone discussion, exists on the content and pernicious implications of this impending legislation. Given its wide impact (twelve nations) will become signatories to TPP as it promises to be the largest free-trade agreement in history. The assurances, made are it will boost economic growth and ensure that American exports will go c

    Of course, what is unspoken by these free trade propagandists is that previous trade accords, NAFTA and GATT (later the WTO) produced massive deficits, job losses and an increasing downward spiral of living standards. Devastating agricultural losses impacted many Third World nations. Mexico being the most harmed.

    This new so-called “Economic Consensus” model will not only reproduce previous economic and social calamities, but will extend special protection for those very businesses who ultimately outsource American jobs. Perhaps the most important chapter in the impending agreement deals with Intellectual Property Rights (IP) would create new rules which cover patents, trademarks and copyrights. IP would potentially produce unprecedented attacks on freedom of speech, individual rights to read, write and publish.

    History shows that, TPP makes unsustainable assurances: such as that it would prevent damage to the environment, protect workers from unsafe working conditions and provide consumer protection for food, drugs and other products.

    Instead of promoting economic prosperity for all, this accord will only serve to enrich wealthier nations and corporations, thus creating worsening poverty in The Third World .The end result was and will continue to be the exact opposite, when safeguards were either opposed or eliminated.

    TPP, like NAFT, will undermine democratic procedures by transferring decision-making from the public sphere, into the hands of a small group of unaccountable wealthy elites. TPP will become, in fact, an instrument that minimizes democracy. Embedded in these arguments is the old and abiding caveat that whoever controls capital and labor has deep seated-interests to protect.

    According to President Obama, unlike past inequities, nations like the United States that participate would have a level playing field for job creation, job protection and the eradication of child labor. There will be rules governing minimum wages and laws providing maximum hours of labor. Additionally, environmental standards would be raised.

    Arguably, in the United States, the prime architect of financial global dominance in an unfettered market system is Milton Friedman. His book Freedom and Democracy became de rigueur in American economic and political thought, with respect to “free markets” and individual freedom. His vaulted ideological paradigm consists of conflating democracy and free markets with a  demand  that government  withdraw from its regulatory commitments so capitalism can organize the economic activity of society without political interference or coercion. This theory that posits individual rationality will encourage individuals to get from the market those goods that best serve their individual self-interest.

    According to Friedman, true choice in the market will be guaranteed when nation-states begin to decentralize their welfare practices. Only then will freedom be advanced. However, it can be shown that coercion in capitalism occurs when individuals choose “not” to be in a market-driven society.

    Dissenters from Friedman’s Doctrine can show empirically, that capitalism is discordant with individual freedom.  Friedman’s definition of freedom is a negative freedom in the absence of the individual right to choose. Moreover, he fails to factor in his thesis the ethical and moral claims of equality and justice. His is an ideological system that punishes individuals who chose not to enter market relations, preventing them from opting out of the system consequently, imprisoning them.

    A new economic, political and social order is needed to challenge capitalist hegemony in both economic and political imperialism. The New “Economic Consensus” which savages labor and the working poor must be jettisoned. The “young” Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, demonstrates his militant humanism, clearly animated by the precept that all social arrangements must serve man’s development. The notion, that man is an end and never a means. Each individual carries in himself all of humanity. Mark begins to see economic problems in their anthropological aspect, and in doing so, he provides an invaluable heuristic tool for judging the moral and ethical content of various economic and political social formations.

    Whether one looks at Mark’s oeuvre or the writings of Luxenburg, Lenin, and Gramsci, one finds an emphasis on the fundamental capacity of the individual to alter the dominant economic and social order and consequently, allow individuals the ability to produce their social world and to self-actualize the “good society.”

    Marxism more than any other paradigm in the social sciences is rich in approaches to studying social formations, with respect to individual agency in overcoming capitalist structures which impede and minimize direct democratic action.

    Definite implications can be drawn from these humanistic postulates when it becomes necessary to focus less on Scientific Marxism and its “hard” deductive conclusions and more on Marx’s ethical and moral imperatives.

    Ethical humanists with a strong propensity for democracy such as Marcuse and De Man, who attacked the narrow and rigid interpretation of Marxism in the 1930’s, began agitating for a moralizing concept that would  eliminate Engel’s insistence on maintaining the uncompromising dictums of “scientific socialism.” In actuality, Marxist thought from start to finish is revolutionary humanist. And it continually serves as a theoretical foundation for the revolutionary struggle for an ethical and moralizing socialism.

    Although Marxist views on democracy remain inchoate, having more in common with classical political philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, he believed that democracy is the way to socialism and that the working classes could achieve power through democratic elections. His assertion is, that people can move beyond the cage of capitalist dogma, and become subjects in their historical evolution, rather than objects of corporate domination.

    At this time, current structural realities of the American electoral system militate against third party movements. Leftist preferences for these movements for a participatory Marxism can be encouraged by the general nature of dialectical thinking where the opposing class forces within capitalism are revealed as nothing more than a set of techniques designed to insure the rule of the powerful elite under the guise of “popular consent.” Therefore, it is a corrupt system of rule Capitalist interpretation of Marxism sees it as totally irrelevant and not applicable to a modern free liberal social order.

    However, many would argue that the Marxist critique of capitalism is still valid. Capitalism still contains massive contradictions, reflected in, seemingly, implacable economic inequalities. Consistent with its attacks labor and its insatiable imperialistic pursuit of profit, is clearly seen in corporate concentration and dominance on a global scale.

    Capitalism’s creative and destructive sides are intimately connected in Mark’s writings. He argues that the idea that industrial capitalism is a necessary precondition to socialism. And socialism cannot exist under poverty-stricken. Capital’s creative elements may be characterized as revolutionizing, universalizing and industrializing in its core.

    Capitalism, in its industrial form, required a “total” revolution in the transformation of all its pre-capitalist economic and social relations. It became destructive of all the traditional and complacent ways of life. The universalizing tendencies of capitalism, developed technology and production, led to the evolution of a world market-characterized by the spread of capital accumulation, development of science and technology, automation and man’s conquest of nature. So, capitalism’s growth, process of investment and capital accumulation stimulated demand for labor, higher wages, employment and consumption.

    Neo-liberal democratic capitalism, still present in the commanding roles of banking, large agricultural, combined with the private mass media, is still predominately bourgeois in political character. Paul Sweezy, in his writings, holds in maintaining that capitalism commands the strategic positions in our society with respect to money, social prestige, bureaucratic institutions and the armed forces of the state.  The channels of communication “are all controlled by capital and will continue to be used vigorously to maintain the position of capital, which all leads to the bankruptcy of reform.”

    Unfortunately, very little remedy exists in defeating capital’s tenacity in mindlessly reproducing itself. Attempts at balancing private ownership and social control are always weakened, as real power is shifted from labor and its associations to the owners of capital. In The Swedish System, as an example, these shifts, coupled with a determined opposition from nonsocialist parties and their allies are effective. Anti-socialist parties, combined with U.S. assistance have, in the case of Chile, for example, overthrew democratically elected President Allende when he adopted policies of nationalization of industries and collectivization. In Venezuela, a very troubled economy is, again, made worse with US involvement.  Nicaragua is one of the very few examples of a socialist democracy that willingly submitted itself to a popular referendum and lost. President Daniel Ortega graciously accepted his defeat.

    Overall, social democracy has mutated into social and political neo-liberalism. The distressing reality is that it has moved from a posture of transforming capitalism, to one of better managing it. The sorry fact remains that, in these systems, the practice of politics as part of a strategic vision of its transition toward a new economic and political order, beyond capitalism has gone missing from democratic socialism.

    The search for a non-authoritarian form of Socialism has been severely hampered by a crucial flaw in 20th century communist thought that power can be willfully exercised in whatever means necessary to bring about Communist regimes.

    However, convincing arguments can be made in formulating a non-authoritarian conception of   the “good” polity, contained in the writings of Marx himself that should serve in creating the right political construct for formulating a conception of a socialist order that, hopefully, will eventually find support for a more effective socialism.

    It can be stated that both liberal democracy and dialectical and scientific socialism have failed, and a new theory of socialism is needed.  If conditions are not such as to permit a party to grasp the reins of power in the old state, then it must work to create those conditions by encouraging the autonomous development of new social movements so people can develop their powers and capacities to the fullest, in a new state.

    * Andrew Raposa is Professor Emeritus, Westfield State University, Political Science, Westfield, Massachusetts.

  • After Single Payer Setback: Union Members Face Multiple Threats in Vermont

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    Liz Nikazmerad is a rarity in American labor: a local union president under the age of 30, displaying both youth and militancy. For the last two year years, she has led the 180-member Local 203 of the United Electrical Workers (UE), while working in the produce department of City Market in Burlington, Vermont. Thanks to their contract bargaining, full-time and part-time employees of this bustling community-owned food cooperative currently enjoy good medical benefits.

    But that wasn’t always the case in Nikazmerad’s past non-union jobs, nor is it any assurance that UE members won’t be forced to pay more for their health care in the future. To curb medical cost inflation and related cost-shifting to workers, the UE has long advocated that private insurance plans be replaced with publicly funded universal coverage.

    Four years ago, a newly elected Vermont governor, Peter Shumlin, took a promising first step in that direction at the state level. His Democrat-dominated legislature passed Act 48, which laid the groundwork for creating a comprehensive public insurance plan called Green Mountain Care (GMC).

    Not all activists deemed GMC to be truly “single-payer,” because of potential legal or political obstacles to the inclusion of Vermonters currently covered through Medicare, the Veterans’ Administration, and even some “self-insured” plans offered by local employers. However, Act 48’s blueprint for getting everyone else into a more rational, cost-effective healthcare system, financed by taxes, was generally hailed as a great breakthrough.

    Unfortunately, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) first required Vermont to operate a private insurance exchange until 2017, when a federal waiver permitting further experimentation might be granted. Despite this unhelpful delay, Shumlin was still re-assuring Vermonters, as recently as last fall, that a brighter health care future lay just a few years ahead.

