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  • 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

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    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.

  • An Antarsya Activist Talks to New Politics about the Syriza Government in Greece

    Image

    New Politics interviewed Iannis Delatolas, an art photographer, a founding member of the Greek Solidarity Movement (AKNY), and a supporter of Antarsya 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, in anti-war activities, and in other social justice causes.

    New Politics – Iannis, why did Syriza do so well in the elections? To what do you attribute such a strong victory?

    Iannis Delatolas – Syriza’s electoral victory is part of a massive shift to the left in Greek Society since the crisis and the memoranda begun. Not only did Syriza get 36.3% of the vote but the combined vote for all the left parties, Syriza, KKE and Antarsya nationally is at 42.56%. In the traditionally "red" working class areas of Athens the combined vote is even higher. In electoral districts “B Athens” it is at 45.1% and “B Piraeus” the combined vote for the Left is at 51.2%. In effect what this means is the end of the social democrats of Pasok and possibly also of the conservative New Democracy party, as voters punished both for the misery and destruction they brought on to Greek society. At the same time this massive leftward shift is a tremendous opening for the radical left in Greece and points to the potential not just for pushing back austerity and restoring pre memoranda wages and social spending, but to the opening for a more radical break and rupture with Capitalism. What the Left does in Greece will reverberate across the globe. And here come a lot of responsibilities and critical moments ahead.  

    New Politics – How do you feel about Antarsya’s showing?

    Delatolas – Antarsya doubled its votes since the last election. These 40,000 votes are a clear anticapitalist vote. Antarsya's strength lies in its ability to argue a radical and confrontational anticapitalist policy in the movements, the labor unions and the movements for social justice in general. Antarsya's influence reaches far beyoned its electoral appeal. It is understandable that people voted Syriza to make sure the memoranda parties did not make a comeback. Some of our periphery voted for Syriza or the KKE, but the significance of Antarsya is that it can unify into common action a substantial section of activists—most importantly with an anticapitalist and revolutionary daily practice and long term goal. As the bankers and the EU fight back against Syriza’s gradual and moderate reversals of memorandum austerity, this anticapitalist perspective of a break with the Euro will become more important. Let's not forget that the Left Platform in Syriza agrees with Antarsya on the need for a Grexit, nationalization of the banks and workers control. So in that sense Antarsya's role has been crucial in being a crystal clear anticapitalist political front.     

    New Politics – What are the various possibilities for Syriza forming a coalition? What are the relative assets and liabilities of the various coalition partners? There have been some reports that Syriza may be considering a coalition with the rightist Independent Greeks party, what do you know about that? What do you think of it? Would Antarsya be willing to be part of a Syriza coalition government?

    Delatolas – This has already been decided.  Unfortunately an alliance with the other left party of the working class was not achieved. Some responsibility lies here with Syriza's pro-Euro position; Syriza is the only left party with a pro Euro stance. Also with the refusal of the KKE to work with any other left party, a symptom of sectarianism but negotiations and pressure might have produced some type of conditional alliance. This was not attempted as Tsipras met first with the Independent Greeks (ANEL) right away and a deal was struck very fast. The alliance with ANEL has been quite some time in the making. It is an unfortunate choice as ANEL is a far right party with racism, homophobia, nationalism and anti-Turkish policies at its core. It would be the equivalent of UK Independence Party in the United Kingdom. Also the party has ties to the shipping magnates, so questions come up now about this government's sustainability long term. And also, we have to ask, how will this impair Syriza's ability to roll back the austerity it was voted in office to do?        

    New Politics – Syriza has said that it will be a hard negotiator with the Troika. What is the current Syriza economic proposal and what is the likelihood of it being accepted?

    Delatolas – Well this has yet to be determined.  Since the 2012 elections, Syriza has retreated from the “cancelation of memoranda” to negotiating down the debt. Giorgos Stathakis said at one time that 95% of the debt was “legitimate,” yet a few days ago talk was of a 50% haircut and then some retreat even  from that… It is unclear if Syriza will be confrontational enough since it keeps saying that it will not leave the Euro. This is tantamount to giving away one's best bargaining chip. Without putting up a fight, this single non-exit from the Euro position makes negotiating much harder, even inside the parameters that Syriza has set up as its political boundaries.

    New Politics – Syriza came out of social movements of labor unions and communities, but the wave of activism of the last few years decline in the recent past. What do you see as the future of the labor and social movements? What needs to be done to revive them?

    Delatolas – Yes, the nearly insurrectional character of 2012 confrontations is not with us today. But we have to keep in mind that 34 General strikes have brought down 4 governments since 2008. So we are talking here about a very militant and unrelenting movement of resistance, maybe more focused in smaller pockets of resistance in the last year or so, such as the ERT workers and the 595 cleaners who were just rehired by the new government. They had become a beacon of resistance. They even came out in support of the Gay Pride last summer. The fact that one of the first things the government did was to rehire them points to the importance of a sustained militancy. They’ve slept on the sidewalk outside the ministry of Finance since 2013 and faced assaults by the riot police and the neo-nazis (I will come back to the police -nazi axis in a bit). It is also important to look into the role of Syriza unionists, as well as of the KKE, has played in voting against 2 day and longer strikes, maybe as part of the limitations that electoralism can impose on radical left parties such as Syriza.    

    New Politics – One of the most serious political problems on the ground in Greece is that the police force has been infiltrated by the ultra-rightwing Golden Dawn Party. What will Syriza do to deal with this problem? What does Antarsya think needs to be done?

    Delatolas – Golden Dawn is not a simply “ultra-right” party.  It is an openly Neo-Nazi party. They operate or did before the antifascist movement curtailed their power for the time being, with storm trooper-like formations of thugs that would go out looking for immigrants and LGBT people, anarchists and socialists to beat and in some cases murdered them. Half their leadership is in jail awaiting trial on charges of running a criminal organization. There has been a delay in these trials. We intend to mobilize and pressure the new government to move and to try their leadership for these crimes. They have been arrested and due to a very small team of lawyers who work pro bono, are now facing charges for their role in orchestrating some of the attacks against migrants, but also for their role on the murder of antifa rap artist Pavlos Fyssas. The two Golden Dawn members who murdered Pakistani immigrant Shahzad Luqman were sent to jail for life, the first time such murders have been punished. This is the first in Greek history. However the fight against fascism in Greece is far from over. More mobilizations are needed such as the upcoming March 21 International Day Against Fascism. We plan to organize an action here in New York and possibly in other US cities.       

    New Politics – When left governments come to power–that is to the left of the Social Democrats–they often face the danger of a military coup. What has Syriza done to win over either part of the top military officers or to organize within the army to win the rank-and-file soldiers from their officers? What is Antarsya's position on the question of the Army?

    Delatolas – Here I would have to defer to comrade Stathis Kouvelakis who is in the Central Committee of Syriza. As he mentioned in an article recently, there do not seem to be the types of networks in the army that could lead to a military threat on the left at this time. Of course that may change in the future. But for the time being a bigger threat comes from the police force and the sections of the judiciary. As you mentioned, more than half of the police are infiltrated by the Golden Dawn. It is far more likely that this toxic alliance of the fascists and these sections of the state can become a real threat in the future. Unfortunately days before the election Syriza put out a press release addressing the police. In that statement, they reneged on a demand of the movement to disarm and dissolve the riot police and the Delta force, known for their racism and brutality, as well for their being a solid electoral voting bloc for Golden Dawn. Alexis Tsipras had already made references to this in the past. Obviously a challenge to the bourgeois State will require more radical circumstances but nevertheless Syriza’s not dissolving the Riot Police right away may cause problems for our side down the line.  

    New Politics – What will be Antarsya's goals under a Syriza government? What will be your attitude toward the government? To what degree would you be willing to defend it against the right? To what degree will you challenge it?

    Delatolas – We plan to support the measures that benefit the workers and impoverished strata. We will be a left opposition to keep pushing the Syriza government to the left. And for the first time since the 1930's a left government is in office.That does not mean that the left has the power yet. That is an important difference. Syriza will still have to work inside the confines of capitalism and the bourgeois state. But we will not stop there. We hope to work with comrades and anticapitalists from all the left parties and movements and fight for an exit from the Euro and cancellation of the debt as opposed to just a “haircut.” And we have no illusions on reforming the EU as the leadership of Syriza proclaims. We expect head on collisions with the bankers and the EU. The Greek workers did not fight all these years and bring Syriza to power for a “light” version of austerity. But we must be aware both of the dangers and the hope we inherit from the ashes of the memoranda parties of New Democracy and PASOK.

  • Some thoughts on the deal between Syriza and the Independent Greeks

    Here are some immediate thoughts. They include how we on the international and internationalist Left might respond. As well as what ­ in my opinion ­ we should say:

    1 – Do not cry, do not wax indignant, understand. The great enlightenment philosopher Spinoza’s advice is pertinent. Let’s understand the logic (of which I am critical). This is not a time for absolutism. But neither for being mealy-mouthed.
     
    2 – This is not a surprise. The meeting lasted an hour between Alexis Tsipras and Panos Kammenos. It was finalizing things. Discussions have been underway for some time. It will not do to say this is an emergency measure caused by falling short of 151 seats. And it certainly will not do to blame the Left, inside or outside Syriza. Why?
     
    3 – As I explained in running commentary, seeking a coalition partner was never a matter of parliamentary arithmetic. It is about political logic.
     
