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  • In Mexico: Priests Fill the Political Void on the Left; Call for Constituent Assembly

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    With the left by and large failing to provide political leadership in the critical political situation that has developed in Mexico following the kidnapping of 43 students in Iguala, Guerrero and the “white house” scandal surrounding President Enrique Peña Nieto, Catholic priests have been attempting to fill the void. Several Catholic priests—Padre Gregorio (Goyo) López, Padre Alejandro Solalinde Guerra, and Archbishop Raúl Vera most prominent among them—have in different ways been playing the role of spokespersons for the oppressed. These priests have been speaking out against government corruption and the politicians’ links to the drug cartels, defending local armed self-defense organizations, demanding an investigation into the role of the Mexican Army, and even calling for a constituent assembly to refound the country on a new and more democratic basis.

    The Catholic Church was from the 1500s to the mid-twentieth century among the most reactionary forces in Mexico, always allied with the landlords and the government. There were famous exceptions, such as Father Miguel Hidalgo y Castillo and Father José Manuel Morelos y Robles, both of whom led the radical wing of the Mexican Independence movement of the early 1800s, still by and large the Church and the priests were arch-reactionaries. But after John XXIII called the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s, some Mexican prelates and priests moved to the left, embracing not only church reform but also the Theology of Liberation. Today one finds Bishop Raúl Vera calling for overturning and replacing the Mexican government with a new democratic government to be built from the grassroots up.

    One might expect such demands to come from the left—and sometimes one does—but the largest left party, National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), led by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is focused on winning elections and raising him to the presidency in 2018, and while it has criticized presidential corruption in the “white house” affair, has not attempted to lead the most recent wave of protests over the killing and kidnapping of the Ayotzinapa Teachers College Students on September 26. Though small left political parties, clandestine guerrilla groups, and armed self-defense forces appear to abound in Mexico, none of them has the credibility or the mass following to put itself forward as the leader in the current prolonged political crisis. The National Coordinating Committee (la CNTE) of the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE), strong in the southern and western states, has played some role in organizing a mass opposition to government policies, but it is not a political party capable of putting forward a genuine political alternative. Many Mexicans, especially young people, don’t believe in Congress, don’t believe in the election authorities, simply do not trust any political party. So, now the Catholic Church has taken up the task of social and political criticism as well as the proposal of alternatives.

    Padre Goyo

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    Each of the Catholic priests who have taken on the role of defender of the people has his own political roles and has carved out his own political space. The nearly 50-year old Padre Gregorio López, better known as Padre Goyo, heads a parish in Apatzingán, Michoacán, a territory controlled by the Knights Templar drug cartel. (He is not to be confused with another Padre Padre Goyo, Gregorio López Gorostieta, who was found murdered, presumably by one of the cartels in the town of Tlapehuala, Guerrero on December 26, 2014.) Padre Goyo, who at home wears both a clerical collar and a bullet proof vest, has become famous in Mexico for fingering drug cartel figures to the Mexican police, among them the mayor of Apatzingán who was subsequently removed from office. An erstwhile defender of the region’s armed self-defense organizations and of their most prominent leader, Dr. José Manuel Mireles Valverde the community of Tepalcatepec, Goyo also criticizes other self-defense organizations that he believes are fronts for the cartels.

    Goyo has also created the Citizens Council Responsible for Promoting a Healthy Fabric of the Social Order or CCRISTOS, made up of local businesspeople and professionals; with that group and the Federal Police has carried out raids on Knights Templar center in Apatzingán. His method had been to organize the middle class and to seek an alliance with the government and the police authorities. His flamboyant behavior and outspoken manner led the Church to send him to Rome where he is supposed to have met with the Pope who reportedly set limits to his activities, though he continues to be kept at arm’s length by Mexican church authorities.

    Padre Goyo recently traveled to the United States speaking in Mexican communities from Los Angeles to Chicago to New York. When I heard him speak in Queens, a tireless if sometimes rambling speaker whose discourse was filled with anecdotes about the drug lords’ many murder victims and tales of his own struggle for justice; he lashed out against the cartels, promoted his own strategy of organizing middle class reform organizations such as CCRISTOS, and insisted that people had to demand that the political authorities and the police do their job and end corruption. He denied that he had sold out the movement or Dr. Mireles while meeting with the Mexican Minster of the Interior, presenting himself as a necessary broker between society and government. Goyo ended his talk be explaining that he was heading off to South America to speak with prominent leaders, seeking to join forces with others fighting against such violence.

    Padre Solalinde

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    Altogether different is Padre Alejanro Solalinde, a 69-year old priest with a calm manner who runs the Brothers on the Road migrant shelter in Ixtepec, Oaxaca, and who has become a leading human rights spokesperson in the last few years. While still a seminarian in the Carmelite order, Solinde and a group of fellow students left the order over ideological differences and disappointment in their education. Solalinde went off to earn bachelor’s degrees in history and another psychology as well as a master’s in family therapy at the Ecclesiastical Studies Institute of Higher Learning. He subsequently spent 30 years as a parish priest before being asked by the Mexican Bishops’ Council to undertake work as the pastor for migrants in the southern states of Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Guerrero. Now a monsignor, he has been awarded the prize for Peace and Democracy and the Pagés Llergo prize for Democracy and Human Rights. He left Mexico in 2012 because of death threats, but subsequently returned to continue his work.

    Thoroughly disgusted with the Mexican authorities, Padre Solalinde recently said, “Peña Nieto, you should know that your government has reached the point that it is only a question of time, before we carry out a peaceful change, we are going to do what you and the three levels of government—and especially the legislators who represent no one—have failed to do.” In the struggle for peaceful change in Mexico, Monsignor Solalinde has been cooperating with Bishop Raúl Vera López in working to bring about a Citizens Constituent Assembly.

    Bishop Raúl Vera López

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    Bishop Raúl Vera López, today organizing to replace the Mexican government with a better one, has had a distinguished career. Born in 1945, he studied chemistry at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and after graduating in 1968 went off to join the Dominican order, taking his vows in León, Guanajuato in November 1969. From there he went to Bologna, Italy to study theology, later graduating summa cum laude with a degree in theology from the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Rome. He was ordained in the priesthood in June of 1975 by Pope Paul VI. He served in the most important leadership councils of the Dominican order in Mexico until he was named bishop by John Paul II, serving for a while as auxiliary bishop to Bishop Samuel Ruiz García in Chiapas during the Mexican government’s peace talks with the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in 1995.

    In 2000 he became the Bishop of the city of Saltillo in the State of Coahuila on the U.S.-Mexican border where he put much of his emphasis on human rights work. He has spoken out frequently on the situation of the state’s miners, as well as that of other workers, and established the Border with Justice project to deal with the many human rights issues on the Coahuila-Texas border. He also established the Fray Juan de Larios Human Rights Center to monitor and to denounce human rights problems in the region. He has won many awards for his work and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012. Now he has taken on the struggle to create a new government in Mexico.

    Vera has called for a Citizens Constituent Assembly. A constituent congress is the term used for a national representative assembly that undertakes to create a new government and to write a new constitution. The two most famous such assemblies, also called constituent congresses or constitutional conventions, were the American Federal Constitutional Convention of 1787 following the War of Independence and the National Constituent Assembly of France created at the time of the revolution of 1789. Mexico has had several constitutions and governments created over the years, the most recent adopted in 1917 in the midst of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1920. While that constitution was in many respects one of the most democratic in the world at the time—at least in theory—the government that it established evolved into an authoritarian one-party state, the rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that held power from 1928 to 2000, followed by a brief conservative government interregnum and the a return to the rule of the PRI, which is where we are today. At the time of the Chiapas Rebellion of January 1, 1994, the EZLN also called for a constituent assembly and in August of that year held a so-called National Democratic Convention in the jungle, though it was neither really a convention or democratic. While left parties have also suggested a constituent assembly, none of them has the authority of Bishop Vera whose recent call has eclipsed the proposals of the far left.

    Taking advantage of the February 5 anniversary of the adoption of the Mexican Constitution of 1917, Vera and his supporters, many of them leading advocates of human rights in Mexico, presented their Citizens’ and Peoples’ Constituent Assembly project to the public. Speaking at the Fray Angélico University Cultural Center near the UNAM in Mexico City, Vera argued that the country’s executive, legislative, and judicial branches had “usurped power,” and he called upon the Mexican people to organize and take it back. The group also published a manifesto (see translation below), together with a similar effort called the National Popular Convention, declaring that they were not any sort of political vanguard but rather that it, “It will be the people of Mexico who together, free and conscious, will achieve the transformation of our country.”

    Joint Declaration of the Citizens’ an Peoples’ Constituent Assembly – Ayotzinapa

    To the People of Mexico

    To the Brother and Sister Peoples of the World

    To the National and International Media

    February 5, 2015 – The dismantling of the country, of the indigenous territories, the destruction of social rights, the curtailment of individual guarantees, and electoral frauds are aspects of the generalized violence exercised against the population, whose cruelest expression is the forced disappearance, torture, and imprisonment of people involved in social struggle. State terrorism imposes itself like a permanent martial law in order to achieve the final sacking of our natural resources in order to sustain the decadence of the most powerful and salvage empire that humanity has known. This violence has turned Mexico into a common grave. While plans for our dispossession and occupation grow and the state announces the generalization of its violence against the population, new and old actors go out into the streets today in massive numbers, moved by the crime of Ayotzinapa, shaking the foundations of a regime that seemed impotent. They unleash hope and put in the center of the struggle the call for justice and a radical questioning of the antinational regime.

    Today the National Popular Convention and the Citizens’ and Peoples’ Constituent Assembly come into the public light, like two streams of the same great river that is the Mexican people in search of a peaceful, popular and civic solution to the crisis as it advances toward the refoundation of Mexico. We recognize both initiatives as part of the process through wich our peoples construct spaces of reflection, analysis, resistance, and common action, and through which they can express all of their voices, wisdom, experiences, spiritualities, and the powerful root of our culture. Both spaces, in addition to our joining in the call for the appearance alive of the 43 Ayotzinapa Teachers College Students, put us in the center of the need for national unity.

    For this reason, we declare that we are walking on parallel, not opposing paths. The objectives of each project lead us to dialogue. In the following days we will continue strengthening the bridges of dialogue, communication, mutual understanding, and action to contribute to liberation from this shameful and unjust neoliberal system.

    We affirm that we are not the vanguard, but rather people making humble efforts to bring together a part of the dissidence that had led to the oppression which this government of lackeys of the transnational, oligarchic capitalist class imposes on us, and for that reason we require dialogue to come together, to speak with different references, but above all those of the unorganized men and women in our citizenry. It will be the peoples of Mexico who together, free and conscious will achieve the transformation of our country.

    Because they were taken from us alive, we want them back alive!

    The people united, will never be defeated!

    Long live the unity of the Mexican people.

    Translation of Declaration by Dan La Botz

  • Why fine teachers are often the best union leaders

               Image I’m struck by how many of the skills and understandings good teachers acquire can also make them fine union activists. Though they may not realize it, teachers have already learned a great deal about organizing – through their work as teachers. Though I never observed Karen Lewis teach, I’ll wager that as CTU President she uses skills that she mastered in her classroom, teaching strategies that empowered her students, making them critical thinkers and active learners. Instructional choices though are only part of what make good union leaders like fine teachers- and vice versa. Another similarity is that union officers pledged to leading “member-driven” unions (again, as Karen Lewis reminds us she is) are elected on programs they help members to realize.  Members have voted on the “curriculum” by electing leaders who are pledged to carry out specific practices and ideals.

                Being a chapter leader/building representative in most schools today is similar to teaching students who have become accustomed to “skill, drill, kill.”  Many teachers, like students, have become socialized to following orders, no matter how counterproductive to real learning. They know what they're being told to do is boring and irrelevant to their lives but as John Dewey notes in “My Pedagogic Creed,"  their chains have become comfortable. Breaking free doesn’t seem worth the effort, especially when the disciplinary apparatus to keep teachers and students in line is so threatening.  What if members don’t want to be empowered? Great chapter leaders draw on the thinking and strategies fine teachers use when faced with a class that wants teachers to “deliver” the lesson rather than supporting them to think, to "own" their learning.

                I think building a democratic culture in the union that supports members to act on their own behalf uses the same strategies as creating a “community of learners” in a classroom. If you know how to do that, you’re more than half-way home to being a stupendous chapter chair/building leader.

    1. We create a culture of community. We try to make sure everyone feels cared for, by making time and space for people to discuss what’s on their minds, their reality.

    2. We find ways to relate students’ reality to the curriculum. That process may be a formal lesson or it may involve pointing out links between what students care deeply about and the curriculum.  If it’s not possible to make those connections, no matter how creative you are, it’s likely the curriculum needs to be adjusted or junked. (We can’t blame the students for a rotten curriculum.)

    3. We make sure the classroom is organized to support the behaviors we want. We have a plan for what we want achieved but we leave space for hearing that what students want doesn’t coincide with our plan.  As for dealing with students who are negative, we’re firm but friendly.  As one classroom management manual puts it, “Be a person but don’t take things personally.”

    4. We try to trust our students. When problems occur we ask them what’s happened, rather than assuming they are at fault. We try not to be defensive.

                Building union democracy in the school requires creating and nurturing a school culture that assumes that when problems occur, members have the right and capacity to organize a response.  They reach out to one another and think through ideas. They understand themselves as being “the union” – often without realizing this is the case.  Not every member is going to want to be empowered, any more than every student in our class will cheerfully greet lessons that require shaking off those chains. Sometimes we have to take a step back and give students direct instruction, to bring those unfamiliar or uncomfortable with active learning a chance to do what they feel is “real learning.”

                Still,  we know we have done our job well as teachers when our students can do challenging work with one another, without our supervision. That same environment defines a democratic, mobilized union chapter: a sense of clear purpose, possibility, and power.

  • Men Explain Things to Me…and I Hardly Care – a review

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    Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me. Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2014. 130pp.

    The word “mansplaining” refers to the condescending tendency of men to lecture women, despite the man’s lack of knowledge—or even despite the woman’s own expertise—on the subject at hand. It entered into the popular feminist lexicon sometime around 2009, and although Rebecca Solnit didn’t coin it, her essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” is largely cited as the inspiration.

    Since then, “Men Explain Things to Me” has been turned into a short, digestible book of the same title, the titular treatise buttressed by six additional feminist essays. While Men Explain Things to Me has been a runaway success, a socialist feminist critique finds that Solnit very much puts the cart before the horse—presuming that male ego or male entitlement is foundational to women’s oppression, rather than the result of the gendered material, economic, and political reality we shorthand as “the patriarchy.”

    Solnit's book includes some cringe-inducing attempts to apply her theory to actual history and politics, including casting France as a “he” and Africa as a “she” in a sweeping metaphor for colonialism (must we gender nations and peoples to understand their sovereignty?). She theorizes that the Bush administration’s disregard of pre-9/11 al-Qaeda warnings could be gendered, noting the FBI agent who issued them was a woman (forgoing the title of “agent,” Solnit curiously refers to her as “the FBI woman”).

    Other essays throughout the book meander tangentially, from rape to gay marriage to the wisdom of Virginia Woolf, all under a vague, interpersonal feminist curriculum. To wit, Solnit talks at great length on the importance of women being heard, being seen, being listened to, etc. Socialists tend to operate under the premise that it’s the economically and politically liberated whose voices are most valued, but Solnit takes a consciousness-raising approach, as if women’s social or cultural capital is the key to a more feminist future.

    Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the book is Solnit’s conjecture on the universality of a specific gendered social relation. In her very first essay, she begins a meditation on mansplaining with:

    "Every woman knows what I'm talking about. It's the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way street harassment does, that this is not their world."

    There is a certain hypocrisy in this position. Solnit’s book is premised on the presumptuousness of men, but she begins this statement with “every woman.” While I’ve never met a woman who hasn’t experienced a patronizing and gendered lecture from a man, I’ve only met a very privileged few who feel the undue confidence of masculinity is their biggest bone to pick with sexism.

    And when she gets to those bigger bones, Solnit outright disdains any materialist analysis:

    “Instead, we hear that American men commit murder-suicides—at the rate of about twelve a week—because the economy is bad, though they also do it when the economy is good; or that those men in India murdered the bus-rider because the poor resent the rich, while other rapes are explained by how the rich exploit the poor.”

    There is a wealth (a surfeit, really) of sociological data that shows that sexual predators of all classes, nationalities, ethnic groups, etc., target marginal victims, and very, very often that means poor women (though sometimes it’s a college student who would violate an “honor-code” by admitting she drank at a frat party, the predator’s wife or girlfriend who hasn’t the resources to leave, and the like). It's either thoughtless or disingenuous that Solnit chose to flatten this information into “because the economy is bad.” In actively dismissing the legitimate economic factors that put women at risk, she portrays class-based explanations of sexual or gendered violence as akin to sympathy for predators who can't find a job.

    The female homicides of Ciudad Juárez—usually referred to as “feminicidios” or “feminicides,” due to the significance of the phenomenon—have been studied extensively by academic feminists. In the brilliant 2010 collection of essays, Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade, and La Frontera, the case is made over and over again for an economic foundation to the mass murders of women. For example, in her article “Accountability for Murder in the Maquiladoras: Linking Corporate Indifference to Gender Violence at the U.S.-Mexico Border,” feminist legal theorist Elvia Arriola says,

    “…the Juárez murder phenomenon is a story about systematic abuse and violence against working-class employees; that abuse includes exposure to toxicity in the workplace, sexual harassment, and arbitrary disciplinary methods. This systematic abuse is the result of investor privileges guaranteed under NAFTA and repeated in the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), which virtually immunize the transnational investor from accountability for harm to the worker, anticipated or not, when conducting business in Mexico.”

    Given the extensive scholarship connecting the economic welfare and labor rights of women to the violence committed against them, one has to wonder; would Rebecca Solnit accuse Arriola of reducing femicide to 'because the economy is bad'?

    It’s worth noting that my review of Solnit's book was originally slotted for another publication, but was killed when a male editor sent an email to the rest of the board that started with “My serious problem is Frost’s review which IMHO radically misreads Solnit”—yes, he took time to bold and color the text for effect (oh how I long for the freedom to emote so emphatically without fear of being branded “hysterical”!). He included a string of select quotes by Solnit, and attached a separate Solnit article intended to edify my review, though nothing he included was in the book, and my review steered clear of assessing Solnit's career, activist credentials or character.

    The man in question ended his email with “IMHO Frost should read the attached Solnit piece and some of her other writings, adjust her attitude, and start again from scratch.” I’m not entirely sure if he has a solid grasp of what the “H” in “IMHO” (an acronym for “in my humble opinion”) stands for, or why an impersonal, collegial review of a book requires me to “adjust my attitude,” but this is the logic of the very real phenomenon of mansplaining. Did I mention that this particular man had not read the book I was reviewing?

    And herein lies the kernel of truth to Solnit’s work. At this point, the mansplain is such a cliché that stories like this are very nearly redundant in internet-culture-literate circles. The only reason I am recounting this particular incident is to isolate mansplaining from its most predictable context; the irony of his mansplaining feminism to me was apparently lost on him.

    Luckily I have another venue for my writing, one where women are not expected to form a united ideological front, and dissent is not conflated with a bad attitude. I happen to believe women’s intellectual work is deserving of the same robust debate as work by their male counterparts, and Solnit’s widely acclaimed massive hit of a book could stand one little critique.

    My own position as a socialist feminist is not that we should be looking to “convert” men, but that we should be looking to liberate women—the first step toward which is seeing the economic factors that leave women vulnerable to abuse and assault.

    While I find Solnit all too ready to invoke class as an indicator of her progressivism, she collapses the material and the cultural, deriding, misconstruing or outright ignoring the very real work done that argues women are safest when they are financially secure—a position in which they are more likely to have access to the legal system, as well as community resources and emergency services.

    As Solnit attempts to render her argument of ego-oriented consciousness feminism into a political theory that simply holds no water, she acknowledges that only “some men” engage in mansplaining. Yet she seems incapable of considering that other women don’t relate to it as she does.

    I have never once felt “crushed into silence” by something as laughable and ubiquitous as masculine bloviating. In fact, my reactions to sexism (social, economic or otherwise) are quite the opposite of silence; this is hardly rare. Some women just walk away from mansplainers in frustration or boredom, a sort of social walkout strike that denies them your audience. There are also some who gladly debate the mansplainers, relishing an easy win. Many of us have no problem pointing out the sexism of mansplaining as it occurs, sometimes only to stand up for ourselves, but sometimes warmly, in the sincere belief that perhaps this particular man could be sympathetic. There are those of us who simply laugh (whether in their faces or behind their backs), some who tell them to shut the hell up and many—like myself—who simply sashay away to more feminist pastures.

    *Amber A'Lee Frost is a writer and musician in Brooklyn. She is on the National Political Committee of Democratic Socialists of America and a contributor to Rosa Luxemburg: Her Life and Legacy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

  • Mexico: Landmines Everywhere – A Book Review Essay

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    Robert Joe Stout. Hidden Dangers: Mexico on the Brink of Disaster. Sunbury Press: Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, 2014. 209 pages. Notes. Bibliography.

    Shannon K. O’Neil. Two Nations Indivisible: Mexico, the United States, and the Road Ahead. A council on Foreign Relations Book. Oxford University Press, 2014 [2013]. 239 page. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Map.

    “Mexico is undergoing economic and political changes that lie like landmines ready to explode beneath the troubled and often discordant impulses of the two countries to satisfy their divergent social and political needs,” writes Robert Joe Stout in Hidden Dangers: Mexico on the Brink of Disaster.

    And he lists the landmines he sees: “Migration, legal and illegal…Intrusion of drug organizations into economic an political activities…Grassroots political movements opposed to globalization, centralized government, and unequal distribution of wealth are being repressed often violently…Government and entrepreneurial corruption…Environmental disaster and the collapse of self-sustaining agriculture.”

    Stout’s subtitle, Brink of Disaster, certainly captures the sense that many have at this moment. Some of the landmines are already exploding. The September 26, 2014 events in Iguala, Guerrero where six were killed, 25 wounded, and 43 disappeared—the kidnapping victims have still not appeared and are believed by many to be dead—led to demonstrations especially in Guerrero, but also throughout all of Mexico. The photos of the 43 students of the Ayotzinapa Teachers College, forcibly disappeared, finally put a face on the tens of thousands of killings and kidnappings that have taken place since 2006. Then came the revelations about the conflict of interest involved in the luxurious homes of Mexican Enrique Peña Nieto and his wife Angélica Rivera and Finance Minister Luis Videgaray which they had acquired from corporations doing business with their Mexican government. All of this as the Mexican economy stagnated, oil prices fell, and the peso lost value. Things in Mexico looked bleak, including the lack of any left movement that might propose a genuine political and economic alternative.

    On the eve of this crisis two authors published books anticipating it. Yet one could hardly imagine two works more different than Stout’s and Shannon K. O’Neil’s. Stout, who lives in Oaxaca, Mexico is a journalist with a critical outlook who closely examines developments in Mexican society, providing detailed accounts of the migration issue, the war on drugs, popular protest, corruption, and environmental issues. He is interested in the nitty-gritty. O’Neil is a policy wonk. She provides broad, sweeping, but also well informed accounts of many of the very same issues, but looking at the political alternatives at the highest level.

    Stout is implicitly critical of the establishment, while O’Neil wants to be one a handmaiden of the powerful. If Stout provides us little reason to hope, O’Neil hopes that contemporary neoliberal capitalism’s reforms—such as those proposed by Peña Nieto and passed by the Mexican Congress will—will bring about peace and prosperity, a possibility, she believes, if only the United States government will work more closely with its Mexican counterparts to achieve the construction of a liberal democracy a functioning justice system, and some sort of immigration reform through new diplomatic efforts. Though O’Neil wants to be optimistic, one is struck frequently by her deeply critical views of the Mexican system (less so of the American) and wonders how she could remain hopeful that diplomacy might bring about significant change.

    Both of these books in their different ways reveal and explain that the immigration problems remain intractable, the border and security issues unresolved, the justice system utterly corrupt, and the situation of ordinary Mexicans increasingly miserable. Popular protest, discussed by Stout but not by O’Neil, is, as he says, being criminalized. The environment, also on Stout’s list but not on O’Neil’s, continues to be devastated because of government’s economic development policies and industry’s lack of concern with anything but profit.

    Unfortunately, Stout, who looks closely as social developments, including popular protest, doesn’t do more than sketch out the recent history of the movements, providing us no sense of their significance, their social goals, their political programs, and their leaderships. O’Neil, whose focus is on the economic and political elites of both nations, for whom she is writing, and from whom she hopes for diplomatic alternatives, has nothing to say about social movements at the base of Mexican society, a serious omission from her otherwise inclusive study. Francisco Goldman, the novelist and writer for the New Yorker suggested in a recent aricle that ,“In December revolution seemed possible in Mexico.” But no revolution was on the agenda then, nor is it now, for there is no left force capable of providing the political or organizational leadership for a revolutionary movement. Nor, has the Mexican state reached its breaking point, the Mexican ruling class exhausted its possibilities, or the Mexican people reached their limit.

    O’Neil, while supporting Peña Nieto’s neoliberal economic reforms and looking with hope toward the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), seems to think that they are compatible with some sort of Keynesian approach, a kind of social liberalism as this has been called in Brazil. She writes;

    “If Mexico can better the lives of its poorest and strengthen its middle class, benefits for all will follow. Its economy will grow faster; its democracy will be stronger. It will boost its international standing, carving out a prominent place for itself as one of the few emerging economies to transform itself into a developed nation. But if no, the country will stagnate economically, politically, and socially, proving the pessimists right while harming the interests of the majority.”