    By January 8, when the governor began his third term, that promise had dimmed so much that Liz Nikazmerad and several hundred others weren’t there to applaud his inauguration in Montpelier. Instead, frustrated advocates of health care reform staged a sit-in at the state capitol, chanting and singing, unfurling banners and refused to leave in protest against the governor’s abrupt abandonment of universal health care six weeks after his re-election.

    “People had fought for this a long time,” Nikazmerad says. “It was a huge win and to have the rug yanked out like that was very upsetting. People were very emotional about it.”

    Escalating Labor Protests

    By the end of day, the UE leader and 28 others—now known as “The Statehouse 29”—faced multiple criminal charges, including resisting arrest, despite the peaceful nature of their capitol sit-in. The cases against 18 were later dropped; other participants settled by paying a fine or promising to do community service work. Their still controversial reproach to the governor has, since January, become the first in a series of angry labor sorties to Montpelier.

    During the current legislative session, the bitter recriminations over the governor’s health care retreat have morphed into broader controversies about workers rights, contract concessions, and what the Vermont Progressive Party (VPP) calls Shumlin’s “austerity budget.” On April 11, 500 state employees, school teachers and other union members rallied at the state house to protest threatened budget cuts and state worker lay-offs. Among the demonstration sponsors were the VPP, the Vermont State Employees Association (VSEA), and the Vermont Workers Center, which is also building for another big labor gathering on May Day in Montpelier.

    “I’m tired of being asked to give back more and more of my wages and benefits, “ state highway department plow driver Ed Olsen told the crowd. “The state always wants to balance the budget on the backs of hard-working Vermonters.”

    Alison Sylvester, a leader of the Vermont NEA, added her union’s voice to the “Fight Back” rally and hailed public teachers successful defense of their right to strike. After a brief public school work stoppage in South Burlington last fall, Governor Shumlin publicly endorsed the idea of banning such strikes, which have been legal in Vermont for fifty years. It took several months of frantic lobbying by hundreds of teachers to kill this idea, by a two-to-one margin, in a Vermont House vote in early April.

    About Face On Single Payer

    Shumlin’s most publicized betrayal of past labor allies occurred, with little advance notice, on December 17. That’s when he called a press conference and declared that “now is not the time to ask our legislature to take the step of passing a financing plan for Green Mountain Care.” The 58-year old governor, a multi-millionaire former business owner, had already postponed the day of reckoning on how to fund universal coverage for more than two years, until he was narrowly elected for the third time. (In last year’s gubernatorial race, Shumlin greatly outspent his Republican challenger, but won by only 2,500 votes; his 46 percent showing would not have been sufficient without conservative vote-splitting by a Libertarian candidate.)

    The 2015 session of the legislature was expected to take up the challenge of Act 48 financing in January. With the acquiescence of key legislators, Shumlin short-circuited that debate by issuing a highly unfavorable status report of his own, which seemed to validate past single-payer criticism by the Vermont GOP and conservative Democrats.

    According to Shumlin, the latest projected cost of universal coverage would double the state budget in its first year alone, while requiring onerous new payroll and income taxes.

    “In my judgment,” the governor stated, “the potential economic disruption and risks would be too great to small businesses, working families, and the state’s economy.” The VWC, which helped mobilize statewide support for passage of Act 48 four years ago, countered the governor’s claims by releasing its own plan for financing Green Mountain Care in a manner more equitable than the state’s current market-based system.

    One hundred economists endorsed the VWC approach, which relies on progressive taxation. The VWC also struck back with a clever “whiteboard” video, entitled “The Time is Now: Healthcare Financing for Vermont, Explained in Three Minutes.” But, of course, neither that quick tutorial on health care reform math or the VWC’s full report garnered the media attention—or had the same legislative clout—as Shumlin’s self-demolition of Green Mountain Care.

    From bad to worse in Montpelier

    In his state budget address in January, Shumlin had another surprise for his past labor friends. He presented the 5,500-member VSEA with a choice between re-opening its current contract and agreeing to give-backs or face hundreds of layoffs. These steps were necessary, he announced, to close a fiscal year 2016 budget deficit, projected to be $112 million, which soon become the main preoccupation of his administration and its legislative allies.

    Legislators representing the Vermont Progressive Party (VPP), the nation’s most successful third party formation, urged their Democratic colleagues to raise needed revenue by capping tax deductions for the wealthiest Vermonters and taxing capital gains on the same basis as earned income. (For more on the VPP, see here.)

    Neither the Democratic leadership nor the governor wanted to do that. So  his administration is instead seeking $8.8 million in state worker concessions, and the Democrat-controlled House has already OKed cuts in social programs like heating  assistance for low-income households.

    In 2008-9, VSEA members agreed to a 3% pay cut, followed by a freeze, under Shumlin’s Republican predecessor. When Shumlin ran for governor in 2010, he promised to be more labor friendly and find better ways to pay for state programs, including the projected single-payer-like plan. Now he is scapegoating unions that backed him and health care reform, complaining that state workers’ scheduled pay hike this year is unreasonably high. “There aren’t too many Vermonters who are getting a 5% increase this year, “ Shumlin told the press on April 11.

    The governor’s about-face on Green Mountain Care reflected more than revised estimates of its cost and feasibility. The troubled 2013 rollout of Vermont Health Connect, the state’s ACA-mandated private insurance exchange, adversely affected public perceptions of the longer-term goal of single payer. Among those most upset were lower-income people previously covered by state-subsidized plans who ended up paying more out-of-pocket when insured through the new exchange.

    “Over the last few years, the Shumlin administration hasn’t done anything to give Vermonters confidence that we could handle being innovators in health care,” says Chris Pearson, a Progressive state rep and vice-chair of the House Committee on Health Care. “There were just too many bad headlines about the nightmare of enrolling, computer problems and cost over-runs.”

    As a result, the popularity of Green Mountain Care is not what it was even a year ago. Pollsters working for the Vermont NEA found 55 percent  of those surveyed in favor of the concept then, while 42 percent were opposed. A slight majority remained in favor even if implementation required, as it would, a large tax increase to capture health care system revenue currently coming, in myriad forms, from individuals and employers, in both the private and public sector.

    After the recent flurry of negative publicity about Green Mountain Care—much of it generated by Shumlin’s own disputed cost estimates— 64-percent  of Vermonters polled in February said they supported the governor’s new position, only 20 percent were opposed, and 10 percent were unsure. Even a majority of Democrats polled said they favored his abandonment of single payer, for the time being.

    Inside the state legislature, friends of Act 48 still hope to emerge from this legislative session with an authorized study of the VWC’s financing plan, the governor’s contested findings and a publicly funded primary care plan that has been proposed by some single payer advocates as an incremental step toward Green Mountain Care.

    Organizing Challenges Ahead

    Sometime in May, the legislative wrangling in Montpelier over budget cuts, health care, and workers rights will be over for this year. But the challenges facing Vermont Progressives and labor-community organizers will remain daunting. Chief among them is sustaining a now seven-year-old campaign to make “healthcare a human right” after such a demoralizing setback. While continuing to assist private and public sector workers involved in strikes and contract fights, the Vermont Workers Center plans to do more grassroots organizing around the shortcomings of Vermont Health Connect coverage.

    Within the VPP, its statewide organizer Kelly Mangan has “gotten a lot of member feedback about running a candidate for governor next year.” This is something her third party refrained from doing in the last three election cycles, to avoid putting a Republican in office—who would have opposed Act 48 from the outset or shelved it sooner than Shumlin did.

    Now, the growing estrangement of labor voters from the Democrats could lead to Shumlin’s replacement by a Republican. One likely candidate for the job is Lieutenant Governor Phil Scott, the affable GOP incumbent who defeated Vermont Progressive Party (VPP) candidate Dean Corren last November by a 62 to 34% margin, with no Democrat on the ballot.

    Any backlash against Vermont Democrats next year, though, might be salved by further VPP legislative gains. Last fall, seven Progressive state reps and three senators were elected, creating the VPP’s largest delegation in Montpelier ever. In March, Progressives captured four seats on the Burlington City Council, where the VPP has jousted with a centrist Democrat mayor.

    But, next year, personal health problems may prevent state senator Anthony Pollina, the VPP’s most experienced statewide standard-bearer, from running for governor. (In 2008, he placed second in a three-way race). At the moment, Vermont’s most successful progressive politician, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, seems more intent on seeking executive office higher than any available in Montpelier, where, as governor, he could help get Vermont back on the single-payer road.

    In his not-yet-official campaigning for the White House, Sanders speaks regularly to out-of-state audiences about the need for a “political revolution.” Unfortunately, on his own home turf, the wrong kind of one may be brewing, fed by working class alienation from business-oriented Democrats.

    * Steve Early began writing about Vermont politics in 1968. He is a former New England organizer for the Communications Workers of America and the author, most recently, of Save Our Unions, from Monthly Review Press. That book reports on single payer campaigning and progressive third party building in Vermont. Early can be reached atLsupport@aol.com

  • Court-Sanctioned Corruption and Plutocracy in America

    ImageReview of: Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United, by Zephyr Teachout. Harvard University Press, 2014

    Sheldon Silver, the former long-serving speaker of the New York State Assembly and a statewide powerhouse lost his job, his law practice, his political life and possibly his freedom over corruption charges in January. His sins according to the federal prosecutor: using his position for personal gain by covertly receiving jumbo payments from a law firm that specialized in lobbying for cuts in New York City real-estate taxes. The firm was founded by his former Assembly counsel, and its client, in turn, was one of the state’s single-largest political donors. Politics as usual? Not really. Silver’s real crime was making it patently obvious he was engaging in a quid pro quo arrangement, which is how corruption in office is singularly judged today, thanks to a series of Supreme Court rulings dating back to 1974.

    Scattered news reports say the dirt on the speaker came via a string of legislators ratting Silver out in return for reduced corruption charges against themselves. Others say the law firm partners themselves rolled over on Silver.

    “Shelley,” as he was known before his fall from grace, is just the most recent example of a public figure to resign or be ousted over allegations  that he used his public office to help private friends and line his own pockets. If true, he fits the narrowest categories of corruption as understood by the contemporary U.S. Supreme Court: that a direct and palpable quid pro quo (literally: getting something for something) operates.