    4 – The argument for including ANEL goes like this: we face a national humanitarian disaster. Greece faces international foes. Just as it did under the Mussolini invasion and the Third Reich occupation. We cannot face up to that with 36 percent support. The Left must broaden its base. To Potami and Pasok would weaken the anti-memorandum position. ANEL will have to stick with an anti-memorandum line. So we will strengthen the anti-memorandum hand in the negotiations with the Troika by having them in the tent. Additionally, this will discombobulate the Right. For the moderates in Syriza it also gives a counterweight to the Left.
     
    5 – (I am trying to do justice to the argument above. I do not agree with it.) This is not just tactics. It is a product of strategy. The theory of how to win hegemony this works from looks to the building of political blocs (resting on class blocs). That finds intellectual resource in a variety of traditions ­ Communist, Eurocommunist, Maoist, even variants of the Trotskyist. I can justify those claims, but not right now. Put the ideological tradition to one side. The issue is political strategy. Consider that and then you can make sense of the ideological justification which, like mathematics to the natural sciences, comes in as handmaiden.
     
    6 – How can a party of the radical Left be in alliance with that Greek UKIP [United Kingdom Independent Party]? Well ­ the memorandum cuts through politics in Greece orthogonally (at right angles) to the Left/Right divide. It is possible to be right-wing on all the social questions and against the memorandum. ANEL may loosely be compared with UKIP. But it was formed out of a split from New Democracy on an anti-memorandum basis. UKIP in Britain is Thatcherite and struggles to articulate the mood against austerity.
     
    7 – What is ANEL [Independent Greeks]? It is a nationalist, xenophobic, anti-German party. But it has not built its support ­ unlike Golden Dawn (GD) ­ on the basis of popular racism. It has built it by not being part of the coalitions which implemented austerity. That is an important distinction. But it is racist. Kammenos voted against the Pasok (when in government alone) law to grant citizenship rights to children of immigrants. Syriza supported the law. It has opposed the concentration camps for immigrants.
     
    8 – How does that pan out? Some on the Left of Syriza ­ many ­ are saying that with 149 MPs to ANEL’s 13, Syriza will “hegemonize” Kammenos. Friends from the internationalist wing of formal majority of Syriza ­ 70 percent of the Congress ­ say that. But they are worried by the move and do not like it.
     
    9 – The position of the Left Platform? Most of the Left Platform ­ led by Panayiotis Lafazanis ­ were privately more against a deal with To Potami or Pasok than with ANEL. Why? Because they share the strategy of building broad “popular alliances” shaped by what they frame as a “national struggle” against the Troika. Alexis Tsipras played with that language a lot in his victory speech last night. He spoke of sovereignty and national dignity. He did not describe the election as a victory for the Left. But it was a Left victory.
     
    10 – The anti-racist mobilizations and demands to do better than Pasok on immigration, human rights, police brutality and jailing GD therefore become even more important in providing a counter pole to the presence of ANEL in the government. Kammenos ­ a poster boy of the shipping magnates ­ is pitching for shipping minister. That ministry has been in the hands of the maritime oligarchs for the last 40 years whoever is in office. People voted for a break with the old corruption, not for tolerating it under a Left government born of hope.
     
    11- The KKE? Its leader did not stick the boot into ANEL in his speech on election night (but rightly attacked the GD as neo-Nazis). It will lambast the government as “more of the same”.
     
    12 – The anti-capitalist Left is in a position to make a clear political explanation of what is wrong with the forming of the coalition. The clarity and strength of that argument is immediately bound up with the movements, against racism and for migrant rights especially.
     
    13 – Was there an alternative? Yes. Syriza could have formed a minority government. But that would mean being very clear that the strategy was of using all positions of strength of the Left, inside and outside government, to conduct a fight with the Right, the oligarchs and the Troika. It is perfectly constitutionally possible to form a minority government. And politically. An aggressive challenge to the minor parties to vote against the government would put them under enormous pressure. In fact, with ANEL in the coalition, the government will have to rely on this tactic anyway. For example, if it wants to propose decent measures over migrants, racism, police behaviour, LGBT equality, etc., it will have to challenge the likes of Pasok and the liberal modernizing To Potami to dare vote against them, while facing down objections from ANEL. Either that or, despite the 149 to 13 balance of the coalition, the tail will wag the dog.
     
    14 – We are at the beginnings of this process. Not the end. There will be much more of this kind of thing. We must prepare for it and calmly understand and explain. Tout comprendre c’est tout pardoner: to understand all is to excuse all, goes another maxim. It can lead to that. But it should not. There is a debate. Some genuinely believe this to be a correct policy. I am one of those who does not. There is nothing wrong in friends of the Greek movement and Left saying so. And if you do think so, you should say so.
     
    15 – But we don’t want to demoralize people? No, we must not. The Left depends on hope and we must approach this ­ as all the future questions ­ from the standpoint of how we develop hope. That rests on deepening the impact of the electoral success in Greece and the breach it opens up over austerity and, whatever the political machinations here, over racism too.
     
    16 – So we should make our case from the standpoint of:

    • Developing the resistance and movements of hope where we are.
    • Seriously acknowledging that these are major questions of strategy. That means debating them through and not foreclosing the argument with outraged indignation. It also requires talking to those from other traditions — with other viewpoints — and not just the comfort of those who agree with us.
    • Placing a premium upon fraternal and intelligent political arguments. The aim is to convince, not to denounce.
    • Taking account of the big lines of division — with the Right and with the elites impozing austerity. The argument against putting ANEL in government is that it weakened the front on those battle lines. That has to be shown.

    Concretely, a massive and unified display of opposition on the international day of action on 21 March, which originated in Greece, against racism and fascism and for migrant and Muslim rights is now a date which all on the Left should bookmark and take action on.

    There will be much more too. But we should approach it all in this spirit.

    This article originally appeared in Counterfire.

    *Kevin Ovenden is a longstanding progressive journalist, writer and activist who has followed Greece's politics and social movements for 25 years. A National Officer of the Stop the War Coalition and a leading activist in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, he led five successful aid convoys to break the siege on Gaza, and was aboard the Mavi Marmara aid ship when Israeli commandoes boarded it killing 10 people in May 2010.

    Please support this venture. Kevin's reporting is funded by the sale of 'Syriza: Greek For Hope' T-shirts , get yours from Philosophy Football

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  • After Syriza's Victory

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    Syriza’s electoral triumph has brought hope to the European radical Left and workers’ movement, offering it an immense opportunity. We can also put that the other way around – to fail this test could have incalculable consequences.

    A few quick remarks on the first difficulties and problems we face:

    First of all, Syriza came close to winning an overall majority, but ultimately just fell short. Its final score (36.3%) was at the lower end of what the exit polls had suggested, while New Democracy’s result was towards the upper end of its exit poll prediction. In this sense there was a twinge of disappointment in the campaign offices and in front of the Propylaea last night. Moreover, having been in central Athens on a number of election nights, I have to say that this time there were fewer people in the streets than after the Pasok victories of the 1980s and 1990s.

    Even if beating New Democracy by 8.5% is an important victory, we have to explain why the dynamic behind Syriza was not as great as we had hoped. One striking aspect of the results is that, while nationally Syriza improved on its June 2012 and European elections score by almost 10%, it made much less progress in the main urban centres (particularly Athens and Thessaloniki), of the order of 6%. So while in June 2012 its best result was in the very working-class, emblematically ‘Red’ 2ndPiraeus constituency (if we don’t include Xanthi, where it enjoyed massive support from the Turkish-speaking minority) this time round it did better in seven other areas (including former Pasok bastions like Crete and the northern Peloponnese) than in the Piraeus industrial belt (though here too it went from 37 to 42%). 

    Thus Syriza made advances above all in rural and semi-urban areas and middling provincial towns: in a Greece whose political behaviour is more conservative and ‘legitimist’. Its influence in the country is thus now more homogeneous, as it makes its appearance as a legitimate ‘party of government’; but it lacked the dynamic to be able to increase its advantage in the major cities and get the extra seats it needed in the mega-constituencies of Athens and Thessaloniki. Its electoral profile is now that of a more ‘cross-class’ party, without the ‘unevenness’ of 2012: its support is less distinctly rooted among the wage-earners of the main urban centres, even if its influence among this population is very great and they do make up a major part of its vote.

    This fact ought to be seen in parallel with the KKE making (albeit limited) gains of 1% relative to June 2012, as well as Antarsya going from 0.33 to 0.64%. Their progress was largely in the main urban centres. So Syriza certainly suffered some small losses ‘to its Left’ and above all was unable to mobilise major reserves of abstaining voters (there was a weak turnout nationally, at just 64%).

    The new government (whose composition was unknown at the time of writing) will have to deal with truly staggering obstacles. The coffers are empty and the state’s revenues are collapsing quicker than expected. It will very soon become apparent that the financing plan set out in the ‘Thessaloniki programme’ was based on very over-optimistic estimates (or even simply wrong ones). The goal, here, was to give the impression that the programme could be realised half by redirecting the European credits (which are earmarked, some of them already allocated, and whose payment is entirely dependent on EU agreement) and half through a more effective collection of tax receipts, without tax reform and without a need for increased budget deficits. The government’s strategic orientation toward the EU is also rather unclear. Yesterday Tsipras was keen to reassure the EU and the markets, speaking of a ‘sincere dialogue’ and ‘mutually advantageous solution’. He didn’t mention the word ‘debt’.