    Yet there is no proposal in Mexico for such economic and political reforms that would lift all boats. The pessimists it seems are right at least for the moment.

    I have no doubt that O’Neil’s book, a product of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Oxford University Press, will end up in all the major academic and big city public libraries, as well as being used in university political science courses. Stout’s Hidden Dangers, published by the small Sunbury Press will have a harder go of it, but it should also find its way into the libraries and would be an excellent book for college courses. If a reader asked me to choose between the two, I would say read Stout, because he has his eye on humble people, their miseries but also their potential, and I believe that that is where change will have to come from, while O’Neil is too close to the men in fine suits and limousines, with their respective flag pins in their lapels, to recognize the road that they and she are on. The road leads to another common grave in the State of Guerrero filled with unidentified human remains.

  • Syriza: “A grain of sand in the machinery”

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    Eric Toussaint, analyses Syriza’s first days at the head of the Greek government for Le Courrier. He was interviewed by Benito Pérez (of the daily Le Courrier, Geneva. 1]

    Eric Toussaint is visibly exhausted at the end of a difficult week. But his mind is clear and his enthusiasm is intact: Syriza’s victory in the Greek legislative election has opened one of those parentheses within which History accelerates and is written as we watch. A political scientist who is experienced in economic matters, founder and spokesman of the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt (CADTM), Toussaint is a key observer of the battle now going on between Greece and its creditors—mainly the governments of Northern Europe. That is evident from the interest that was shown in his presentations Saturday, in Geneva, during a day of discussions on the economy organized by Le Courrier. A former adviser to the government of Ecuador and the president of Paraguay (Fernando Lugo), the Belgian native has also been approached by Syriza. Pending his possible involvement, Eric Toussaint is speaking out freely and observing the Greek experiment with a benevolent but critical eye.

    What is your assessment of the first steps taken by the Syriza government in the economic area?

    Eric Toussaint: The first measures they’ve taken have been to end a series of policies that were unjust, unpopular and damaging for the country. Very concretely, the government has granted free electricity to the 300,000 households that were without power; returned the legal minimum wage to its former level (751 euros), re-hired 3,500 employees who had been fired; dissolved the entity created by the Troika to manage privatisations; cancelled the sale of the ports of Piraeus and Thessaloniki, etc. In short, the government has shown that it will fulfil the mandate entrusted to it by Greece’s people. We can only be pleased with that.

    Is the make-up of the government, with the appointment of Yanis Varoufakis to the key post of Finance Minister, in line with that attitude?

    Personally, I’m disappointed that all ten of the “super-ministers” are men, even if several women do hold important vice-ministerial positions. On the economic level, while Varoufakis is in the spotlight, the key man is [vice- Prime Minister] Yannis Dragasakis, who belongs to the more moderate wing of Syriza. The government is the result of a very delicate balancing act. For my part, I would like to point to the very important inclusion of Giorgos Katrougalos, who is in charge of administrative reform; he’s the one who just announced the re-hiring of the employees who had been fired. He is a jurist and is one of the originators in 2011, along with ourselves, of the Initiative for a citizen audit of Greece’s debt!

    The appointment of Panos Kammenos to Defense and Syriza’s alliance with his right-wing AN.EL party, however, will make it more difficult to keep other campaign promises, including making the Church pay its share and reducing the size of the army, which is a sacred cow…

    Yes. Those two concessions are cause for concern. For a year and a half, Alexis Tsipras has made a series of positive statements about the Church, on its role in binding up the social wounds caused by austerity. To the point where he’s forgotten to point out that the Church, which owns large amounts of real estate, needs to contribute more to the public finances.

    As for the presence of Kammenos at Defense, that is of course a message to the army that Syriza won’t touch it. However Greece’s military budget, proportionally, is one of the largest in the European Union. And in fact Germany and France, who are the main suppliers to the Greek army, have made certain that the successive governments in Greece have limited their austerity efforts in that area. Having said that, Kammenos has been surrounded by a “safety rail” in the form of the vice-minister, Costas Ysichos, a Greek-Argentine and a former member of the Montoneros guerillas, who is on the left within Syriza.

    I would also point out that despite the presence of a party with racist tendencies in its coalition, the government immediately announced that he will grant Greek citizenship to children of migrants who were born or grew up in the country. Of course, it should be voted by the Parliament. That’s important in the context of Greece, since the preceding government had played on xenophobia. That’s Syriza’s way of showing that the alliance with AN.EL is limited to economic issues and that it won’t make migrants pay the price.

    On the central issue of the debt, some Syriza members argue for a moratorium on repayments, which would be indexed to growth.

    If that’s the case, it means that the Greek position has already evolved, probably due the very strong and very negative reactions of various key personalities in the Eurozone, since the farthest any of them have gone is to suggest the possibility of rescheduling repayments… Suspension of payment and an audit of the debt are among the weapons Syriza has publicly discussed using, but only as a secondary strategy. The Syriza government’s primary strategy is to call for a negotiation and an international conference to discuss all the debts. It also includes putting the debate at the heart of the European institutions, rejecting the Troika (the Central Bank, the IMF, and the EU) as illegitimate.

    So the battle lines seem to be drawn. Is that simply posturing in order to raise the stakes, or is any dialogue really impossible?

    I tend to lean towards the latter. Syriza proposes two fundamental things: First, maintain budgetary balance—something few European governments can boast of doing—but redistribute the costs differently, lightening the burden on victims of the crisis while increasing it for those who have benefited from it. Second: Negotiate a reduction of the debt. However, for the European leaders, the debt is the instrument used to impose the very neoliberal structural adjustment measures that Syriza has decided to end. Therefore no compromise seems possible. Possibly, if Syriza had said, “We’ll continue following neoliberal model, but you lighten the debt,” the EU might have accepted. But in fact, Europe cannot allow Tsipras to keep his word. He’s probably been told, “Look at Hollande; that’s what he did in your position. So do like he and everyone else have done and get with the program.”…

    The important thing that’s happened this week is that Syriza has already dropped a grain of sand into the machinery, and that’s decisive.

    What weapons do each camp have to use in this inevitable standoff?

    The figures illustrate the challenge we face in 2015. Greece must repay 21 billion euros in several payments, with the main deadlines in March and July-August. The agreement between the former government and the Troika was that the Troika would lend Greece the money necessary for meeting the repayments provided that it continue the privatisations and the rest of the austerity plan.

    In such a situation, Syriza’s weapon is simple: suspend payment. Then, as I see it, the Greek government should create an audit commission to determine which debts are legitimate and must be repaid. The audit can provide legal arguments to support a suspension of repayment, or possibly a repudiation of illegal debts—that is, debts that were contracted without respecting the internal order of the country or international treaties.

    I found an EU regulatory provision adopted in 2013 that requires all countries under structural adjustment to audit their debt in order to explain why it has risen so high and to reveal any possible irregularities. [2]

    How can a debt that was contracted voluntarily by a democratic government be illegitimate?

    Mainly due to the fact that these loans were granted under unjust terms. Greece was forced to conduct policies that amounted to social counter-reform and which violated certain rights, along with a policy of austerity that has destroyed the economy and made repayment impossible. It can also be demonstrated that the government acted illegally for the benefit of private interests, which would make the transaction null and void. An audit of Greece’s debt is easy to conduct—80% of it is in the hands of the Troika and goes back no farther than 2010.

    As you say, the majority of Greece’s debts have been in European public hands since then. Isn’t it unjust to make European taxpayers pay?

    The legislatures of these countries agreed to the loans under deceitful pretexts. We were told, “Greece must be saved”; “Help the poor Greek retired people” when in reality the French, German, and Belgian governments had been appealed to by their banks, who were worried that Greece would no longer be able to repay their high-risk, very high-rate loans. Merkel’s and Sarkozy’s goal was to allow their banks to wriggle out without taking any damages, while taking the opportunity to impose anti-labour measures and privatisations. In reality, the goal was not to save the Greek retirees’ pensions, but to reduce them! Consequently, since the operation served to save the creditor banks, the governments should pay the cost of cancelling the debts via a tax on those institutions.

    In reality, the amounts at stake are not that significant for the EU. The absence of reaction by the international stock exchanges proves that there is no systemic risk. The current impasse is more an ideological question. For the EU, the risk is of creating the precedent of a country remaining within the Union without applying the neoliberal policies. Scuttling Syriza would be a message sent to the Cypriot, Portuguese, Irish and Spanish voters— in particular the latter, who might be tempted to vote Podemos in a few months.

    Concretely, suspending repayment of the debt would mean a halt to the European payments and the explosion of interest rates on the capital markets for Greece. Would the Greek government lack funds?

    No. Nothing indicates that the budget would no longer be balanced, and that means that Greece does not need to borrow funds—which in any case would only be used for debt repayments. As for the share of financing Greece has obtained on the financial markets, it’s minimal. And anyway, the rates have already exploded in the past week, even though the suspension hasn’t take place.

    What weapons can the EU use to strangle Greece?

    The Greek banks are in very bad shape. These banks receive loans from the European Central Bank (ECB) to provide them with cash. I feel that the ECB could block these loans at the risk of seeing the Greek banking system collapse. Faced with that possibility, Greece will have to act quickly, expropriate the owners of the institutions, and turn them into public services. But that would require a radicalisation of Syriza’s program.

    Can the Greek government hope for any real international support?

    From social movements, yes! Over the past weeks, we’ve seen many movements get involved that had never before called for a vote for a political party! That support, in particular in the major EU countries, can be very significant. If major German trade unions like DGB and Verdi openly support Syriza and tell the SPD-CDU government “Keep your hands off Greece,” that could weigh in the balance. As for the governments, outside the EU, it’s also possible that certain ones would support Greece for opportunistic reasons—I’m thinking of Russia, for example. If Russia were to lend Greece a few billion at very low rates without attaching conditions, that could help. Of course, I would prefer that other governments do it. Ten years ago, Hugo Chávez would have surely taken the initiative. But today Venezuela doesn’t have the financial capacity.

    “All that just to regulate capitalism a little?!”

    Economists are intensely discussing one question: Is the break being recommended by Syriza possible or not without Greece’s exiting the euro? What is your opinion on that?

    Well, we’ll see! Syriza has a very good saying: “No sacrifices for the euro,” because it just isn’t worth it. Syriza will only take the initiative of leaving the Eurozone if it is forced to, because a majority of Greeks are still attached to the single currency. And also, leaving the euro would only be advantageous if nationalisation of the banks and strict oversight of movements of capital were put in place, which explains why the less radical wing of Syriza is reticent. More generally, such a decision would exacerbate the conflict with Europe.

    For the government, the advantage would be being able to contract debt with its national bank in a new national currency. Provided, of course, that the population would maintain its trust in this “new drachma.” We could also imagine a redistributive monetary reform, with differentiated exchange rates depending on the size of transactions, in order to provide an advantage to the poorer citizens. That has already been done—for example in Belgium, just after the Second World War—and is also a way of fighting inflation (see text box “Redistributive Monetary Reform”).

    On the other hand, devaluating in order to make Greek exports more attractive would put the purchasing power of the Greek people at risk. And it would remain within the same mindset of competitiveness.

    The Eurozone countries have no interest in expelling Greece.

    No, except perhaps as a kind of political punishment. To teach them what it costs to revolt… But no legal mechanism exists for doing it!

    In the current context, the measures the Syriza government is taking are courageous, but they still mostly amount to a return to an earlier situation that was not really very progressive. There has also been a call for a European New Deal. Ultimately, what is Syriza’s political project?

    Frankly, I’m asking myself the same question. But given the calendar, we’ll know in the next few months. Up to now, the option was to move back a bit towards a social state. We’re still far from having gone back to the earlier situation! Beyond Syriza, my concern is that the radical Left in Europe no longer seems to see an alternative form of power outside the framework of regulated capitalism. Admittedly, the balance of power is not good, and restoring social rights is already progress. But look at the sacrifices that have been made! Capitalism has shown so clearly where it’s leading us that there is the possibility of a real chance of an emancipatory or socialist project—call it whatever you want—if it puts an end to social injustice, and provided that the population participates directly in the political and economic choices made by the society. I would find it regrettable if all the suffering, all these efforts that have been made, lead to nothing more than a slightly regulated capitalism. Obviously, these transformations need to be brought about with the assent of the population, at a pace that is acceptable to the people. Syriza was elected to restore a degree of social justice, and not to conduct a program of emancipation. But for the population to follow along, you have to be able to present them with a project, an outlook. And that’s where there’s a real lack of reflection and concrete action.

    *Éric Toussaint is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Liège, is president of CADTM Belgium (Committee for the Abolition of Third-World Debt), and a member of the Scientific Committee of ATTAC France. He is the author, with Damien Millet, of “AAA. Audit Annulation Autre politique”, Seuil, Paris, 2012 and of “Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank, Sixty Questions, Sixty Answers”, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2010. He has published extensively in this field. He is a member of the Fourth International leadership.

    Translated by Snake Arbusto

    This article originally appeared in International Viewpoint.

    Text box[3] : Redistributive monetary reform

    A redistribution of wealth can also be accomplished via an appropriate monetary reform. Without going into detail here, this could be modelled on the monetary reform carried out after the Second World War by the Belgian government, or, in another part of the world and at another point in time, by the Nicaraguan authorities in 1985. It is aimed at taxing the revenues of those who have enriched themselves at the expense of others. The principle is simple: At the time of a currency change, automatic parity between the old and new currency (one former euro in exchange for one new drachma, for example) would be guaranteed only up to a certain ceiling.

    Above that ceiling, the excess amounts must be placed in an escrow account and their origin justified and authenticated. In principle, any amount above the ceiling is exchanged at a less favourable rate (for example: two former euros in exchange for one new drachma); should the funds prove to be of criminal origin, they can be seized. Such a monetary reform would allow a share of the wealth to be distributed in a way that is more socially equitable. Another goal of such a reform is to reduce the supply of money in circulation so as to fight inflationary tendencies. In order for it to be effective, strict oversight over movements of capital and foreign exchange operations must be put in place.

    Here is an example (of course the rate scales given here can be modified a great deal following a serious study of the distribution of cash savings among households and the adoption of strict criteria):

    1€ would be exchanged for 1 new drachma up to 200,000 € 1€ = 0.7 new drachma between 200,000 and 250,000 € 1€ = 0.6 new drachma between 250,000 and 350,000 € 1€ = 0.5 new drachma between 350,000 and 500,000 € 1€ = 0.4 new drachma between 500,000 and 600,000 € 1€ = 0.2 new drachma above 600,000 € 1€ = 0.1 new drachma above one million euros

    If a household has 200,000 € in cash, it receives 200,000 new drachmas If it has 250,000 €, it receives 200,000 + 35,000 = 235,000 new drachmas (n.d.) If it has 350,000 €, it receives 200,000 + 35,000 + 60,000 = 295,000 n.d. If it has 500,000 €, it receives 200,000 + 35,000 + 60,000 + 75,000 = 370,000 n.d. If it has 600,000 €, it receives 200,000 + 35,000 + 60,000 + 75,000 + 40,000 = 370,000 n.d. If it has one million €, it receives 415,000 + 80,000 = 495,000 new drachmas If it has two million €, it receives 415,000 + 80,000 + 100,000 = 595,000 n.d.

    CADTM

    Footnotes

    [1] Source:http://www.lecourrier.ch/127…

    [2] See: http://cadtm.org/What-if-SYRIZA-too…

    [3] This text box written by Eric Toussaint was added subsequent to the interview published by the daily Le Courrier

     

  • 2015: A Time for Outrage?

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    Two years have passed since one of the great political and social thinkers of our time departed this world.

    On 26 February 2013 Stephane Hessel died at the age of 95. Hessel enjoyed a long life, from his birth in Berlin to his final breath in Paris, where one of his last works Indignez-Vous! (Time For Outrage) was published.

     

    The small book holds a large punch and it came to life from a fiery speech Hessel gave in 2008 commemorating the French resistance. The 37 page book was translated into many languages and emerged during a time when the occupy movement was breaking out of social networks and onto the streets, it was a time when the Arab spring was spreading across the middle east, a time when the Sarkozy presidency was coming to an end and Greece was in the throes of social and economic upheaval.

    Indignez-Vous! the short yet fierce little book showed the resilient spirit of Hessel who penned the work at the age of 92. The resistance veteran strived to resurrect the resistance spirit for this generation not only in France but across Europe and further afield.

    Indignez-Vous! warned us of how social rights can fall victim to harsh economic changes. Hessel painted the capitalist machine as the agitator of such harshness, “The power of money which the resistance fought so hard against has never been as great and selfish and shameless as it is now.”

    Hessel used Indignez-Vous! to call the youth out against the social oppression that a recession brings. The small book was his last great call on the current generation to take over, keep going, get angry! Indeed the youth took over when they occupied Wall Street, indeed this generation kept going as the Arab spring spread like wild fire and indeed the modern voter got angry when they dumped Sarkozy from office, but in 2015 the fight continues.

    Hessel came from a generation that stood up against the wrongs done against social freedoms and human rights, he called on the modern youth to follow suit and keep the flame lit, to you who will create the 21stcentury, he writes in Indignez-vous! “we say with affection, to create is to resist, to resist is to create.”

    Across Europe the austere way of living created a harsh reality, especially in countries such as Spain, Ireland and Greece.

    Recently in Greece we have seen the people there pushed to their limits and in its general election they chose left wing values in the form of the anti-austerity party Syriza. In Spain we might see the same trend in it’s forthcoming election as the similar anti austerity party Podemos is rising to become a beacon in the Spanish political landscape. In Ireland, the support of the Labour party which oversaw strict austerity measures in government is being eradicated by anti-austerity left wing parties such as Sinn Fein. A general election in Ireland is a year away, but the rise of Sinn Fein and other left wing parties is inevitable and like Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, Ireland can also display that social courage and left wing values that Stephane Hessel advocated for.

    Hessel’s legacy is a great one, his freedom fighting spirit, his handbook of social revolution Indignez-Vous! and his overall fantastically inspiring life. Stephane Hessel lived life long and rebelliously, it is just a pity he hasn’t lived it just a bit longer to see this generation through these hard times but his words remain with us as a legacy of a permanent revolution.

    To create is to resist, to resist is to create.

    Stephane Frederic Hessel 20 0ctober 1917 – 26 February 2013

  • SYRIZA, Socialists and the Struggles Ahead: A Roundtable

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    Greece's left-wing government is on a collision course with the rulers of Europe over the commitment of the Coalition of the Radical Left, or SYRIZA, to reverse drastic austerity measures imposed under the Memorandums negotiated with the European Union (EU).

    SYRIZA won a tremendous victory in the January 25 elections because it promised an alternative to the catastrophic economic and social crisis that Greece has endured for more than five years. But with the government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras only two weeks old, the political and financial elite of Europe, from Germany's Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schäuble to Mario Draghi, head of the European Central Bank (ECB), have rejected all proposals to negotiate Greece's huge foreign debt or relax the austerity conditions imposed as a condition for the bailout of the country's economic system. With a showdown approaching, all eyes are on the struggle in Greece and the hope it hold for the future.

    Antonis Davanellos and Sotiris Martalis are members of the Greek socialist organization Internationalist Workers Left (DEA), a co-founder of SYRIZA a decade ago and now a leading force in the Left Platform inside SYRIZA. Both are members of SYRIZA's Central Committee. On February 7, Antonis and Sotiris spoke to an audience of socialists in the U.S. via videoconference about SYRIZA's election victory, the first days of the new government and the struggles that lie ahead. After an opening presentation, the two responded to numerous questions from the audience. Here, we publish their comments, edited and supplemented for publication at SocialistWorker.org. [This article originally appeared in Socialist Worker. – Eds.]

    Antonis Davanellos: Opening Presentation

    The first thing to understand is the importance of January 25 as a victory for the left, as well as for SYRIZA. This has happened in a country where, in the past century, there were two dictatorships and a civil war, in which the left suffered terrible defeats. This is the first major political victory for the radical left in the whole period since the 1940s.

    This victory is based on the mass resistance of the working class in Greece over the past five or six years. So you can understand that throughout the population, throughout the country, there is a feeling of joy and celebration.

    This feeling of celebration has been reinforced by what the ministers of the new government have said in just the first weeks after the election. The government will officially be in power on Monday, February 9, but before that, when the new ministers were taking over their ministries, they were already saying and doing important things.

    For example, one was sworn in and immediately announced that the ongoing privatization of the port of Piraeus, the largest seaport in Greece, will end. Another said that as of that day, the privatization of the Public Electricity Co. (DEI) would be reversed. There were announcements that the layoffs in the public sector would end, and 3,500 workers could return to work.

    Also during this time, Tsipras made an agreement with the Independent Greeks [known by the initials ANEL, a right-wing party that is also against the Memorandums] to be a part of the government, going against the position of SYRIZA that it would form a government of the left.

    It seems that some people outside Greece think that SYRIZA has made a deal with a party that is similar to Golden Dawn. This is not the case. The Independent Greeks are a party that comes from the right. They have also taken a clear position against the Memorandums, which has forced them to change their conservative positions on specific questions. For example, ANEL supports privatization in its basic program. Yet over the past five years, it has been against any concrete proposal for privatization because they were carried out under the Memorandums.

    After the agreement with ANEL was announced, our organization produced a statement opposing this alliance with the Independent Greeks. We said that this went against the declarations from the conferences of SYRIZA that rejected alliances with center-left parties–surely this meant the center-right as well. We said that the alliance with ANEL would be a transmission belt for conservative pressures on the government.

    But to be honest, in the days ahead, I think your attention should not be on the Independent Greeks as much as other factors that are much more crucial in determining what the government will or will not do. The threat posed by the Independent Greeks will be an easy problem for us to solve compared to the bigger problems–dealing with the international lenders, with the existing ruling class in Greece, and with the existing state.

    After the formation of the government, the negotiations with Greece's creditors began, and what we have seen is the European Union and European Commission, the European Central Bank, along with the German government, taking a very hard position. They are trying to humiliate the newly elected government in Greece, with a clear aim of isolating and eventually overthrowing that government.

    Facing them is the new Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, who is not a member of SYRIZA. He is an ex-social democrat who was selected by the SYRIZA leadership to be a minister. He is trying to maneuver against the pressure exerted by the EU by changing the basic positions of SYRIZA around the question of debt, in the hopes of making a compromise with Wolfgang Schäuble [the finance minister of Germany].

    We don't know what the outcome of this maneuvering will be. This is a new and unpredictable situation. But we do know the importance of the changes in Greece–they are immense, inside the country, and outside it.

    Within Greece, there is a sense that we must support the government, but also that the government must not compromise with the creditors. Two nights ago, on February 5, after a last-minute appeal and very little organization, more than 10,000 people were in Syntagma Square to show their support for the government, but at the same time to demand that the government not retreat.

    This will be a very complicated situation. Even if the leadership of SYRIZA wants to make a compromise, it isn't at all certain it can do so. There is a lot of evidence that the working class movement in Greece is willing to fight, and now that there is hope as a result of the SYRIZA victory, I think it can fight even better.

    But we must also remember the importance of the change internationally. A few days ago, I was in Germany, speaking to a public meeting about the government of the left in Greece, and as people there said, this is the first time in 20 years that there has been a public discussion in Germany about another possible road than neoliberalism. That is very important. You can see the alternative in Spain–the second example of left-wing success in elections after SYRIZA is Podemos. This is a real political threat to the ruling classes of Europe and the EU leadership.

    I don't know exactly what will happen–nobody knows. We may win, and we may be defeated. We don't know the end of the story. The only thing that I can tell you is that we will fight to win. Nobody should forget that SYRIZA is a particular kind of political party–it is a network of activists and militants with a strong left that isn't defeated.

    – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
    Antonis Davanellos: First Round of Answers

    We were asked about the reaction of the mass movements to the new government. It is too early to say. The government has not even, at this point, officially presented its program, so we are really at the beginning.

    There was a demonstration several days ago in Syntagma Square in support of the government and against Schäuble's threats. Plus, there are discussions and meetings in unions and at many workplaces, talking about the demands that can be presented to the government, and how to push it for solutions. But that is the point we are at right now.

    It is still early. For example, the workers at ERT [the public radio and TV station closed down by the government in 2013, which led to an occupation of the main production facility] are saying that for now, they will wait for the government to present its solution for reopening the station. We are in discussions with those workers–about the need to mobilize to make this happen quicker. But this shows the feeling is that up until now, the government is doing well.

    As for the Left Platform and the left inside SYRIZA, all the radical currents inside SYRIZA, with the exception of DEA, are participating in the government.

    For example, the Left Current, which together with us forms the Left Platform, has four important ministers in the new government. The radical wing among supporters of the current that Tsipras is part of–the Left Unity current–has five ministers. DEA has elected two members of parliament–one is a member of DEA and one is a supporter from Kalamata. Both are women, and one is the youngest member of parliament in Greece.

    As for the attitude of the ruling class in Greece toward SYRIZA and the conflict there, for the moment, this is secondary, because the principal question is the negotiations with Europe over the debt.

    The Greek ruling class isn't supporting the government, but is asking it to compromise with the EU. For its part, the leadership of SYRIZA is trying to convince the ruling class, through the media and so on, that Tsipras will find a solution without a major crisis. But all of this is speculative, because it is based on the estimation that Schäuble will accept a compromise and also that the social base of SYRIZA and its membership will accept a compromise.