    For Zephyr Teachout, the Fordham University law professor and Democratic candidate for governor in 2014 who on a shoestring budget took some 35 percent of the vote away from the state’s neoliberal prince in the governor’s mansion, that definition is too constricted. In Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United, she demonstrates how that conceit short-circuits what the nation’s founding fathers had in mind when they talked about public office and democratic involvement in governing. It’s not just selling votes or a blatant one-hand-washes-the other or a favor to the spouse’s ne’er-do-well brother-in-law that are dangerous. It includes the unvoiced but no less operational understanding that big campaign contributions (it cost some $2 million on average to be reelected to the U.S. House of Representatives; chump change compared to the Senate, where the average is $10 million) in effect buy favorable attention for desired legislation as well as privileged access to elected officials through professional lobbyists, themselves often former public office holders.

    That fit where money buys compliance, even if unvoiced but simply understood, is something ordinary citizens can’t match. It means the demos — the people and their ability to self-govern or even believe they can self-govern is crippled and too easily gestates democracy into plutocracy. It’s not unlike media critic A.J. Liebling’s quip that, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”

    Corruption never had a clear and uniform legal definition, Teachout insists. With state courts ruling differently and the High Court itself imprecise if not contradictory, the vagueness ended when the right-wing-dominated U.S. Supreme Court, in three decisions beginning in 1975, recognized only blatant quid pro quo as a corrupt public practice. Paying a lobbyist $5 million dollars to get an incumbent to vote a corporation’s needs is okay if there’s no demonstrable reciprocity.

    Teachout’s solution is not primarily better investigatory agencies but better hash marks (she calls them “lighted lines”) that indicate what is criminal and act to control for abuses proactively. Examples include uniform federal laws again limiting campaign contributions so that electeds spend less time fundraising and more time with constituents and doing their jobs. More to the point, she favors a return to vigorous trust busting, the kind the GOP’s Teddy Roosevelt once favored, so that corporations have neither the right to invest huge sums in politics nor the capacity to buy politicians through what Jimmy Carter as president once called “legal bribery.”

    With Teachout as a constitutional lawyer and Fordham law professor, she is well suited to tell this story. It runs from the propriety of Louis XVI giving Benjamin Franklin, the then-retiring U.S. ambassador, a gift of a jewel-encrusted snuff box to the 2014 case with which the Supreme Court completed its trifecta of limped anti-corruption decisions that she argues “have seriously constrained public power to pass anticorruption statutes” and “definitively rejected the traditional concept of corruption.”

    The court’s unravelling of how corruption works in practice comes from three court cases, starting in 1976. In Buckley v. Valeo, the court struck down federal spending limits by campaigns as an abridgement of First Amendment rights, but sustained rules limiting campaign contributions from individual sources, strict discloser rules on where the money comes from and public funding of elections was halal. In 2010 an even more right-wing court majority found in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC) not only that corporations were now to be considered as people with free speech rights, but that in the court’s opinion ingratiation and privileged access to pols was no more than “donors trying to influence policy through campaign contributions, unless the donors were crass.” It said favoritism and influence were the inevitable part of responsive government, hence of politics.

    In 2014, in McCutcheon v. FEC, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that “Congress may target only a specific type of corruption — ‘quid pro quo’ corruption. … Spending large sums of money in connection with elections, but not in connection with an effort to control the exercise of an officeholder’s official duties, does not give rise to quid pro quo corruption.”

    Translation: when corporations use their wealth to squelch opposition, not only must corruption be the smoking gun, but a body with a bullet, in effect defining corruption in its most primitive form, as overt, conspicuous and quantifiable back-scratch deals

    After a thorough and almost agonizingly detailed grand tour of dozens of often conflicting federal and state court decisions differing on the precise legal meaning of “corruption,” Teachout ends up with a book that should become required reading in constitutional law classes. Caveat emptor: given the wealth of detail underscoring her critique, it’s no beach reading. Her style happily is fine; in places ripping. Academics should take note.

    There’s a lot more that is sensible and definitive in Teachout’s dissection of justice gone awry that it’s worth asking, “Why is this woman not the governor of New York?”

     

    Michael Hirsch is on the editorial board of New Politics. This article first appeared in The Indypendent, April 9, 2015, Issue #205.

  • Something's Happening in Latin America – A Review Essay

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    Steve Ellner, editor. Latin America’s Radical Left: Challenges and Complexities of Political Power in the Twenty-first Century. Rowman and Littlefield, 2014. Notes. Index. Paper: $29.95.

    George Ciccariello-Maher, We Created Chavez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution. Duke University Press, 2013. 352 pages. Notes. 17 photos and 1 map. Index.

    “There’s somethin’ happenin’ here, What it is ain’t exactly clear” – Stephen Stills 

    With the Middle East in flames, NATO trying to start World War III in Ukraine while the European Union’s economy stagnates, Africa torn by low-level wars, and China re-entering the world stage in an assertive manner, there’s one region of the world that is relatively quiet:  South America.  (Oops—Obama just blew that by declaring Venezuela a “national security threat” to the US.  But, never mind.)  Yet some of the most interesting and far-reaching changes in the world are taking place in this region.  And these two books are excellent entries into understanding current developments in the region.

    Latin America’s Radical Left, edited by Steve Ellner, is a collection of articles that examine developments especially in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela.  Is this socialism, is it anti-neo-liberalism, is it social democracy: what is it?  According to Roger Burbach, “Something new is afoot in Latin America.  US hegemony is weakening while a new order is struggling to be born.”  He argues it is the quest for a socialist utopia.

    This group of very experienced Latin Americanists has the tools and knowledge to provide unusually clear understandings of what is going on, and they convey it well.  It is different than efforts to establish socialism in the 20th Century in the Hemisphere, whether in Cuba, Chile or Nicaragua.  It is very complex, with no simple answers.  It varies considerably from the traditional Marxist view of the necessity for leadership by an industrial proletariat, and is very heterogeneous.  It means there are no simple answers.

    One of the things that gets discussed throughout the volume is a rejection of the differentiation among these countries between the “good left” and “bad left,” an argument put forth by conservative Mexican intellectual, Jorge Castañeda.  This is an effort to divide the governments of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela from those of Brazil and Chile.  First, as shown in numerous articles in this collection, his is much too simplistic to understand what is going on.  And, as the various authors show, it is wrong.

    This collection certainly challenges the idea that there is one common approach to creating social change in the region, or that there are simple answers.  These authors critically examine their respective countries, and seek to explain the complexities being addressed, while both giving credit to innovative initiatives and pointing out where the process of changes is limited or being short-changed.  As Steve Ellner writes in his Introduction, “The chapters in this book focus on the distinguishing features of, and challenges confronting, the twenty-first-century Latin American radical left in power.  The book’s basic thesis is that the obstacles and complexities arising from these experiences are quantitatively and qualitatively different from twentieth-century cases of leftist rule.”

    William I. Robinson, in his Forward, argues the importance of understanding what is currently taking place in Latin America:  “Anyone who wants to understand the prospects for, and complexities of, transformational projects in this age of global capitalism will have to look at the experiences of the twenty-first-century Latin America radical left.”  He talks about global revolt taking place across the planet, but recognizes that “The global revolt has yet to address the matter of political power.”  This weakness is critical:  “There can be no real emancipatory projects without addressing the matter of political power.”  The cases that are looked at in this volume—Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador primarily, but Nicaragua, El Salvador and Cuba as well—“while a heterodox group, are precisely those countries where the left exercises political power, or at least attempts to push forward a popular project from within the state.”  Robinson—a very experienced and long-term observer in Latin America himself—writes, “What becomes clear to me from the politics of the new radical left in Latin America is that vanguardism and horizontalism are twin pitfalls,” but then clarifies so as to argue against the dichotomous thinking, the either/or approach being the problem, and that we should approach in an “and/but” manner.  (Ellner, in a previous book, Rethinking Venezuelan Politics, has discussed the interactions both vertically—between the state and society—and horizontally between movements, and their interactions.)

    This volume is an excellent place to begin—and has the added advantage of authors knowing of these other cases taking place at the same, so there is a comparative consciousness that makes most of these contributions even more valuable than just the subject immediately at hand.

    The book begins with Roger Burbach’s “The Radical Left’s Turbulent Transitions,” Diana Raby’s “Brief Hypotheses on the State, Democracy, and Revolution in Latin America Today,” and Marcel Nelson’s “Institutional Conflict and the Bolivarian Revolution:  Venezuela’s Negotiation of the Free Trade Area of the Americas,” in efforts to give a “Theoretical, Historical, and International Background” to the entire volume. 

    Raby argues the importance of control of the state, specifically challenging autonomist theories currently in vogue:  “the state—a revolutionized state … is essential to any genuinely transformative (i.e., socialist) project.  Only a revolutionary state, with the strength derived from mass popular support, control of key economic sectors, and revolutionary armed forces, can reclaim the public sphere and combat the global tyranny of unrestrained mercantilization and protecting sphere of social economy, social justice, and popular power.”

    Nelson makes a contribution that is very important, and for much more than Latin America.  Building off of Nicos Polantzas’ theoretical work on the state, Nelson argues that the state is not a thing, such as something to be captured, but as a field of struggle, that includes many different relationships and forces.  This means that just because one wins the position of head of state, this does not mean that every other part of the state will automatically line up and follow the leader.  (This helps us understand differences between progressive mayors in the US with, for examples, the police.)  What it means that every part of the state apparatus must be won to the progressive side, and it cannot be assumed that each will change automatically just because someone has won an election.