    Yesterday I was alarmed to hear comrades praising [ECB president Mario] Draghi, presenting him as some sort of great adversary of Angela Merkel and [German finance minister Wolfgang] Schäuble, and almost as an ally of Syriza’s. Today the only European leader whose smiling face adorns the homepage of the party’s official website left.gr is that of Martin Schulz [president of the EU parliament; member of the German Social Democrats], who has asked for an immediate meeting with Tsipras. It seems that some circles in the party have gone so far as to convince themselves of the truth of campaign slogans like ‘Europe’s changing’, in the sense that ‘the EU is prepared to make an honourable compromise with us’. But the outlook on that front, in the best-case scenario, would be to bypass the Troika and ‘negotiate’ (that magic word!) a mildly blunted version of the Memorandums directly with the EU institutions.

    Last but not least, while Mr. Kammenos and his sovereigntyist right-wing ANEL party [Independent Greeks] are certainly a lesser evil compared to formations like To Potami (whose stated goal was to force Syriza to stay within the narrow boundaries set by the EU and the Memorandums), they are nonetheless an evil. Their participation in the government, even with just one minister, would symbolise the end of the idea of an ‘anti-austerity government of the Left’. Moreover, this is a party of the Right, one that is particularly concerned to protect the ‘hard core’ of the state apparatus (it will be important to keep a watchful eye over whatever cabinet portfolio it might get). It will be no surprise if its first demands are for the ministry of defence or public order, though it seems that it will not get them.

    Syriza has a very narrow margin of manoeuvre – but these ambiguities must soon be resolved. Society remains passive for the moment, yet the hopes placed in Syriza are very great and very concrete. Hugely important tasks lie ahead for those forces that are conscious of the coming dangers and determined to defend the key points of the party’s programme of breaking with austerity. More than ever we must be clear that there is no middle course between confrontation and capitulation. The moment of truth is at hand.

    Athens, 26 January 2015

    Translated by David Broder

    *Stathis Kouvelakis teaches philosophy at King’s College in London. He is a member of the national leadership of Syriza. This article originally appeared on the Verso Blog

     

  • Context versus Value

    There have been mostly two kinds of responses to the Charlie Hebdo killings. On one side are those who have simply seen it as a satire versus intolerance issue, with a subtext: Satire being seen as a western/universal (artistic) value and intolerance being a fundamental aspect of religion (more specifically: Political Islam). Others, who have also equally defended the right to free speech and condemned the killings, however pointed out to the often Islamophobic and racist provocations by the western media, including the murky history of Charles Hebdo, with a crude justification of aiming their guns at jihadis.  

    Those who have critically looked into the claims of free speech have taken recourse to concrete historical and political contexts of contemporary times. The recent examples of atrocities on Muslims in Europe and the Middle East are quite overwhelming. The concrete contexts around the debate seriously raise questions on the value judgment being passed on the limitations of Islamic societies to respond to anti-religious art against them by people of other religions and cultures. Though it is true, Islamic nations and societies don’t have a good record of tolerance against anti-religious art and literature, that political fact and context does not absolve the western countries of their dealing with Muslims and Islamic countries. So there is clearly an overlap here, between how Islamic societies rule themselves and how the West has demonized them and violated their lifeworld at numerous instances. An argument against one fact cannot totally justify itself by overlooking the other fact of the matter. And yet, both these facts are separate, and both are ethically wrong. Islamic societies cannot have barbaric laws against free speech and art while the West cannot exploit, harass and kill Muslims in the name of dubious values equally western and deemed universal. Everything the West affirms may be or may not be valuable for the whole world (or even for everybody within their own world.). In fact, such affirmations can be plain intolerable. Zionist excesses as an excuse for Israeli paranoia against the Palestinian struggle is one such instance. Capitalism and its exploitative machinations is another obvious – “universal” – example. These examples are not simply political, hence contestable, but extremely value-laden and justificatory. The counter-universal values, in contrast to these exploitative regimes of power, would be workers movements and anti-imperialist resistances. Palestine, the Vietnam of our times, itself is a value. Its greatness lies in the fact that – despite bulldozers and air strikes – it exists.

    The West is clever as always. Today it runs the same imperialistic business by using other phrases: For instance, “restoring democracy”. In the name of restoring democracy, the West has used its military and political power to meddle with other countries. This is an old, shameless tactic of justifying imperialism using the rhetoric of democracy. The term “civilian” is today mostly used and heard along with another casually used term like “casualty”. Civilians die casually, as a casualty, when the West goes out to restore democracy in countries with non-democratic regimes.

    So the scenario seems to be, if your country or society suffers from a lack of free speech or democracy, the West is going to teach you how to go about it. It will caricature your gods, bully your governments and injure your people. You have to pay for not being democratic or free enough. This is not an argument, this is a writ, and it is passed without ado all the time. The crowd which celebrates free speech and democracy are often silent or not vocal enough when such violent transgressions are made upon other people’s right to sovereignty. Marginal critics raising their voice are dismissed as “leftists”.

    If there is a problem with bearded jihadis blindly shooting at cartoonists, there is an equal problem with clean shaven soldiers shooting people like ducks from sophisticated warplanes. Let this nonsense of medieval versus modern end with these two images. Both these images aren’t medieval but modern images of violence in the name of both religion and democracy, carrying out mindless acts against each other. In fact, the jihadis seem more mindless than the soldiers who aren’t so mindless – they have rational purposes at hand. Taking over other countries and governments are more sinister than killing cartoonists. After all, rationality is another modern, western (and now universal) value. When rationality kills, it sounds a little better does it? On the contrary, it sounds a little worse.

    So arguments based on context are obviously murkier than arguments based on the basis of this universal value called free speech. Questions have been raised if we can expect free speech from people whose mindsets about others aren’t free yet? Caricaturing is not an obvious sign of a free mind. In fact, cartoonists are often known to be conservative. Conservatives know to laugh and poke fun at the world as much as liberals and radicals do. So free speech and free art need not only be a liberal value. The conservative right can also claim to hold such values. In such cases, it will be wise enough for free speech defenders to be careful about considering what is free speech and art. The idea of free speech sounds more and more tied up to the context. Like any good Marxist will tell you, you cannot proclaim a value without clarifying the context.

    Here we come to the last bit and raise the question left to ask: If all values are context-based, are universal values really not universal? Is the idea of the universal merely a western manufactured idea to rule over and decry others?

    The idea of the universal, to begin with, is a consensual idea. Everyone has to believe in, trust and yes – love, that idea for it to be universal. If there is a great value in universal values then it is also important to see how these values are propagated and used to influence others. It is also important to consider and know how other religious and cultural traditions sanction and admit ways of self-criticism, which may not correspond to unbridled, secular insult, and despite that – and also because of it – teach us a few other aspects of free speech. A secular consensus on free speech cannot act in a hegemonic fashion if it also wants to be seen as a plural value, accepted by everybody. It is not the rest of the world's responsibility to stand by the values of the West (in the name of a universal consensus) without the West's equal responsibility to stand by the values of other worlds. There cannot be any universality without otherness, just as there cannot be truth without reconciliation.

    If values deemed universal are pushed down people’s throats and those not sharing the consensus are bullied into agreement or submission, then the value no longer looks or sounds attractive. No value, universal or otherwise, can be established through violence. If there is any universal value that comes before all other universal values it is an ethics based on a certain kind of nonviolence. Without a primary consensus against violence, no world based on universal values can be established. If that be the case, the West has to first admit how it fares on the charge-sheet of violence vis-à-vis the Islamic world. Only then perhaps, this blame gaming can end and we can debate on more substantive issues which, of course, has to do with how free speech and art can survive and thrive in this world of bizarre violence. 

    *Manash Bhattacharjee is a poet and political science scholar. He has contributed to Guernica, Huffington Post, Outlook, The Hindu, etc. His first collection of poetry, Ghalib's Tomb and Other Poems (2013), was published by The London Magazine. He is currently Adjunct Professor in The Centre for Culture and Creative Expressions at Ambedkar University, New Delhi.

  • "We're Facing an Important Crossroad"

    ImageLebanese Marxist intellectual Gilbert Achcar, author of The People Want (2013), Eastern Cauldron (2004) and The Clash of Barbarisms (2002/2006), says Egypt is at an historical and highly important crossroads in the development of the long-term revolutionary process— stressing the urgency in building leadership and formulating strategies appropriate for change. Imminent catastrophe can be avoided, he advises, by deploying organized political forces pursuing a strategy that seeks to construct a third, revolutionary phase, equally removed from the old regime and religious radicalism.

    Gilbert Achcar, don’t the successive failures and defeats in countries that have witnessed uprisings over the last four years make you reconsider the concept of “the long-term revolutionary process” that you outlined in your book, The People Want?

    There have certainly been failures and setbacks, but “defeats”—in the sense of doing away with the revolutionary process for good—seems to me inaccurate. Since 2011 I have been saying that what began back then was a long-term revolutionary process that would play out over many years, decades even, and pass through a number of phases. In many countries the process is currently going through a phase of retracting after its initial spread, faced as it is with an assault on all fronts by the counter-revolution in its various forms.

    This brings us to the issue of leadership. The great revolutionary wave, which first broke in Tunisia in 2010 and left no Arab country untouched, was produced by measurable results—objective social and economic realities and a highly combustible political situation. But the course of these revolutions is determined by the interaction of these objective circumstances with the condition and actions of the potential leaders of revolutionary change.