    In reality, that isn't a certainty at all–on either side. I think that Schäuble cannot accept even Yanis Varoufakis' more moderate proposal, which is in conflict with the positions SYRIZA has committed to in its declarations. And at the same time, you can already hear voices inside SYRIZA protesting against the concessions of Varoufakis' plan.

    I think this is just the first chapter of the book. The second chapter will be about taxing the corporations and the rich; stopping the privatizations and reclaiming the major companies and enterprises that have been privatized; and above all, the question of controlling the banks.

    There was a question about Golden Dawn, Islamophobia and the line of SYRIZA toward immigrants in Greece. The showing of Golden Dawn was the only dark spot in the elections that we were unhappy about. Their result was a little bit weaker than the last elections, but they still won over 6 percent of the vote.

    The main thing to say is that Golden Dawn has been forced to change how it operates in order to keep its influence. Up to six months ago, it was organized around armed violence in the streets–attacks by Nazi thugs against immigrants, gays, unionists and left-wing activists.

    After the death of Pavlos Fyssas [a left-wing hip-hop artist murdered by a Golden Dawn member in September 2013] and the mass mobilizations that forced New Democracy and the state to take legal action against Golden Dawn, this orientation collapsed. Now the Nazis are considering whether they should turn toward an electoral strategy and perhaps try to cooperate with Antonis Samaras [the former prime minister and leader of the main center-right party New Democracy].

    This is because a huge crisis has opened up inside New Democracy, following the election defeat. There is a confrontation between Samaras' hard-line right strategy and policies and the traditional center-right positions of people around Kostas Karamanlis. Many of Karamanlis' followers are accusing Samaras that of having transformed New Democracy into a far-right groupuscule.

    On the question of Islamophobia, SYRIZA is a party that has grown up fighting against racism. So for the vast majority of our members and followers, Islamophobia is something they protest. Local branches of SYRIZA are organizing in support of immigrants and fighting against Islamophobia–but this is mainly at the grassroots.

    The new government has appointed Tasia Christodoulopoulou, a radical, anti-racist activist, as the minister responsible for questions of immigration. All the other parties, starting with ANEL and continuing through New Democracy and PASOK, are objecting and asking how a radical activist can be a minister and carry out the laws on immigration.

    In a month's time, there will be a demonstration demanding legalization for immigrants, giving full civil rights to the children of immigrants, accepting refugees who are fleeing war, and eliminating the camps where immigrants are detained. So you can see that this is an ongoing battle, but we are in a much better position now than we were.

    On the relationship of SYRIZA and the other parties in Greece, the first point is that this wasn't just an election victory for SYRIZA, but a major political victory.

    Look at the overall picture. SYRIZA won 36.3 percent of the vote. Then you have New Democracy, the former ruling party, at 27.8 percent, and all the other parties–including PASOK, previously the main party of the center left–are around 6 percent or less. This shows the dominance of SYRIZA in the new parliament, which gives the government many options to strengthen its position–but only if they use them.

    For example, one of the first acts of the new parliament was to elect a speaker, and the candidate put forward by SYRIZA, Zoe Konstantopoulou, got 235 votes out of 300. That means that many more members of parliament than just SYRIZA–the MPs of the Communist Party, the center-left parties–voted for SYRIZA's candidate.

    As for two other parties of the left, the Communist Party and ANTARSYA, the Communist Party has maintained its hostility toward cooperating with SYRIZA, which people call sectarian. In my mind, their attitude is not merely sectarian, but completely abstentionist and passive. They continue to attack SYRIZA first and New Democracy second. The party maintained that it would not support SYRIZA in a vote of tolerance in parliament [which would have allowed SYRIZA to lead a government on its own],

    I will say that I think Tsipras gave a big present to the leadership of the Communist Party by immediately making an agreement to form a government with the support of the Independent Greeks. If he had insisted on going to parliament to present the program of a SYRIZA government and then asked for a vote of tolerance–the course we supported–I think the Communist Party would have been in a very difficult position in maintaining its sectarian position, without losing further support.

    ANTARSYA [a coalition of anti-capitalist organizations that got less than 1 percent of the vote and does not have representation in parliament] is in trouble. Its electoral showing was a little better than in the parliamentary elections in June 2012, but still less than what it got in May 2012. For now, the coalition has many differences within it. One part is rightly supporting the SYRIZA government, while another is continuing its rejection.

    That is where things stand with SYRIZA and the other parties of the left. Given that, I think the question of the balance of forces inside SYRIZA is the more important question.

    On the left inside SYRIZA is the Left Platform, which is made up of DEA and the Left Current. At the conference, the Left Platform had 30 percent of the vote of SYRIZA members, and it is accepted by everyone that after the conference, the Left Platform became stronger.

    The new development was a split among the supporters of Tsipras in his Left Unity current. This split to the left was presented publicly through an open letter signed by 53 cadres of SYRIZA–so we refer to them as "the 53." The important thing is that if you add the support for the Left Platform to the support for the 53, together, they are a strong part of the Central Committee of SYRIZA.

    This explains why Tsipras and the party leadership didn't call meetings of the Central Committee and acted by themselves in the lead-up to the election. They were able to get away with this, but the pressure inside the party about these questions of democracy is strong and building.

    The leadership is apparently planning a reorganization of the party, which would mean a new conference held very soon, and the election of a new Central Committee. With this, Tsipras may hope he can change the balance of forces inside SYRIZA away from the left and back in his favor. Will it work? We will see. It will not be easy. But to be absolutely honest, this new situation after the elections is confusing and chaotic, and nobody knows exactly what will come next.

    I said earlier that the rest of the left inside SYRIZA, other than DEA, has agreed to participate in the government. We have decided not to participate–not just governmental offices, but also in the machinery of the state. We will try to remain a force inside the social movements and in the Left Platform inside SYRIZA.

    I will say a few things about DEA at this point. We are still a small organization, though we are double our size from when we began. The most important thing to say is that we are a very healthy organization, with connections in many unions, social movements and the local organizations of SYRIZA. We have done this openly as members of DEA, representing our organization.

    We have strengthened DEA–for example, with a serious campaign around our newspaper. We are producing a much bigger newspaper, and for the first time, we are selling our paper not only through members, but at newsstands, which is an important step forward for us.

    There are some inside SYRIZA who think that the left is isolated right now. We don't feel this way. We know that our position within SYRIZA is a minority, but we have a very big audience that is in contact with us, and that respects the political positions we are taking.

    I also want to comment on the situation outside of Greece in Europe. The politics of austerity and neoliberalism still dominate, and the gains for the right wing in countries like France and Italy are one part of the picture. But we shouldn't lose sight of the signs of change. SYRIZA's election victory in Greece is one example. The strong support for Podemos in Spain is another. Sinn Fein has made gains in Ireland, and there is good news from Portugal for the first time in some years. And in Germany, there are signs that the situation is shifting.

    Still, having said this, it is absolutely clear that a majority of the governments and all the governing institutions of Europe will attack the agenda that SYRIZA is putting forward. Against this, all the radicals inside SYRIZA have a common slogan: Not one step back. We insist on our program and will work to achieve it–to use a reference from the movement in the United States–by any means necessary.

    And "by any means necessary," that includes understanding that the confrontation with the European Union might mean an exit from the euro and a return to a national currency. We do not support this as a first choice, or worse, as a method to save Greek capitalism from the crisis. This is not a Plan B for an economic revival in Greece, as some economists have put forward. Rather, it is a political position stating that we are determined to overthrow austerity, and we will finish the job by any means necessary.

    – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
    Sotiris Martalis: First Round of Answers

    I want to comment on the question about the relationship between SYRIZA, the trade unions and the Communist Party.

    SYRIZA's forces in the unions have increased over the last period, but until now, the majority in most unions are social democrats. On most questions, they win, with the support of more conservative forces. But in the past year, there have been a number of splits, with the forces of SYRIZA in a stronger position–which has led some social democrats to approach us with support or offers of alliances. We believe that this will continue and that SYRIZA will continue to become a stronger force in the trade unions.

    Members of the Communist Party have had a sectarian policy inside the unions as well as in politics. For a long time, the Communist Party and ANTARSYA had similar demands to SYRIZA of stopping the layoffs and rehiring public-sector workers, opening up public services and enterprises that were closed and stopping the wage cuts. Now they talk about demanding that the government immediately increase salaries by 35 percent or more, to the level they were at in 2009. So you can see that this is not a policy of pushing SYRIZA from the left, but of dividing the struggle.

    I agree with Antonis that DEA is not isolated within SYRIZA–we know a large part of the left inside the Party sees DEA as an important part of the Left Platform and will continue to find ways to work with us. I also want to say that in December, DEA had a unity conference with a smaller organization, Kokkino, which has joined forces with DEA so we are now stronger and better able to build inside SYRIZA.

    As far as the attitude of workers and popular forces toward the new government, there were many symbolic steps that won a lot of support for SYRIZA. For example, on the day after the election, Tsipras made a point of going to national resistance monument in Kaisariani, where the Nazis executed 200 people, most of them Communists, on May Day in 1944, during the occupation of Greece in the Second World War. Tsipras laid a wreath in memory of the victims.

    Also on that first day, workers took down the barriers surrounding parliament, which were put up to stop demonstrators. At the same time, the new ministers were announcing that SYRIZA would honor its promises to implement measures like restoring the minimum wage to 751 euros a month from 530 euros, to re-establish collective labor agreements, to go back to not taxing people's first 12,000 euros of income and so on.

    All this gave a lot of momentum to the government, and a lot of hope to people that it will stand up for its commitments. Now, we have to see how the government deals with the international lenders so that it will have money to honor these promises.

    – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
    Antonis Davanellos: Second Round of Answers

    I want to first talk about the working class movement before the elections. It's obvious that Greece had a huge resistance movement until 2012. From 2010 to 2012, there were several dozen general strikes and many other major workplace battles, which were the backbone of mass demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of people.

    This experience was important for the working class in many ways, but most of all, it taught workers that to win even their minimum demands against austerity, they had to defeat the government and reject the Troika. Greek workers tried to do this through their own struggles and demonstrations, but at that point, they encountered the naked force of the state. We have faced not just the police, but military special forces, with all their weapons.

    It was a very difficult experience, and by 2012, workers had turned their hopes toward elections to defeat the Memorandum governments. The conclusion can be summed up as this: We prefer the way of struggle, with the working class in the middle of the political scene, but we can't choose the conditions we face.

    It is important to say that this wasn't a turn to the right since 2012–that is absolutely clear. This is why SYRIZA won–because the mass of the working class is attempting to make changes in their conditions by supporting a left alternative in elections.

    At the same time, of course, there were workers and social struggles that did continue. I think that is an important fact for everybody to remember, because it means the conditions exist for a huge movement to reappear very quickly. That sends a message to the ruling class, but also to the new government.

    I'll also say something about the Movement of the Squares, the rise of the popular assemblies and so on. Looking back, it has not had as much of an impact as many people outside Greece may think. For a period, the occupations of public spaces were very important, but the movement didn't leave much behind.

    I think that here in Greece–though this is not the case in many countries–the central social force of the resistance movement has been the organized working class. By organized, I mean organized in workplaces for the possibility of strikes and struggles. In Greece, we didn't have the same kind of sentiment that people have called "anti-party" or "anti-political." It is important to recognize that the majority of workers felt that to change their lives, they needed to support a left-wing party in the elections.

    In the concrete circumstances of today, various forces on the left, including DEA as well as the Left Current within SYRIZA, support the idea of reconstructing the popular committees–that is, uniting local organizations of resistance. We are at the beginning stages of this–something we are discussing and planning for, but have not yet done.

    In Spain, the development of the resistance was different. There, the occupation movement of the "indignados" was a much stronger ingredient in the resistance. I think this is the basis of the creation of Podemos. Within Podemos, we have a relationship with Izquierda Anticapitalista. We think this is the most serious effort to organize within Podemos against the influence of these anti-politics or anti-left ideas that could seriously damage this movement that has created so many hopes.

    For Greece, the Podemos movement is very important. Maybe the most important event for us after the election was the massive demonstration in Madrid organized by Podemos–with hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating in solidarity with Greece, showing the unity of the resistance across Europe.

    Someone asked about the social democratic parties in Greece and why they have not responded to the crisis by moving to the left. I think the explanation lies in what the social democratic parties have done over the past 20 or 30 years. They have moved so far to the right, and this involved creating relationships with the ruling classes that they can't break now. I think it is impossible for the Social Democratic Party in Germany to return to what the SPD was in the 1970s.

    Given this, I think the only way forward is what we have done in Greece. For the left to grow, it must sweep aside the social democratic parties. In Greece, PASOK, which was once one of the strongest social democratic parties in Europe, basically doesn't exist anymore. It won less than 5 percent of the vote, and it can no longer mobilize people to demonstrations.

    As for the question about the importance of raising the minimum wage to the pre-Memorandum level, this is critical. It is not really about the conditions of the workers who are paid at the minimum wage. More importantly, this measure, along with the restoration of collective labor agreements, sends a political message to the majority of the working class that we starting to make gains, and there is more to come in the future. Our newspaper's front-page headline right now is: "We will take everything back."

    The minimum wage influences income at all levels. If the minimum salary is growing, it will push up all salaries above it. So this is very important, and I'm sure we will see that the ruling class will pressure Tsipras to delay and retreat on this.

    What obstacles does SYRIZA present for mobilizations of the working class? I think the answer is to this question is: It doesn't. We must change our way of thinking, at least with the conditions that exist in Greece. We cannot explain everything wrong by saying the problems are caused by the leadership. There is something else very important, which is the balance of forces inside society.

    That does not mean that the leadership of SYRIZA has no responsibility for what happens. It has serious responsibilities that we demand it live up to. But in reality, there is no magic button that Tsipras can push and the working class will mobilize inside Greece.

    It is very important that our political current has a transitional strategy and tactics. We are starting from the real conditions of the working class movement and trying to put forward concrete steps to make gains and increase the confidence of workers. I want to take this opportunity to again thank Haymarket Books for its help in publishing a book in Greek on the Fourth Congress of the Communist International [Toward the United Front: Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922]. We thought that with our relationship to SYRIZA, we were opening up a new path for socialists, but with these documents, we realized that the path was begun some years ago. To introduce these ideas in a book for the Greek left was a big help for us.

    That leads me to talking about the lessons from the experience of SYRIZA for other countries. Here, I must be very honest. It is not possible to translate these lessons directly for anyone on the left internationally. SYRIZA is the concrete result of the concrete conditions of the concrete class struggle in Greece.

    Nobody can explain the political development of SYRIZA without the massive mobilization of working class three years ago. This was the basis of SYRIZA's rise and its victory in the elections, but that was not the only factor. Ten years ago in Greece, there were huge mobilizations against capitalist globalization, the creation of the Greek Social Forum and a movement against war. These are also part of the roots of SYRIZA.

    After this experience, we tried to continue what we started in the Greek Social Forum with a political formation. Ten years after the founding of SYRIZA, we are happy to say that we have done very well–but that is a period of 10 years of fighting, of specific developments of the Greek left and so on. So we cannot give lessons to anyone.

    But having said that, as I said before, it is very important for any political current to hold some basic strategic ideas, and here, I think the concept of transitional demands and strategies is very important. That's why we make reference to Lenin and Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg. There are times when we are in a small minority, and there are times when we feel like we are swimming with the stream with these ideas.

    I will talk more about the question of exiting the euro. As I said before, our approach to this question is in the context of what will bring us closer to socialism. So our approach is absolutely not the same as the economists who think that exiting the euro will ease Greece's crisis within the bounds of capitalism.

    That's why we don't feel that we are saying the same thing as Costas Lapavitsas [the left-wing economist and now a member of parliament representing SYRIZA]. Costas is a radical. His proposals for exiting the euro are coming from the left, but we can't agree with the idea that changing the currency will pull Greek society out of the crisis. If the balance of forces between workers and the ruling class remains the same, the shift to a national currency could be a disaster for workers by making them bear the brunt of a huge devaluation.

    Shifting to a national currency based on a permanent devaluation in order for the Greek economy to become more competitive with other countries is not exactly a march toward social liberation. It can be a march toward worse misery and poverty.

    On the other hand, however, we prefer Lapavitsas' economic ideas to those of Yanis Varoufakis. The ideas of Varoufakis are simply social democratic. He believes he has clever mechanisms for negotiations on the debt, where Greece will pay all of the debt, but in a way where nobody loses–not Greek workers, not the creditors, not anybody. He is proposing that Greece be able to issue new bonds, where the payments are tied to growth in the Greek economy, to the Euribor measure of interest rates offered by banks, and to other things.

    I think that Varoufakis' hope to avoid a confrontation with the ruling class and save the Greek economy through his new financial ideas is simply a social democratic fantasy that will lead to a big setback. And I'm not sure at all that Schäuble will accept what Varoufakis is proposing. In just a few days, the finance ministers from the Eurozone will meet to discuss the plan and make a decision. So a moment of truth is coming for the new government.

    As I said before, we don't start from the question of whether Greece should keep the euro or leave. We start from the idea that we must organize our class to confront and reverse austerity, and in this way, we can open the way for exiting the era of neoliberalism and moving toward socialism.

    I will finish with the question of SYRIZA's agreement with ANEL and the discussion inside the Left Platform. We don't agree with making an alliance with ANEL. It isn't mainly because ANEL is tied up with the Greek Orthodox Church or that it is a hard-line Greek nationalist party. All this is true, but the main problem is that the presence of ANEL inside a government of the left will be the transmission belt for the ruling class to put more pressure on the government.

    That's why we opposed the agreement with ANEL from the beginning, and why you can be sure that we will be the first to push for kicking the ANEL founder, Panos Kammenos, out of the government when this becomes possible. Frankly, I think that will be easy when the time comes.

    But there is a different danger that people need to be aware of. Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament and leader of the European alliance of center-left parties, visited Athens and said it was a shame for SYRIZA to make an alliance with the Independent Greeks. But his alternative was that SYRIZA should create an alliance with PASOK.

    That is pure hypocrisy. For the past three years, the European social democrats were supporting a government in which PASOK participated under the rule of New Democracy and a hard right prime minister who has connections with Golden Dawn. And now they talk about fighting the right?

    I think that Tsipras made the agreement with the Independent Greeks because he wanted to form a government the next day after the elections. If he was obliged to move in the way we proposed–to wait for two weeks until the new session of parliament opened and seek a vote of tolerance for SYRIZA to govern alone–that would have meant the prime minister from New Democracy, Antonis Samaras, would have remained in place for two weeks, and been in a position to organize some very damaging things, like a bank run or closing some large enterprises in order to create a climate of panic. And that might have created the conditions for parliament not to accept the result of the elections.

    So I think that Tsipras moved so quickly because he was afraid that two weeks is a long and dangerous time in conditions like these. That's why the discussion about ANEL is calmer inside Greece. Everybody knows that this is problem, but it is a problem we can confront. There are more dangerous threats for the left than ANEL's presence in the government.

    So the discussions within the Left Platform are very difficult. In crucial political moments, the political background and education of every part of SYRIZA will come to the surface. So, for example, because of our political tradition, it was easier for DEA to recognize the problems with Varoufakis' ideas–and not as easy for the comrades of the Left Current, who come from a Stalinist background, where the popular front is a prominent legacy.

    So there is confusion among the left in SYRIZA, but with the concrete experiences we are going through now, we can confront this confusion. For example, before the parliament opened, we worked together with other currents in SYRIZA to stop any tendency in the party from undermining the importance of the commitment on the minimum wage and other proposals SYRIZA has made.

    So that is the situation. It is very difficult and complicated, and the only thing we can say is that we will fight as hard as we can within this situation for the goals and strategies of the left.

    – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
    Sotiris Martalis: Second Round of Answers

    I have one point to add to the question about whether the ruling class could try to build another social democratic party to counteract the popularity of SYRIZA. In reality, they have tried this, with the creation of a new party named Potami, which means "river." Potami is a creation with a lot of support from the mass media, and it doesn't have a clear line.

    The real problem for the ruling class is not which social democratic party to create or rebuild, but the political defeat of the center-left, which has given SYRIZA political hegemony. On the center-left, there are three parties, one of which didn't reach the 3 percent necessary to get into parliament–so those parties are very weak.

    One question SYRIZA must face now is what happens when former leaders of these social democratic parties try to come to SYRIZA. SYRIZA has problems just based on its size. Its membership is around 35,000 people, and it won 2,250,000 votes–that's a very big gap. So that's another problem that reality has presented to SYRIZA, and that it must solve.

    Transcription by Karen Domínguez Burke

    This article originally appeared in Socialist Worker.

     

     

  • After the Fall: An Autopsy of the Midterms

    Surveying the wreckage of his party’s 2014 election campaign, Howard Dean, on the November 9th Meet the Press, was candid, with such sound bytes as, ““Where the hell is the Democratic party …You got to stand for something if you want to win.” The Republicans’ message was, “We’re not Obama.” What was the Democrats’ message? “Oh well, we really aren’t either.”

    Translation: “Get my message; we need a message.”

    No matter how hard the Democrats tried to demonize their Republican rivals—the data in several states show a far higher rate of negative ads from Democrats —they couldn’t match the Death Star ferocity of the GOP message attack: the failed presidency of Barack Obama. That energized the Republican base. Nothing so potent was tendered to bring out the Democratic base vote, especially among white workers.

    In election eve comments, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka placed the blame on the victors’ having “enough big-money backers to drown out the truth.” He did see hope in a number of ballot issues that directly aid working people, especially raises in the minimum wage (Arkansas, Illinois, Nebraska) but also including mandating open school board meetings (Colorado), a right to vote amendment that proponents say precludes voter ID requirements (Illinois), guaranteed birth-control prescription coverage (Illinois), a millionaires’ tax (Illinois), and repeal of the automatic gas-sales tax increase (Massachusetts). Many passed in the same states that swung to the Republicans.

    “The defining narrative of this election was confirmation, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Americans are desperate for a new economic life,” Trumka said. “In way too many elections, they got a false choice.  In these very difficult times, they did not a get a genuine economic alternative to their unhappiness and very real fear of the future. But when voters did have a chance to choose their future directly—through ballot measures—their decisions are unmistakable.”

    One such opportunity happened in Richmond, Cal., where the Richmond Progressive Alliance ran candidates for city office against a slate owned, in effect, by Chevron, the city’s main employer. Chevron red-baited the progressives, spending $3 million on a whispering campaign suggesting one of the insurgents was gender-challenged and another was “a dangerous anarchist” because he took part in nearby Oakland’s Occupy action.

    That pricey disinformation gambit didn’t work; the Alliance is a group with a 10-year history of recognized successes, including being instrumental in raising the minimum wage; cleaning the air—largely by wrenching agreements out of Chevron; lowering energy bills; and ending the police practice of driver’s license checkpoints. Among its many campaign issues: saving the local medical center, fighting for teachers’ rights and better schools, and instituting job training for youth and other local residents at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. And what is singularly important: it’s a 24/7 operation; they don’t fold up between elections, but serve as the political base for elected officials committed to social change instead of corporate control. As the Alliance’s basic literature says, “It is between elections that corporations and entrenched interests have the most influence in bending government to their way.”

    A giant October rally saw more than 500 attendees pack the Richmond Civic Center—to meet the candidates and hear Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who endorsed the slate and predicted the Alliance and its grassroots work would prove a model for other cities. The three council members plus the mayor, a well-known area independent running on their slate, are now Richmond’s elected leadership.

    Few Working-Class Issues Prominent in Campaigns

    It would seem that, in principle,Trumka was right about working people reliably voting their class interests when those interests are starkly drawn. So why weren’t working families’ needs front and center on candidate appeals? Why wasn’t wage stagnation pinned on the GOP? Or Wall Street banking theft? Where were the critical living wage demands? And where was organized labor in making these class issues part of the Democrats’ campaign? Why didn’t it disabuse the Democrats’ notion that keeping their heads down and waiting for the GOP to implode is not a strategy; it’s barely a tactic.

    Weakness in Liberal Election Punditry

    Much of the center-left commentary on the election follows a pattern begun soon after the 2008 election, to wit that President Obama should grow a spine. Writing in Daily Kos, Laurence Lewis advances the incontestable, that “Democrats have to reclaim the mantle of being the people’s party, and they must fight any Republican efforts that will widen the income gap, undermine civil and human rights, or loosen protections on workers, consumers, the environment, and the historically and institutionally disadvantaged.”

    Good sentiment, but as advice it’s like demanding a castrato reproduce. It’s that big-tent mantra that requires at least rhetorically satisfying such disparate agencies as Wall Street hedge funders, donors, labor unions, tenant farmers and tenants, landowners and landlords, feminists and fathers’ rights advocates, and an agglomeration of interests that not only can’t agree on a common agenda, but are in many ways antagonistic. Even the need to battle corporate rapacity in the long-term interest of business itself isn’t shared by many in the party’s higher circles, either for ideological, economic, or opportunistic reasons.

    Add the post- Great Society politics holding that election success comes from courting the always-in-play statistical middle of the electorate—especially when traditional New Deal-like supporters and union leaders have nowhere else to go absent massive changes in constitutional and election law, and the idea of this party moving toward populism in anything but rhetoric is stillborn. Then there’s the baleful electoral notion that you go after existing voters as safe bets instead of new ones who could be wild cards, and you have a lose-lose scenario.