    From there, the book shifts to discussing “The Twenty-First-Century Radical Left in Power in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador.”  This includes a chapter by Steve Ellner on “Social and Political Diversity and the Democratic Road to Change in Venezuela,” Federico Fuentes’ “‘Bad Left Government’ versus ‘Good Left Social Movements’?  Creative Tensions within Bolivia’s Process of Change,” and Marc Becker’s “Rafael Correa and Social Movements in Ecuador.”  Besides being excellent discussions of each of these three countries and their current political struggles, one of the most important things presented in these sections is the necessity for elected progressive leaders to not forsake or turn on the left forces that got their into power—should the leaders be attacked by the right, without the left forces, who will defend them?  In other words, while it is ridiculous to believe all will be sweetness and light between progressive elected officials and progressive social forces once “the left” gets into power, this is an important warning to progressive officials of the need to always remember who are their strategic allies.

    The following section is “Influences of the Twenty-First-Century Radical Left in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Cuba.”  This includes an article by Héctor Perla, Jr., and Héctor M. Cruz-Feliciano titled “The Twenty-First-Century Road to Socialism in El Salvador and Nicaragua:  Making Sense of Apparent Paradoxes.”  This is followed by a very interesting chapter on “Cuba’s New Socialism:  Different Visions Shaping Current Changes” by Camila Piñeiro Harnecker.” The latter is particularly interesting in light of changes currently taking place in Cuba, and Piñeiro Harnecker knowledgeably discusses different aspects of the range of thinking going on among the Cuban people.

    The final section is on “Economy, Society and Media.”  Thomas Purcell writes on “The Political Economy of Social Production Companies in Venezuela,” which discusses efforts to make the Venezuelan economy less dependent on oil.  George Ciccariello-Maher writes on “Constituent Moments, Constitutional Processes:  Social Movements and the New Latin American Left,” and seeks “to avoid fetishizing either constituent power from below or the constituted power of the state, focusing instead on the dynamic interplay between the two.”  And this is followed by Kevin Young’s article “The Good, the Bad, and the Benevolent Interventionist:  US Press and Intellectual Distortions of the Latin American Left.”

    This is followed by editor Steve Ellner’s “Concluding Observations:  The Twenty-First-Century Radical Left and the Latin American Road to Change.”   In this, Ellner summarizes the changes going on—particularly in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela—noting they are influenced by “identification with Latin American tradition and nationalism, even while the thinking of its leaders is also rooted in Marxism.”

    Having this broader context provided by the Latin America’s Radical Left collection allows us to delve into one case in detail, that of Venezuela.  In We Created Chávez:  A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution, George Ciccariello-Maher gets behind the rhetoric—of both the left and the right—to try to understand the developments in Venezuela. 

    So much of recent Venezuelan history has been viewed through the lens of the late president, Hugo Chávez.  Chávez, a progressive, former military leader was democratically elected into the presidency in 1998, taking office the next year.  But the coup attempt in April 2002—where Chávez was removed from office and detained by right wing putschists until he was freed through a revolt of the people of Caracas and military forces that remained loyal—and an amazing film by an Irish film company of the coup, “The Revolution Will Not be Televised,” brought Chávez to world attention. 

    The film company was in Venezuela to try to understand Chávez and what was happening in the country, and found itself inside the National Palace “Miraflores” during the coup and, despite not knowing whether they would even survive, kept the cameras rolling.  Showing Chavez as a very charismatic and popular president, strongly supported by the poor and traditionally disenfranchised of the country before the coup, and then showing the coup from the inside Miraflores—as well as presenting the arrogance of the coup leaders during their brief “moment in the sun”—and then Chávez’ return to Miraflores, the film introduced this revolutionary to the world.

    And Chávez kept progressing, moving from a limited to more a radical vision of what could be done in Venezuela—based on radical ideas of popular, grassroots democracy—eventually putting forth the concept of “socialism for the 21st century” in the mid-2000s.  And his willingness to challenge the US Empire brought him many followers from outside and well as inside the country.

    Ciccariello-Maher seeks to understand what is behind Chávez:  as he explained to one interlocutor, who asked why he was there, “We had come to understand the revolutionary collectives that constitute Venezuelan Hugo Chávez’s most radical support base, to grasp their political vision and their often tense relationship with the processes of political transformation known as the Bolivarian Revolution.”

    To understand this book, then, we have to recognize it is not about Chávez. 

    Then who is the book about?  The book is about “the people,” but that is not just anyone.  Building off of the writings of Argentine-Mexican philosopher of liberation, Enrique Dussel, “the Latin American pueblo is instead a category of both rupture and struggle, a moment of combat in which those oppressed within the prevailing social order and those excluded from it intervene to transform the system, in which a victimized part of the community speaks for and attempts to radically change the whole” (emphasis in original).  In other words, whether included within the system or excluded from it, the author focuses on those who have been oppressed and who have stood up to transform the system:  it honors not those oppressed, but the oppressed who have chosen to fight.

    To understand this, however, Ciccariello-Maher presents a very sophisticated understanding of the Venezuelan “process”:  “the goal here is to avoid the twin dangers that plague contemporary discussions of revolutionary change in Latin America in particular:  the tendency to fetishize the state, official power, and its institutions, and the opposing tendency to fetishize antipower.” 

    Ciccariello-Maher tells the story—actually, it’s many stories—of people’s struggles against oppression, going back to 1958 and the end of the last dictatorship in Venezuela.  He talks about the guerrilla struggle, when people took to the hills and alleys of the cities to fight.  While that failed, people learned from those experiences, and then went back into the barrios and reconnected with the people therein, although some continued military operations.  They survived tremendous police repression over the years—repression is just limited to dictatorships.  He talks of a barrio, 23 de Enero (January 23), on the west side of Caracas, and a center of organizing.

    The author talks about the economic devaluation of the bolivar in 1983.  The government turned to the International Monetary Fund for relief:  “As the macroeconomic crisis deepened, the Venezuelan government would respond in the increasingly strict neoliberal terms of the International Monetary Fund, and with both its capacity and willingness to provide for the population in free fall, the country became a veritable tinderbox of resistance.”  And the government responded to this resistance by widespread repression as compared to the targeted repression it had used against the guerrillas.  Ultimately, however, “this broad offensive against the masses pushed barrio residents toward the new organizational forms oriented around self-government, the elimination of the drug trade, and armed self-defense … which remains central to the Bolivarian Revolution.”

    This gets one to the heart of the Venezuelan revolutionary process as it has developed, the “proceso.”  The fact is that the revolutionaries, and probably most activists, do not trust the state, yet they support Chávez.  How can that be explained? There is a difference, too, between the present and the future:  the distinction between Chávez, as head of state, and the proceso. In the first case, Chávez has won their personal support, although that’s not necessarily true for those around him.  However, that trust is not a blank check:  the proceso is more important than the individual.  So, in other words, when Chávez acts progressively, they support him; when he acts in reactionary manner, they challenge him and the state apparatus in general:  the second position “maintains the possibility of moving decisively beyond the president if conditions warrant it.”

    Yet in trying to understand the development of the proceso, Ciccariello-Maher disorients the “traditional” story of Chávez and his rise to power: instead of focusing on Chávez’ attempted coup attempt in 1992 and then jumping forward to his election to the presidency in 1998, this account focuses first on the “Caracazo,” an urban uprising centered in Caracas that exploded in February 1989. This was the time, “one of the rare and explosive instance in which the force of the people appears as the decisive actor,” and he argues that 1992 and 1998 grew out of events in 1989.  Further, he sees the next crucial moment when the masses of people of Caracas streamed out of their shacks to converge on Miraflores to demand Chávez’ return, overturning the coup attempt, on April 13, 2002.

    And because of the support of the people—as I quickly came to understand during a short trip to Venezuela in 2006 that Chávez didn’t have the organization to get these people out to support the president—Chávez not only became more radical himself personally and escalated the proceso, but the proceso was able to withstand the economic sabotage by the elite in late 2002-early 2003 that threatened to undermine all that had been done.  And that the proceso has continued to advance to this date.

    It is this recognition—that it is el pueblo that is the heart of the revolutionary process, not an elected leader, not even as one as charismatic as Hugo Chavez—that makes Ciccariello-Maher’s account so important.  And this is a tremendously inspiring account, which became even more important upon the death of Chávez in March 2013:  by understanding the role of the mobilized people in the proceso, one would know that the proceso was not dependent on Chávez and would continue, although obviously whoever succeed Chávez would propel or hinder the process.

    There is a limitation that must be commented upon:  despite the excellent account developed by the author, and it seems to be fairly applicable throughout many of the barrios surrounding Caracas, there is simply no way to tell how widespread this phenomena is across the country.  That might be considered “small potatoes” by some, but Venezuela is more than just Caracas, the capital, although it is the largest urban concentration.  Are these projects, so well explicated by Ciccariello-Maher, common throughout the rest of the country, and especially in other major cities? 

    It is important to raise this issue, as the opposition in Venezuela has opposed and challenged “Chavismo,” the ideology officially established by Hugo Chávez, sometimes more effectively and sometimes less, but still fairly consistently.  This opposition is led by members of the elites, but it extends at least somewhat into the higher echelons of the military, and it certainly includes students who have stayed within the traditional, private higher educational system—and as the government has not been able to overcome crime, or the subversion of commercial interests who often limited goods on shelves in the stores, it has won some support among working people and the poor.  Additionally, we know the US Government has long acted to support the opposition, giving them much more power and potential than could be won on their own.

    One of the things learned by Chávez and his allies is the need to use the state apparatus to devolve power downward into the masses.  The project of communal councils and support for radical trade unionism—training “ordinary” people to make decisions and take power over their collective lives—is an extension of the proceso.  Based on what’s been done previously, it is what gives me hope that the opposition can be kept to the margins, and the Eagle from landing in Venezuela.

    In short, two excellent volumes to help us understand what is going on in Latin America, with most attention being paid to South America.  I think they are essential resources, and I think they provide much food for thought for those of us who are politically active—not only about developments “there,” but also “here.”

    *Kim Scipes, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Purdue University North Central in Westville, IN, and a long-time political activist.  He is also is the author of KMU: Building Genuine Trade Unionism in the Philippines, 1980-1994, and AFL-CIO’s Secret War against Developing Country Workers:  Solidarity or Sabotage? He is currently circulating a proposal to publishers for a book tentatively titled Class Struggle, White Supremacy and Chicago Proletarians in Steel and Meatpacking, 1933-1955. He can be reached through his web site:  http://faculty.pnc.edu/kscipes.