    This is the main weak point: we face revolutionary circumstances but without organized revolutionary forces that pursue a revolutionary strategy capable of advancing the process of revolutionary change. This applies to all Arab countries. If we look at Tunisia, Egypt and Syria, we find that progressive forces have not performed the required role, which is to form a revolutionary front independent of what I term the “two poles” of the counter-revolution.

    What exactly do you mean by two poles of the counter revolution?

    There is one counter-revolution, represented by the old regime, and another represented by the reactionary forces opposed to the old regime, and which trade in religious ideology. The issue with the progressive leadership in our countries is that they have effaced their progressive identity by allying with one counter-revolutionary pole against the other, or otherwise by hopping from an alliance with one to an alliance with the other, instead of forging a third way, equally removed from both.

    Is there any hope of overcoming the consequences and returning to the revolutionary path?

    Hope rests on us realizing that the revolutionary process is long-term and that it might take decades. When we talk about the French, English or Chinese revolutions, we are talking about processes that ran on for decades, from the first explosion to the point at which these societies reached a new state of sustainable stability.

    Our revolutionary process is bound to continue as long as objective circumstances continue to generate crises and explosions and in the absence of any solution to the underlying problem, which is the blockage of economic development and the resulting high levels of unemployment, against the backdrop of a social system linked to a rentier patrimonial state.

    Nor do revolutionary processes develop in a straight line: the course is crooked. There will be phases of ebb and flow in the interaction between the revolution and counter-revolution. To ignore this is to fall prey to short-sightedness, like the euphoria of the 2011 “Arab Spring,” which was built on a fantasy that “peaceful” uprisings could lead to the rapid spread of democracy and the improvement of social conditions. It involved turning a blind eye to the seriousness of the obstacles that our societies are facing, obstacles that we must pay a high price for removing. There is no avoiding it: we are due further revolutionary explosions in our countries in the medium-term, if not the short-term.

    So will it be possible to overcome these consequences in the future?

    In some countries in our region, progressive forces have sufficient political weight to entertain the possibility of leading the revolutionary process. This is the case in Tunisia, where the labor movement is objectively capable of leading society. In Egypt, though, there is no single organized force with comparable power, but there is a tremendous revolutionary energy, particularly among young people, that could be brought together through a coalition of revolutionary progressive forces. This energy manifested itself in the vote for Hamdeen Sabahy in the first round of the 2012 presidential elections: five million people rejected the old regime as represented by Shafiq and his reactionary rival, Morsi.

    However, the problem here is the lack of a suitable strategy. In Egypt, Hamdeen Sabahy has unfortunately pursued a twisty—if not mazy—political path. He has gone from an alliance with the Brotherhood in the 2011 parliamentary elections to an alliance with the old regime on June 30 / July 3 2013, heaping praise on Field Marshal El Sisi. Hamdeen paid a high price for it, since he disappointed the youth movement and all those who were eager to enact progressive revolutionary change by establishing a third pole, as well as losing almost all of the credibility he’d accumulated at the height of his popularity in 2012 when he distanced himself from both Shafiq and Morsi.

    Lacking a suitable strategy we are threatened by degeneration across the board. When a leadership capable of advancing revolutionary change falls away, the threat of a vicious reactionary backlash is doubled. So long as we remained trapped in the binary polarization of the old regime and reactionary forces that trade on religion, the likelihood of a descent into what in an earlier book I termed “the clash of barbarisms” grows ever stronger.

    Leaving absolute optimism and pessimism aside, we need to be aware that we are facing a historical and highly important crossroads in the development of the long-term revolutionary process, which should make us determined to build leadership and formulate strategies appropriate for change if we wish to avoid imminent catastrophe.

    Is it the lack of a progressive leadership that has allowed IS and other jihadist movements to offer themselves as an alternative leadership in Syria?

    The case of Syria provides the starkest expression of the historical problem we face. In the early months of 2011 the Syrian uprising was concerned with the same social, economic and political problems that led to uprisings across the region. The uprising was being led first and foremost by the youth, who used social media to coordinate and organize the movement. They formed “local coordination committees” based on a political program that was democratic, not sectarian, and clearly voiced the great progressive aspiration of the 2011 uprising.

    More than in Egypt, the problem in Syria lay in the absence of an organized progressive vanguard capable of leading the revolutionary process in the long-term. The coordination committees did not attempt to form an organized leadership on the ground, other than online, and what happened was that, in their absence, certain political forces appointed themselves as leaders from abroad, a deeply flawed alliance that included certain progressives under the overall control of the Muslim Brotherhood. The coordination committees made a serious mistake when they recognized this leadership, which was in thrall to Turkey, Qatar and the US. They combined this with completely failing to acknowledge the impossibility of repeating in Syria the Egyptian scenario of January 25 to February 11 [2011], i.e.: the impossibility of bringing down Bashar Al Assad in the way Hosni Mubarak had been brought down before him.

    In a “royal republic” like Syria, where the armed forces fall under the control of the ruling family’s private guard, there is no way of toppling the head of the regime without bringing down the whole regime, including the “deep state.” So, the uprising never had a chance of achieving victory “peacefully,” but its transformation into an armed conflict took place in a piecemeal, disorganized fashion, the initiative of officers and soldiers who deserted from the army in protest at its oppression of the public.

    As things stand, the lack of a progressive leadership, with progressives throwing themselves into the arms of the Brotherhood and Qatar, left the way open for forces with a more radical hostility to the regime to come to the fore, even though this hostility has a reactionary, religious, sectarian inspiration. Simultaneously, the Al Assad regime has done everything in its power to strengthen these religious forces at the expense of the democrats, in order to be able to accuse the opposition as a whole of religious extremism, to demonize it, and to forestall the danger of Western countries lending it their support. This is how the Syrian opposition got sucked into a degenerative dialectics of religious extremism that led to the founding of ISIS.

    The rise of IS and its military expansion have taken place with staggering speed, suggesting that it might collapse equally quickly. In the medium and long-term there is still hope that an alliance might take shape that is capable of representing the progressive revolutionary energy that has burned so brightly since 2011, and even to return it to its rightful place in the future, once the war is over. This, however, will depend on those who want to create revolutionary change having the ability to create an alternative pole equally removed from the criminal regime and the fanatical gangs.

    Do you think that the current regimes are being reckless in their defense of the old order and their failure to offer the smallest concessions to keep the masses happy?

    The Syrian example is quite clear: This regime, like all Arab regimes, will not leave the stage voluntarily, and anyone who imagines it will is dreaming. These regimes are built on the ruling class’s exploitation of public resources to such a degree that it necessitates dictatorship. These rulers will defend their privileges to their last soldier. The starting point for any strategy must therefore be that these regimes—as long as they retain control over the armed services and agencies—will work to safeguard their interests at any cost, whether through civil war as in Syria, or by tightening the grip of dictatorship, as in Egypt.

    This means that radical revolutionary change can never be achieved without paralyzing the repressive capabilities of the current socio-political regime. This will either take place through victory over it in a drawn-out civil war (as happened in Libya), which as we see from Syria can have a heavy price, or otherwise by the revolutionary forces winning over the majority of the armed forces to the side of the revolution. Armies are composed of a minority of elites totally dedicated to the regime and a majority of ordinary citizens. The disaster of the Syrian revolutionaries was that they were unable to divide the Syrian army on a large enough scale: indeed, they did not even attempt to do so during the early stages of the uprising.

    This brings us back to a basic condition for profound change: leadership. It is impossible to influence soldiers and the armed agencies of state without a political leadership capable of winning “the hearts and minds” of the common men who serve in the armed forces and convincing them to support the popular revolution.

    The chief obstacle to the Arab uprising is the lack of such a leadership, or the lack of a strategic vision when they do exist. What is needed is organized forces that follow a strategy to construct a third, revolutionary pole, equally removed from the old regime and religious radicalism, the two poles of the counter-revolution.

     

    This article originally appeared on Correspondents.org, Jan. 9, 2015.

    Dina Kabil has been a cultural reporter at the French-language Al-Ahram Weekly since 1994 and writes for the Lebanese website Al-muddon. She was written for the Egyptian newspaper Al-shorouq, since its foundation, as well as Al-badil.

     

  • Infamy

    INFAMY.  That is the only word that can sum up how we feel about the the murder of our buddies at Charlie Hebdo. A crime made even more hateful because these comrade artists were people on the left, anti-racists, anti-fascists, anti-colonialists, sympathizers with communism and anarchism. It was only recently that they participated in an homage to the memory of a group of Algerians assassinated by the French police in Paris on October 17, 1961. Their only weapons were the pen, humor, irreverence, and insolence—including against religion, in keeping with the historic tradition of the French anti-clerical left. But on the cover of the last issue of the magazine before they were killed was a cartoon against the Islamaphobic French novelist Michel Houllebecq, while one would find inside a page of cartoons against religion…the Catholic religion. We recall that Charb, the editor-in-chief, was a cartoonist with a revolutionary sensibility, who did the illustrations for the book Marx: mode d'emploi [Marx: A User’s Manual] by the French revolutionary socialist Daniel Bensaïd. Charb was also present at the evening of the homage to Bensaïd, where he drew some touching and ironic caricatures which were projected as the event took place.

    The act of these intolerant jidhadists is a crime against freedom of the press, freedom of thought, and artistic liberty. But it is also a crime against Islam, against the Muslims of France who run the risk that they will be made to pay for this infamy for which they had no responsibility.