    Unions Stump for Democrats Who Might As Well Be Mainstream Republicans

    Case in point: New York governor Andrew Cuomo is the state’s most business-friendly and worker-bashing top official since Nelson Rockefeller. AFT President Randi Weingarten had it right, if late, when she pointedly assured members in a memo posted on the union’s website days before the election that “I am deeply disappointed and appalled by Gov. Cuomo’s recent statement that public education is a ‘monopoly’ that needs to be busted up. She went on to say that his was language more appropriate for “hedge fund millionaires, right-wing privatizers, and tea partiers,” and it was “heartbreaking to see Cuomo aping them.” She distinguished Cuomo from better “gubernatorial candidates [in other states] who unequivocally support public education, respect teachers, and will fight for the investment our schools need.”

    That’s not how the pro-labor Working Families Party saw it, as it hand-delivered Cuomo its endorsement, despite a revolt by grassroots members backing Fordham University law professor Zephyr Teachout. The neophyte candidate went on to strongly challenge Cuomo in the Democratic primary, garnering some 35 percent of the state primary vote.

    The party endorsed Cuomo because key unions in the party didn’t just agree to differ for the nonce and work together after the election; they made plain that if Cuomo was denied the nomination, they would walk, find a new party, and take their money with them. So the WFP campaigned without mentioning its own candidate. Its ace in the hole was on the order of “never mind the candidate—it’s the party’s ballot status that matters.”

    One high-placed source in the multi-state SEIU 1199 put the best face on what, in any other context, would be blackmail, saying that with healthcare funding in crisis, “the union has to get a seat at the governor’s table” in order to have influence. Assuming it could influence outcomes—never a gimme—the obvious question is why the union simply didn’t take a four-month sabbatical from the party (especially when it was clear Cuomo was unbeatable) without threatening to junk a 16-year party relationship. “Well, you know 1199; we don’t play nice,” the source said, making it clear the comment was not for attribution.

    If there was a protest vote against the neoliberal governor, it went to the Greens, whose statewide total of some 200,000 is impressive, especially for an underfunded campaign and a skeletal party whose major assets were credible top candidates, some facility with new media, and just enough cash to do robocalls.

    Previewing a Congressional GOP Majority

    What can we expect from this new political bestiary? The most obvious things a GOP-dominated Senate will task itself with is a further erosion of, if not full-scale assault on, Obamacare and a trench war over federal appointments, from federal judges to cabinet members to regulatory agencies (including the NLRB). At this writing, the lame duck session in the House is expected to block Obama from permanently filling the remaining vacancy on the District of Columbia Circuit court, which, given its location, frequently rules on federal regulations and enforcement agencies, including those overseeing labor relations, health and safety, and environmental cases.

    But if some mutated bipartisanship emerges, corporate-tax reform (the kind that mean fewer taxes for corporations), deficit reduction, and federal highway funding (but not mass transit) are the future at best. If not, get ready for a brawl over approving the Keystone XL pipeline, an environmental nightmare, or countering the nativist swing against immigrants that fires opposition to the Dream Act.

    Ironically, labor may benefit from a Republican Congress in at least one area: trade policy. Many in the GOP don’t like fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement either—and labor could find its new best friend in Tea Party loyalists. Proof maybe of Marx’s maxim that history does repeat, “the second time as farce.”

    The Toll

    So it isn’t hard to explain the GOP’s surge. Added to the demonizing of Obama, it was a low-turnout election where just 35 percent of registered voters cast ballots, meaning (for starters) that poor people and students didn’t vote in proportion to their size in the population. Voting was also down among key progressive constituencies: African-Americans, Hispanics, and unmarried women. By contrast, the proportion of voters 65 and over rose from 16 percent in 2012 to 22 percent this time. Then there’s the traditional midterm voter profile—a white male, married, older, no-flies–on-us cohort that trends conservative and votes regularly.

    Sure, voter suppression in some states effectively scaled back Democratic turnout. Two High Court rulings untying campaign contributions meant that ideologically driven corporate heads, such as the Waltons and the Koch Brothers, had a carte blanche to target close races.

    The media played its part too, treating the contests as a grand guignol and the news hook as a series of dog races and campaign blunders. But the big reason Democrats lost was because they campaigned on little more than the lesser evil fallback that “we may be bad, but they are worse.” With wages frozen, working-class homes devalued, a wealth gap that rivals the widest since the Depression, and war news that only makes Obama look weak, it was unlikely Democrats could win on a campaign that implied to voters “you’ve never had it so good.”

    The Quality of the Elected

    Here’s a selected look at what that strategy delivered:

    In Illinois, an epic battle pitted a GOP plutocrat against a Democratic kleptocrat, with equity investor and Chicago business fixture Bruce Rauner ousting incumbent Democrat Gov. Pat Quinn in a race that featured a mountain of mudslinging and some $100 million spent between the two candidates. The Democrats missed targeting one of Rauner’s campaign promises, to “create right-to-work zones: and allow local communities to decide whether workers must join a union in order to get a job.”

    For their part, the unions were slow to mobilize an army of volunteers for Quinn, who was no day at a Lake Michigan beach for working people. AFSCME and the AFT in particular never forgot his 2012 move to cut public pension costs, force government workers to pay more, raise the retirement age, and scale back cost-of-living adjustments. “Bottom line, Quinn was just not well-liked,” one senior union staff member told me, sotto voce.

    And what really is the difference when the 57-year-old Rauner, a longtime grandee of the blue-blood Commercial Club of Chicago, went on to name Democrat Bill Daly to head his transition team. The former JPMorgan Chase investment banker, and Obama and Rahm Emanuel consigliere, was named by must-read Chicago Reader columnist Ben Joravsky, “as much, or more, responsible for our state’s financial woes as anyone else in or around Illinois. Or at least the Chicago part of it.” Joravsky called Daly “a consummate insider whose firm once made millions managing state pensions funds during Governor Blago’s reign.”

    The same can be said about Massachusetts, where voters preferred GOP candidate Charlie Baker over Democrat and incumbent attorney general Martha Coakley. Baker, a former state budget director and health plan executive, was named by the Boston Globe in a 2010 investigation as singularly responsible for immense cost overruns in Boston’s “Big Dig,” a waterfront tunnel and bridge complex that replaced the decaying elevated Central Artery roadway along Boston Harbor. Originally expected to cost $3 billion, the final cost maxed out at nearly $15 billion, with interest alone coming to $7 billion, which will not be paid off until 2038. That exposé was enough to keep Baker out of the governor’s mansion in 2010, but not this time, Nor was it enough to keep him from winning the Boston Globe’s endorsement.

    So What’s the Problem?

    Among the difficulties in divining a future for the main parties is that the United States doesn’t have parties. It has agglomerations of interests and individual operators who make a career out of fashioning connections to national and state candidates. Sociologically, the party is 435 discrete election machines with paid staff and volunteers. You can’t join the Democratic or Republican Parties, but you can enroll in a club or wear a button or throw a party for a candidate. There’s no role for anyone else between elections. These are not mass parties but voting blocks, whose supporters have little capacity outside of money for influencing party directions, though the poorer of us can maybe influence officeholders and promote insurgents on the most local and least powerful of levels. Where does democracy fit?

    That’s a question the late Peter Mair raises in Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy (Verso, 2013). Without reducing his argument to a tweet, his analysis holds that even the mass socialist parties in Europe are no longer democratic in the sense that a Demos decides policy or that the parties are vehicles for voice so that elected officials even hear them, which largely explains the collapsing rates of voter participation across the continent, too, only not yet as extreme as in the U.S. The effect, then, is not just silencing voters but turning elected officials into, at best, quality control monitors of “experts,” read policy analysts and engineers, who administer the state. The parties are left with barely discernable differences over how to manage capitalism in general and an austerity regime in particular.

    Is Mair right? Do politicians have a circumscribed range of choices? Agree or disagree, a better initial question is what is labor doing to make them choose? Look at how much time and money is spent on politicking and how little on organizing, both on the job and in the wider communities over community vs. neighborhood issues, too. The two don’t have to be counterpoised, but for all intents and purposes they are. Another conundrum. David Rolf, the president of a highly successful Seattle-based healthcare affiliate of the SEIU thinks unions on every level are a dead parrot whose handlers can only hope to pass on what resources remain to newer, informal associations not mired in contract unionism. As he told The Washington Post’s Harold Meyerson, “If right-to-work passing in Michigan isn’t Lenin’s statue coming down in Red Square, I don’t know what is.”

    Add that to the changing nature of work, where an entire generation faces the possibility of never holding a full-time job, let alone a career with benefits, and it’s clear that if unions are to survive, they or their successors will have to locate or help build solidarity in a once-more fragmented working class that has no common workplace or even common, steady employer. Unfortunately, like his mentor Andy Stern, Huff (?) doesn’t drop the service model for organizing; he just switches the service model from union functions to organizing. The model is still one of condescending saviors and not working-class self-activity.

    What’s Next?

    We know what labor wants to do in the short run. Trumka announced a Raising Wages Summit set for January, which will formulate plans “to hold all 2016 candidates accountable for improving the lives of working families and will lay the groundwork for state and local legislative campaigns in 2015.” It’s engaged in a campaign against Walmart and the Walton family, gunning up support for a $15 per hour minimum wage and full-time work as the norm. It is also working with the Clinton Global Initiative to “find innovative ways to create good jobs that support workers and their families.” A post-election release reads, “The AFL-CIO is ready to work with anyone—business, government, investors—who wants to create good jobs and help restore America’s middle class and challenge policies that stand in the way of giving America the chance to go back to work.”

    You don’t have to be a Karl Marx aficionado to know that last formulation is problematic. Despite the excellent work of the union-environmental Blue-Green coalition to control for methane gas (a far greater atmospheric danger than is carbon dioxide)—and the unions’ interest in it as a job generator for replacing corroded cast iron pipe is clear and right—that confluence of mind and interest between labor and other social movements is so far the exception. More typical of the union movement’s regimen is backing business, pushing its agenda full throttle if it contains any hint of jobs. Given that the Federation also cooperates with environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, on mutual projects, where does fracking fit in? Or construction jobs, where Class A office towers, coming with bottomless budgets, run against plans for more modest and less profitable affordable housing and schools. How can labor balance the two and still claim unity? What will be prioritized?

    So what to do? Much of the answer lies in recognizing how disparate, and even conflicting, are the needs of the more than 60 national unions. There isn’t much of a common agenda that the Democrats were even obliged to promote, especially in a midterm election where candidates campaign on discrete local issues and personalities. In the best of times, labor’s ability, thus far, in getting the Democrats themselves to run on consistent working-class themes is like herding pre-schoolers, or cats.

    That’s at least unless three things happen—none the shock of the new to New Labor Forum readers. The union movement has to:

    • ratchet up its demands, bring union power out of isolation at the bargaining table or whispered into the ears of legislators and back to the workplace, where it has teeth;
    • make common cause with the entire working class and not simply the organized sector, no matter how generalizable it thinks that what’s good for members is good for all;
    • mobilize new voters not just in seasonal GOTV efforts but regularly. And not just as voters, but as activists.

    Fear of a reactionary specter only gets you so far, especially when the sitting president, and not the party out of power, is widely seen—fairly or not—as a deer in the headlights, and neoliberal Democratic governors are more at home promoting the needs of the privileged .01 percent of the population than with those shared by 99.9 percent of their own voters.

    Then there’s the very real possibility that Hillary Clinton will be the next Democratic candidate for president. That way can’t be the way to build a New Jerusalem.

     

    Michael Hirsch, a New Politics editorial board member, is a longtime labor activist, former steelworker, recently retired union staffer and a New York-based politics and labor writer. This article originally appeared in the Winter 2015 issue of New Labor Forum.

  • Panel Discussion on Syriza Victory

    The Campaign for Peace and Democracy sponsored a panel discussion Friday evening on "After the Greek Elections: The Future of Austerity in Greece, Europe, and Beyond." A standing-room-only audience heard speakers address the success of the Syriza coalition party in the recent Greek elections and how it is dealing with the austerity crisis.

    Part 1 (part 2 is below)

    Here were my opening remarks:

    Hello. I’m Tom Harrison, co-director of the CPD, which is the sponsor of this forum along with the NYU Radical Film and Lecture Series. The Co-Sponsors are AKNY-Greece Solidarity Movement/Aristeri Kinisi Neas Yorkis, SYRIZA-NY, ANTARSYA-US, Jacobin, New Politics, Against the Current, Logos, the International Socialist Organization (ISO)-NY, Socialist Alternative, and
    Democratic Socialists of America-New York City

    So, welcome to “After the Greek Elections: The Future of Austerity in Greece, Europe and Beyond.” Thanks for braving the chill and for putting up with the several changes of venue.

    Before we get underway, however, a word from one of our sponsors. The Campaign for Peace and Democracy has been around since 1982. Our deep involvement in solidarity work with Greece flows not only from our opposition to the power of financial and corporate elites and their political lackeys – but also our commitment to promoting international solidarity among progressive movements in different parts of the world. That’s the kind of thing the Campaign has been doing for more than 30 years, whether it’s bringing Eastern European dissidents together with Western peace and justice activists, as we did in the 1980s, or trying to foster support for and knowledge of the anti-austerity struggle in Greece, as we are doing today. The Greek struggles are the vanguard of a global resistance, a resistance of which we too are a part.

    This meeting is dedicated to discussing the hard questions that confront Syriza and Greece. Tonight, therefore, you will hear much criticism of Syriza, at least of its leaders, as well as much praise. But I think there is general agreement that the coming to power of a party of the radical left represents an enormous step forward – towards a better world as well as a better Greece.

    We must applaud the Greek peoples' courage in defying the threats and pressure applied by EU leaders and financial circles to influence the election. But we must remember that Syriza's electoral triumph was prepared by six years of grassroots resistance, including dozens of general strikes, the movement of the squares, mobilizations against the neofascist Golden Dawn, and the valiant struggles of teachers, cleaners, transport workers, media workers, and many others. During those six years, Greeks have fought back with great determination, offering an inspiring example to all those, throughout the world, who are being strangled by the neoliberal agenda – the agenda of crippling unions, especially unions of public employees, reducing workers’ living standards, cutting public services, drastic upward redistribution of wealth, and securing the overwhelming domination of corporate and financial elites. This brutal agenda is grinding down the vast majority of the population and fuelling the rise of the far right.

    We hope the election of the Syriza government will have a domino effect across Europe; it has already begun with Spain, where the fast-growing Podemos movement stands to make major gains in elections later this year. On election night, Greek crowds chanted: “First we take Athens, then Madrid, then Berlin!”

    And we hope that its effects will be felt in the United States, where the rich and powerful have had their way for much too long. The experience of the Greek people shows that a massive people's coalition can be built, a powerful movement of the left allied with an independent political party, that can shake the financial citadels and eventually take power.

    Meanwhile, we know that the elites of the EU are determined to crush the Syriza government and nip its radical project in the bud. They desperately want to prevent the “infection” of radical democracy from spreading. So it is our job precisely to do all we can to spread it. That – spreading and intensifying the resistance — is the best hope for the success of Syriza and the future of the Greek people.

    Greeks are courageously standing up to power. They need our support, and this meeting is an early contribution to the forging of that solidarity in the U.S.  Big solidarity meetings have already taken place in London, Paris and other European cities. But they also need us to follow their example. As Syriza’s slogan puts it: “Hope is coming. Greece is going forward. Europe is changing.” We stand with the Greek people. Their battle is also ours.

    The speakers:

    Natassa Romanou is a Research Professor at Columbia University in Climate Studies, a member of SYRIZA and the ecosocialist group System Change Not Climate Change. She is a founding member, SYRIZA-NY and AKNY. Natassa was in Greece for the elections.

    Alan Akrivos is a founding member SYRIZA-NY, a member of Socialist Alternative/(CWI), and among the founders of AKNY. He has been active in the struggle to stop the neo-fascist Golden Dawn in NYC, and speaks frequently across the U.S. on issues of international politics, labor, and socialism.

    Iannis Delatolas is an art photographer, a founding member of AKNY, and a supporter of Antarsya-MARS and of the International Socialist Tendency. He has been involved in the antifascist solidarity movement with Greece and in struggles for LGBTQ rights, abortion rights, anti-war, and other social justice causes.

    Nantina Vgontzas is a Greek-American PhD student in sociology at NYU focusing on political economy and social movements. She is a member of the UAW Graduate Student Organizing Committee and involved in the nationwide Academic Workers for a Democratic Union reform movement. She grew up in the US but has lived in Greece at different points in her life, most recently during the year after the 2012 elections. This summer she will be in Athens to study developments in the labor movement amid the transformation of the party system. 

    Aaron Amaral is a member of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and a founding member of AKNY. The ISO sister organization in Greece, Internationalist Workers Left (DEA) participated in the formation of the SYRIZA coalition and is part of the Left Platform within SYRIZA.

    The chair is Joanne Landy, the other Co-Director of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy.

     

    [Note: because of technical difficulties, we are using videos from two different videographers, Joe Friendly and Stopmotionsolo. The opening remarks of the last speaker on the first video are repeated at the beginning of the second video.]

  • Revolution Defended in Rojava–For Now

    Image

    After approximately four and a half months of fighting, Kurdish forces have successfully pushed the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (known as ISIS or ISIL) out of Kobanî. The coalition of ground forces most notably included the People’s Defense Units (YPG) , Women’s Defense Units (YPJ) , and the Peshmerga from the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG).At the same time, through the air, a U.S. led-coalition made 700 airstrikes against ISIS. On February 6 it was reported  “fourteen more villages and some strategically important points have been liberated.” In an October 2014 article for Naked Capitalism Claude Salhani noted the strategic importance of the region. Salhani stated “victory for” ISIS in the region “would give the group prestige among the dozens of groups lined up in the fight against Syrian President Bashar Assad. It would also secure the terror organization’s flow of oil to a lucrative market.”

    Yet, great damage was sustained in Kobanî, with thousands killed, over 260,000 refugees having crossed the border into Turkey. For all the attention given to ISIS by mainstream Western media, these events have been tremendously underreported. Recent developments in the area known as Rojava may indicate why. Many report a social revolution is underway in Kurdistan, with the three cantons of Rojava – Efrîn, Kobanî, Cizîre – being at the forefront of this social transformation.

    An academic delegation, including prominent anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber, has not only confirmed, but has expressed support for what is taking place in Rojava. Graeber himself reports participatory democratic alternatives being attempted throughout the core and capillaries of Kurdish society, remarking in an interview that “One of the first places we [the academic delegation] visited was a police academy (Asayiş). Everyone had to take courses in non-violent conflict resolution and feminist theory before they were allowed to touch a gun. The co-directors explained to us their ultimate aim was to give everyone in the country six weeks of police training, so that ultimately, they could eliminate police.”

    This is in addition to schooling being provided and instituted at all levels of education, including an upstart university in Rojava. Janet Biehl, also part of the delegation, stated “The education system in Rojava is non-traditional, rejecting ideas of hierarchy, power and hegemony. Instead of following a teacher-student hierarchy, students teach each other and learn from each other’s experience.”

    The academic delegation as a whole asserts that the people of Rojava seek to not construct a state. Rather, what is sought is system of self-governance that is managed through various neighborhood and citywide councils, assemblies and committees, as well as through thematic councils, such as women’s councils and other assemblies at all levels of society, with cooperatives as the primary and vaunted mode of economic production. Citing Dara Kurdaxi, an economist and participant in the region, Michael Knapp in Peace in Kurdistan writes “the oil industry is under the control of the councils and managed by the workers’ committee.” He also notes that “A great deal of land which was previously nationalized under Assad as part of the anti-Kurdish policies is now managed by free Rojava through agricultural cooperatives” and that there also “doctors’ committees” who are “working to form a free health system.”

    Together these arrangements compose what is otherwise known as Democratic Confederalism and Democratic Autonomy. In an article written for The Guardian, Graeber compares developments and democratic experiments in Rojava to the anarchist- and socialist-led Spanish Revolution of the 1930s. In what can be considered the constitution of the three autonomous cantons, the Charter of the Social Contract stipulates that the peoples of the region “do not accept the concept of state nationalism, military and religious." Instead, it is repeatedly stated that “democratic self-management”is adhered to.

    Despite the attention paid to ISIS, virtually nil has been given by the mainstream media to Kurdistan. Little attention is being paid to the internal dynamics and goals of Rojava, which run counter to capitalism, the state, patriarchy, and the ecocidal tendencies wrought and perpetuated by various overlapping social hierarchical networks and systems. Given the extraordinary and ever-increasing corporate control of mainstream media it is no surprise that examples of system-change are given little to no airtime. Concomitant to the victory in Kobanî, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan expressed staunch opposition to self-governance in Rojava.

    None of this is to say the Rojava Revolution is without its contradictions. Human Rights Watch notes “the human rights abuses committed by the Democratic Union Party (PYD)  and its security forces are far less egregious and widespread” compared to those of the Assad regime, ISIS and other non-state actors, but “they are nonetheless serious.” Such practices include the recruitment of children under the age of eighteen years old. According to Human Rights Watch much of the activity of the underage recruits includes manning checkpoints and assisting in transferring military supplies and information – activities prohibited by international law for those underage.

    Human Rights Watch also notes that “"one 17-year-old boy said he had participated in military operations.” In addition, many people who were interviewed noted children participating on the frontlines. Human Rights Watch also states that while the YPG has condemned the presence of children in security forces, however, it also notes that “some children had joined on a ‘voluntary basis’ but did not serve on the battlefield.” The YPG has since stated “it would no longer admit new recruits under age 18 and sign Geneva Call’s 'Deed of Commitment' protecting children in armed conflict.”

    Yet, in Syria Freedom Forever Joseph Daher has documented four demonstrations between December 27, 2014 and January 11, 2014 demanding that the PYD return a fifteen-year old girl. The tension here, though, has not been between families and the largely male composed People’s Defense Units (YPG), but rather between families of such children and the Women’s Defense Units (YPJ). Daher writes of a number of other concerning incidents and practices within the region. These include the closure of an independent radio station by the PYD. There have been conflicting reports concerning the PYD's actions and stance in the region.

    Many have noted the free multiculturalism of Rojava. For example, in an interview David Graeber states “the Assyrians we talked to said, after a long difficult relation with the regime, they felt they finally were being allowed free religious and cultural autonomy.” On the other hand, the Anarchist Federation in Britain released a statement in December denoting its suspicion of the PYD. There has been a persistent independent explicit anarchist presence in the region, though, with frequent direct action being taken by the Turkish Revolutionary Anarchist Action (DAF) organization.

    Nevertheless, victory in Kobanî cannot be understated. Participatory democratic institutions in Kurdistan not only puncture false representations of political life and ideology in the Middle East, but also show an alternative to the state and capitalism is possible. These institutions have emerged despite being surrounded by hostile forces as well as having multiple embargos placed upon the region. On the left, it is our job to shine a light on these positive developments, and make sure such societal and structural critiques and projects are sustained. It is also important to document questionable practices, such as the ones mentioned above.

    Solidarity and support should be given, but a critical perspective must be maintained. Given recent comments by Erdogan, the tenuous political situation in the whole of Syria, and the American government’s involvement in the region, we should be weary of those who assert this is the final victory against external threats to the social revolution underway in Rojava.

    *Alexander Kolokotronis is a BA/MA philosophy student at Queens College, City University of New York. He is the founder of Student Organization for Democratic Alternatives, a Worker Cooperative Development Assistant at Make the Road NY, and the Student Coordinator for NYC Network of Worker Cooperatives.

     

  • Rasmea Odeh Action Alert

    Image[Ed. note: Readers of David Finkel's November article on "The Trials of Rasmea Odeh" will be interested in this alert from the Rasmea Defense Committee.]

    The Rasmea Defense Committee is calling for people across the country to plan educational events, protests, and fundraisers next week to support efforts to defend Palestinian-American community leader Rasmea Odeh ahead of her March 12 sentencing. 

    Rasmea, 67, was tortured by the Israeli government in 1969. On November 10, 2014 in front of supporters in the courtroom, she was found guilty of one count of Unlawful Procurement of Naturalization. She is facing deportation and up to ten years in jail on these trumped up immigration charges. Rasmea's case is part of a larger campaign against Palestinian leaders, institutions, and community members, as well as an example of government repression waged against social justice activists. 

    Though Rasmea has been unjustly convicted, her struggle is far from over as an appeals process will begin after sentencing. Rasmea has made so many contributions to the cause of freedom and now needs your support to help her get justice.

    Plan an event February 9 – February 15 to educate your community or campus about Rasmea's case and raise money for her defense. There are already events happening in Chicago, NYC, and Minneapolis.

    You can find information to help you plan at justice4rasmea.org. 

    Please share your actions by emailing info@stopfbi.net.

    Join a live stream presentation with Rasmea on Friday, February 13 at 7:30pm EST. Details here.

    Follow defense efforts on Facebook and Twitter to get updates as they become available. Tweet your support for Rasmea using #Justice4Rasmea. 

    Come to Detroit March 12 for the sentencing hearing.

    Email info@stopfbi.net for more information. 

    Thank you for taking action. 
     

  • Solidarity with Syriza: What Can the Left Demand?

    ImageFor Syriza to triumph, it is not enough for it to play tough with the European Union. not enough to bypass the structure of the European Central Bank to find individual national allies, not enough to refuse to cooperate with capitalist auditors. Greece has already lost 30% of its GDP since the peak before the crisis, with unemployment standing at 25%, a decline only comparable to that seen in the US during the Great Depression. Syriza is fighting for fiscal leeway to revive the public sector, slow the pace of job cuts, raise pensions and boost consumer demand in an effort to revive the Greek economy.