     

  • Mujica and the Chicago Socialist Campaign: A Small Battle in a Larger War

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    The usual practice for lefties defeated in electoral politics is to claim victory, victory in the sense of having spread the word, victory in the sense of building an organization, victory in the sense of whatever plausible argument comes to hand. In the case of Jorge Mujica's campaign for 25th Ward Alderman, we can safely assert it was a successful proof of concept: The "socialist" label, in some neighborhoods, is not a handicap even if it is not an asset. Begging your pardon but I've been saying as much for years. Through our participation, Chicago DSA did earn a reputation as an organization that delivers on its commitments. But the campaign intended to establish a socialist presence in Chicago government and that requires victory.

    Chicago's 25th Ward is a gerrymandered district that was drawn for the benefit of the incumbent, Danny Solis. Solis is an erstwhile community organizer of the Alinsky school gone over to the dark side. The ward is located just southwest of Chicago's downtown, forming an upside down "U" wrapped around the University of Illinois at Chicago campus. The west wing includes parts of the largely Mexican Pilsen neighborhood. The apogee includes parts of Chicago's well-to-do, professional near west side then swoops down through the Union Station rail yards to include much of the south side's Chinatown. The previous ward boundaries made a district heavily Latino. The current ward has a bare majority of Latinos, Mexican mostly, with some Puerto Ricans and other Latino nationalities.

    The ward ended up with three other candidates in addition to Solis and Mujica. Roberto Montano is a businessman and, in the past, Solis' Chief of Staff. It's hard to say why he was running though it may have had something to do with Mayoral candidate Willie Wilson. Byron Sigcho was the other credible left of center candidate. An immigrant from Ecuador, a doctoral candidate in Education at UIC and very much a student politician, he had done some significant research into charter schools. Sigcho had the endorsement of Reclaim Chicago, the electoral coalition backed by National Nurses United. And finally there was Ed Hershey, a member of a small obscure Trotskyist sect. Was that redundant? In any case, Hershey seemed to feel the campaign needed a real socialist.

    Mujica's campaign grew out of the Chicago Socialist Campaign (CSC). The CSC was organized in response to Kshama Sawant's victory as a socialist in Seattle. Initially there was interest from several possible candidates for alderman. Ultimately, three ran for office. One won. Only Jorge Mujica decided to run as a socialist.

    Meetings of the CSC sometimes were as large as a hundred people, many of whom were not members of any socialist organization. Unfortunately this did not translate into election workers. Those who did volunteer were often totally without experience in election campaigns and most did not live in the district. It's easy to be snide about this, and people have commented about leftists who like to sit and complain about Democrats. But Mujica pointed out that the CSC drew people from across the city. If he had been running for a citywide office, as Sawant did in Seattle, there would have been opportunities to be involved near at hand for everyone. Instead, there were often important contests closer to home.

    And it's not as if Mujica himself was able to put in the time a campaign requires. He's not a rich man and had to work most of the campaign season. Otherwise, Mujica himself is reasonably credible as a candidate for city council. He was one of the organizers of Chicago's huge May Day immigrant rights marches several years ago, and that's just the most visible of the organizing he's done. He's been involved in Mexican electoral politics, and the aldermanic campaign was his second campaign in the U.S. Mujica is a personable fellow with a lively personality, articulate in both Spanish and English, and easy to look at even if he is rather more shaggy than the bourgeois image of an official. Well this is a socialist campaign, yes?

    Money was a problem for the campaign. It did have a paid campaign manager. The campaign did manage two bulk mail drops targeted at voters in the Pilsen neighborhood. And the campaign did have a good social media campaign directed at that same constituency. AFSCME Council 31 endorsed Mujica, as did a council of Chicago area CWA locals, bringing some mainstream credibility and money to the campaign. Chicago DSA raised over $1600 in early money and not all of it from DSA members.

    The mayoral contest also was a problem for the campaign. The Mujica campaign made no endorsement for Mayor. But many election activists in the ward were committed to working for Jesus Garcia's campaign for Mayor. An endorsement of Garcia by Mujica might have attracted some of those campaign workers but then again maybe not because it was clear that Garcia's campaign was not likely to endorse Mujica. The 25th Ward is in the backyard of Bob Fioretti, another a liberal candidate for Mayor, and neutrality left open the possibility of some support from his people. Ultimately though, the CSC, with its commitment to independent electoral politics, mostly felt Garcia was too much of a "Democrat."A great deal has been said about voter turnout. It was considerably less than the municipal election four years ago, but it was actually not much different than the municipal elections eight and twelve years ago. The 25th Ward was near the median for this election. The Board of Election did have its thumb on the scale, though. It set up the Ward's early voting site in Chinatown. Solis escaped a run-off election by only several dozen votes, prompting the Sigcho campaign to file for a recount of several precincts. A few of the items listed in the complaint may have plausibly been voter fraud but most of it sounded like sloppy inattention to procedure. Whatever the case, it made no difference. The official results put Solis at 3811 (51.07%), Sigcho at 1383 (18.53%), Mujica at 907 (12.15%), Montano at 748 (10.02%), and Hershey at 614 (8.23%).

    Of the groups participating in the CSC, the International Socialist Organization, Solidarity, and Chicago DSA came through. DSA raised money, provided opposition research, did issues research, provided mailing services, and had a dedicated handful of members who gathered petition signatures, canvassed voters, blitzed precincts, leafleted L stations, and did election day work. I think we could have done better, particularly with recruiting more people to work, but it's also true that Chicago DSA has no members in the 25th Ward. Will this coalition effort be duplicated in future elections? It would be a good thing if it were, but I'm inclined to be skeptical. Chicago DSA is open to the possibility. We'll see.

    *This article was originally published in New Ground, a publication of the Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Thanks to New Ground and to editor Bob Roman for permission to republish.

     

  • Liam O’Flaherty: Leader of a Four Day Revolt

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    Liam O’Flaherty is regarded as one of Ireland’s finest writers of the twentieth century, but before he rose to literary prominence, O’Flaherty led a little known and short lived occupation of the Rotunda Concert Hall in Dublin city just days after the formation of the Irish Free state in 1922.

    Born off the coast of Galway on the Aran Island of Inis Mor in 1896, O’Flaherty served with the Irish Guards during World War I. After experiencing severe shellshock in Flanders he was discharged with a disability pension and led a somewhat nomadic life for the next few years.

    O’Flaherty’s travels took him around the Mediterranean, South America, Canada and North America. O’Flaherty had long held left wing values but, during these travelling years his left wing ideals swelled and he brought such political convictions back home to Ireland with him in Christmas 1921. He became involved in left wing politics in Dublin city and became a fixture on O’Connell street where from a small news stand he gave out political pamphlets and sold The Workers Republic newspaper. It wasn’t long before he gave up that role in order to lead a small working class revolt just a few yards up the street in the Rotunda hall.

    On Monday January 16, 1922, the Provisional Government of the Irish Free State was announced and two days later approximately 200 unemployed men, made up mostly of unemployed dock workers, marched into the Rotunda Concert Hall and Pillar room which is now the Gate Theatre and occupied it. O’Flaherty was at the head of this band as the chairman of the Council of Unemployed in Dublin and ordered garrisons to be divided into companies and red flags to be hung out the windows.

    This act of defiance by O’Flaherty and his army of unemployed happened during a time when Ireland was adjusting to the outcome of the War of Independence. It was a time when society across Ireland was slowly falling into a state of anarchy. Workers strikes no longer had any impact because the social atmosphere in Ireland at the time demanded something more and this is why ordinary strikes transformed into workers flying the red flag and taking over their place of employment through occupations. O’Flaherty admired workers like those in Limerick and Cork who took over workplaces to set up their own soviets and he sought something similar with his occupation of the Rotunda concert hall.

    The Rotunda was a significant point to make a social stand due to its historical link with the era of revolution. It was at the Rotunda where Sinn Fein was founded in 1905 and it was also the location of the formation of the Irish Volunteers in 1913 who would then transform into the Irish Republican Army, and O’Flaherty saw it as a place to establish what he envisioned to be a workers republic.

    O’Flaherty spoke to journalists outside, informing them that if he and his men were apprehended, that they would not recognise a court that was run by a government that does not recognise the unemployed.

    Unemployment in the aftermath of World War I was rife in towns and cities such as Dublin, and for the majority of soldiers returning home from the front, the prospect of employment seemed far off as Irish society was experiencing change amidst political upheaval.

    The occupation of the Rotunda by the unemployed men was not a half hearted affair. A maintenance fund was set up to ensure the occupation could last, while food provisions were organised from Boland’s bakery on Capel Street. Morale was also kept high through lectures, talks and concerts while daily marches and drills kept a military style of discipline within the garrison.

    While a workers republic was on the minds of those inside the Rotunda, outside on the street the mood for left wing politics was not as clean cut.

     A nightly mob would gather outside the Rotunda where attempts were made to remove the red flags flying from the widows. To disperse the angry mob outside, shots were fired over their heads from the occupiers inside the concert hall.

    At one stage the mob tried to storm the Rotunda but O’Flaherty’s unemployed protesters managed to push them back out.

    The occupation which began that Wednesday came to an end four days later at midnight Saturday when O’Flaherty and his band of men left without any incident.

    The growing resentment from those gathered on the street outside the Rotunda pushed the authorities into giving O’Flaherty an ultimatum, either he and his men leave immediately or they would forcefully remove them.

    To avoid any bloodshed O’Flaherty agreed to end the occupation of the Rotunda. With his revolver in his pocket he managed to slip away from the authorities and fled to Cork where he hid out.

    Some six months after O’Flaherty’s occupation of the Rotunda Hall, the mood across the land was drastically changing and social disorder spilled over into all out civil war when pro-treaty forces and IRA anti-treaty forces clashed. This of course enticed O’Flaherty out of hiding in Cork and he travelled back to Dublin to fight alongside the anti-treaty side.

    O’Flaherty wasn’t long in Dublin before he took flight again. He took a ship to Liverpool where his political activism ended and his literary career began.