    The Islamophobic trend that has developed in France in the last several years, with the support of racist journalists like Eric Zemmour, or established novelists like Houellebecq, confuses Muslims with fundamentalists, and fundamentalists with jihadists in a bewildering and manipulative mix-up. The unhealthy political climate encourages various racist currents, racial purists and fascists, and above all the Le Pen family business which makes racism and Islamophobia the basis of its trade. They will naturally use the jihadists’ crime to spread their poison.

    Both jihadists and Islamophobes try to create an atmosphere encouraging a “war of civilizations,” following the sinister proposition of Samuel Huntington (one of the architects of the Vietnam War). It is urgent that we remember that the real conflict is not between “Islam” and the “West,” but between the exploiters and the exploited, the oppressors and the oppressed, between the interests of capitalism and those of humanity.

    Translation by Dan La Botz

  • Sanders for President?

    Image[This article is a reply to David Goodner's "Why Bernie Sanders Needs to Run for President—As an Independent."]

    Dear David,

    You want the excellent Bernie Sanders to run as an independent in the 2016 presidential. So do I!

    To my mind Sanders ought to run both as a Democrat and as an independent, and there’s no reason to think Bernie at the end of a primary campaign would embrace the neoliberal winner—he’s at the twilight of a prodigious career; what can the party toffs do to him now? So the two electoral strategies you envision don’t cancel each other out, as Illinois Republican John Anderson showed in his 1980 run both in the GOP primaries and then again in the fall general election as an independent against both Reagan and Carter. Anderson did so well in marketing himself as the real independent choice that he blew the far-more deserving Barry Commoner and the Citizen’s Party effort—the effort I was involved in and the real choice for voters—out of the sky. Commoner did barely as well on the national level as the Greens did handily this year in New York State.

    Saying that, I’m less interested in arguing the wisdom of running as an independent, as a Democrat, or as both. I think we ought to be talking about the difficulties of doing any national effort at all—difficulties you don’t even hint at.

    Why did Commoner, an excellent stump speaker and then the key informed voice denouncing environmental degradation, lose so badly? Because even had Anderson stayed out of the race, the campaign would have been virtually cut off from the media. We were on the ballot in less than half of the states. Our funding was a joke; we ran one radio ad. And worst of all, we had our calculation backwards. You don’t run a candidate—not on the presidential level—to build a movement; you build a movement that represents actual struggles and that can mount a campaign the press can’t ignore, the debates must include, and that has the capacity to either move the mainstream parties left or make them step back to die.

    That was never the status of the left circa 1980, which was in many ways stronger than today’s. It had more radicals concentrated in strategic workplaces; it boasted an environmental movement that was bigger even than Occupy. It had Marxism much more established and accepted in universities and even in economics faculties than it is now. The corporate offensive was not yet the full-court press it became post-PATCO. The Citizens Party even had the advantage of running against a failed president and a GOP that had not yet descended into unalloyed barbarism, so that the “lesser evil” defense of Carter should not have worked. It did, as did a drop in voter turnout.

    So I don’t see how a Sanders run has any advantage over Commoner’s. Not in its candidate, its gravitas, or its ability to harness the left around a single campaign. Is a Sanders race worth doing? Yes, and mostly to get the left out of talking to itself and into talking to a wider public with which we otherwise have little connection. But that decent effort won’t run the table, and we ought to be frank about why.

    None of this is to disparage either Occupy or the new antiracist movement, which you rightly prize, only to suggest that the leap from protest to politics, (from protest to radical politics, and not the house-broken variety Bayard Rustin and Michael Harrington mistakenly sold) is enormous. You make it sound like a day’s stroll at a pristine beach and not the thousand mile trek across a carcass-strewn desert, which a left campaign either in the primary, in the general election, or both would of necessity be. I know that you fight with the army you have, not the army you want, but the army you have shouldn’t be misled into thinking the moment is ripe for seizing.

    If I have to narrow my criticism of your piece to one objection—a piece my heart loved even as my head got a migraine—it’s that you oversell your argument. Parts read like a 4 a.m. television advert for the all-purpose ShamWow. What you don’t do is assay the downside. Sure, that’s what advertisers never do unless compelled by law, which is why Big Pharma has to—and in excruciating detail—list the downsides of its alleged new wonder drugs. But we’re supposed to be better than that.

    Some particulars.

    The Hawkins-Jones Green Party gubernatorial effort in New York State, which I supported with brio, dollars, and shoe leather, too, was anomalous, and not an indicator of things to come. That election pitted a thuggish, corporate-hugging centrist (the lesser Cuomo) who was a sure winner against a GOP joke candidate. The Greens ran credible people who became not just a reservoir for protest votes, but an opportunity for the protest vote to register as necessary among those who would otherwise think the lesser evil equates with the good.

    It took a full-out effort by the ballot-obsessed Working Families Party elders, mostly because of threats from key union leaders more afraid of Cuomo than anything else, to cut into that protest vote. They beat out the Greens narrowly in the city by mobilizing to say that a vote for Cuomo WAS counterintuitively (and preposterously) a protest vote in that it would save the WFP's precious ballot line. And the Greens statewide still outpolled the WFP handily, doing best upstate, including in Albany and Ithaca (huge in Ithaca) where state politics IS local politics and state problems are omnipresent. The Greens outdid the WFP, sure, and I was thrilled, but its trouncing of the WFP doesn’t in itself indicate viability in any other context. That viability depends on what the Greens do post-election in beginning to make themselves part of the everyday neighborhood landscape, and that’s a tenuous work in progress, not a sure thing.

    As to Kshama Sawant’s City Council win in Seattle as a harbinger: no! Hers was a discrete situation and in no way generalizable. She was an outspoken and prominent activist in Occupy who deserved and generated press attention, then ran in a nonpartisan election in a progressive city district whose incumbent council member was increasingly unpopular and past his sell-by date. Both the Greens' strong run in New York and Sawant's in Seattle happened in the context of a perfect storm. What would be Bernie’s. Or ours?

    Second, you don't build a national party out of straw, let alone a nation-wide Democratic Socialist Party alternative with the teeth to bite down hard on capital. If the failure of the Peace and Freedom Party effort in 1968 proved anything, it's that even a failing imperialist war and a highly unpopular race-and class-biased draft aren't sufficient to win or even do well absent other factors that contribute to creating a third party movement, let alone mounting a challenge to the business class and its permanent state. So when you write “[A Sanders campaign’s] goals should include winning at least a third of the popular vote, concrete victories in dozens of local, county, statewide, and federal down-ballot races, construction of permanent party infrastructure and close collaboration with social movement actors independent of the Democratic Party,” you’re telescoping events.

    Third, the Occupy Movement was ideologically was so resolutely nonpolitical that it boggles the mind (mine, certainly) that you would see it as making a seamless transition to—or even the presaging of—an electoral upsurge. Its success in changing popular discourse away from the alleged horrors of a budget deficit to the real horror of an exploitative 1 percent was historic, but it never moved beyond brilliantly framing inequality to implementing a substantive politics.

    Fourth, Bernie is likely not going to run as an independent; he likely won't even run as a primary candidate-insurgent. Why? Because by his own often-stated standard, he won’t run absent a movement dedicated to working electorally 24/7 to make the effort matter and build something that lasts. So as attractive as he is (and he's quite attractive—I saw him in action twice this past year in Massachusetts and California)—at least attractive if the Vermont left ever forgives him for being key to getting the boondoggle F-35 fighter plane built in Vermont—his sagacity in saying he won't run absent a grassroots movement for him and whose local efforts his campaign would reflect nationally is spot-on. At least his standard requires those who think he should take the plunge to confront that reasonable demand. My answer: it’s not going to happen, or at least not in enough states to get him on the ballot to run a mostly 50-state campaign. 

    With those limitations, he could actually do more harm running as a Democratic Party primary candidate attacking the predictable pack of Wall Street flavors-of-the month as they emerge, though the perennial problem of no money=no press attention=no debate time added to the stunted ground war he’ll be forced to wage will doom that one, too. Remember too, that the only way the Libertarian Party could run a 50-state campaign in 1980 was with almost unlimited funding courtesy of the Koch brothers, of which David Koch was their vice presidential candidate. Sure, the mantra “they’ve got the power but we’ve got the numbers” is true enough, but our numbers are what Marx said about the peasantry; that they were for the most part “sacks of potatoes,” held together by the sack, not by solidarity.

    BTW, the support I know Sanders is getting from the world of the liberals, i.e., from Progressive Democrats of America mostly and from individuals in Democratic Socialists of America, too, is all based on his running as a Democrat. In fact, many of the electorally minded in DSA (excluding me, thank you) are mostly interested in a primary run, and I blame them (and PDA, which is more to the point) for cutting bait long before they need to. Like you, but coming to different conclusions, they’re not much weighing the options either.

    Elsewhere on the left (loosely defined ) are Democracy for America and MoveOn.org, which are entranced with Elizabeth Warren, mostly as an alternative to Hillary. The warm feeling for Warren is so strong that the groups didn’t even consider including Sanders as an option in their presidential poll, then announcing Warren scored 82 percent of all votes cast. Not since the Soviet Union fell was voting that heavily skewed , or the lack of competition clearer. (Though as I write Moveon.Org seems to be having a rethink about Sanders.) When liberals decide an election race is hopeless, who do we have to step in?

    Lastly, (at least for now) by the time the GOP finishes grinding bones to make bread in 2016, even Hillary Clinton will start looking good in comparison to whatever creature of the night is the Republican candidate. That’s how Obama won both times, and how even John Kerry could be said to shine in comparison to Bush. Now hating the GOP didn’t work in the 2014 midterm elections. Think that trope is now a dead parrot? I don’t.