    On its own, the best the beleaguered left government can extract will be a short-lived debt holiday.  The Greek state—and the Greek working class—needs a permanent debt jubilee.  And this is not their need alone. Syriza needs to free itself from the state’s dependency on thoroughly redundant banking system imposed from on high as a prior restraint against democracy. But it cannot break these structures alone.

    Austerity is a means of disinvesting, of asset stripping the public sector and dismantling social safety nets. It is a means of maintaining slack labor market to impose social discipline and keep the working class in each country divided against itself. But this is a policy choice, just as the prolonged (second) depression imposed on Greece by the EU is, itself, a gratuitous imposition—a demonstration effect and a warning to workers everywhere that previous victories are revocable.

    This needs some unpacking.  It is a basic accounting identity that aggregate expenditures in any economy equal aggregate income. What comes out of one pocket goes into another until, in the end, capitalists get what they spend and workers spend what they get.

    This also means that all leakages from the -economy—net private savings plus leakages arising from trade deficits plus government spending balances— must cancel each other out.  If, as in Greece, there is to be net private savings that accompany additional leakages in the form of trade deficits, the Greek government must spend in excess of tax revenue. There can be no net private savings in any economy with trade deficits without the accumulation of government debt. Government debt equals private savings.

    And conversely, if the Greek state is to run surpluses needed to pay back its foreign creditors, the private sector has to dissave (invest in excess of savings) and run trade surpluses from which these additional investment funds can be drawn. This dissaving must be equal to the targeted government surplus.

    Turning a trading deficit into a surplus, where there is a single currency and therefore no possibility of depreciating the Greek currency with respect to that of its trading partners leaves only one alternative: collapsing the domestic price structure. It is the only path available for Greek capitalists to undercut their foreign competitors. Capitalists are, of course, always eager to cut wage costs. So that, in the context of mass unemployment, presents few problems.

    But gaining a competitive edge also requires cutting profit margins in a Greek capitalism already overinvested relative to profitability. And this needs to occur where supplemental markets are shrinking due to a collapse of the state sector. Greek capitalists can therefore have no realistic expectations that lower profit margins will be offset by increased domestic sales. Because capitalists will not invest in a deflationary spiral, no government—no matter how obsequious before the demands of finance—could ever satisfy the claims of foreign creditors through austerity. It can sell off the state’s assets, including those that generate tax revenues. But as soon as it also reneges on its pension, health care, housing and social welfare obligations it contributes further to the very deflationary slide that makes domestic investment pointless.  In short, private investment in excess of savings is simply not feasible. Even if Greek capitalism were able to reverse its trade deficits, the reversal cannot translate into conditions commensurate to the demands on the Greek state to accumulate surpluses.

    That is why austerity is simply self-defeating. It cannot restore Greece to fiscal solvency. Greek capitalism, as it now stands, is a dog chasing its tail. What austerity will do, in contrast, is to consign Greece to permanent debt peonage, carrion that predatory bankers can feed off.  Capitalist depressions, it is true, lay the predicate for recovery by slashing excess capital values and raising the rate of exploitation. They allow the economy to restructure in a leaner and more efficiently aggregate profitable fashion. But that’s as far as they go. Capitalist recoveries cannot be completed through market forces alone. They cannot, in a word, be completed capitalistically. Markets require a decisive exogenous jumpstart in the form of public works projects, mass infusions of state spending or wars—which are a combination of the first two—before an upswing can be fully set into motion.

    Because of this, capitalists can never agree on when to call a halt to the restructuring processes of depression. Market fundamentalism is their religion; and its ideology, the study of economics, a faith-based discipline. Calling an end to a depression is a decision that must be politically forced. American capitalism was utterly demoralized during the 1930s, facing an emboldened and radicalized labor movement. It needed a savior. Even then, the “economic royalists” fought the Roosevelt administration tooth and nail in an attempt to moderate and call off the state’s, as of then, unprecedented economic intervention. The Roosevelt administration balked and American capitalism by 1937 plunged back into depression. The arrested recovery continued to falter until WWII finally turned the economy around. German capitalism needed the reassurance of Nazism to destroy working class resistance before it would willingly accede to state intervention.

    Capitalist elites today are less concerned with economic revival that with bringing the crisis of profitability stemming back to the late 1960s to an end. And this by vanquishing the welfare state. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to roll back the historic gains of the European working classes. Before they approve of state intervention, the ruling elites must evidently convince themselves that the depression has exhausted its potential to restore social discipline in as memorably traumatic and disorienting a manner as it possibly can.

    The “genius” of the Eurozone structure is that there is no means within its existing architecture to politically force the economic upheaval that is needed.  The European Central Bank (ECB) does not, by design, have the authority to directly fund national deficits. Such deficits in excess of 2% of GDP are a violation of the terms of membership in the Eurozone. Yet only by massive pump priming can Greece revive its economy to the level that it might later raise sufficient tax revenues to service its foreign debt while continuing to fuel its recovery.

    The ECB has only one tool. It can only engage in quantitative easing to purchase toxic assets (such as sovereign Greek debt) and remove them from the balance sheets of private bankers. It can inject the banks with Euros as an asset swap. But, as has been shown, there is no incentive for Greek capitalists to borrow from banks, awash in liquidity as they may now be, for productive investment. There is simply no profit potential. All that quantitative easing can now do is fuel speculative bubbles—primarily financial— as capitalists look for other means of annexing income independent of the actual creation of goods and services.

    Capitalism has long decommodified money. In the Eurozone, capitalism has also denationalized it. This fiat money, unlike gold, is not scarce. It is created by the ECB at will by computer-generated deposits into the accounts of private banks and their depositors. Unlike gold or silver, there are no natural limits to its creation. It could be spent into existence gratis by the central bank. For the natural rate of interest for freely reproducible fiat money is zero. But it is still lent into existence at a premium, as if its supplies were somehow limited and had to be rationed.  The ECB acts, by legal constraint, as if it were still the guardian of a measurably specified commodity hoard. Euros therefore enter into existence capitalistically as a claim on surplus labor, long after money has shed its commodity shell.  And long too after money as capital is called upon as a functional requirement and social necessity for public finance. This constraint too, is an essential design aspect of the structure of the Eurozone.

    It is the inability of the Greek state, straightjacketed by a capitalist financial system using post-capitalist monetary tokens to repay its debts, which gives apparent weight to the claim that Greece is living beyond its means. This is a bankers’ worldview. But no nation can truthfully be said to be living beyond its means as long as there is unused capacity and unemployed workers. The attainment of full capacity employment is the real upper limit to potential state spending. Beyond this lies the only objective constraint, the only test of whether an economy is living beyond its means—state induced inflation.

    Here, then, is the raw material that the European labor movement and its parties have to work with: denationalized money that is not internationalized; decommodified money that is not socialized.  Euros remain the product of a banking system that retains the traditional power of the purse to keep popular appetites and grass roots democracy in check, rather than acting as a counterweight to the destructive tendencies of the capitalist accumulation process. It is a banking system that has outgrown the class relations that gave birth to it, while constrained to function under conditions where its powers remain untapped.

    This same central banking system working with the same tools that—if collectivized under public oversight, if wrested from capitalism and from its capitalistically imposed restraints— has the latent potential to ease the stranglehold capitalism traditionally has had over the state. Socialized central banking would permit Greek democracy, and democracy in the EU member states, to freely finance their collective recovery without the accumulation of debt, to eliminate the waste of financial speculation, to provide guaranteed jobs on demand, basic income supports and secure retirements.  It would allow socialist governments to carve out new spheres of decommodified use-values and to finance worker coops and other experiments in alternative forms of egalitarian enterprise ownership. It can do so up to the full potential of the inflation barrier.

    And, it would politically neutralize the ability of capitalism to resist by nullifying the twin threats of a capital strike and capital flight.

    This is an immediate basis for actionable class solidarity. Syriza cannot socialize the ECB alone.  But, absent socialist victories across Europe, Syriza will be quarantined. It is holding out heroically, but it cannot indefinitely. Because Greece cannot comply with the demands of the ECB, Europe’s private banks will eventually grind down Greek resistance while exacting restitution for its predatory loans from the hides of Europe’s working classes. The alternative to collective action is not just an isolated defeat—painful enough to contemplate—but the release, once again, of nationalist poisons throughout the continent.

     

  • Greece after the election — not a threat but an opportunity for Europe

    [Ed. note: The list of signatories to this declaration includes seven out of nine German trade union presidents, all members of the executive boards of the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB) and IG Metall, plus some (primarily social-democratic) politicians at the Bundestag and European Parliament levels, including the vice-chairman of the SPD, as well as numerous academics.]

    The political landslide in Greece is an opportunity, not only for that crisis-ridden country but also for a fundamental reassessment and revision of EU economic and social policy.

    We highlight once again the criticism already voiced on many occasions in the past by the trade unions: right from the outset, the key conditions under which Greece receives financial assistance did not deserve the label ‘reform’. The billions of euros that have flowed into Greece have been used primarily to stabilise the financial sector. At the same time, the country has been driven into deep recession by brutal cutbacks in government spending that at the same time have made Greece the most heavily indebted country in the entire EU. The consequence is a social and humanitarian crisis without precedent in Europe. One third of the population is living in poverty, the welfare state has been hugely weakened, the minimum wage cut by 22% and the collective bargaining system and other protections for those still in work dismantled; at the same time the burden of taxation on the lower income groups has been increased. Unemployment now stands at 27%, while youth unemployment exceeds 50%. Many people do not have the means to pay for food, electricity, heating and accommodation. A large share of the population no longer has health insurance and can access medical care only in emergencies. The election result is a devastating verdict on this failed policy.

    All this had nothing to do with reforms designed to address Greece’s actual problems. None of the country’s structural problems has been solved, but additional ones have certainly been created. This has been a policy of cutback and destruction, not rebuilding. Genuine structural reforms worthy of the name would have led to the emergence of new opportunities for economic development rather than driving a highly qualified generation of young people abroad. Genuine structural reforms would have included serious attempts to tackle tax evasion. Genuine structural reforms would have tackled clientelism and corruption in public procurement. The new Greek government is being challenged to draw up its own reconstruction and development plans, which have to become part of a ‘European Investment Plan’, as has long been demanded by the trade unions, and to create the conditions in which such plans can bear fruit.

    Serious negotiations with the new Greek government must get under way, without any attempts at blackmail, in order to open up economic and social prospects for the country beyond the failed austerity policy. This applies in particular to the ruinous obligations agreed with the previous government, now voted out of office, that were the prerequisites for payment of the international loans. Europe must not persist in pursuing, at the expense of the Greek population, a policy that has been decisively rejected by the majority of Greek voters. Just carrying on regardless is no longer an option!

    The rejection at the ballot box of those responsible for the previous policy in Greece is a democratic decision that must be respected at the European level. The new government must be given a fair chance. Anyone who now demands that the country simply continue along the previous, so-called ‘path to reform’ is in fact denying the Greek people the right to a democratically legitimised change of policy in their country. And if they add that such a change of policy is, at best, possible only if Greece leaves the European currency union, then that is tantamount to saying that the European institutions are incompatible with democratic decisions taken in the member states. Such statements will merely give a shot in the arm to the burgeoning nationalist movements across Europe.

    The democratic deficit at European level, oft-lamented but still not yet overcome, must not be even more firmly entrenched by constraining democracy in the member states. Rather, as many of us emphasised in 2012 in a call for action entitled ‘Founding Europe Anew!’, democracy at EU level must be strengthened if the European project is to gain renewed credibility. The European project will not be furthered by austerity dictates but only by a bottom-up democratic initiative in favour of economic regeneration and greater social justice.

    This initiative must be supported now in the interests of the Greek people. At the same time, it will help to kick-start the process of policy change across Europe as a whole. The political upheaval in Greece must be turned into an opportunity to establish a democratic and social Europe!

    (translated by Andrew Wilson, Manchester)

    Initial signatories
    Reiner Hoffmann, DGB
    Bsirske, Verdi
    Robert Craven, IG BAU
    Alexander Kirchner, ECG
    Michaela Rosenberger, NGG
    Marlis Tepe, GEW
    Michael Vassiliadis, IG BCE
    Detlef Wetzel, IG Metall
     
    union president, other countries
    Erich Foglar, OGB
     
    Other signatories
    Prof. Elmar Altvater, social scientist
    Prof. Brigitte Aulenbacher, social scientist
    Klaus Barthel, MP, SPD, depreciation Chairman
    Christiane Benner, IG Metall
    Prof. Hans-ürgen Bieling, social scientist
    Dr. Reinhard Bispinck, social scientist
    Prof. Gerhard Bosch, social scientist
    Prof. Ulrich Brand, social scientist
    Prof. Christine Brückner, educationalist
    Dr. Udo Bullmann MEP, SPD
    Annelie Colorful Bach, DGB
    Prof. Dr. Frank Deppe, social scientist
    Prof. Klaus Dörre, social scientist
    Prof. Trevor Evans, economist
    Jens Geier, MEP, SPD
    Thomas Händel MEP, The Left
    Elke Hannack, DGB
    Prof. Arne Heise, economist
    Prof. Rudolf Hickel, economist
    Olivier Höbel, IG Metall
    Joerg Hofmann, IG Metall, Institute Solidarity Modern Board
    Dr. Andreas Keller, GEW
    Jurgen Kerner, IG Metall
    Cansel Kiziltepe, MP, SPD
    Stefan Körzell, DGB
    Dr. Steffen Lehndorff, social scientist
    Wolfgang Lemb, IG Metall
    Prof. Birgit Mahnkopf, social scientist
    Lisa Paus, MP, Alliance 90 / The Greens
    Prof. Thomas Sauer, economist
    Thorsten Schäfer – Gumbel, MP Hesse, SPD Deputy Chairman
    Dr. Wolfgang Schäfer – Klug, the General Chairman
    Armin Schild, IG Metall, member of the SPD National Executive
    Prof. Mechthild Schrooten, economist
    Dr. Thorsten Schulten, social scientist
    Irene Schulz, IG Metall
    Prof. Michael Schumann, social scientist
    Dr. Ralf Stegner, SPD, Deputy Chairman, MP in Schleswig – Holstein
    Jutta Steinruck MEP, SPD
    Prof. Olaf Struck, social scientist
    Dr. Axel Troost, MP, The Left
    Dr. Hans Jürgen Urban, IG Metall
    Professor Frieder Otto Wolf, philosopher
    Prof. Karl Georg Zinn, economist
    Roman Zitzelsberger, IG Metall
     

  • New York Labor Mural: Censorship or Curatorial Standards?

    Image

    Mike Alewitz, the internationally famous muralist, is fighting for the installation his mural “The City at the Crossroads of History” at the Museum of the City of New York. Commissioned by the Puffin Foundation, the museum has refused to install the piece because of objections to its content. Alewitz calls this a case of censorship, while the museum argues it is a question of “curatorial standards.” There is a petition campaign in support of the installation of the mural. (Find at the foot of this article links to a slideshow of the mural, an interview with Alewitz, and the petition site.)

    Alewitz is a brilliant artist whose murals grace the walls of community centers, labor unions, and public buildings in the United States and other countries. The one I know best is his “Sindicalismo sin Fronteras” [Labor Unionism without Borders] in the assembly hall of the Authentic Labor Front (FAT) federation in Mexico City. As one looks toward the stage, the face of the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata looms behind a landscape of agriculture and industry, in front of him a peasant, a worker, and teacher, and on side Albert Parsons, the Haymarket martyr, and on the other Lucy Parsons, his widow and long time left labor activist. Like all of Alewtiz’s art, the image is dramatic, the composition masterly, the colors stunning, and at the center is the struggle of working people for a better life.

    The Story of the New York Mural

    In January of 2009, Puffin Foundation President Perry Rosenstein wrote to Alewitz with a proposal to create a major new work for a gallery at the Museum of the City of New York that would be endowed by the Puffin Foundation. “The Puffin Foundation Ltd. has sought to open the doors of artistic expression by providing grants to artists and art organizations who are often excluded from mainstream opportunities due to their race, gender, or social philosophy,” reads a statement on the foundation’s website. Rosenstein reportedly wanted to make the mural “the centerpiece” of the gallery.

    The Puffin Foundation commissioned the mural in early 2011, and in November Alewitz made a PowerPoint presentation of his mural that was well received by panel made up of officers and representatives of both the Museum and the Puffin Foundation, as well as other distinguished figures: Peter G. Carroll, Executive Director, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives; Esther Cohen, Professor Joshua Freeman, Victor Navasky, Publisher of The Nation, Bruno Quinson, publisher, Professor Christopher Rhomberg and Tom Roderick. “The mural proposal was met with unanimous and enthusiastic approval,” says Alewitz.

    Image

     

    The City at the Cross Roads of History – Mural by Mike Alewitz

    After a private presentation of the mural to Museum Director Susan Henshaw Jones, however, relations between Alewitz, the Puffin foundation, and the Museum began to sour. Alewitz completed the mural on February 24, 2014, but the Puffin Foundation informed him that the museum was refusing to exhibit the work. On January 19, 2015, Museum Director Jones used the occasion of Martin Luther King’s holiday to issue a statement, saying only that the mural “did not meet the curatorial standards or purposes of the museum.”

    Alewitz says that Jones objected to representations Rev. Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King being at the center of the mural, as well as to the absence of other social movements. Rosenstein wrote to Alewitz, “As New Yorkers, we also think that Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King should not be the central figures, as iconic as they may be.” He also suggested that the mural might include “…some less favorable movements (without demonizing or glorifying), such as New York’s nativists or the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.” 

    Alewitz disagrees with foundation and the Museum. “Anyone who thinks that the Kings should not be iconic figures for New York really needs to read the history of the civil rights and anti-war movement,” says Alewitz. He believes the museum and the foundation also objected to his “unabashed, partisan defense of the labor movement and a radical approach that the one percent, who are the donors to the museum, feel very uncomfortable about. I am not surprised that [the director] as the representative of them—because that’s who funds and runs these institutions—would object to the mural.”

    Alewitz was willing to negotiate with the foundation and the museum, but they have been unable to find common ground. The National Coalition Against Censorship asked the museum to discuss the situation, but to date there is no response.

    One could compare the “censorship” of his piece to the censorship of Diego Rivera’s famous mural “Man at the Crossroad” commissioned by the Rockefellers for Rockefeller Center in New York. Rivera began painting in 1933, but in 1934, apparently because it had an image of Vladimir Lenin, a leader of the Russian Revolution of October 1917, the Rockefellers had the mural destroyed before it was completed. The incident was celebrated in E.B. White’s famous poem, “I Paint what I See.” Interestingly Rivera was to be paid $21,000 for his work, while Puffin agreed to pay Alewitz $25,000 for his. While Alewitz’s mural, “The City at the Crossroads of History,” the name of which was clearly inspired by Rivera’s, has not been destroyed, still he is aggrieved. He accepted a rather meager payment for his work believing that his painting would find a permanent home where it would be viewed by hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers and other visitors to the museum and above all to many New York working people.

    This is not Alewitz’s first controversy. When he was commissioned to paint the Socialist Workers Party’s “Pathfinder Mural”—Pathfinder is the name of the party’s press—the party attempted to direct his work, to which he objected. When Baltimore Clayworks, an arts organization, chose him for a residency in Maryland to paint a cycle of five murals called “The Dreams of Harriet Tubman,” depicting the life, activities, and aspiration of Tubman, a leader of the Underground Railroad, Alewitz again ran into trouble. He painted Tubman, who rescued African Americans from slavery in the South, holding a rifle. Associated Black Charities objected arguing that such an image was inappropriate in a city that had seen 300 murders in in the previous year. Another of Alewitz’s Tubman murals in Maryland was defaced with swastikas and racist slogans but was nevertheless successfully completed.

    Alewitz has not shied from this current fight and he and his supporters have a petition campaign to pressure the foundation and the museum to install his mural.

    To see the PowerPoint of Alewitz’s mural, go here.

    To hear Alewitz talk about his fight for his mural, go here.

    To see a “Censorship Fact Sheet” about the museum, go here.

    To sign a petition in support of the installation of Alewitz’s mural, go here.

    A Google images search will produce dozens of Alewitz paintings, banners, and murals.

  • The Challenge of Podemos

    The emergence of so-called populist parties as a response to increasingly discredited political elites is a European-wide phenomenon. In most cases these parties have emerged on the right, if not the far-right. Not so in the Spanish state where Podemos, after barely ten months in existence, appears to be undermining the whole political set up in place since the end of the Franco dictatorship in the late 1970s.

    In May it astounded political commentators, winning 1.2 million votes and five MEPs in the European elections. By the end of November it was, even more surprisingly, leading the polls ahead of the two parties that have dominated Spanish politics for over 30 years: the conservative People’s Party (PP) and the Socialist Party (PSOE).1 At the time of writing, Podemos boasts a quarter of a million people (informally) registered as members, who participate in the decision making processes. Its leadership now talks of winning next year’s general elections. Such is its impact that the Fourth International’s Anticapitalist Left describes Podemos as “the vehicle through which citizens’ indignation is expressed and a unique opportunity to break at the root the miseries inherited from the dictatorship and the 40-year offensive of neoliberal and oligarchic capitalism”.2

    Yet within a relatively short time span the new party has adopted a highly centralised structure and openly describes its new programme as “social democratic”. It has also, with the calculated ambiguity of its politics, begun to attract voters from outside the left.3 So are the hopes initially placed in Podemos by the left, both in the Spanish state and internationally, justified?

    Out of the squares

    Central to Podemos’s success has been the widespread existence of corruption among politicians and business people associated with them. Most have been accused of tax fraud or of accepting pay-offs for building contracts. Since the elections of November 2011, 1,900 people have been charged in such cases and 170 of them condemned, although few have been imprisoned.4 The sense that such corruption is endemic comes on top of the effects of the crisis and swingeing austerity measures introduced by both main parties. While unemployment (at around 27 percent, over 50 percent among youth) and poverty have soared (with 25 percent living below the poverty line), the number of millionaires has actually increased in recent years. Distribution of wealth in Spain is now the second most unequal in the European Union.

    Mass resistance, not only to austerity but to the whole political set up since the transition to democracy, emerged in May 2011 with the occupation of public squares by the 15-M (indignados) movement.5 Despite not sustaining the initial level of mobilisation, 15-M left a deep mark on the country’s collective consciousness. Now millions perceive corruption as the direct cause of the crisis and that the constitutional settlement of 1978 installed a system that operated behind people’s backs and to the benefit of a minority.

    Podemos’s success also has to be seen in relation to the role of the mainstream left. In power for 21 of the last 32 years, the PSOE has long since lost any credibility as a party of change due to its systematic attacks on its working class base and its abject subservience to the needs of capital. Corruption cases have not only been common inside the PSOE, but even among some leading members of the main unions, CCOO and UGT.6 More importantly, the unions are seen as sharing responsibility for the failed “regime of 1978” and incapable of either reacting effectively in response to the PP’s offensive or of understanding the new situation created by the 15-M. This malaise also affects the Communist Party led United Left (IU) which now sees its support, gained as a result of the crisis of the two-party system, plummeting in the polls at the expense of Podemos.

    The 15-M may have left the squares but its assembly-based methods of organisation continue to influence subsequent mobilisations. This has particularly been the case with the anti-eviction campaign, Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH), which has managed to pinpoint the responsibility of the financial institutions for the suffering of thousands, and created a highly popular and radical movement. Rank and file anti-cuts movements, the mareas (tides), inspired by the 15-M, have mobilised massively in defence of health and education. Then on 22 March this year 1 million people descended on Madrid for “bread, work and a roof”. These “Marches for Dignity” were organised by the smaller left unions and local collectives; evidence that the spirit of 15-M is very much alive.

    Yet despite the mood of radicalisation generated by such struggles, which have included some victories, a growing feeling has emerged that mobilisation alone has not led to real change and that a political alternative is necessary.

    From protest to parliament

    Behind the formation of Podemos was a group of young university lecturers, many from the Madrid Complutense University political science and philosophy departments. Most had been politically active, some as members of IU. They argued:

    Spain faces a crisis of regime resulting primarily by a breakdown in consensus and the dislocation of traditional political identities; the conditions exist for a populist left—which does not consist in symbolically carving out positions within the regime, but seeks to create another dichotomy—articulated in a new political will with a majority vocation.7

    Influenced by Gramscian arguments about the struggle for hegemony, this group decided to make a very thought-out intervention into the mass media as a form of raising political consciousness. Its online programme of political debate, La Tuerka, became the mouthpiece of the 15-M, providing daily coverage of what was happening in the squares. More importantly, it served as a launch pad for its charismatic presenter, Pablo Iglesias, onto national television. Iglesias, a political science teacher at the Complutense, rapidly acquired fame and notoriety with his inflexible, albeit didactic, confrontations on popular chat shows with representatives of the political establishment. As Iglesias himself puts it, for most people such shows are “much more important” than any debate in parliament.8 According to Iglesias:

    15-M was a symptom that this country was changing, that the principal [forms of] consensus were changing…a symptom of regime crisis that could later emerge in many places…something that functions in the magma and suddenly makes many people in this country see a guy with a pony tail [Iglesias] on television and listen to him.9

    Podemos’s visibility in the media became “a particularly powerful communication tool and symbolic catalyst for popular articulation of the European election campaign”.10

    Podemos was launched in early 2014 with a call to stand a unitary list in the European elections “headed by people that express new ways to relate to politics and represent a real threat for the two-party system…and those who have hijacked our democracy”.11 Iglesias launched the challenge to get 50,000 signatures to support this candidature. Amazingly, this was achieved within three days. Nationally the project was rapidly set up through the creation of “circles”, effectively a cross between an open assembly and a party branch. Podemos could appear like Bepe Grillo’s Five Star Movement in Italy, which had similar meteoric success and its own brand of what is often termed “anti-politics”, but such comparisons are superficial and ignore the mass left wing base of the new party.