    In 1925 The Informer was published and 10 years later adapted for the big screen by John Ford, while other notable works O’Flaherty wrote shortly after leaving Ireland include Famine in 1937 and a number of short stories such as The Sniper.

    The four day Rotunda occupation led by Liam O’Flaherty and some 200 unemployed men has now been submerged into the bigger historical picture of that time, while O’Flaherty’s political involvement during that turbulent era has been trumped by his literary success.

    Lily Murphy is a freelance writer from Cork city, Ireland. Email: lilymurphycork@gmail.com

  • Should Chicago Unions Have Backed a Socialist Instead of Chuy García?

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    The “See, we told you so!” reaction by socialists to Rahm Emmanuel's victory over Jesús "Chuy" García in the recent mayoral runoff was as predictable as it was hypocritical. Scott Jay's article in New Politics is but one example of this kind of reaction which combines self-vindication and bravado with an utter lack of awareness of Chicago's political terrain. This know-it-all know-nothingism becomes painfully obvious when Jay writes:

    "[Socialist Tim] Meegan would have lost a substantial number of votes if he ran against Garcia, but if the goal was to create a political organizing space that can fight lesser-evilism, then it would have been more than worth it. However, it would have been extremely unpopular and would have been met with widespread hostility by most of the labor movement."

    So according to Jay, Meegan should not only have refused to endorse García, he should have run against him.

    This seems like a reasonable stand for a socialist to take, until you recognize the following:

    ·         Meegan was already running for alderman in the 33rd ward, making it impossible to run for two positions at once.

    ·         Meegan lost the three-way race in his ward by a hefty margin, 2,779 votes to the incumbent Deborah Mell's 4,103. (Mell narrowly escaped being forced into a runoff by dozens of votes).

    ·         Meegan would have been easily eliminated in the primary just as Emmanuel's and García's opponents were.

    ·         It takes 12,500 petition signatures to get a candidate on the ballot for mayor in the first place. In practice, this means gathering three times that figure (over 36,000) to guarantee that a sufficient number of signatures survive legal challenges by rival campaigns. So even if Chicago's teachers' union leader Karen Lewis decided Scott Jay was absolutely right and ordered her entire membership to sign Meegan petitions, they'd be about 10,000 signatures short since the union has 26,000 members.

    As if if the above weren't bad enough, there's the fact that all of the openly socialist candidates were defeated in every ward they ran in:

    ·         Jorge Mujica lost in the 25th ward after the “about a hundred Chicago socialists from various organizations, inspired by the election victory of Kshama Sawant in Seattle, came together to organize the Chicago Socialist Campaign” went MIA by the time it came time to actually do the hard work of campaigning for votes.

    ·         Eco-socialist Olga Bautista was crushed in the primary, receiving only 208 votes or 2.19% in ward 10 (although the ultimate victor there was Chicago Teachers Union executive board member Susan Garza).

    New Politics, Scott Jay, and everyone in the socialist movement ought to take a good long hard look in the mirror and ask what we socialists are doing wrong (and what we can do better) to serve the class we think we are worthy of leading before pointing fingers at everyone else for the failure of the American workers' movement to live up to socialist expectations and conform to socialist principles. Writing that everything would be peachy keen 'if only' we were in charge of the labor movement is the political equivalent of playing fantasy football — entertaining for sure, but inherently irrelevant to real-world developments and struggles 

     *James Cunningham is a socialist blogger.

  • Eduardo Galeano – ¡Presente!

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    Eduardo Galeano, the world-renowned leftist Uruguayan journalist and writer made famous with the publication in 1971 of his book The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, died today at the age of 74 in Montevideo, Uruguay, where he lived. Long admired as a journalist, with his three-volume Memory of Fire in 1982, Galeano also became known as a writer of non-fiction prose who might be compared to writers of fiction such as Gabriel García Márquez, author of the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude or Isabel Allende who wrote House of the Spirits. Like their novels, his trilogy captures the real spirit of Latin America’s magical history.

    Born Eduardo Germán María Hughes Galeano in Montevideo on September 3, 1940, Galeano began his career as a journalist in the early 1960s working as a correspondent for Sol and then as an editor for Marcha, which published such writers as Mario Vargas Llosa and Mario Benedetti. When a rightwing military coup took power in Uruguay in 1973, Galeano was jailed and subsequently went into exile, first in Argentina, where he edited Crisis, and then in Spain where he wrote his trilogy Memory of Fire (Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind). Memory of Fire mixed history and journalism in vignettes and biographical sketches written in a creative prose style that reminded American readers of John Dos Passos’ 1930s classic U.SA. triology (The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money).

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    Open Veins of Latin America was a detailed, systematic, and sustained attack on European and U.S. imperialism in Latin America over five centuries, showing how first Spanish conquistadores, then English bankers and merchants, and finally U.S. corporations had dominated Latin America’s economy and pillaged the country’s natural resources while exploiting its enforced cheap labor. The book became a classic of the Latin American left and of the left around the world. In a famous gesture, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez gave a copy of Open Veins to U.S. President Barack Obama at the opening of the Fifth Summit of the Americas held in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tabago, in April of 2009.

    In 1985 Galeano returned from exile to Uruguay, establishing himself in the capital, Montevideo.

    Galeano created a stir in March of last year with his comment made at a book fair in Brazil where he was being honored on the occasion of the forty-third anniversary of the publication of Open Veins. Asked what he thought of his book today, he said, “I wouldn’t be capable of reading this book again; I’d keel over. For me, this prose of the traditional left is extremely leaden, and my physique can’t tolerate it.” Conservatives pounced on his remark as a repudiation of his leftist politics, when in reality it was the judgement of a mature author looking back at a book written in his youth in an altogether different period.

    Galeano remained a leftist until his death. He supported the campaign of Tabaré Vázquez and the leftist Broad Front in the 2004 election and in 2005 he became a member of the board of TeleSur, the pan-American television network based in Caracas, Venezuela. For fifty years, Galeano’s voice spoke truth to power and inspired the oppressed.

  • Blame the Black Political Class For Re-Electing Obama's Mayor Rahm Emanuel in Chicago

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    NOTE:  The original version of this article quoted a claim that no voter registration drive was conducted. Since we did not take the time to fact-check this claim before publication, the article has been altered to omit the claim. – Bruce A. Dixon

    The results are in, and the truth hurts. Rahm Emanuel will sit in the mayor's office on the fifth floor of Chicago's City Hall four more years. Despite fudging police stats to make murders disappear, despite stonewalling on police torture and atrocities, despite deliberately shortening red light camera intervals to raise revenue for his buddies, despite closing and privatizing more than 50 public schools, almost exclusively in black and brown neighborhoods, than anywhere in the country, and despite his facing a solid progressive Democrat challenger, Rahm Emanuel carried every single ward in black Chicago, not by big margins, but by enough.

    It's true that Chuy Garcia was outspent at least six to one in the April runoff and twelve to one in the February election. It's true that Emanuel used that cash to buy an unanswerable deluge of radio and TV commercials. Big money and media are important, but these are advantages the candidates of capital will always possess. Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel had something else in his pocket.

    Rahm Emanuel's biggest asset was the overwhelming support of Chicago's well-established black political class of preachers, business types, “community leaders” and public officials. President Barack Obama himself came home to Chicago this year and in 2011 to campaign for Rahm and cut commercials for him. Nearly every prominent black elected official in town, Democrats all, came out for Rahm, for privatization, for gentrification, for austerity, for more of the same. This is the state of black politics in 2015, and the reason that Rahm Emanuel carried every single one of Chicago's majority black wards.

    A career Democrat politician himself, Chuy Garcia could talk about the injustice of high stakes testing and privatizing public schools. What Garcia simply could not do was explain to black audiences why almost every black politician in town including the black Chicago Democrat in the White House was riding with Rahm. To do so would have been to directly criticize the regime of black urban politics and the policies of the president himself, something even the most “progressive” career Democrat politicians don't do.

    Soon after taking office in 2011, Rahm Emanuel had dinner with Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union. Rahm told the CTU president that a quarter of Chicago's public school children would never amount to anything and that he refused to “throw money” at it. Lewis promptly took the mayor's remarks public. That's not the kind of thing career Democrats pols do to each other.

    Before being diagnosed with brain cancer last fall, Karen Lewis was the presumptive mayoral candidate and actually leading Rahm Emanuel. As a black woman and not a career Democrat, Lewis might have felt freer than Garcia did to question the extent to which urban black politicians, not just in Chicago but in Atlanta, New York, Philly, and a hundred other cities, and the president himself were in bed with gentrifiers, school privatizers, warmongers and pension cutters. Lewis might have pointed out the close personal and political relationships between Illinois Republican governor Bruce Rauner, who aims to make Illinois a right-to-work state one county at a time, and Mayor Emanuel. She might have seized upon the widespread civic outrage in black Chicago against police immunity and impunity in a way that Chuy was not prepared to do.

    Unlike Garcia, Karen Lewis was on record saying that Rahm Emanuel's policies of privatizing public education were nothing more or less than carrying out President Obama's national policy on public education. But Lewis wasn't the candidate. Garcia was.

    “To win, Chuy needed to carry black wards against Emanuel, to make discouraged voters in those neighborhoods come out,” a campaign staffer told Black Agenda Report.

    “You do that by conducting an intense voter registration drive in those areas, and giving those people compelling reasons to come out. It could have been done. Chuy's campaign was dealt a good hand, but they didn't play it. They failed to emphasize the issues that could have set black Chicago on fire.”

     “This was the winter and spring when Ferguson was on everybody's lips. Chuy could have won wider and deeper support in black Chicago by focusing early and sustained attention on the corrupt and brutal practices of CPD, Chicago's Police Department. He didn't do that. It took weeks to get the Garcia campaign to endorse the drive for reparations for survivors of Chicago police torture. It took weeks more to briefly draw Garcia's attention to CPD's black site at Homan Square, another controversy he declined to make a big sustained stink about. The campaign pissed away these key opportunities to mobilize black support. And the only jobs program they announced with actual numbers was Chuy's proposal to hire a thousand extra cops.”