    In 2000, I worked hard for Nader. Even here in New York State, where Gore was a shoe-in, we got nowhere. And Nader started with more name recognition and more appreciation by the public than does Bernie now. Or Barry Commoner back when.

    Bottom line, and to repeat, it would be great for the left organizationally if Bernie runs as an independent, but the rewards are just not what you say. Why? Because they are cultural and (for the left) provide a context for cooperation and recruiting, but those are not a means to build a movement on the scale you envision as a near certainty. Not in time to affect balloting in just 22 months. Which is more than sad, because the American imperium endangers civilization. We know that too well. Undoing its genocidal madness needs sober analysis for a start. I’m all for storming heaven, as Marx said about the Paris Commune, but let us at least be as clear as was Uncle Karl that there is no heaven except what we make of life here. Minimizing the profound difficulties of building a third party in the US—including the structured, first-past-the-post voting system that gives no representation to dissident voters no matter how numerous, which in itself privileges two parties and no more—is setting ourselves up for a fall. Building a national independent effort from the scant resources we have to turn a rebel band into a dominating political player on your timetable—a force with the breadth and depth it would need to survive and grow even in the face of predictable corporate counterattacks—is just as much illusory as thinking a Democrat on a white horse underwritten by Wall Street will save us. And save us from Wall Street.

    I never much liked the Situationist slogan, “Be Realistic; Demand the Impossible.” Amilcar Cabral’s “Tell no lies; claim no easy victories,” is the better watchword.

    Best,

    Michael Hirsch

     

    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.

     

     

     

  • Why Bernie Sanders Needs to Run for President—As an Independent

    Image[This article originally appeared in In These Times. See the reply by Michael Hirsch.]

    Bernie Sanders, the fiery, independent, populist U.S. Senator from Vermont, has been mulling a presidential campaign in 2016. There is no question about it: He should absolutely run.  

    Mr. Sanders has the credentials, the charisma and the community support he needs to seize the populist moment we are in and help spark a grassroots insurgency against the billionaire class. Somebody has to take on Hillary Clinton from the Left—otherwise the 2016 elections will be nothing more than two corporate politicians making hollow promises to the American people while selling their souls behind the scenes to war profiteers and Wall Street banksters. And while Elizabeth Warren is also a compelling candidate, chances are at least moderately high that she may not run, opting to play it safe in favor of maintaining good standing with the party’s leadership. And even if Warren does run, her candidacy will not contribute to the building of a genuine third party movement—which is what the Left really needs to do to build long-term independent political power.

    That’s why Bernie Sanders must run—and it’s why he should run on a third party ticket, not as a Democrat.

    Merely impacting the 2016 presidential elections through the Democratic primaries is too small of a goal given the times we are in, and will not go far or fast enough to move the people and the planet away from the brink of corporate and climate catastrophe. The last thing we need is a firebrand like Mr. Sanders to spearhead a populist electoral charge and raise expectations, only to concede after a few weeks, endorse Hillary and urge his followers back into the folds of the establishment Democratic tent. 

    It would be disappointing, to say the least, to see a lifelong independent and self-described democratic socialist using the specter of a Republican boogey-man to scare millions of everyday people back into the two-party closet. The truth is, our country’s neoliberal turn advanced tremendously under the Carter, Clinton and Obama Administrations, and it was the Supreme Court that stole the 2000 election from Al Gore, not Ralph Nader.

    Neither should Mr. Sanders run only as an independent without attempting to build the kind of organizational and party infrastructure that can live on after his campaign is over, as Nader failed to do in 2004. Mr. Sanders should instead aim higher and strive to change the course of U.S. history by making 2016 the year that an independent third party broke through the white noise and became a permanent fixture in American politics. This should not be done through the Green Party, but through the construction of a new, broad-based democratic socialist party.

    Building a nationally viable third party in less than two years will be challenging, but Mr. Sanders has long enough coattails to pull it off. For one thing, the conditions in this country are ripe for this kind of move. Grassroots social movements, from Madison to Occupy Wall Street to #BlackLivesMatter, have been growing steadily since the economic crash in 2008, and have articulated a reform agenda that neither political party appears willing to embrace.  

    The 2014 midterm elections saw the lowest voter turnout of the modern era, after which the much ballyhooed left turn by President Obama and Senate Democrats turned out to be little more than liberal hype. (See, for example, the party’s capitulation to the corporate right without much of a fight during the recent “Crominbus” budget debate.) The incident serves as yet another example of a political culture that has become thoroughly corrupted by big corporate money. 

    Voters aren’t stupid. Their apathy in these elections comes from a lack of appealing choices. In a system where neither party is willing to address the bread-and-butter issues that impact us most like jobs, education, housing, health-care and debt, our only options are to stay home or to “vote the bums out,” replacing them with another set of bums we’ll want to vote out, ad infinitum. 

    That’s why the history of U.S. electoral politics is such a schizophrenic seesawing of power back and forth between two wings of the same corporate power structure. One party swoops into office using the voter backlash against the other’s broken promises as a wedge, and then once in power does very little (at best) to make everyday people’s lives better in material, tangible ways.

    Such a system will never be able to solve the staggering number of social problems confronting us. A third party candidacy led by Bernie Sanders, perhaps with a strong running mate like Seattle council woman and fellow socialist Kshama Sawant as his running mate, can give voice to the aspirations of millions of working-class Americans who have been effectively shut out of the governing process by the corrosive influence of corporate power. Their goals should include winning at least a third of the popular vote, concrete victories in dozens of local, county, statewide, and federal down-ballot races, construction of permanent party infrastructure and close collaboration with social movement actors independent of the Democratic Party. 

    There is already an emerging electoral precedent that suggests such a strategy is not outside of our ambitious reach. Ms. Sawant’s successful campaign in Seattle in 2013 not only elevated a card-carrying socialist to office, it helped catapult (alongside tenacious street demonstrations) the national Fight for $15 movement that has seen several major American cities pass significant minimum wage increases.

    The success of Howie Hawkins and Brian Jones on the Green Party ticket in November’s New York gubernatorial race is also strong evidence that the appetite for third-party movement-building is there—if organizers and activists are willing to seize the initiative and take some risks. 

    The liberal establishment will cry “spoiler,” but their strategy has long proven to be bankrupt. It’s time for a new course of action—and Bernie Sanders has the name recognition, the resume and the gravitas to be the face of a new national democratic socialist political party that has the potential to change the direction of U.S. politics.

     

    David Goodner is union organizer in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Originally from Iowa, he worked in Des Moines as a community organizer and Catholic Worker between 2009-2014. He may be reached at david.a.goodner [at] gmail.com or @davidgoodner.

  • Frank Fried, 1927-2015, Presente!

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    Franklin Fried, who devoted more than 70 years to supporting and fighting for freedom, justice, equality, and liberation for working and oppressed people in the U.S. and around the world, died Tuesday, Jan. 13, at his home in Alameda, California. He was 87.

    Frank Fried was the principal presenter of folk and popular music in Chicago for a quarter of a century, but he always thought of himself, first and foremost, as a revolutionary socialist. In his own view, his signal achievement was a historic 1968 series of benefit concerts for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which he organized at the request of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He also produced the Beatles’ 1964 and 1965 Chicago appearances, along with innumerable concerts by the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Miriam Makeba, Pete Seeger, Frank Zappa, the Chad Mitchell Trio, and many other artists.

    Frank was a radical, a socialist, and a labor and civil rights activist throughout his life, and he took great pride in never having abandoned his principles of fair play throughout his storied show business career. “After shaking hands with some managers and promoters in the business, you would have to check if you still had all your fingers,” he would half jest. The colorful story of how he tried to be different, with mixed success, is recounted on his website, showbizred.com.

    Frank was born in 1927 on Chicago’s north side. His father, a lawyer in private practice, died when Fried was a child. His mother, who worked as a secretary for the Illinois State Athletic Commission, felt compelled to send Fried to a military school for proper discipline. After military school, he attended the University of Chicago. He dropped out after two years to serve in the United States Navy at the end of World War II.

    After the war, Fried joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) as a teenager and worked as a welder in Chicago’s booming U.S. Steel South Works plant. He was attracted to the SWP’s democratic vision of world socialism. In 1947, he and his Chicago comrades helped lead a broad and successful defense campaign for James Hickman, who was up on murder charges. Hickman, an AfricanAmerican sharecropper who had recently moved his family to Chicago from the South, was accused of shooting the landlord who had burned his family out of their apartment, killing three of Hickman’s children. With help from SWP organizers, community pressure got the charges reduced and Hickman released. The dramatic story is recounted in a recent book from Haymarket Press, People Wasn’t Made to Burn, which is dedicated to Frank.

    Frank called the campaign “perhaps the party’s finest hour” and credited that organizing experience for much of his later success in building broad coalitions for social justice. Frank had a remarkable ability to collaborate with folks from across the left spectrum, and to help others reach out and build in ways they would not have done without his help and counsel.

    A few years later, Frank was expelled from the SWP along with prominent dissident Bert Cochran and many of the party’s foremost intellectuals and labor activists. In 1954 Fried helped that group launch the American Socialist, a magazine that aimed to free the idea of socialism from its association in the American mind with Stalinist dictatorship, and he traveled the country promoting it.