    Populism

    During the first months Podemos was quite a fragmented and diverse project, both in terms of organisation and ideology, but Iglesias and his collaborators had a clear idea about what they wanted to build. Their very specific theoretical analysis was based on the experiences of various Latin American radical reform movements, in Venezuela, Bolivia and, particularly, Ecuador.12 Rather than mere electoral victories these processes were:

    driven by new national-popular majorities that required profound political changes demanding access to power and that sparked a war of positions for the conquest of the state. During these processes, and at a time when the traditional order was in a state of decomposition, virtuous interventions have opened completely new political opportunities, almost always causing shock and discomfort within the traditional left.13

    Not that it was a question of just copying the Latin American experience but “translating, reformulating, plundering the arsenal of concepts and examples”.14 Like Hugo Chávez, “Podemos talks about winning, about razing to the ground, about bringing down the system… In the same way, the ambiguity of Podemos’s discourse, which is as sensational for some as it is irritating for others, is also a lesson learned from the Bolivarian process”.15

    In particular the leaders of Podemos are influenced by the “post-Marxist” Argentine political theorist Ernesto Laclau and his conception of populism in relation to Latin America. Laclau, like Iglesias and his closest collaborators, takes his cue from the reformist reading of Antonio Gramsci on the struggle for hegemony that became popular in academic and Eurocommunist circles in the 1970s.16

    Laclau’s conception of populism is seen by the Podemos leadership as clearly tying in with the 15-M, when people saw that a series of shared demands were not accepted by supposedly democratic institutions, thus leading to a conflict between “the people” and “the power”. Also like Laclau, Podemos’s ideologues have defined their demands as “common sense”, not as “anti-system”; something that breaks with the dynamic of many of the social movements seen in the Spanish state in the last decade, but links well with one of the central slogans of the 15-M: “We are not anti-system. The system is anti us”.

    Within this schema an “imagined people” is diametrically opposed to the “caste”, a term that defines those who have occupied the institutions of power behind the backs of the citizenry, selling popular sovereignty over to international economic interests and benefitting themselves economically, either legally or illegally.17 The people-caste antagonism substitutes itself for the “old” antagonism of proletariat-bourgeoisie, successfully building a “new consciousness” where the left has failed. This new imagined identity binds together “those below against those above”. The traditional left-right axis is thus dismissed as paralysing, given its incapacity to resuscitate a “lost class consciousness” which in turn has impeded the building of a new transforming project on the left. Hence Iglesias argues that for the left to win, it:

    needs to stop being a religion and become a tool in the hands of the people. It needs to become the people… We like our slogans, symbols and anthems. We like getting together as a group. We think that if we get several party initials on a poster this means we are going to win. No way. It is about people’s anger and hopes. It is about reaching people who otherwise would see us as aliens because the left has been defeated.18

    Finally, a fundamental question is leadership. According to Laclau:

    Once a series of unmet demands are raised, these must crystallise around a leader [because] the more institutionalised a society is the more people live immanently within an impersonal apparatus. But…the more people find their social roots exposed, the more they will need a form of exterior identification of their daily experience through which [they can] reconstruct a sense of their own identity.19

    According to Iglesias, the failure of the traditional left and the perception that mobilisation has not led to concrete victories have indeed left people with their “social roots exposed”. Such mobilisations are now presented as “belonging to a past phase in the political process, now followed by a mainly institutional phase”.20

    As leading Podemos theorist Íñigo Errejón argues:

    Contrary to the argument claiming that there is “no shortcut”, defended by “movementist” currents and the extreme left, Podemos—born from “above” and not “from below”—argues that election time is also a time of articulation and construction of political identities.21

    So it is not about a leadership forged in the struggles from below, but on an ideological plane, by way of a scrupulously worked out discourse which supposedly fits with the current state of mass consciousness. As a consequence both Iglesias and the rest of the Podemos leadership tend to vacillate when asked about controversial subjects such as immigration, nationalisation or the right to self-determination. Podemos’s idea of “the people” has also provoked controversy in the national minorities, Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia, where, as a result, the new party has not had the same impact as in the rest of the state. These ambiguities expose the contradictions at the heart of the party, as would become much clearer during the founding process between 15 September and 15 November, which included the Citizens’ Assembly in October.

    Democracy and leadership

    After the Euro-elections last May there was a pressing need to organise the party’s internal structures. From the first moment it became clear that Iglesias and his closest collaborators were in conflict with many of the activists in the circles. The team put in place to prepare and establish the norms for the Citizens’ Assembly in October was elected over the internet on the sole basis that it was headed by Iglesias, a method that now became central to the weakening of the circles’ control over the party.

    At the centre of the process around the Assembly was the discussion of three documents on ethical, political and organisational principles. The methodology used was different from that before the EU elections, which had seen a profoundly open and democratic elaboration of the programme and the constitution of electoral lists centred on the circles. Instead debates were now centred on the teams that presented the documents.

    Differences were clearest in the debate over organisational principles, which polarised round two different conceptions of democracy and leadership. Iglesias’s document was based on a centralist conception whereby the general secretary chooses an executive of 15, while a citizens’ council, a political leadership consisting of 62 people, would be elected online by all those listed as “members” on the basis of both individual candidates and open lists which could be voted for as a block or separately. The council in turn would endorse the executive and interpret the mandates of a national assembly that meets every three years. While the general secretary can call assemblies at any level and propose or remove members of the executive at will, in order for the membership to do the same, 25 percent of those registered, over 60,000 people at the time of writing, or 30 percent of the circles, need to support such a move.

    Opposition to Iglesias’s position came from a grouping, Sumando Podemos (“joining together we can”), supported by three of the party’s MEPs, Anticapitalist Left (IA), and many local activists and centred on organising the party on the basis of direct participatory democracy, rooted in the localities, the social movements and the circles.22 Iglesias pointed instead to the many people outside the circles “to whom we want to give instruments and mechanisms so they can form part of this enormous collective process”.23

    For Errejón:

    Our political proposal is saying that a deep and narrow window of opportunity has opened up that could be closed, thus we have to create a very democratic organisation that is in the hands of the members but as well…an extraordinarily efficient…electoral war machine…it would make no sense to build [such a machine]…without giving ourselves an organisational structure that allows us to achieve our political objective.24

    So what was at stake was the absolute control of the organisation by the founding nucleus, a control that would be legitimised by online voting providing a massive personal vote for Iglesias and those he supported so he could lead a process—without any obstacles—that will culminate with the general elections scheduled for the autumn of 2015.

    For this to happen it was necessary to weaken any serious internal opposition; hence the prohibition on anyone belonging to other political organisations holding positions of leadership. This measure was primarily aimed at the IA, which had played a key role in the launching of Podemos, providing both many of the signatories on the founding manifesto and the initial organisational muscle to set up the circles. Consequently in the recent elections for the citizens’ council no members of IA stood, not even its MEP Teresa Rodríguez. Likewise, those around Iglesias won a proposal not to contest next May’s local elections, arguing that the party was still too disorganised to be able to control those who stood.

    As expected Iglesias’s team won both the organisational debate, with over 90,000 voting for his position, and 14,000 for Sumando Podemos’s proposals, thus leaving the circles with very little means to influence the higher levels of the party. A few weeks later the leadership elections, from which Sumando had withdrawn in protest at the lack of any consensus, led to Iglesias, as general secretary, and his list of 62 for the citizens’ council getting on average around 80,000 votes while the candidate who came sixty-third got barely 3,000. The fact that there were hundreds of candidates, many standing individually, meant that any alternative vote was completely fragmented.

    A new reformism?

    At the time of writing most of the party’s programme had yet to be formalised, but based on declarations by its leading figures and the EU election campaign it would be expected to include the end of political privileges (for example, the near automatic move from ministry to boardroom); strict controls on MPs’ income; mechanisms to allow popular control over elected representatives; the introduction of self-determination for the national minorities; and the direct election of the head of state (as opposed to the hereditary monarchy now in place). Podemos aims to carry out such measures through a constituent process which would dismantle the “regime of 1978”.

    Since the EU elections, however, all the signs are that much of the early radicalism will be ditched. Iglesias, speaking in late October, turned to Lenin to justify this turn to pragmatism:

    The true Lenin of the revolution is that of the NEP, a Lenin that gets up in the morning with an enormous headache and says: everything that I knew up till now has turned out not to be true and what we have to do is apply forms of capitalist development in the countryside because if not it will be impossible to make the economy work.25

    This shift is clear in the party’s preliminary economic programme presented in late November. Written by two leading social democratic economists, Juan Torres López and Vicenç Navarro, it sets out a series of “short-term pragmatic proposals” aimed at “acting with realism (but) without renouncing our dreams”. Scandinavian social democracy is now cited as a model rather than the Bolivarian Revolution. Justification for this shift is defended with the familiar argument that there was now a need for the party to be “responsible” faced with the tasks of government.

    Aiming to introduce a series of reforms that would bring under control the worst excesses of neoliberalism and lead to considerable benefits for the population, the economic programme includes progressive taxation, the establishment of a public bank, the repeal of the PP’s punitive labour reform, a 35-hour week and a tax on selling and buying operations on the stock exchange. Central to funding its proposals is the end of rampant tax evasion and the establishment of a level of taxation similar to the average rate in the EU.26

    Gone from the programme for the EU elections are: a basic universal wage for all citizens (instead there will be more state aid to those in poverty), the nationalisation of “strategic sectors of the economy”, the lowering of the retirement age to 60 (instead it will drop from 67 back to 65) and, what was the centrepiece in May, the cancellation of the Spanish state’s debt. Instead the debt will be “renegotiated” from the position of a defence of “national interests”. Clearly Podemos’s leaders have taken their cue from Syriza (the Greek Coalition of the Radical Left)27 in defending the notion of renegotiation. As with the Greek case, this puts the whole of its economic reforms in the hands of the European Central Bank. Like Syriza, Podemos rules out a break with both the EU and the euro if the bankers prevent any escape from a crippling debt.

    In case anyone was in doubt as to the implications of such a strategy, the programme speaks of the “costs and sacrifices” that will be necessary because of government policies in recent years and past decisions such as signing the 1991 Maastricht Treaty. Once in power, Podemos will meet “social agents”, including unions and employers, as part of the process of drawing up a definitive programme.

    For many, Podemos increasingly seems like the PSOE at the end of the 1970s. Iglesias himself confirms that “there is a sensation…around Podemos that there was with the PSOE before the elections of 1982” when the Socialists won a landslide victory in what is generally considered to be the final act of the transition to democracy. Podemos itself speaks of building in “the space between the PSOE and IU”. The image of bright young talented newcomers is reminiscent of the PSOE in 1982, as is the massive amount of hope that the party would bring real change. Future prime minister and PSOE leader Felipe González spoke, for instance, in 1979, in terms similar to Podemos today, about the need for democracy to be “felt and lived in the municipality, the factories, in the schools, the hospitals, the universities, the workshops” and no longer “an abstract instrument for the exclusive use of professional politicians or those of us who are obliged to engage in politics due to our ideological or moral commitment”.28

    Comparisons, however, between the PSOE in the 1970s and Podemos have a limited validity. Even at the end of the dictatorship the PSOE was a nationally structured party, with a long, albeit chequered, history. Backed with massive funding by the German Social Democratic Party, its aim in 1982 was to “modernise” Spain and prepare the country for EU membership. More to the point are both the context of crisis in which Podemos must operate and, importantly, the political and social base of the new party as reflected in the circles.

    Squaring the circle

    If and when Podemos wins the elections, those charged with carrying out its programme would be, in Iglesias’s words, the “best” experts available. According to Iglesias:

    We don’t want a Podemos government but a government of the best. It is not politicians that make public administration and hospitals work; they are made to work by the people, in particular the most prepared people. We want to count on all of them so the country has a reasonable, decent, government.29

    A reflection of what type of administration is imagined can be seen by looking at those elected in November on Iglesias’s list to Podemos’s leadership. In contrast to the party’s mass base, all are university educated; most holding professional, teaching or research posts.30 There are few activists and hardly anyone with workplace or trade union experience. So it seems that a Podemos government would be based on a sort of technocratic elite, made immune by both ideology and direct control by the electorate from the temptations to adapt, if not betray, that have befallen so many previous would-be reformers in parliamentary institutions around the world.31

    Within this context must be seen Iglesias’s insistence on the rule of law and patriotism as central to turning round the effects of crisis and austerity. As seen, Podemos intends to debate its economic proposals with employers as well as the unions. On exactly how the rich would be made to pay higher taxes, or pay them at all in some cases, Iglesias explains:

    It is normal that [big business] want the PP to win…but when we sit down and explain to them that one of the keys to prosperity is reducing inequality and having resources to carry out [policies] of expansion, the large firms are going to understand that it is much easier to do business in a prosperous country than in a country that is sinking… I am convinced that they are going to understand without any type of scandal, [that] they are going to reconsider”.32

    Elsewhere Iglesias stresses that winning an election is not the same as taking power.33 So such apparently innocent declarations could be seen as part of Iglesias and his closest collaborators’ strategy to win popular support on the basis of what is effectively “common sense”. Faced with the reality of a capitalist class refusing to comply with its patriotic duty the people’s government would then be justified, and justified in the eyes of the electorate, to, for example, expropriate the offenders’ wealth and property. Shades of the left “populist” governments of Venezuela and Bolivia are clearly visible in such an approach. First it is necessary to get into power; then the people will be moulded (“building the people”) into a new, albeit passive, “democratic” subject. Of course, reality might prove a bit more stubborn.

    By denying the relevance of the left-right divide in politics it is easy to overlook, or at least not consider that there is any connection with, past failures of the reformist left. Instead we are in an idealised “post-Marxist” world where the institutions of bourgeois democracy appear to take on an autonomous function; the “right” people and the right structures are capable of separating these institutions off from the capitalist system as a whole. So in the world view of Podemos, or at least its leadership, class struggle, state violence and the bourgeois nature of the democratic state either do not exist or can be overcome without recourse to revolution from below.

    In his latest book Iglesias presents a distorted view of the Marxist revolutionary alternative, presenting this as equivalent to the failed actions of small armed groups such as the Red Army Faction in Germany or of ETA in the Basque Country. In contrast, he defends what he claims is the only option for change, a would-be Gramscian strategy of reform as a game of chess. Marxists such as Lenin were supposedly in favour of “conquering the state” rather than smashing it and replacing it with a new workers’ state. It is probably no coincidence that in his summary of Spanish history he manages to speak of the civil war without making any mention at all of the workers’ revolution of 1936.34

    Finally, there is the problem that Podemos, even if it received more votes than any other party in next year’s election, would probably not win a working majority so it is hard to see how the new party will not end up in an alliance with the PSOE if it wants to form, in its own words, a “progressive government”. The only other majority would be a Greek-style coalition of the PP and PSOE35 and that would surely guarantee the PSOE follows the path of Pasok into near oblivion. On the other hand, any pact with a “regime” party like the PSOE could spell the death of Podemos.

    The left and Podemos

    With the tight control of Iglesias and his supporters over Podemos and its rapid slide into social democracy, it is reasonable to ask if this is an arena where the revolutionary left should intervene. To respond to this question it is necessary to look beyond what Podemos represents on a formal level and appreciate its role in a context of leftward shifting class consciousness on the back of years of defeats for the working class. The rapid transformation of Podemos from the political expression of the democratic storm of the 15-M to a new form of reformist party controlled tightly from above has meant that it is hard to comprehend fully the dynamics at work.

    Defining the exact nature of Podemos’s activist base is therefore not a straightforward task. The huge growth around a deliberately ambiguous political programme has produced circles, a thousand or so to date, which vary greatly in composition, even between different neighbourhoods of the same city.

    While it is true that the 15-M movement was a direct inspiration to Podemos and its promoters and many activists were involved in it, the new party is not in any sense based primarily on this milieu. Indeed some former 15-M activists were resentful of the launch of Podemos, viewing it as an imposition from above. Podemos captured the spirit of the 15-M movement and at the same time contains at its heart a direct criticism of its excessive procrastination and lack of clear concrete goals. In fact, huge swathes of the base of Podemos are people who have not been political activists before. To this can be added disenchanted former PSOE or IU members and people who were active in the convulsions of the transition during the 1970s and then became disaffected and dropped out of activity. Among this multitude the organised anti-capitalist left is a very small minority.

    Podemos’s rightward drift as elections approach is by no means clear to the thousands of people who have thrown themselves into the project because they believe in a clear break with the old political regime and, mostly, believe that the newly elected leadership of Podemos intends to carry this through. As MEP Teresa Rodríguez puts it: “Podemos has become the hope of many people, not a hope, but the hope, [it is] what is left for our generation, what we can tell our grandchildren [about] as a great feat, as a failure or as a betrayal”.36

    So how the anti-capitalist left deals with the massive illusions in Iglesias and his party is not a secondary question. Clever denunciations of reformism are no more useful than sectarian disdain. What is needed is engagement with the hopes that so many people hold in Podemos with practical proposals to extend the party’s influence and activity. Above all, the struggle for the circles to have a real influence over both policy and the activities of the elected representatives will continue. In this sense the call for mobilisations to continue parallel to electoral activity is central—mobilisations which, at best, the party leadership see as secondary to its electoral intervention.

    It would also be a mistake to underestimate the effect of Podemos’s entrance into representative institutions. This would provide a massive boost for everybody who wants real change. United Left and other minority parties, who have been more or less alone in parliament in their denunciations of the ravages of neoliberalism and corruption, will be joined by a far larger group of young and articulate MPs, some at least activists from the PAH and other new social movements.

    If a Podemos government were to be formed, mobilisation would be equally important to exert pressure to ensure the promised reforms were carried out. Likewise, if a Podemos government starts to betray the hopes of its voters, a confident active base will be essential to exert pressure from below, and, in the worst case scenario, be able to win an audience with sections of the party’s supporters and avoid them falling into passivity or veering to the right. If such an intervention is carried out with sensitivity but clarity, at the same time as making a real contribution to the project, the anti-capitalist left can win far wider support than it enjoys today.

    Notes

    1: From receiving a combined vote of around 80 percent for over 30 years, recent polls have the PSOE and PP on under 50 percent. Latest figures, published on 24 November, show Podemos on 28.3 percent, PP 26.3 percent and PSOE 20 percent.

    2: Izquierda Anticapitalista, 2014.

    3: A third of its potential voters previously voted for the PSOE; and 17 percent for the PP-El Pais, 1 December 2014.

    4: Público, 2 November 2014.

    5: Durgan and Sans, 2011.

    6: The CCOO (Comsiones Obreras-Workers’ Commissions) was formerly led by the Communist Party; the UGT (Unión General de Trabajadores) union federation is associated with PSOE.

    7: Errejón, 2014b.

    8: Rivero, 2014, p96; also see Pastor, 2014.

    9: Pablo Iglesias (video).

    10: Errejón, 2014b; Iglesias claimed he was putting words to what people think and what was needed to be said-Rivero, 2014, p98.

    11: Errejón, 2014b.

    12: Podemos’s two principal ideologues, Íñigo Errejón and Juan Carlos Monedero, have spent time in Latin America; Errejón was in Bolivia working on his thesis on the MAS (Movement for Socialism); Monedero worked in Venezuela as an advisor for Chávez’s government. For an example of Iglesias on the importance as a model of the Equadorian government see Rivero, 2014, p111.

    13: Errejon, 2014b.

    14: Errejón, 2014a.

    15: Pascual Serrano cited in Stobart, 2014.

    16: Most clearly expressed in Errejón, 2014a, and Iglesias, 2014, pp34-36, 48; see Harman, 2007, for a critique of this interpretation of Gramsci’s thought.

    17: The term “caste” was popularised by the Italian journalists Sergio Rizzo and Gian Antonio Stella in reference to how politics in their country had been colonised by business people-Rivero, 2014, p148; Rizzo and Stella, 2007.

    18: Cited in Stobart, 2014.

    19: Arellano Ortiz, 2012.

    20: Stobart, 2014.

    21: Errejón, 2014b.

    22: On these debates see Villaverde, 2014, and Castillo, 2014.

    23: Rivero, 2014, p75.

    24: López de Miguel, 2014.

    25: Pablo Iglesias (video). The New Economic Policy, adopted by the ruling Bolsheviks in early 1921, was explicitly presented by Lenin as a retreat designed to conciliate the peasant majority by reviving market mechanisms.

    26: Iglesias, 2014.

    27: Syriza is major point of reference for Iglesias and his collaborators; Syriza’s Alexis Tsipras was a key speaker at a rally to announce leadership election results; he also writes the introduction to Iglesias, 2014.

    28: Cited in Rivero, 2014, p51.

    29: Bayo and López de Miguel, 2014.

    30: Castro and Pais Beiro, 2014.

    31: Errejón: “We are providing ourselves the mechanisms to not commit the same errors and that does not mean we won’t commit mistakes… What we can do is fulfill with an [ethical code] that reminds us where we are, that you cannot be on the side of those below and those above at the same time”, López de Miguel, 2014.

    32: Bayo and López de Miguel, 2014.

    33: Iglesias, 2014, pp171-176.

    34: Iglesias, 2014, pp36-41, 95-97.

    35: An alliance of this kind was already being considered within both parties in 2012 according to El Pais, see Rivero, 2014, p24.

    36: Rodríguez, 2014.

    References

    Arellano Ortiz, Fernando, 2012, “El populismo en América Latina está creando nuevas formas de legitimidad política” (2 June), www.vientosur.info/spip.php?article6621

    Bayo, Carlos Enrique, and Alejandro López de Miguel, 2014, “Pablo Iglesias: ‘Vamos a construir un Gobierno de los mejores’”, Público (15 November), http://tinyurl.com/kxcztcv

    Castillo, Jesús, 2014, “Triangulando el juego: Podemos, instituciones y movimientos”,
    La Hiedra, number 10 (September), http://tinyurl.com/q8vhblk

    Castro, Irene, and Mario Pais Beiro, 2014, “Quién es quién de la lista de Pablo Iglesias para dirigir Podemos”, Diario (10 November), http://tinyurl.com/q7e46gt

    Durgan, Andy, and Joel Sans, 2011, “’No One Represents Us’: the 15 May Movement in the Spanish State”, International Socialism 132 (autumn), www.isj.org.uk/?id=757

    Errejón, Íñigo, 2014a, “Muere Ernesto Laclau, teórico de la hegemonía”, Público (14 April), www.publico.es/514300/muere-ernesto-laclau-teorico-de-la-hegemonia

    Errejón, Íñigo, 2014b, “Spain’s Podemos: An inside view of a radical left sensation”, Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal (15 July), http://links.org.au/node/3969

    Harman, Chris, 2007, “Gramsci, the Prison Notebooks and Philosophy”, International Socialism 114 (spring), www.isj.org.uk/?id=308

    Iglesias, Pablo, 2014, Disputar la Democracia (Akal).

    Izquierda Anticapitalista, 2014, “Izquierda Anticapitalista ante los acuerdos de la Asamblea Ciudadana de Podemos” (5 November), www.anticapitalistas.org/spip.php?article30086

    López de Miguel, Alejandro, 2014, “Entrevista con Iñigo Errejón: Vamos a construir una maquina de guerra electoral” Público (23 October), http://tinyurl.com/q2xby7b

    Pastor, Jaime, 2014, “Partidos, elecciones y Podemos”, Viento Sur (14 October), www.vientosur.info/spip.php?article9481

    Rivero, Jacobo, 2014, Conversación con Pablo Iglesias (Akal).

    Rizzo, Sergio, and Gian Antonio Stella, 2007, La casta: Così i politici italiani sono diventati intoccabili (Biblioteca Univerzale Rizzoli).

    Rodríguez, Teresa, 2014, “¿Podemos se rompe?” Público (24 October), http://blogs.publico.es/lo-queremos-todo/2014/10/24/podemos-se-rompe/

    Stobart, Luke, 2014, “Understanding Podemos (1/3): 15-M & counter-politics”, Left Flank
    (5 November), http://tinyurl.com/pcfc45t

    Villaverde, Ana, 2014, “¿Qué democracia interna para Podemos?” La Hiedra, number 10 (September), http://lahiedra.info/que-democracia-interna-para-podemos/

    Reposted with permission from the journal International Socialism, no. 145.

     

  • What Caused the Killings?

    ImageGilbert Achcar is a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and the author of many books, including Clash of Barbarisms: September 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder, The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising and Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism.

    In the aftermath of the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris and the wave of repression and Islamophobia that followed, Achcar talked to Ahmed Shawki in late January about the questions the left in France and internationally need to answer to organize an anti-racist, anti-imperialist response.

     

    WHAT HAS been the reaction to the attack on Charlie Hebdo by French society in general, and the French state and ruling class in particular?

    THE REACTION has been what anybody would expect. The initial reaction was one of massive shock–which is not that different from the initial reaction to 9/11 in the United States, though it's obviously a big exaggeration to place both attacks on an equal footing as many did, particularly in France.

    And, of course, the shock was immediately exploited by the French government in the same way that 9/11 was exploited by the Bush administration–in order to silence critics and get wide support in the name of "national unity." Suddenly, François Hollande's popularity went up sharply, from a very low point. The same happened with George W. Bush, whose popularity was very low before 9/11 and got boosted beyond anything he could have dreamed of.