    There's a nonsense story going around that Chicago's mayoral election was “a fight for the future of liberalism” or “a fight for the soul of the Democratic party.” Both these are pretty much nonsense. Mayor Emanuel and President Obama along with the their supporting constellation of black elected officials, preachers, business types and community leaders are almost all liberals and Democrats. Emanuel's closing of 50 plus public schools, and his drive to privatize education is the national policy of a liberal Democrat president, implemented by liberal Democrat mayors and black elected officials in Philly, Sacramento, Atlanta and hundreds of US cities.

    Sure, big money and big media were important, as were strategic blunders by the Garcia campaign, like not seizing upon issues that could have won them energetic, fired up followers. But the biggest single factor in Rahm Emanuel's win this week was the overwhelming support of the black political class from the president on down.

    Rahm Emanuel is Obama's mayor. This is President Obama's victory, and his legacy to Chicago. It's Bobby Rush's victory and Emanuel's atrocities are on his tab as well. It's the victory of the black misleadership class over the people they ostensibly represent, and we'll all be paying for it in the days and the years to come.

    There's the usual lot of talk about this being the beginning of a long term mobilization, of a permanent movement. We'll see. If the mobilizing energies are poured back into more Democrat candidates, who by habit, nature, and professional courtesy don't disagree too strenuously with other Democrats, it's hard to imagine any different result.

    Here's a link to the New York Times exit polling on the election, and to the ward by ward totals posted at the Chicago Board of Elections.

    *Bruce A. Dixon is an exiled Chicagoan now living in suburban Atlanta, where he's managing editor at Black Agenda Report and a member of the state committee of the Georgia Green Party.

    This article originally appeared in Black Agenda Report. Thanks to Bruce A. Dixon and to Black Agenda Report for permission to reprint.

  • Small Victory for Independent Politics in Chicago, as Rahm Prevails

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    Chicago teachers now have one of their own on the city council. Susan Sadlowski Garza, school counselor and Chicago Teachers Union executive board member, declared victory this week over incumbent John Pope. Absentee ballots are still being counted, but signs indicate she will squeeze past by less than 100 votes.

    While the CTU-led campaign to oust Mayor Rahm Emanuel fell short, Garza’s victory is a boost for the council’s progressive caucus, which before the election included 7 members out of 50. Depending on the outcome of absentee ballot counts in several close races, the progressive caucus could increase to 12.

    Garza was the lone CTU member to win election—a total of five were on the February ballot and two made it to a runoff. CTU member Tara Stamps lost in the runoff to Emma Mitts, another Emanuel ally known for bringing Chicago’s first Walmart store to her ward. Walmart rewarded Mitts with a $1,500 donation last month.

    Several other Emanuel allies on the city council lost their spots to challengers backed by United Working Families, the independent political organization created last year by CTU, the Service Employees' big health care local, and a number of Chicago community groups.

    Garza’s win in her Southeast Side district relied on grassroots volunteers and her family’s roots in the community. Her father Ed Sadlowski was a longtime reform leader in the Steelworkers. On Election Day, Garza had 250 volunteers getting out the vote in her ward.

    The 10th Ward runs along Chicago’s southern lakefront, where steel mills were once the main employers. Community groups complain of toxins and hazards from nearby industry. In her campaign Garza committed to booting the polluters out of the area. One of the main culprits, animal feed producer Agri-Fine, was a major Pope contributor.

    On education, Garza stressed that Emanuel’s education cuts affect everyone in Chicago, not just teachers or public sector workers, because students suffer—for instance, from not having enough counselors.

    United Working Families also backed Jesus “Chuy” Garcia’s campaign for mayor, as did the city’s largest transit union and SEIU’s state council. Garcia made it to a run-off with Emanuel—the first run-off in Chicago's machine-dominated history—but ultimately lost, 44 to 55 percent.
    Emanuel’s fundraising strength allowed him to flood the airwaves with campaign ads. Garcia built support after the runoff and did particularly well in Latino neighborhoods, but ultimately could not compete with Emanuel on visibility.

    Still, in her ward, Garza said, the mayor is unpopular among everyday Chicagoans. “Every single union member I’ve spoken to, whether it’s a laborer, a steelworker, or an auto worker,” she said, “everyone is showing interest in being part of United Working Families.”

    Why They Ran

    For teachers and their supporters who took on the mayor in 2012’s week-long strike, United Working Families represented the logical next step.

    Despite deep public support for teachers, strong organization at the school level, and their ability to mobilize on a massive scale, CTU members found that the mayor and the machine-controlled city council have sway over their workplace: the public schools.

    Specifically, CTU has been limited by the city’s Tax Increment Financing policy, which diverts a big chunk of property taxes to subsidies to developers rather than to schools, and by the mayor’s ability to appoint the school board and fund charter schools at the expense of existing public schools.

    While Garza supporters celebrate her upset in one part of the city, Chicago teachers and United Working Families are strategizing about how to deal with four more years of “Mayor 1%” and his majority on the council.

    “We certainly want to break from the politics of austerity,” said CTU organizer Brandon Johnson. “We want a break from the disinvestment. Whenever you have incumbents that vote 100 percent of the time with the mayor of Chicago and his corporate-interest agenda, there is clearly a need to have a more independent voice.”

    On the immediate horizon is CTU’s fight for a new contract. The current one expires in June. After being bested by CTU in the 2012 contract battle, Emanuel is no doubt eager to inflict a loss on his most visible political enemy.

    An open question is whether the energy generated by the electoral battle will translate into a lasting progressive political organization independent of the Democratic machine. Garza’s win provides at least one ray of hope.

    For more on struggles in Chicago, check out Labor Notes' latest book, How to Jump-Start Your Union: Lessons from the Chicago Teachers.

     

    This article was first published in Labor Notes. Thanks to Samantha Winslow and Labor Notes for permission to reprint.

  • The Failures of Lesser-Evilism in Chicago

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    Once again, a major election in the US has brought out the specter of lesser-evilism–the call to vote for the least bad option–and once again this strategy has been a complete failure, regardless of which candidate actually wins. Usually it is a Republican against a Democrat, although in Chicago in 2015 it was a neoliberal Democrat, Rahm Emanuel, against a slightly less neoliberal Democrat, Jesus “Chuy” Garcia.

    There will be many analyses of how Garcia failed to beat Emanuel, such as Micah Uetricht’s piece in Jacobin which noted that “Garcia as a candidate was mediocre at best, and was far from the best candidate for Chicago’s current moment.” His campaign promise of putting another 1,000 police on the streets, at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement and in the midst of yet another Chicago police scandal, was unconscionable though not surprising.

    But Uetricht looks on the bright side, commenting that “progressive unions and community organizations have formed a new political organization, United Working Families, that seeks to train and run long-term movement activists as candidates and create a political home for themselves outside of the Democratic Party.” This is an odd conclusion, as the UWF and really the entire labor Left, including many independent local campaigns, were fully behind Garcia, a pro-austerity, pro-police Democrat. Rather than breaking from the Democratic Party, these efforts helped redirect independent political aspirations back into it.

    With the end of the Chicago election season, it is worth reviewing not only Garcia’s weaknesses but also the ongoing inability of even the left-wing of the labor movement to break from the politics of lesser-evilism, and the damage it does to struggles for social change. We need to have an honest and blunt assessment of the damage that has been done, because otherwise there can be no path forward. And while many of those involved have been and will continue to be comrades in struggle, some serious mistakes were made that must be accounted for.

    From social justice unionism to lesser-evilism

    It is hardly possible to promote the lesser-evil without lying about how evil they actually are and, therefore, disarming oneself. What was astonishing to watch were the efforts of the leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union—the people who led a polarizing and powerful strike against austerity just a few years back—taking the lead in Garcia’s campaign. It is nothing less than a disaster that CTU President Karen Lewis, who in years past was a figure who could mobilize the labor movement around broad social issues and against neoliberalism and racism, spent the last few months assuring everybody that a candidate openly in favor of attacking workers was in fact their friend. We should not pretend that this is a minor disagreement among comrades. The once inspiring promise that the current leadership of the CTU might lead a new path for the labor movement lies in tatters after this debacle.

    Karen Lewis and her Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) came to the leadership of CTU in 2010 offering the promise of social justice unionism and, potentially, a new page in the history of US labor struggles. They delivered a popular teachers strike in 2012, but there have been many difficulties since. After the strike, they were unable to stop nearly all of Emmanuel’s school closures, but Lewis and CTU Vice-President Jesse Sharkey are now minor media stars and power brokers in Chicago.

    Karen Lewis nearly ran for mayor herself but, unfortunately, became seriously ill. Instead, she anointed Garcia her successor, and he was introduced at an annual CTU dinner by Sharkey as “the next mayor of Chicago” along with a surprise video from Lewis. The CTU membership had little say in any of this, as the endorsement was rushed through just days later.

    In short, their wheelings and dealings now need not have any direct relation to the needs of their members. Lewis and Sharkey are powers unto themselves. The leadership can make its own decisions and the membership is merely expected to follow, rather than the other way around.

    One of the most cynical moments of the Garcia campaign orchestrated by the CTU leadership took place in late March, with Garcia and Sharkey holding a press conference in support of a fifteen dollar an hour minimum wage for all Chicago Public School workers. Certainly this was a perfectly good demand to raise. The problem is, it was already obvious that Garcia was not committed to it at all and his actions following it made a mockery of the demand.

    The very next day, according to a Chicago Tribune reporter, Garcia described his actual plans for Chicago public sector workers in a televised debate with Emanuel. If he could not get additional funding from the state of Illinois, then “we have to sit down with the teachers’ union and have a difficult discussion with the teachers,” he said. Garcia also responded to a question from Emanuel about whether he was beholden to the public sector unions. Assuring his commitment to austerity, Garcia responded, “Given the state of affairs you have put the city in—the fiscal free-fall—I’m gonna tell the unions a lot of bad news because the situation is so dire.”