    The magazine folded in 1959, a victim of the poisonous cold war atmosphere, Frank said later. “The trajectory that we expected of hooking up with militant sections of the labor movement and a new beginning of the radical movement never happened,” he explained. “The group did not leave much of a footprint, but individuals played an important role in the labor and civil rights movement, and the attractive style and open tone of the magazine did leave an imprint on the New Left that came after us,” he added.

    For Frank, the value of the American Socialist group lay in reaching out and attempting to regroup with other socialists without rejecting its Trotskyist background. “We attempted to bring our heritage to the problems and radical language and organization of the modern world without ever forgetting the legacy of Leon Trotsky, who had an incredible impact on me as he stood up for workers democracy against the tides of history,” he said.

    Frank stumbled into show business when he met the Austrian folk singer Martha Schlamme at the Gate of Horn, an early folk music venue in Chicago, in 1958. In need of a job and intrigued by the power of folk songs to move people emotionally and politically, Frank went to work as an assistant to Albert Grossman, the club’s owner. On a trip to San Francisco the following year on Grossman’s behalf, Frank met the Gateway Singers, a racially integrated folksinging group, and managed the group through their period of greatest commercial success. He had a knack for managing, and by the end of the 1950s he was also handling the Chad Mitchell Trio and numerous other prominent folk and popular music performers.

    Frank opened Triangle Productions in 1959, with fellow socialist Fred Fine, in order to raise money for leftist projects through benefit concerts. When folk music became a pop craze during the Kennedy administration, the business took off. This was a major turn away from the repression of the 1950s, both culturally and politically. Many of the folk artists were unabashedly radical, and some, like Pete Seeger, were still blacklisted. Frank took special pride in being one of the first commercial promoters to book Seeger, whose soldout concerts on Frank Fried’s stage in 1957 marked a defeat for the McCarthyite blacklist.

    When Bob Dylan’s turn from folk toward rock resulted in an explosion of psychedelic, blues and country-inflected music, Frank recognized that the new groups would seize the spotlight from both acoustic folk groups and more traditional, pasteurized pop. He moved quickly on his hunch. By the early 1960s, Triangle shows dominated live entertainment programming in Chicago and the surrounding area. Triangle Productions ran tours and concerts for the Rolling Stones, the Mothers of Invention, and many other major acts of the time. Meanwhile Frank Sinatra, Harry Belafonte, Johnny Mathis, and Barbra Streisand remained regulars on his stages.

    Throughout his career, Frank tried to weave themes of social justice into his cultural promotions, paying special attention to Miriam Makeba and other politically engaged artists. In 1963 Frank served as producer for “We Shall Overcome,” the only commercial recording by the SNCC Freedom Singers, on Mercury Records and he also took an active role in the movement against the Vietnam War as a leader of Business Executives Move for Vietnam Peace.

    In 1977 he returned to his roots in the steel industry as a key backer of Ed Sadlowski’s insurgent “Steelworkers FightBack” campaign. Frank traveled the country with Sadlowski, working plant gates and union halls in an attempt to divert the Steelworkers Union from what Sadlowski had dubbed “tuxedo unionism” and toward a militant working-class perspective. He and Sadlowski became lifelong friends.

    Frank sold his production company in the early 1980s and moved to Los Angeles with his wife Françoise, hoping the weather might help ease her congenital degenerative disease. After Françoise’s death in 1985, Frank moved to New Orleans as the CEO of the Delta Queen Steamboat Co. He remarried there in 1988 and moved to the hills above Oakland, California with his second wife, the mystery writer Alice WilsonFried, and their daughter Teasha.

    Frank’s friendship with Miriam Makeba inspired him to active solidarity with the fight against Apartheid in South Africa. After Apartheid, he was a stalwart supporter of the struggle to build a Socialist alternative as the only way to guarantee the promise of Liberation. He helped launch Amandla!, a popular radical opinion magazine associated with the Democratic Left Front, and remained a valued advisor to its editors.

    Frank met the writer Daniel Singer when they fought together to defend Solidarnosc against the Polish and Soviet Stalinist parties and in the 1990s, Frank led the launch of the Daniel Singer Prize, an annual essay competition for young people on topics related to socialism.

    In 2011 Frank plunged into supporting the renovation of the Trotsky Museum in Mexico City, organizing a U.S. tour by Esteban Volkov, Trotsky’s grandson. He also recently joined the Solidarity chapter in the San Francisco Bay Area as a means of being connected to the movement he invested so much of his hopes in. His longtime comrade Carl Finamore reported that even when Frank was too frail to speak, “he was still able to muster enough energy to give us the middle finger and the raised fist at separate points during our discussions.”

    Preceded in death by his first wife, Francoise Nicolas, and his elder sister, Vivian Medak, Frank is survived by his wife Alice, his children Pascale, Isabelle, Bruno, Troy, and Teasha, and many grandchildren, nieces and nephews.

    Frank’s memorial celebration will be held January 24, 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. at the Grand View Pavilion, 300 Island Drive, Alameda, California. In lieu of flowers or gifts, the family requests that donations in Frank’s memory be sent to Amandla! Magazine (in care of editor Brian Ashley,brian@amandla.org.za) or to the Center for  Constitutional Rights (http://goo.gl/H4Cmcr).

    *This obituary was a collective effort by Frank Fried's close friends, overseen by his family.

     

  • The Coming Reckoning in Turkey

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    On December 24 a sixteen-year-old student named Mehmet Emin Altunses was arrested in the Turkish city of Konya. His crime? Apparently the youth insulted President Tayyip Recep Erdoğan, saying in a speech that the new president (who served two terms as prime minister between 2003 and 2014) was “the leader of corruption, bribery and theft,” as well as the owner of an “illegal palace.”

    These were references to a corruption scandal involving high-level government officials that surfaced in December of 2013, and the recent construction of a new presidential palace in Ankara costing an estimated $615 million in taxpayer money at a time of slow growth, severe inflation, and high unemployment. Though Altunses was released on December 26 after the emergence of public outrage over the arrest, the minor still faces a four-year prison term if convicted of insulting the president under Article 299 of the Turkish criminal code.

    Though coming to power on a platform of democracy and transparency in 2002, abundant evidence suggests political domination, Sunni Islam, and neoliberal capitalism form the core of the AKP’s plan for the “new Turkey.” An explicit nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire expressed by those in power (with Erdoğan, as premier or president, playing the role of sultan) implicitly rejects the secular principles on which the republic was founded, in favor of reactionary social and cultural policies. Perfectly compatible with this politico-cultural zeitgeist has been a profound economic transformation, in which the maintenance of high rates of speculative growth and profit outweigh all considerations of working-class health and humanity.

    The case of the rebel teenager is just one in a long line of conservative and authoritarian measures taken by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) since coming to power. For youth like Altunses there is much to be critical of. Though the official encouragement of religious education in the formerly secular Turkish state dates to the years after a military coup in 1980 (that was in part an attempt to destroy the Turkish left), under the AKP the Islamicization of the public educational system has reached new heights.

    Education reform in 2012 made it legal for children to attend religious or vocational schools from the age of nine, while the number of religious training schools (Imam Hatip) increased from 537 in 2012 to 2,074 in 2013, with almost a million students enrolled. Hundreds of secular schools have been converted into religious institutions, and students have been involuntarily assigned to state-run religious schools. In December of 2014 the National Education Council approved compulsory religious education (of the Sunni variety) in primary schools, which was quickly followed by the Education Ministry’s announcement of a new “moral education” program to be administered to public schools. The working classes are especially vulnerable, seemingly by design; it is likely that eventually secular education will be the preserve of a tiny, wealthy elite.

    Not one to be outdone by mere legislative reform, Erdoğan has called for further educational changes. In November the president claimed, based on a blatant misunderstanding of a document written by Christopher Columbus, that Muslim sailors reached America in 1178, three hundred years before the Spanish conquistador, and stated his intention to inform education authorities to adjust curricula accordingly. In early December a National Education Council plan was unveiled to make lessons in Ottoman Turkish (the Turkish alphabet was Latinized during Mustafa Kemal’s cultural revolution from above in the 1930s) mandatory in high school. “Whether they like it or not, the Ottoman language will be learned and taught in this country,” the president said of the measure.

    Conservative social policies, along with Erdoğan and other party leaders’ repeatedly patriarchal statements concerning women’s primary social role as mothers, has unsurprisingly not improved the position of women in society. Rather, violence against women has skyrocketed since 2002, with 39 percent of women in Turkey experiencing violence at some point in their lives. In the summer of 2014 Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arinç decried “moral corruption” in Turkey, and informed women it was improper for them to smile in public. Most recently, during a visit to a hospital to celebrate the first birth in Istanbul in 2015, Health Minister Mehmet Müezzinoğlu stressed that women “have the career of motherhood,” and this career should be the center of their lives. If motherhood should indeed be women’s primary career, why should it matter that Turkey ranked 125 out of 142 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap report of 2014?

    Another AKP casualty has been the press. According to Reporters Without Borders Turkey was the world’s leader in jailing journalists in 2012 and 2013, though President Erdoğan recently stated his country had the world’s “freest press” in response to European Union criticisms over the apprehension of reporters allegedly linked to the U.S.-based Islamic cleric and former Erdoğan ally, Fethullah Gülen. Though it is common knowledge that followers of Gülen suffuse positions of power and the media in Turkey, it is also clear the frequent arrest of journalists is designed to intimidate and silence opponents of the regime. A recent decision to ban media coverage of the parliamentary questioning of four former ministers allegedly involved in the corruption scandal of December 2013, and raids and arrests of media workers allegedly linked to Gülen late in 2014, are unlikely to improve Turkey’s 2014 press freedom rating.