    These were quite similar reactions from appalled and frightened societies–and, of course, the crimes were appalling indeed. In both cases, the ruling class took advantage of the shock in order to whip up nationalist sentiment and support for the state: The police forces have been hailed as great heroes in France for mobilizing several tens of thousands in hunting down three lunatic assassins. To be sure, the New York firefighters were much more deserving of the praise for their bravery.

    There is nothing much original about all this. Instead, what is rather original is the way the discussion evolved later on.

    As you know, the Charlie Hebdo attack and the anti-Semitic attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris were perpetrated by two young men of Algerian background and one from Malian background, the three of them French-born. Over the last few days, there has been a significant shift in the discussion about the attacks: it has become more mitigated, with increasing acknowledgement of the fact that there is something wrong in French society–in the way it treats people of immigrant origin.

    This shift went to the point French Prime Minister Manuel Valls stating publicly two weeks after the attack that there is a "territorial, social, ethnic apartheid" in France with regard to people of immigrant origin. That's an extremely strong characterization indeed–and as you might expect, it was massively criticized, even from within the cabinet over which Valls presides.

    But it did represent a vindication of some sort for those who said from the start that those terrible attacks should lead people to think in the first place about the conditions that bring young people to such a level of resentment that they become willing to engage in suicidal attacks in order to kill. Not that any reason whatsoever could constitute an excuse for the murders that were perpetrated, but because it is indispensable to investigate the origin of such hatred and resentment instead of indulging in the inept explanation that "they hate us for our freedoms," as George W. Bush put it after 9/11.

    This gets us to the core issue, which is what the French prime minister was referring to. The core issue is the condition of populations of immigrant origin inside France. One obvious and very telling indication of this is the fact that a majority of inmates in French prisons are people of Muslim background, although they constitute less than 10 percent of the population. And there is the related fact that the French society and state have never really settled accounts with their colonial legacy.

    On this last issue, it's striking that self-examination in the U.S. society about the Vietnam War has been much more radical and widespread–reflecting the huge mobilization that built up within the U.S. itself against that war–than whatever there has been in France about the war in Algeria, although the latter was no less brutal, if not more so, and came after well over one century of barbaric colonial occupation of that country.

    France is a country where, believe it or not, the parliament voted in 2005–that is, only 10 years ago, not half a century ago!–for a law about the colonial legacy that saluted the men and women, especially the military, who took part in the colonial enterprise. And it required, among other things, that schools should teach "the positive role of the French presence overseas, especially in North Africa." That particular part of the law was repealed by presidential decree a year later after a huge outcry from migrant organizations, the left, historians and schoolteachers. But the very fact that such a law could be adopted by a parliamentary majority is just outrageous.

    CAN YOU tell us more about the reaction to the prime minister's statement about France's "apartheid"? Because that's a striking statement.

    IT IS–very striking. Mind you, Valls is definitely not a radical or even a progressive. He's from the right wing of the Socialist Party. He was minister of the interior before becoming prime minister, and was criticized on the left for entering into a competition with the far right–with Marine Le Pen–of trying to outdo each other on the issue of immigration. And now, suddenly, here he is with this strong statement.

    Unsurprisingly, he was widely criticized, not only from the right-wing opposition, but also from within his own party, and even from some people on the left, all of them saying that he went over the top and should not have used the A-word.

    His most sober critics pointed to the fact that there is no legal apartheid in France, unlike what you had until a few decades ago in South Africa or in the U.S. South half a century ago. But no one could seriously deny the reality of a "territorial, social and ethnic" segregation in France that is similar to what still prevails in the United States.

    The condition of the populations of migrant origin in France is indeed closer to that of the Black people in the U.S. than to apartheid in the strict sense. These populations are concentrated in separate areas, on the periphery of cities, and live in extremely frustrating conditions. On top of that comes racism that is pervasive in various forms in French society, including discrimination in employment, in housing and so on.

    On this last point, France is even worse than the United States–it won't be any time soon that we shall see a person of African background elected president of France, other than in the wild fantasy of an infamous French Islamophobic novelist. It is actually–and unfortunately–much more likely that a far-right candidate would be elected to the French presidency. After all, in 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen managed to get to the second round of the presidential election, beating the Socialist Party candidate in the first round.

    THIS BRINGS up a related question about the French far right, which is quite powerful electorally, with Le Pen's daughter Marine leading a "reformed" National Front. My understanding is that the National Front, which historically draws its inspiration from the far right–up to and including the fascist right–is now inviting representation among its leadership of gays, of other minorities, of Jews. But it is singling out the immigrant population, and in particular Muslims, as the "new enemy." Is that roughly the trajectory?

    GENERALLY speaking, the far right in Europe nowadays, except for a lunatic fringe, does not focus on anti-Semitism or even anti-gay bigotry. Actually, one of the major figures of the far right in Holland was an openly gay man, who used to justify his Islamophobia by referring to the alleged homophobia of migrants of Muslim background.

    So this is no longer the platform of the European far right nowadays. The preferred target of their hate speech is Islam. Muslims are their scapegoats, much more so than Jews or any of the other victims of fascism and Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s–save the Roma, who are still the object of much racist hatred. Nowadays, it is Islam that is by far the main target of far-right hatred.

    This Islamophobia is actually presented most often with the pretense that it isn't about racism–that it's a rejection of the religion alone, and not of Muslims themselves, so long as they aren't practicing Muslims.

    In other words, there are "bad Muslims" and "good Muslims," the latter being those who "drink alcohol and eat pork," i.e. those who are irreligious and adapt fully to Western Christian culture. The most welcome Muslims–here in the ethnic sense, of course–are the small minority who join the Islamophobic choir, seeking reward for their collaboration, like the colonial natives who worked for their colonial masters.

    It is this anti-Islam approach that is at work in the demonstrations that have been organized in Germany by a movement that claims to be fighting against "the Islamization of the West." This kind of ideology is common to the far right all over Europe–though maybe less so for the UK Independence Party in Britain, which targets all immigrants, including those from European Union countries.

    IT'S BEEN suggested that the French left is quite poor on the question of institutional racism within French society. Do you think that's true?

    DEFINITELY. THE French left–and I mean what is usually called the "radical left," to the left of the Socialist Party, which I would not really call "left"–has a poor record on relating to people of immigrant origin. This is a major failure–though, of course, you can find similar situations in most imperialist countries.

    The absence of a strong connection with these populations, and particularly with their youth, means that there is little challenge when the resentment that builds up for legitimate reasons among them goes in the wrong direction, leading in extreme cases to the murderous fanaticism that we have seen at play.

    The historical record of the French Communist Party on anti-colonialism, especially in the case of Algeria, is far from clean overall. Within France, the fight against ethnic discrimination and the colonial legacy has not been central enough in the actions of the left, and this has led many young people who have been attracted to the left at some point to reject it and develop quite bitter feelings toward it.

    This is usually connected to a tradition within the French left that one may call "radical secularism," or "secular fundamentalism."

    YOU MEAN "laicité"?

    "LAICITÉ" MEANS secularism. There is something beyond that, though–let's call it an "anti-clerical" tradition, which has been very strong on the left historically in France. It can take the form of secularist arrogance toward religion and the believers overall.

    As long as the targeted religion is the dominant one, this isn't a major problem, although even then it can be politically counterproductive. As the young Marx aptly put it, the same religion that is the dominant classes' ideological tool can also be the "sigh of the oppressed."

    But this is much truer when the religion in question is the particular faith of an oppressed and exploited part of society, the religion of the downtrodden, such as–in the West–Judaism yesterday and Islam today. You cannot have the same attitude to Judaism in 1930s' Europe as in today's Israel, for instance–or the same attitude to Islam in Europe today as in Muslim-majority countries. Likewise, you cannot have the same attitude to Christianity in, say, today's Egypt where Christians are an oppressed minority as in Christian-majority countries.

    This is the problem with Charlie Hebdo. Some of the people involved in Charlie Hebdo were very much on the left. Stéphane Charbonnier, known as Charb, the editor of the magazine, who was the principal target of the assassins, was, by any standard, someone on the left. He had close ties with the Communist Party and the general milieu of the left. His funerals were held to the tune of the "Internationale," and his eulogy by Luz, a surviving member of the Charlie Hebdo editorial staff, included a bitter criticism of the French right and far right, and of the Pope as well as of Benjamin Netanyahu.

    In this respect, the comparison that some have made of Charlie Hebdo to a Nazi publication publishing anti-Semitic cartoons in Nazi Germany is completely absurd. Charlie Hebdo is definitely not a far-right publication–and present-day France definitely not a Nazi-like state.

    Rather, Charlie Hebdo is a blatant illustration of the left-wing arrogant secularism that I mentioned, which is an attitude widely held on the left in good conscience–that is, in the firm belief that secularism and anti-clericalism are basic tenets of the left-wing tradition. They are seen as part of a left-wing identity, along with feminism and other emancipatory causes.

    I KNOW that one of the major debates on the French left in the last decade or so was about the question of the veil and the rights of Muslim women to wear the hijab in public. Can you discuss what the issues were in that debate?

    THIS IS another illustration of the same problem. It arose in 1989 over the issue of young girls coming to school wearing the headscarf, and being expelled for insisting on doing so, with the support of their families. This led to a 2004 law banning "ostentatious" religious symbols from being worn in public schools.

    Part of the left–in fact, I would say the vast majority of the French left, including the Communist Party–supported this ban, in the name of "helping" young girls to fight an oppressive imposition of the headscarf on them by their families, and in the conviction that since the headscarf is a symbol of women's oppression, banning it is a way of challenging this oppression, as well as of upholding the secular character of public schools.

    The core problem with this arrogant secularism–this very Orientalist arrogance, one could say–is the belief that liberation can be "imposed" on the oppressed. The rationale is that in forcing you to remove your headscarf, I am "liberating" you, whether you approve of it or not. Needless to say, this happens to be an exact reproduction of the colonial mindset.

    I THINK that for some people, this criticism of the French left for its arrogant secularism gets mixed up with a hesitation to make a left-wing analysis of political Islamism, particularly the reactionary variety behind the attack on Charlie Hebdo or the September 11 attacks in the U.S. You touched on that issue with your book The Clash of Barbarisms, didn't you?

    I WROTE that book after 9/11 indeed. When you're faced with an attack like 9/11, of course, the term "barbaric" will inevitably be used to describe it.

    Now how should anti-imperialists react? There are two possible ways. One is to say, "No, it's not barbaric." That's ridiculous, because it obviously is. Why should one regard as barbaric the Islamophobic rampage perpetrated by Anders Breivik, the Norwegian far-right fanatic, in 2012, but not the massacres of 9/11, or the Paris killings, for that matter? This would be an extreme case of "Orientalism in reverse," substituting the contempt of Islam with a very naive and uncritical stance toward everything that is done in Islam's name.

    What is politically wrong and dangerous is not the use of terms like "barbaric," "appalling" and the like, but that of the misplaced political category of "fascism." Many on the French left–the Communist Party, but also members of the far left, and most recently, the post-Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou–have labeled the Paris attacks as "fascistic" and described those perpetrating them as "fascists."

    This is completely pointless in socio-political terms since fascism is an ultra-nationalistic mass movement whose main vocation is to salvage capitalism by crushing whatever threatens it, starting with the workers' movement, and to promote aggressive imperialism. Applying this category to terrorist currents inspired by religious fundamentalism in countries that are dominated by imperialism is nonsense.

    Such a use of the label "fascism" blurs everything that makes it a distinctive sociopolitical category. If one wishes to dilute a socio-political category this way, then phenomena such as Stalinism or, even more so, the Baathist dictatorships in pre-2003 Iraq or present-day Syria bear much more resemblance to historical fascism than al-Qaeda or the purported "Islamic State in Iraq and Syria."

    The misuse of the label was started by the neocons in the Bush administration and others who called al-Qaeda "Islamo-fascism," and it is quite unfortunate that people on the left fall into this trap. The obvious political goal of this misuse of the label–since "fascism" is seen as the ultimate evil, and Nazism itself being an avatar of fascism–is to justify every action against it, including imperialist wars.

    I remember well a discussion in which I was invited to take part in Paris in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, which was organized by the Communist Party. One of the speakers, a prominent member of that party, explained that al-Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalism constitute the new fascism, against which it is legitimate to support war by Western states, in the same way as it was legitimate for the USSR to ally with the U.S. and the UK against fascist powers in the Second World War. You can find a direct echo of the same rationale in the neocon description of the "war on terror" as being a "Third World War" against "Islamo-fascism."

    To come back to the "barbaric" label, the other way of reacting to it, of course, is to say: Yes, these massacres are barbaric indeed, but they are in the first place a reaction to capitalist-imperialist barbarism, which is much worse. That's the reaction many on the left had after 9/11. Noam Chomsky was probably the most prominent of those who explained that, as appalling as the 9/11 attacks were, they were dwarfed by the massacres committed by U.S. imperialism.

    In my book on "the clash of barbarisms," I emphasized that the barbarism of the strong is the major culprit, and that it is the primary cause that leads to the emergence of a counter-barbarism on the opposite side. This "clash of barbarisms" is the true face of what has been, and still is, misleadingly described as a "clash of civilizations." As Rosa Luxemburg put it a century ago, the dynamics of the crisis of capitalism and imperialism leaves no option in the long run but "socialism or barbarism."

    The attacks of September 11, 2001, those of Madrid 2004, London 2005 and Paris recently, were all claimed by al-Qaeda–an extremely reactionary organization. Along with likeminded organizations, they are the sworn enemies of anyone on the left in the countries where they are based. For example, a prominent member of the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria boasts of having organized the assassination of two key leaders of the Tunisian left in 2013.

    The young men who carried out the killings in Paris were wrapped up in terroristic organizations that stand on the extreme far right in Muslim-majority countries. Al-Qaeda is an outgrowth of Wahhabism, the most reactionary interpretation of Islam and the official ideology of the Saudi kingdom–and as everybody knows, the Saudi kingdom is the best friend of the United States in the Middle East, outside of Israel.

    People on the left should not appear to be excusing or supporting in any way organizations like these. We must denounce them for what they are–but we must also stress, at the same time, that the main responsibility in their emergence lies with those who started the "clash of barbarisms" in the first place, and whose barbarism is murderous on an incomparably larger scale: the imperialist powers, and above all, the United States.

    There's actually a direct and obvious connection between the two. The United States, along with the Saudi kingdom, has been fostering for decades these militant Islamic fundamentalist currents in the fight against the left in Muslim-majority countries. These currents were, for a long time, associated with the United States–a historical collaboration that culminated in the 1980s war in Afghanistan, when they were backed by Washington, the Saudis and the Pakistani dictatorship, against the Soviet occupation.

    What happened eventually is that, like in the Frankenstein story, some sections of these forces turned against the Saudi monarchy and against the United States. This is the story of al-Qaeda: its founders were allied with the United States and the Saudi kingdom during the fight against the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, but they turned against both of them because of the direct deployment of U.S. troops in the Saudi kingdom in preparation for the first U.S. war against Iraq in 1991.

    Thus, the Bush Sr. administration provoked al-Qaeda's about-face against the U.S. with the first war on Iraq, and Bush Jr. carried it on with the invasion of Iraq. The latter was carried out on the pretext of huge lies, one of which was that it was needed in order to destroy al-Qaeda–although there was no connection whatsoever between al-Qaeda and Iraq. The result of the U.S. occupation of that country was actually a huge boost to al-Qaeda, allowing it to acquire a crucial territorial base in the Middle East, after having previously been restricted to Afghanistan.

    What is today called the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is but a further development of what used to be al-Qaeda's branch in Iraq–an organization that didn't exist before the 2003 invasion, but came into being thanks to the occupation. It was defeated and marginalized from 2007 onward, but it then managed to re-emerge in Syria, taking advantage of the conditions created by the civil war in that country and the utmost brutality of the Syrian regime. And here it is, now striking again in the heart of the West. As ever: "They sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind."

     

     article originally appeared in the online Socialist Worker, the newspaper of the International Socialist organization.

  • Black Lives Matter Gathering Points a New Direction for the Movement

    Image

    The Black Lives Matter Movement is alive and well. If it has for the moment—under political attack and facing the winter’s sub-freezing temperatures—withdrawn from the streets, it has done so to plan a new stage in the fight for justice for African American victims of police racism and violence. As many as 400 people, mostly young people of color, attended the eight-hour long Black Lives Matter Gathering at the famous Riverside Church in Manhattan on January 30 where in workshops, trainings, and plenary sessions it seemed that a new direction was being set for the movement.

    Looking around the room and at the stage during the plenary, it was clear that this event signaled a turn in the America’s social movements today. While there were people there of all ages, it was clear that this is a movement of the young, and while there were people of all races, it was also clear that this is a movement led by African Americans, in particular, and by other people of color as well. 

    Black women took the lead in organizing the event, in the workshops, and in the plenary, where the dominant themes were the need for organization, program, and strategy. If they admire the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, the activists of today’s Black Lives Matter Movement believe they start at a higher political level, committed to full equality for women and the LGBT community. If some of those involved in Black Lives Matter Movement got their first experience with a mass movement in Occupy Wall Street, they seem have now to have drawn the lesson that a movement needs a democratic organization, a list of demands, and a strategy that can organize the power to achieve them. If they still want no traditional leaders, they are interested in creating an inclusive, democratic, and collective leadership.

    Most of the activists at the Gathering came from community- or campus-based organizations in the New York City area. And while every anarchist, socialist, or communist group seemed to be in attendance—and there are plenty of them—the most striking thing was the sense that the movement was greater than all of the groups, that it had its own independent life. These activists from the Black Lives Matter Movement in New York, made up of tens of thousands who had participated in protests throughout the city over the last several months, had come together at the Gathering to help the movement to find itself, to know itself, and to figure out where it was going. One had the sense of being present at an historic event, one that marks the beginning of new and significant developments.

    The Emergence of a New Social Movement

    The Black Lives Matter Movement emerged across the country in the fall of 2014 as thousands in scores of cities, organized by local groups or national networks, protested the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in New York City. The movement’s high point was seen by many as the December 13 Millions March in New York, a march of 50,000 organized by two young African American women, 19-year-old Synead (Cid) Nichols and 23-year-old Umaara Elliot.  

    But when on December 20, 2014 Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley, a man with a long history of mental illness, first shot and seriously wounded his girlfriend in a Baltimore suburb and then killed two New York City Police Department officers, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, the situation suddenly changed. The New York police union, a number of politicians, and the media argued that the Black Lives Matter Movement was responsible for killing and that the protests should stop. When Mayor de Blasio called upon the protestors to pause until after the police officers’ families had held their funerals, the protestors refused. “We will not let recent tragic moments derail this movement,” one protester shouted. “This is the revolution and we will not be repressed.”

    Still, the change in the political climate caused by the killings of the police officers and the conservative pro-police and anti-movement rhetoric, combined with the arrival of winter and below-freezing temperatures, drove the movement from the streets. Organizers of the Black Lives Matter Gathering felt that this pause provided a moment for reflection, reorganization, and recommitment to the movement’s goals.

    The Gathering

    The Riverside Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. made his famous August 4, 1967 speech condemning the Vietnam War and the site of many important social justice meetings, provided space for the Gathering’s 2:00 to 10:00 p.m. program of workshops, trainings, networking sessions, and plenary. The program began with six workshops: Independent Media for the Movement; Organizing Youth to Dismantle Oppression; From Ferguson and NYC to Palestine: Occupation, Racism & Militarized Policing; Running in Heels: Safety Strategies for LGBTSTGNC People of Color; Strategy, Tactics, and Movement Building; and From a History of Repression to a Future Liberation: Where do the Police Come from and How can they be Replaced?

    The Strategy, Tactics, and Movement Building Workshop began with about 40 people in the room but ended up with closer to 100. Akua Gyamerah began the discussion by telling those present, “We will need years of patient organizing. We need action, but also need to pause to analyze the situation. We need to ask how we can build, grow, but also how to sustain the movement.” She suggested that the movement needed to be “democratically structured and prepared to engaged in debates about different strategies” in order to draw the lessons of its experiences. When she also argued that the movement needed to be independent of the Democratic Party, the room erupted in applause.

    During the discussion speakers—all men and women of color—offered a variety of takes on the state of the movement. One woman talked about the how the Black Lives Matter movement had had a progressive role vis-à-vis the LBGT movement. Another woman was concerned that the various groups in the movement weren’t cooperating. “Right now we are very much fragmented,” she said. One man said, “We need to protest everyday” as well as organizing boycotts. One young woman from a town “up the Hudson,” said she liked the Ferguson idea of being “decentralized but coordinated.” One person argued for organizing around “a few simple demands,” while others thought the movement should be guided by “the needs of society’s most exploited and oppressed.” And there were many other comments and observations. One had to be impressed by the respect speakers showed for each other’s views, though it was also clear that this was only the beginning of what would be a long conversation, and as Gyamerah suggested, there would have to be some serious debate over strategies, goals and vision.

    The sense that African American people have played and continue to play an important role and often the leading role in American history was a pervasive notion. Many speakers both in the workshops and in the plenary argued that when black people move, others usually move with them and that that is generally good for the country, that it is leads to greater democracy and more power for working people.

    Moral Assignment of the Time: Revolution

    The plenary session speakers were five black women: the chair, Prof. Johanna Fernández of Baruch College; Danette Chavis, a founder of National Action against Police Brutality; Ansha Rose a 20 year old activist in the Black Youth Project; Thenjiwe McHarrison of Ferguson Action; and Colia Clark, a  veteran civil rights activist and Green Party candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2010 and 2012). The four movement leaders—all of them powerful speakers—were asked by Fernandez to respond to the questions at the center of the Gathering: What is this movement? What do we learn from the past? Where do we go from here? What do we need to grow and win?

    Chavis argued that the police had to be held accountable for their actions. “This is not the 1960s all over again. Then there was a demand for laws, today we have the laws and they are being broken.” She told the nearly 400 people at the plenary session, “Something totally different is taking place in law enforcement today. Ever since the Twin Towers dropped, things have changed. Rights have been diminished. Muslims have been persecuted.” Since September 11, 2001, she argued, in the eyes of government and the police, “the American people have become the potential terrorists.” Chavis told the young activists, “In this fight all hands are needed. Protest. Boycott. We need to do it all. Hit ‘em high, hit ‘em low.”

    Ansha Rose told the group, “We have to dispel the myth that police keep people safe. They keep some people with property safe and protect some people in government. But policing is discriminatory and used to control people.” She also urged people to consider not only police violence but also “structural violence” in every aspect of the social system. To oppose such violence she said, “We need direct action; that is, confronting power outside of the prescribed channels.” Rose told the group that it was important to be in an organization. “Organizations last longer than movements, longer than campaigns, they sustain us through our lives,” said Rose. She also argued for the importance of making demands. “We need specific demands—and a step-by-step strategy to take power and to win our demands.”

    When Rose dismissed the notion that we live in a “post-racial society,” and criticized those who carried “All Lives Matter” signs in the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, there was applause from the crowd. “We have to fight to say ‘Black Lives Matter’ even in this movement,” she said. “I believe in solidarity and in allies, but the word ‘ally’ should be a verb. We need to have a discussion about what it means to be an ally, and to be able to listen to each other.”

    Thenjiwe Harris, who has been active in Ferguson, told the group, “I didn’t need a police union official to tell me they were going to make war on us. When they militarized the police, that told me that there was a war against our people. Today militarized weapons are in our communities and in our schools. In Ferguson they came out with everything they have. They will do it everywhere when the time is right. So we have to bring them everything we’ve got. The time for sitting on the sidelines is over, the question is: which side are you on?”

    Colia Clark, a veteran of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), began by saying that when she saw this new movement and couldn’t identify any leaders, she thought to herself, “that’s like SNCC.” Clark talked about American history, arguing that, “The United States is not and has never been a democracy.” For just that reason, she argued, we need to call for a Constitutional Convention to re-found the country. But before that, she told the Gathering, “We need to call a convention of the 800 cities that joined the Black Lives Matter protests.”

    Johanna Fernandez ended the plenary session by stating, “The moral assignment of this time is to bring revolution to this nation.”

    The Black Lives Matter Gathering was a signal event. No doubt it is only one of many such events large and small taking place across the country. The Gathering made clear that we not only have a new movement here, but that there is a new leadership. We are at the beginning of something big and important.

  • The Left and the Election of Syriza

    It was always going to be messy­ and it has gotten so remarkably quickly. The decision by the Syriza leadership to form a coalition government with the anti-immigrant Independent Greeks (ANEL) party has rightly shaken progressives who hoped that the Greek elections would rapidly transform politics to the left. Instead, we have been harshly reminded that the logic of electoral politics can be dangerously compromising for the left.

    For anyone who thought the election itself would transform the landscape, this can only be a bitter disappointment. But Sunday’s stunning electoral defeat for Greek’s governing parties of austerity was not the product of the great minds of the Syriza leadership. It came about primarily due to six years of grassroots struggle ­two dozen general strikes, anti-racist mobilizations against the fascist Golden Dawn, solidarity work in neighborhoods to feed the hungry, protests by migrant workers, student rebellions, campaigns by healthcare workers, and much more. These struggles built the culture of solidarity and resistance upon which Syriza has drawn. And only if there is a deepening of all these forms of struggle in the months ahead will we be able to say that the electoral victory opened a road to real social and political conquests for the left.

    There is little doubt that the Syriza leadership desperately wants to compromise with the dominant institutions, particularly the EU. This was to be expected. Moreover, the institutional power of capital is enormous. But, Syriza’s leaders are also under pressure from their party’s largely working-class base, which wants an end to austerity and a real campaign against poverty and social inequality.