    It was a classic lesser-evil moment which earned Garcia high marks. In short, what he was saying is, I will cut wages and benefits, and I am going to blame it on Rahm Emanuel. Unfortunately, the lesser evil—the “nice guy”—is often much better at carrying out the evil than the “bad guy.” In fact, Garcia’s promise was precisely that he would deliver the bad news in a nicer tone of voice. Nonetheless, immediately following these comments in the debate, Garcia was greeted by a rally sponsored by United Working Families.

    “No gravy”

    The next week Garcia reiterated this theme of lean budgets. There will be “some very tough conversations for some tough medicine to be swallowed by all of the partners,” he said. “So there’s no gravy to go around.” The difference between his administration and Emanuel’s is that his “approach will be collaborative.”

    So what was Garcia actually promising–a wage to $15 per hour or budget cuts? Well, this might be shocking to hear, but it looks like this politician may just have been lying about his promises to the workers.

    The CTU leadership should have known better than to believe Garcia was really committed to wage increases and not austerity, and they probably did know, but their prominent position as power brokers in Chicago has now overtaken their better judgement. They no longer need to worry about what their members or any other workers think while they fight for a seat at the political table.

    As representatives of public sector workers, they are literally promoting the person who they hope will be the new employer and who they know will do so as a budget-cutter. As always with this strategy, it is a win-win situation for everybody but the workers, and the fact that many (though certainly not all) rank-and-filers also support Garcia does not make the work of Lewis and Sharkey any less damaging.

    Within hours of the election results, Sharkey announced that the CTU was looking for a quick deal to extend the current teachers’ contract for one year. This is a stark about-face from just two months previous when Lewis insisted that CTU was not going to extend the contract and they were prepared to strike for it and, yes, it would cost the city some money. Having put all their eggs in Garcia’s basket, they are now reeling and they only have themselves and their failed strategy to blame for it.

    It is certainly unconscionable under these circumstances that some unions actually backed Emanuel, the greater evil. Former staffers and volunteers of UNITE HERE in Chicago have signed an open letter criticizing their union’s decision to endorse Emanuel, as they certainly should. But that leaves us with the basic question–what about Garcia? Endorsing Emanuel is a betrayal of working people, but endorsing Garcia would not be much better.

    As for the CTU, there was a fight over the endorsement of Garcia, although much of it was pushed by people who supported Alderman Bob Fioretti, a more liberal and consistent ally of Chicago teachers. In a perfect twist of fate, Fioretti, the lesser of three evils, eventually endorsed the greater evil Emanuel. Even lesser-lesser-evilism is a dead end.

    Which begs another, more important question–what remains of the Left in the CTU? Considering the hopes that many had that the CORE caucus could pave the way for the future of the labor movement, it would seem that there ought to be a group of Chicago teachers who could openly disagree with their leadership’s undemocratic and dishonest promotion of a budget cutter. There is no less of a need to build rank-and-file opposition against the lesser of two evils, in fact this is often the more important task because it is through the lesser evil that evils are often carried out.

    What we are seeing is that social justice unionism, without a clear analysis and strategy around the Democratic Party, will stumble over the same roadblocks that labor has always stumbled over, regardless of how left-wing the elected leaders claim to be.

    Some would argue that mobilizing rank-and-file opposition to Garcia in these circumstances would be premature, or better yet “ultra-left,” but if the unions are going to oppose austerity then they need to do it consistently, or else we will end up in the same morass we currently find ourselves in. When our friends support our enemies, we need to be honest about what dangerous ground we are on.

    Similar problems apply to the various left-wing electoral campaigns that were notable over the past year, and this is especially true in Chicago where a number of rank-and-file teachers ran against pro-Emanuel candidates. The nature of their opposition was sometimes less clear, however. Tim Meegan, for example, is a Chicago teacher who ran an independent campaign for Alderman that came close to forcing a runoff. Nonetheless, Meegan endorsed Garcia. This begs yet another question–what does it mean for an “independent” campaign to endorse an austerity-promoting Democrat?

    A decade ago, there were battles throughout the (now moribund) Green Party, led by the late Peter Camejo, about whether they would endorse Democrats. In other words, for people like Camejo, actual independence was the entire point of the effort. If left-wing electoral campaigns are going to support and promote Democrats, what is the point of the campaign?

    These are difficult questions to ask and are offered in a spirit of solidarity, but they must be asked and the Left needs to have a frank discussion about them, because if this electoral work does not challenge and weaken the status quo and in particular weaken the hold of the Democrats over the Left and the labor movement, then it is not clear what it is attempting to accomplish.

    The labor movement is not going to break with lesser-evilism in one fell swoop all in unison, but rather through a protracted and ugly battle that will be opposed by people who have made their careers negotiating compromises. Those who stick out their necks will be slandered and isolated by the mainstream union apparatus. Meegan would have lost a substantial number of votes if he ran against Garcia, but if the goal was to create a political organizing space that can fight lesser-evilism, then it would have been more than worth it. However, it would have been extremely unpopular and would have been met with widespread hostility by most of the labor movement.

    Independent organizing will not be not easy. There will be a massive pushback from the Democrats and their hangers-on. In other words, there will be an open struggle and many convenient alliances will be broken, but at least we will fight for what we actually want and need, instead of continuing to fight for what we don’t want.

  • Death by Cop March – Los Angeles

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    The protestors marched through the streets of Los Angeles on April 7 carrying 617 coffins representing the death of 617 individuals killed by Los Angeles law enforcement since 2000. Participants convened on the L.A. County Board of Supervisors from the north, south, east, and west, staging die-ins at strategic locations along the way. Family members of those murdered along with individuals who have suffered at the hands of the LAPD delivered powerful messages of anger, hope, and sadness, urging the need for continued and escalated community response to LAPD oppression and brutality.

    ImageThe Youth Justice Coalition, organizers of the event, said that, "At least 617 people have been killed by Los Angeles County law enforcement since 2000 – that’s almost 1 person killed by law enforcement every week in LA. African Americans are 9 percent of LA County’s population but 28% of the people killed by police and sheriffs. Fifty-four percent of those killed are Latino, while the Latino population in LA is 48%. LA County leads the nation BY FAR in law enforcement killings of community members.

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    “Since 2000, according the LA County DA’s Office, there has not been a single prosecution in any of these cases. In addition, the DA has reported to us the their office has had an agreement in place since the Cooley administration to not investigate any use of force until the internal investigation conducted by law enforcement has been completed, 6 months to a year after the incident."  

  • Getting rid of the losers, like teachers who are “old and costly” and kids who are not “champions”

                A headline in a recent news story about Los Angeles teachers, calling the district’s teaching force “old and costly,” is a companion piece to the New York Times front page article about the Success Academy chain headed by Eva Moskowitz.  Taken together these explain why teachers unions are being attacked so viciously and why the unions need to change gears and direction now.  Once again, the Chicago Teachers Union leads the way in its new contract demands.

                The Right and many liberals insist that improving teacher quality is the best way to end poverty. This line of reasoning is based on the assumption that governments are powerless – or ought not – to interfere with the “right” to make profit in any way possible, including or especially in situations of dire emergency and human disaster, as Naomi Klein explains. Having succeeded in firing all of New Orlean’s teachers, mainly African American, after Katrina, to create the first all-charter school district in the nation, education “reformers” in both parties have gone after career teachers elsewhere. The aim, as this news article shows, is to eliminate experienced teachers who cost more. In so doing teaching is destroyed as a career and profession. To make that happen in a way that is seemingly objective, the project to marketize education uses scores from standardized tests to evaluate teachers, tweaked to allow for differences in students’ characteristics in what is called “value added measures.”

                We should have no illusions that these reforms will help all students achieve, the rhetoric that’s used to defend marketization and testing.  In fact, the goal is to “blow up” (Chester Finn’s term) the system of public education created at the turn of the last century. From neoliberalism’s stand point, the system was not sufficiently Darwinian because of increased economic competition. The sorting of those who deserve good jobs and those who don’t has to begin in kindergarten. Parents who are desperate to make sure that their children will be among “the haves” with access to the rapidly diminishing number of good jobs the global economy offers submit their children to many practices that advantaged parents may not be willing to permit.

                I want to caution that how kids learn and should be taught is not universal. I think that some white progressives are too quick to dismiss differences in teaching and learning that are related to cultural expectations, and I urge that we acknowledge that good teachers and parents can disagree about what works for kids, as older kids will disagree among themselves. There are, however, certain ground rules we have to insist upon, like behaviors that show we respect one another. As a teacher and teacher educator I think that respect is clearly missing in Success Academy’s practice of shaming low achievers by posting their scores to be seen by classmates and making their lives “misery.” I would urge parents not to send their children to a school that uses these practices. Respect is also missing in classrooms making poor kids of color obedient to teachers’ control of every bodily function, as occurs in prisons – preparation for what awaits students who don’t respond positively enough to the tactics of “champion” teachers who follow this prescription for good teaching. 

     Image           Older teachers are often not considered “champions” because they have ideas borne of experience and education about how schools should operate, how they and students should be supported. They want wages sufficient to support a family and working conditions that allow them to spend time with their own children. They are “costly” not only in salary but in their potential, in their unions, collectively to challenge the authoritarianism that pervades schools.

                An essential aspect of persuading parents to see alternatives to the dog-eat-dog competition to which they are told they must submit their children is for unions to do as the Chicago Teachers Union has in its latest contract proposals. The union is using the contract talks to challenge the school district and city about conditions in schools, administrative demands that rob kids of teachers' time, class size, as well as broader political issues of funding and fair taxation. In so doing the union supports parents and the public to see – and join with them in fighting for – a different vision of education, one in which we don’t have schools create a select group of “champions” and toss out the rest as disposable. The union has arrived at these demands through a bottom-up process and brings them to negotiations in a representative team of 50 members. In so doing, it models the democratic relations we need in schools and what teachers unions throughout this country need to do, pronto.

     

    You can follow me on twitter  and  Facebook. If you haven't already, you may want to read my book about The Future of Our Schools.  If you’re in Chicago April 17-20, you can join researchers looking at what’s happening in teacher unionism. Info on the offerings are in the online program at aera.net, including two panels in which I am participating.