    Workers have fared no better than journalists, the rights of women, or the public education system. Though reliable numbers are difficult to come by, it is probable that prior to the 1980 coup the unionization rate in Turkey stood at more than 30 percent, after two decades of working-class organization and radicalization. A new, post-coup constitution in 1982—which still governs Turkey today—severely curtailed civil liberties and labor rights. The unionization rate in Turkey as of 2011 was 5.9 percent, the lowest in the OECD. Under the AKP, between 2002 and 2011 the rate has fallen by 38 percent. The absence of left political organizations and a vibrant trade union movement has been filled by state charity and a unique form of authoritarian populism.

    While the erosion of labor and union rights has corresponded to weakening purchasing power, growing inequality, and increasing insecurity for workers, the pernicious effects of contemporary capitalism were given a horrifyingly human face last year. In May of 2014 a mine explosion in the western city of Soma killed 301 coal miners; the industrial murder was the largest in the country’s history. Turkey has been a historically deadly place for miners, however, even by the standards of the industry—another mining disaster five months after Soma killed 18 workers in the central Anatolian province of Karaman.

    Worker deaths in the booming construction industry similarly remain endemic, with 294 killed on the job in 2013, and the number dead in 2014 was likely more. In September of 2014 the killing of 10 workers who plunged from the 32nd floor of a new luxury complex on a faulty elevator in Istanbul grotesquely epitomizes the callous disregard for human life that is structurally embedded in precarious forms of labor like subcontracting, which now dominate many industries.

    And yet, despite the authoritarianism of the state and the ravages of neoliberalism, resistance is alive in Turkey. In the summer of 2013 approximately 2.5 million Turks across the country participated in protests against the government after the brutal police suppression of an environmental protest in Gezi Park, in the heart of downtown Istanbul. Women have refused to accept the government’s attempt to push them into patriarchal subordination, the most humorous example being a massive social media campaign in which women posted selfies of themselves smiling and laughing in defiance of Deputy Prime Minister Arinç’s misogynist comments. Widespread worker protests erupted after the Soma massacre, and the government has finally ratified the International Labour Organization’s Convention 176 on miner safety. The labor movement has also claimed important victories in the glass and tire industries over the last year, indicating trade unions remain vital organizations for the working class.

    Yet nationwide societal victories have remained elusive. The AKP has remained defiant, unwilling to even countenance mistakes and evoking conspiracy theories regarding “marginal elements” whenever opposition to its policies are expressed. While Gezi Park continues to exist, activists are being prosecuted for plotting a coup during the protests, while the municipality of Istanbul plans to again consider the park’s destruction. Conservative educational reforms continue, despite teacher unions’ opposition; journalists are harassed and jailed, and new media laws are intended to further stifle dissent. Organized labor seems unable (as elsewhere) to formulate a serious strategy for revitalizing a radical democratic workers’ movement.

    The task that lies ahead for a reconstituted Turkish left is thus enormous, in large part because of the country’s institutional barriers to organization and free speech. The creation of the People’s Democracy Party (HDP) in 2012, a party comparable to Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, or Die Linke in Germany, suggests a leftist political alternative now exists. The government is however attempting to exclude the party from parliamentary elections in 2015, after HDP calls for support for Kobane’s Kurds in Rojava (North Syria) led to widespread protests and clashes with state forces that claimed dozens of lives. Yet the formal political arena is not where real change will occur. Unless diverse social movements, from progressive trade unions to a variety of civil rights organizations, create a united front that enlists the support of historically excluded working people, the AKP’s authoritarian march will continue to remold Turkish society in the interests of conservative religion and capital. 

    Daniel Johnson is a writer and historian.

  • Julio Scherer García – 1926-2015 – Mexican Journalist

    ImageJulio Scherer, who worked as a journalist for 70 years, will be most remembered for founding Proceso, the weekly news magazine that transformed Mexican journalism and helped to contributed to the ongoing struggle for democracy in Mexico.

    How does one explain Proceso to American readers? Well, imagine that Newsweek was edited by leftists, but published in a country where only a small percentage of the population could afford to subscribe to a magazine. Or imagine that The Nation published investigative journalism more like that found in Rolling Stone and was snapped up at newsstands throughout the country by leftist intellectuals, government officials, and politicians of all stripes. Or, imagine…. Well, in truth, we have nothing quite like it.

    Mexican journalism is different. After the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the founding of the modern Mexican state in 1929, and well into the 1960s, Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) controlled the newspapers and then radio and television. Most publications depended at least in part upon government advertising to supplement commercial advertising because there was little income from subscriptions in a country where most people were too poor to subscribe to or buy a weekly magazine or even a daily newspaper.

    The PRI secretly subsidized newspapers, paid off editors, bought reporters, suppressed publications that criticized the government and politicians. If a reporter got out of line, the PRI would pressure the publication’s owners to fire him. Publishers and editors learned to self-censor, avoided controversial topics, accepted official explanations, and never criticized the PRI. Later, as radio and television developed, the PRI applied the same sorts of controls over those media. Journalism became a profession in Mexico nearly as corrupt as law and the police, politics and the priesthood, or commerce and industry.

    Julio Scherer can be credited with having worked to change all of that. Scherer was born on April 7, 1926 to Pablo Scherer the well-off son of German immigrants and to Paz García Gómez, descendant of a family of lawyers. Scherer went off to study philosophy and law at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, but then suddenly decided to drop his studies and go to work at Excelsior in the lowly post of copy boy. Copy boys in Mexico, young, skinny, and hungry were always called hueso—bone.

    Soon he became a reporter and fell in love with the profession of journalism. As he wrote in his autobiography Vivir:

    “I lived my years as a reporter for Excelsior in harmony with the typewriter. Very young I met the revolt of Guatemala, and saw the White House deploy its power (…). In the early adventures as a journalist, I was eager to look and to feel before thinking. I decided to make face the cold and in the company of a millionaire friend, Agustin Torres Eagle, traveled to Russia in the winter of 1959, the temperature ten degrees below zero. I wanted to interview Premier Khrushchev, but didn’t get past the last usher. It was the time when Stalin remained sculpted to the borders of the Tartar empire.

    A rising reporter then by 1968 the editor of Excelsior, Scherer found himself being criticized and threatened by the PRI. One occasion, as he writes,

    “In my first meeting with [Mexican President Gustavo] Díaz Ordaz, I received the blow of an extreme accusation: that in his judgment I was a traitor to Mexico. After that I would never return in peace to [the Excelsior offices] at Reforma 18. A systematic campaign sought to discredit the newspaper. We got used to hearing ‘Excelsior lies,’ which became a ritual of the addicts of power.”

    Díaz Ordaz, it should be remembered, was the president who sent the police to murder hundreds of pro-democracy student demonstrators at Tlaltelolco during the Olympic Games of 1968.

    Scherer’s last big assignment before leaving Excelsior was covering the Prague Spring of 1968 and when he returned to Mexico he found the same sort of democratic upheaval taking place there. Stepping out on the balcony of Excelsior at Reform 18 as the students marched past he heard them shout angrily, “Sell-out newspapers!” But, writes Scherer in his memoir, “I watched and I listened.”

    When the new president Luis Echeverria, who had been the organizer of the murder of the student protestors, became President in 1970, he decided to do away with Excelsior. Excelsior was a democratically controlled cooperative, so the president’s agents used threats and the blandishments of power to get the coop to remove Scherer from his position. Scherer and his supporters organized a street-meeting protest, but his career at Mexico’s most important newspaper was over. Echeverria, it would turn out, had actually done him a favor.

    Scherer went off to found his own weekly, Proceso, with a slick cover, but cheap newsprint paper inside, with large headlines, sometimes shocking news photos and clever cartoons. It soon became the indispensable publication whether one was part of la clase política that ran the country or the opposition political parties and movements that fought for democratic change.

    Proceso became the magazine that for many years did the only serious investigative reporting in every significant area of Mexican political, economic, and social life. Scherer’s slogan was that journalism “would lose its meaning if it didn’t follow the dark labyrinths of power.” He and his reporters went deep into the labyrinths. They reported on police chief Arturo Durazo Moreno’s mansions, on the Mexican government’s secret army unit that was fighting guerrillas, and on the embezzlements of Raúl Salinas, brother of Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

    Scherer also interviewed heads of state John F. Kennedy, Salvador, Allende, Zhou Enlai, Fidel Castro, Augusto Pinochet, as well as Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos and Ismael Zamada head of the Sinaloa Cartel. Everything that a reader wanted or needed to know about what happened last week was in Proceso. And still is.

    Proceso changed the way journalism was done in Mexico and contributed to the fight for democracy that continues today. Today journalism is an even more dangerous profession than it was in the old days when the PRI ran the country. The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that 32 journalists have been killed in Mexico since 1992, the motives and the technology confirmed. Wikipedia finds that more than 100 reporters have been killed or disappeared since 2000. One of these, Regina Martínez Pérez, worked for Proceso; she was killed on April 28, 2012, in Xalapa, Mexico. Today it is not the government which gets reporters fired, but drug cartels protected by the police and military who kill journalists.

    In addition to editing Excelsior and Proceso, Scherer wrote 22 books. Scherer’s wife Susana Ibarra Puga died in 1988. He is survived by nine children and many grandchildren.

    ¡Que viva Julio Scherer García! Julio Scherer Garcia. ¡Presente!