    In these circumstances, the Syriza leadership can be expected to tack and turn, cozying up to the forces of capital on the one hand, making concessions to the demands and expectations of its working class electorate on the other. So, it does a deal with ANEL at the same time that Syriza’s new Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, announces that his government will end its military cooperation with Israel and cancel its membership in the EU Free Trade Agreement if the blockade of Gaza is not lifted.

    These contradictions will not be wished away. They will not vanish because leftist critics declare that they should. They will be resolved ­one way or the other­ through sustained social struggle. It will not be easy­ and we were hopelessly naïve if we expected it to be so.

    But Syriza’s victory and the defeat of the parties of austerity has galvanized the forces of resistance, filled them with energy and hope, and created a more favorable terrain for social struggles. And it is there, in struggles from below, not the arena of parliament, that the decisive battles will be fought.

    In this context the March 21 International Day of Action against Racism and Fascism and for Migrant and Muslim Rights, ­a campaign which originated in Greece­, now becomes an urgent rallying point for “Street Syriza, ” as it has been called, to set the tone and the direction of events.

    *David McNally is a Professor of Political Science at York University, a member of the New Socialist Grouop and the author of Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires, and Global Capitalism.

  • New York Times perpetuates myth Israel was ‘fighting for its very survival’ during 1967 war

    ImageOn January 25, the New York Times posted an article by their Israel correspondent, Jodi Rudoren, about a new Israeli film, “Censored Voices,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this past weekend. Directed by Mor Loushy, “Censored Voices” is “the latest in a series of movies by leftist Israeli filmmakers who have won awards abroad by presenting harsh looks at their own society.” The film deals with Israeli war crimes committed during the 1967 war between Israel and Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. But while Rudoren’s article performs a valuable service in drawing attention to the film, it also perpetuates one of the main myths about that war.

    Based largely on interviews with Israeli soldiers—conducted in 1967, and heavily censored at the time—“Censored Voices” documents Israeli soldiers “summarily executing prisoners and evacuating Arab villages in a manner that one fighter likened to the Nazis’ treatment of European Jews.” Israeli atrocities in that war have been known for quite a while, but film is certainly a more powerful medium than newsprint.

    The film (which I haven’t yet seen) seems important, and especially useful at a time when the Israeli military is under investigation for atrocities committed in its recent Gaza assaults. It is increasingly hard for anyone to believe that Israeli soldiers are “blessed with special moral values,” in the words of a 1995 statement from the office of then-Prime Minister (and 1967 Chief of Staff) Yitzhak Rabin. Rudoren’s article also provides the significant information that even “Censored Voices” was censored and hence doesn’t tell the full story of the war crimes that occurred: “Israel forbids the filmmakers to reveal how much they were forced to change, and the military censor’s office refused to discuss it.”

    But Rudoren and apparently Loushy give an extremely inaccurate context for the atrocities committed in 1967. Rudoren describes that war as one in which Israel “started out fighting … for its very survival.” The film, says Rudoren, could lead to fodder for Israel’s critics if “viewed without consideration for the existential threat Israel faced at the time.” The movie, she writes, “does make clear the imminent threat to Israel —and then the stunning turnabout that military historians have long considered a marvel.” And Loushy is quoted as saying that “This is the story of men who went out to war feeling like they had to defend their life, and they were right, of course….”

    But they were not right, and nor are Rudoren or Loushy.

    Yes, Israeli soldiers, like much of the world, believed at the time that Israel faced an existential threat, as Arab armies poised on Israel’s borders while Radio Cairo broadcast bloodcurdling threats. But military and intelligence leaders in both Tel Aviv and Washington knew better.

    Consider the testimony of Prime Minister Menachem Begin, a member of the cabinet in June 1967:

    “In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”

    Or that of General Matti Peled, one of the twelve members of the Israeli Army’s general staff in 1967:

    “I am convinced that our General Staff never told the government [of Levi Eshkol] that there was any substance to the Egyptian military threat to Israel, or that we were not capable of crushing Nasser’s army which had exposed itself, with unprecedented foolishness, to the devastating strikes of our forces…. While we proceeded towards the full mobilization of our forces, no person in his right mind could believe that all this force was necessary for our ‘defense’ against the Egyptian threat….To pretend that the Egyptian forces concentrated on our borders were capable of threatening Israel’s existence not only insults the intelligence of any person capable of analyzing this kind of situation, but is primarily an insult to Zahal [the Israeli Army].”

    Or that of General Ezer Weizman, chief of operations in 1967 and later a prominent rightwing politician, who declared that “There never was a danger of extermination,” and that this hypothesis “had never been considered in any serious meeting.”

    Or that of Haim Bar-Lev, Deputy Chief of Staff in 1967, and later a cabinet member: “We were not threatened with genocide on the eve of the Six-Day War and we had never thought of such a possibility.”

    Or that of 1967 cabinet member Mordecai Bentov, a member of the leftist Mapam Party, who voted against launching the war in 1967 because he was convinced that political and diplomatic means of avoiding war had not been exhausted: “This whole story about the threat of extermination was totally contrived, and then elaborated upon, a posteriori, to justify the annexation of new Arab territories.”

    The same view was held in Washington. On May 26, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara “said that the U.S. agreed with the Israeli view that Israel would prevail in a conflict, even if hostilities were initiated by Egypt.” The chair of the Joints Chiefs of Staff “General Wheeler restated the American view of Israel’s military superiority and said that, although we recognize that casualties would be greater than in 1948 and 1956, Israel would prevail.” President Lyndon Johnson “said … if Israel is attacked, our judgment is that the Israelis would lick them,” and told the Israeli foreign minister “if the UAR attacks ‘you will whip hell out of them.’” The CIA predicted not only that Israel would win, but the day on which they would do so.

    The evidence is thus overwhelming that Israeli policymakers did not go to war in response to an existential threat. Why does all this matter today? If Israel’s conquest of the West Bank and Gaza (as well as the Golan Heights) were all inadvertent consequences of a war against an existential threat, then Israeli responsibility for the occupation is somewhat mitigated.

    Of course, even if Israel had been forced to go to war by an existential threat, it still would have had choices. It could have offered Palestinians the option of an independent state of their own or a binational state. Justice was always possible. Indeed, every year since 1967 Israel has had the choice of whether to seek to reverse the occupation and seek security through building ties to Palestinians rather than by extending their oppressive occupation, and it has consistently chosen the latter. In the same way, every year since 1947 Israel had a choice of whether to welcome back the refugees or to accelerate their dispossession. Again, Israel has consistently chosen the latter. Nevertheless, knowing what happened in 1967 is important because the absence of an existential threat undermines the chief Israeli talking point for its ongoing occupation.

    On June 5, when Israel launched its offensive, Prime Minister Eshkol publicly declared that Israel had no territorial ambitions and Defense Minister Dayan told his troops, “Soldiers of the IDF, we have no objectives of conquest.” When later that summer U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk reminded Foreign Minister Abba Eban of Eshkol’s statement, Eban “simply shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘We’ve changed our minds.’“1 But in fact, we know that several key Israeli policymakers wanted to acquire more land before the first shot was fired. The Minister of Labor, Yigal Allon, wrote an article before the outbreak of fighting in which he stated we “must not cease fighting until we achieve total victory, the territorial fulfillment of the Land of Israel.”2 Prime Minister Levi Eshkol told his wife the evening before the war, “We have to take back Jerusalem.”3 And more generally David Ben Gurion had been saying since 1949 that Israel’s failure to conquer East Jerusalem and the West Bank in the War of Independence was “a lamentation for generations,” a phrase used by many Israeli politicians over the subsequent 18 years.4

    Did Israel occupy these lands simply as bargaining chips for peace? Hardly: almost immediately it annexed East Jerusalem; expelled several hundred thousand Palestinian residents of the occupied territories, and began moving settlers into the occupied territories5—a policy their legal advisor told them was in contravention of international law. This is what you do when you are interested in creating “facts on the ground” for permanent border changes, not bargaining chips for peace.

    All this history is occluded by Rudoren’s gloss of the 1967 war as representing an existential threat to Israel. To be sure, Rudoren didn’t have to present in her news story a full historical analysis of the 1967 war, with a careful assessment of all the evidence. But to offer up the pro-Israel myth as if it were undisputed fact is simply propaganda.

     

    Notes

    1. Dean Rusk, As I Saw It (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), p. 388.
    1. Michael Brecher with Benjamin Geist, Decisions in Crisis: Israel, 1967 and 1973 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p, p. 100. The article was published after the war but written before.
    1. Donald Neff, Warriors for Jerusalem: the Six Days That Changed the Middle East (New York: Linden Press/Simon & Schuster, 1984), p, p. 195.
    1. Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (New York: Vintage, 2001), p. 321.
    1. Morris, Righteous Victims, pp. 327-29. See also Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005, translated 2007), pp. 523-42.

     

  • The Real Threat in Europe

    ImageThe real threat is the repression of migrant communities by national security states with the backing of a significant segment of the majority population mobilized by right wing forces.

    In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo and kosher supermarket shootings, security forces in Belgium launched a massive manhunt for what they described as jihadist sleeper cells that were about to mount new terrorist attacks.  To many observers, however, the operation seemed to stem less from hard intelligence than from the police hitting the panic button.

    Fanning the Flames

    The paranoia coursing through the public is not surprising since the western media, particularly the sensationalist CNN, have painted an image of thousands of homegrown jihadis returning to Europe to sow terror after military training in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria at the hands of Al Qaeda and Isis, with the security agencies having little capability of following up on them. CNN has warned its global audience that, according to intelligence sources, “as many as 20 sleeper cells of between 120 and 180 people could be ready to strike in France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.”

    The sense of entering an exceptional period has been reinforced by high-profile media appearances by so-called security experts like US Senator John McCain, Interpol Chief Jurgen Stock, and former Central Intelligence Agency Chief Leon Panetta.  McCain announces that the threat to the West is so great that only deploying American “boots on the ground” in Iraq and Syria to fight Isis will stem the terrorist tide in the West. Stock urges hitting suspected terrorists “before they hit you.”  Panetta says that the terrorist assault is now entering “a much more dangerous chapter” that will require more coordinated surveillance and action on the part of the US and European security forces. He warns—on CNN, not surprisingly–that Isis and Al Qaeda “are engaged in a much more aggressive effort to conduct violence not only in Europe, but I think it’s a matter of time before they direct it at the United States as well. “

    The Real Threat

    Panetta’s statement is irresponsible speculation masking as expert opinion.  What is not speculation is that the situation of the migrant communities in Europe is, to borrow his words, entering a new, more dangerous chapter.  While the official responses of Western European governments to the Paris events have been predominantly along the lines of liberal discourse, touching on themes like “inclusiveness” and “assimilation” of migrants and the Muslim community, migrants throughout the continent fear that the real solution entertained by increasing numbers of white Europeans is that proposed by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who declared bluntly: "We should not look at economic immigration as if it had any use, because it only brings trouble and threats to European people.  Therefore, immigration must be stopped. That's the Hungarian stance."  Ironically, Orban had just attended the January 11 “Unity Rally” in Paris that was joined by thousands of Muslim migrants bearing the slogan “Je suis Charlie.”

    France as Epicenter

    With the largest Muslim immigrant community in Europe, numbering over four million, France has become the focus of the continent’s struggle over migration.  Oban’s views on cracking down on migrants are reflected domestically by Marine Le Pen, who, in an op-ed piece published in the New York Times, called not only for “restricting immigration” but also for “stripping jihadis of their citizenship,” a proposal that many migrants took to apply to more than just active jihadis.  Le Pen’s National Front is on a roll, having won 26 per cent of the vote, or 4.1 million votes, in the May 2014 elections to the European Parliament, a result described by French Prime Minister Manuel Valls as  “a shock, an earthquake."   Recent polls show French President Francois Hollande losing to Le Pen in a runoff election if held today.

    In her contribution to the Times, Le Pen calls attention to the fact that “Whether from the right or the left, one French administration after another has failed to size up the problem or the task to be accomplished.”  This is probably the only accurate statement in the piece.

    It is not that successive administrations have not had the opportunity to address the issue in a decisive way.  The biggest opportunity was provided by the massive riots in the banlieues or miserable suburbs of French cities a decade ago. The 2005 riots, which lasted for 20 successive nights and resulted in the burning of 9000 vehicles and the destruction of 80 schools and many business establishments, brought to the eyes of France and the world the desperation of the migrant communities that inhabited the suburbs and the tremendous resentment of their young people. As Mary Dejevsky of The Independent wrote, the riots offered a glimpse of the “France that is marooned between town and country, shut away behind ugly concrete walls, confined inside rotting tower blocks…the France that has failed.”  It was in these banlieues that the Charlie Hebdo gunmen, the Kouachi brothers, Cherif and Said, were born, raised, and worked.

    The Illusion of Equality

    The riots could have been the beginning of a process of truly integrating communities that were defined as French but did not have the opportunities that other French people had.  Yet, for ten years, hardly anything in the way of substantial reform was done to speed up the  assimilation of migrants and improve their living conditions.  One key problem was, paradoxically, rooted in the ideology of the French Revolution.  As one French immigration specialist noted, “Part of the problem is the French approach to integration, based on the concept that everyone is equal.  The idea that we are equal is fiction.  Ethnic minorities keep being told they do not exist.”  French official ideology is so intent on erasing particularities that the government does not allow statistics to be broken down by religion or ethnicity.  The result of ideological blinders is, as Guy Arnold describes it, a “resentful society of supposedly equal French citizens that has grown up in the heart of France’s capital under the blind eyes of successive governments that have simply not wanted to know.”

    Laicite

    The life of immigrants was further complicated by another legacy of the French Revolution, the core principle of laicite or secularism.  The separation of Church and state has always been strict in France, but in recent years, it has bordered on intolerance, with a devastating impact on relations between Muslims and the dominant society.  Invoking laicite, a movement drawing support from left to right was able to pass in 2004 a law banning the hijab, a scarf that covers the head and chest, in public schools. This was followed in 2011 by another law, again with support across the ideological spectrum, that criminalized hiding one’s face in public, effectively banning two other traditional items of clothing worn by Muslim women: the niqab, a veil that covers the entire face, and the burqa, an outer garment that covers one from head to toe.    

    Some analysts claim that it was not so much the ideology of laicite that was at fault but doctrinaire ideologues and self-interested politicians who allowed the issue to run out of control instead of appealing to common sense and tolerance to allow these regular items of female Muslim dress to become parts of a diverse sartorial scene, as in Britain and the United States.

    Failure of the French Model

    A third reason for the absence of reform was the smug conviction among technocrats that the “French model of assimilation” was on the whole working and the 2005 riots were merely a rough patch on the road.  In the “French model,” according to analyst Francois Dubet, “the process of migration was supposed to follow three distinct phases leading to the making of ‘excellent French people.’ First, a phase of economic integration into sectors of activities reserved for migrants and characterized by brutal exploitation. Second, a phase of political participation through trade unions and political parties. Third, a phase of cultural assimilation and fusion into the national French entity, with the culture of origin being, over time, maintained solely in the private sphere.” 

    What the technocrats did not face up to was that by the 1990’s the mechanism sustaining the model had broken down, owing largely to the inability of a capitalist economic system in the grip of neoliberal policies to generate the semi-skilled and unskilled jobs for migrant youth that had served as the means of integration into the working class for earlier generations of migrants.  Youth unemployment in many of the banlieues reached 40 per cent, nearly twice the national average.  And with the absence of stable employment, migrant youth lacked the base from which they could be incorporated into trade unions, political parties, and cultural institutions.

    Impeded by ideological blindness to inequality, political mishandling of the Muslim dress issue, and technocratic failure to realize that neoliberalism had disrupted the economic ladder to integration, authorities increasingly took to repressive measures to deal with the “migrant problem.”  The solution took the form of even tighter policing of the banlieues,  with an emphasis on controlling young males, and, most notably, an escalation of deportations.  When Nicolas Sarkozy took office as president of France in 2007, deportation became the preferred method of dealing with migrants.  With his Interior Minister given free rein, a record 32,912 migrants were deported in 2011, a 17 per cent rise from the year before.  The minister, Claude Gueant, regularly engaged in explosive anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic rhetoric, linking Muslim immigrants to crime and drugs and asserting that Muslims praying in the street led to the “French no longer [feeling] at home.”  As the 2012 presidential elections drew near, Muslim and immigrant baiting became the means by which Sarkozy tried, unsuccessfully, to cut into Marine Le Pen’s right-wing base to stop Francois Hollande from being elected president in 2012.

    Where was the Left?

    Notably absent as a decisive force shaping the politics of migration was the Left.  This is because, for the most part, the Left marginalized itself. The Socialists largely bought into the technocrats’ assimilation model, while the Communist Party of France (PCF) oscillated between hostility to and uneasy acceptance of migrants.  Failing to understand capitalism’s dynamic of creating new strata of marginalized workers, the PCF largely stuck to representing, servicing and protecting its traditional industrial working class base.  Indeed, the PCF was initially hostile to migrants, with the party leadership voting to limit migration in 1980 and PCF-dominated local governments opposing entry of migrants to housing projects.  Currently, although the party supports the regularization of undocumented migrants, the PCF and the migrant community view each other with mutual suspicion.

    This is not to say that there were no efforts on the part of the militant left to organize migrants.  Small Maoist groups dabbled in mobilizing them in the 1970’s and 1980’s.  But with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist project, many progressive activists shied away from organizing unorganized sectors of the working class, which they regarded as a failed agent of change, while others evolved into union bureaucrats.  Some militants became active instead in the largely middle-class based anti-globalization movement, while some of the most progressive promising intellectuals, like the now celebrated Alain Badiou, moved from politics to philosophy.  (Badiou as a young academic had founded a Maoist formation, the Marxist Leninist French Communist Union [UCFML], that tried to organize migrants into class-conscious workers.)

    Over the last decade, one issue in particular eroded the already tenuous ties of the Left to the Muslim migrant community.  While all sectors could unite against racism and Islamophobia, a debilitating debate split their ranks on the issue of the hijab, with some viewing its use in public places as a violation of laicite and others defending the right of women to wear it.

    With the ossification of class politics, ethnic, cultural, national, and racial themes came to dominate public debate both inside and outside the banlieues.  For the youth of the banlieues, the vacuum created by the absence of the left had critical consequences. As Dubet put it, “the traditional character of the left-wing activist supporting the population’s collective protest is disappearing behind the religious figure embodying the alternative route for a dignified and moral life in a city ‘outside the real world,’ in a community protected from a society perceived as being impure.”  

    Reading accounts of their trajectory, one cannot but entertain the possibility that in other circumstances, Cherif and Said Kouachi would probably have been ripe for recruitment into a progressive movement.  But with no figure on the secular left to provide guidance to their feelings of injustice and their idealism, that vacuum, in the case of Cherif, was filled by Farid Benyettou, a devout Muslim of Algerian descent who tirelessly held discussion groups with impressionable young men, encouraging them to join jihad and setting up, according to one investigative report, “a pipeline for young French Muslims” to travel to join Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s  Al Qaeda’s network in Iraq.   The rest, as they say, is history.

    An Inevitable Ascendancy?

    The real threat in France and in Europe is not the fantasy of a thousand jihadist sleeper cells poised to wreak havoc on society.  The real threat is the repression of migrant communities by national security states with the backing of a significant segment of the majority population mobilized by right wing forces.  These forces are becoming increasingly sophisticated in popularizing their reactionary project.  In her recent op-ed piece in the New York Times, Marine Le Pen invokes the name of the liberal icon Albert Camus and deploys Republican discourse:  “We, the French, are viscerally attached to our laïcité, our sovereignty, our independence, our values. The world knows that when France is attacked it is liberty that is dealt a blow…The name of our country, France, still rings out like a call to freedom.”  Some commentators have interpreted this new style as a “move to the center.”  They are mistaken.  It is extremist intent masked in secular Republican discourse.  What is unmistakable, though, is the confidence with which Le Pen now speaks to the West.  It is the confidence of one who feels she is in the antechamber of power.

    Is the ascendancy of Le Pen and similar far-right leaders inevitable?  

    In France, as in Europe as a whole, the relationship between the dominant society and the migrant community is a story of missed opportunities, timid initiatives, and failures in leadership.  It is also a story of abdication.  A central actor that had played a role in the integration and amelioration of the conditions of earlier oppressed and exploited communities deserted the scene, leaving the field to racists and religious fundamentalists.  Still, a secular Left that bridges the growing gulf between communities by asserting, beyond real differences of religion, culture, and ethnicity, the overriding common interest of people as workers that are exploited and divided by an aggressive neoliberal capitalism and rallies them around a transformative emancipatory project is still Europe’s best antidote to the brewing maelstrom.  Whether the European Left is up to the challenge is, however, another story.

     

    *As chairman of the Committee on Overseas Workers Affairs of the House of Representatives of the Philippines, Walden Bello is engaged in the issues facing migrant workers.

    This article was originally written for Telesur English.

     

  • Philly teachers – the kind of troublemakers who built teachers unions

    Image        I have a long-time  friend who recalls how, as a young teacher, she came to  her Brooklyn school on November 7, 1960  to walk the picket line. She was terrified at breaking the law and was only one of a very few teachers in her school to strike. Fearful but also committed, she held hands with a gal pal for mutual support. Only 5,600 New York City teachers out of 45,000 walked the picket line. My friend loved teaching and felt that conditions in the school would improve if teachers had a union that spoke for the profession. This minority action led to formation of what is now the largest teachers union local in the world, the United Federation of Teachers.

                The story of modern teacher unionism’s creation is of a relatively small number of courageous individuals who banded together, defying the existing social norms, taking direct action – at personal risk.  They were dismissed by leaders of mainstream teacher organizations as zealots who endangered all teachers by acting with no one’s authority but their own.  

                We again see courageous teachers taking action in small groups, with parent support, to defend their professional ideals, publicizing and boycotting standardized tests that are especially brutal for kids who have no chance of doing well for reaons beyond the control of any child, school, or teacher.  Two especially  vulnerable groups are children with special needs who don’t have the capacity to master work being tested and English Language Learners (ELLs), who have recently arrived in the US speaking a different language.  

                However most teachers unions are straining to make nice with the testing regime, to maintain “a seat at the table,” as AFT President Weingarten likes to describe the compliant role the union plays. We see important exceptions, with the Chicago Teachers Union once again being a model of how a union can navigate legal constraints and still support members who are standing up with parents to oppose the testing. When teachers and parents in dozens of schools defied the school board and boycotted a test (that was not going to “count” no less), the CTU announced support and geared up to defend its members.  The movement to “opt out” of testing has been largely driven by white middle class parents and teachers, but as CTU President Karen Lewis masterfully explains, standardized testing has its roots in the eugenics movement. CTU’s stance on standardized testing, the superb materials it distributes to members, the media and parents, and now, its defense of teachers who refuse to be frightened into doing what they know is wrong for their students – all show what can happen when we have teachers unions that are democratic and militant.

                In contrast to the CTU’s public, energetic support of boycotting teachers, the Philadelphia Teachers Federation (PFT) has been slow to rally to the defense of teachers at the Feltonville  School who informed parents about the tests and then faced disciplinary action from the school board. In a recent blog Diane Ravitch helped the teachers by publicizing their struggle but didn’t mention the PFT’s role.  Parent activists expressed their support for the teachers days before the union made a public statement.  Though the leadership clique that has long controlled the PFT has not provided a public explanation of its delay in expressing support of the teachers’ right to inform parents, loyalists of the union brass were not shy in emails they sent to teachers in their schools about branding Feltonville teachers as disruptors who should have respected the right of the union (honchos) to dictate when and how to resist – or not. Leading Feltonville activist teachers are members of the reform Caucus of Working Educators (CWE), which has mounted a petition campaign and mobilized to win broader support of the Feltonville teachers  and rights of parents to opt out their children out of the tests.  CWE has done with far fewer resources what the PFT should have done – long ago – with far more. The leaders of this opt-out movement are mostly gutsy women, teachers and moms, who are standing up for kids, public education, and the teaching profession. 

                A look at the PFT website tells the story of a business union, unwilling and probably unable in its current form, to represent members forcefully or defend public schools.  The home page has no mention of the opt out issue, though it’s hot news in several Philly community papers. There’s no mention of the opt out struggle even under “News and issues.” But maybe’s there’s a  mention of the disciplinary hearing Feltonville teachers face under “Events”? Nope, top event on that page is a glowing account of what the PFT appears to consider the big story for Philly teachers, parents, and students: “This Year, PFT members raised $16,780 for "Komen for the Cure!"  The story carries a prominent photo of  PFT President, Jerry Jordan – whose picture is also on the homepage.  Having a union president's picture all over union materials is evidence of the paternalism that, unfortunately, characterizes many unions, even those with an overwhelmingly female membership, like teachers unions.

                It's important that Jerry Jordan has finally stated support for the right of teachers to inform parents about opting-out of the tests, but winning on standardized testing, which threatens teachers’ livelihoods and kids’ lives, will take far more than a statement to the press or sending a lawyer to help a Feltonville teacher in the disciplinary hearing.  CWE understands, as do the Chicago reformers who now lead the CTU, that business unionism is a dead end. We can’t make deals with politicians who aim to destroy our schools, our profession, public education.  We need democratized,  mobilized unions to push back successfully. Teachers who care about kids need to learn, fast, how to transform their unions.  If you need some advice, you might ask the teachers at Feltonville – after you sign the petition supporting them and parent's right to opt out of tests.  We have a great deal to learn from their struggle.