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

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    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!

    Image

    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!

     

     

  • Is Solidarity without Identity Possible? – On the Charlie Hebdo Attack

    The time I saw Charb in Paris was January 24, 2010, the day of the crowded commemoration of the French philosopher and activist Daniel Bensaïd at La Mutualité. During the speeches, Charb kept drawing and projecting vignettes about his comrade Daniel, whose book, Marx: Mode d’Emploi, he had illustrated a year earlier. In the deep sadness that filled the big room his vignettes constantly reminded us of Bensaïd’s subtle humor, of his little malicious smile with which he used to charm us all, slowly helping us to heal the loss. Director of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, Charb was one of the ten cartoonists and journalists killed, together with two policemen, in the ferocious attack of January 7, 2015.

    Since then messages of solidarity stating “Je suis Charlie” — I am Charlie — have been flooding the web and other media, a massive manhunt to capture the killers is taking place, shotguns have been fired against two mosques, a kebab shop has been bombed, and all French political leaders have appealed to national unity in defense of the République. Sadly enough, this means that the attack might have been a successful one. Of all the targets the attackers could choose, they deliberately chose a magazine that, in spite of the controversies about the quite Islamophobic vignettes it published, still had credibility among the French Left. A magazine, moreover, that embodied a distinctively French tradition of secularist irreverence, the distinctively French pride of being free to satirize both God and the King, enjoying dwelling in the trivial obscenities of the genre. The target was politically and carefully chosen. The narrative about the direct correspondence between the publication of irreverent vignettes of Muhammad and the attack, as in some sort of mechanical cause-and-effect connection, is over-simplistic. Nor is the narrative about attacks on freedom of speech and of press sufficient to understand what is really happening.

    The strategy behind the attack aims at a polarization of French society, at an escalation of the conflict, and above all at the resuscitation of the mantra of “the clash of civilizations.” It further isolates the Muslim population in France (around five million people) and exposes it to a further escalation of the already worrying and rampant Islamophobia. It is pushing the white population to gather behind the banners of the national republican unity and identity perceived as under attack from the new French, that is, the Muslim French. And, in order not to leave any option of resistance other than radical Islamism to the Muslim population, it is hitting the French Left, the only barrier against an uncontrolled proliferation of Islamophobia in the country, where it hurts the most: in its troubles in dealing with France’s colonial past and legacy and in reformulating universalism in such a way as to give full inclusion to Arab and Muslim people.

    Charlie Hebdo is an extreme symptom of the troubles of the French Left. Its covers alternate denouncing and criticizing French policies against immigrants and Houellebecq’s Islamophobic paranoia with an endless series of vignettes targeting “les islamistes.” Following the killing of a thousand Muslim Brothers in the 2013 Rabaa massacre in Egypt, CH published a cover with a vignette saying: “Le Coran, c’est de la merde, ça n’arrête pas les balles” (The Quran is a piece of shit: it doesn’t stop bullets). Its defenders, in the wake of the criticisms and accusations of Islamophobia Charlie Hebdo started to receive, kept pointing out that its satire was addressed to all religions indiscriminately. Whether this is true or not (and I think it is not entirely true), this answer shows a fundamental misunderstanding about context — that same misunderstanding that led part of the French left to capitulate in favor of an abstract republican secularism on the occasion of the discussions regarding the scarf law.

    Muslims are not only a largely oppressed and exploited minority in France, they are increasingly becoming the scapegoat of the economic crisis, the mirror upon which white Europeans project their deepest nightmares and fears. Every single week in Germany several thousands of people gather in various cities under the organizational denomination of PEGIDA for demonstrations against the “Islamization des Abendlandes” (PEGIDA stands for “Patrotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West”). An Italian rightwing newspaper published the photo of the attack on Charlie Hebdo under the title “This is Islam,” and a large part of the Italian population would be perfectly happy to let Muslim immigrants sink without help in the Mediterranean. In this worrying, and honestly scary, context, the repeated publication of vignettes caricaturizing Islamists by adopting religious symbols and stereotypical representations that by the same token identify five million oppressed people living in France was not an act of courage.

    In spite of my very dear memory of Charb’s sweet, humorous, and moving vignettes about Daniel Bensaïd, I cannot bring my self to participate in the choir and say that “I am Charlie.” But here is the problem. This attack and these murders push people like me into a corner, as they make it extremely difficult for us to say that we find this act of violence disgusting and unacceptable, that we deeply loathe the politics, strategy, and means of radical Islamists, that we are in pain for the people who have been murdered, but that yet we cannot identify ourselves with Charlie Hebdo. And we cannot deploy the expected slogan of “We are all French” in this moment in which a specific version of French national identity was mobilized to oppress those French citizens who cannot possibly identify with it.

    This tiny space, the space for a solidarity capable of challenging identities, rather than reinforcing or restating them, for a solidarity that does not need the affirmation of a common identity to express itself, is the space that the attack against Charlie Hebdo risks closing, forcing all of us to participate, willingly or unwillingly, directly or indirectly, in the renewed farce of the clash of civilizations.

    This article originally appeared in Public Seminar.

    Cinzia Arruzza is assistant professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in NYC and is a feminist and Marxist activist.

  • The Massacre at Charlie Hebdo

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    The mass murder at Charlie Hebdo in Paris is the leading news story in the world, and is universally condemned – rightfully so. In the left’s condemnation of this brutal massacre of journalists and cartoonists for expressing opinions in satirical form, we need to express our dissent from some of what’s being preached under the foggy cover of “je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie).

    In the first place, these killings are widely described as “an attack on the values of the West” — this rhetoric, for example, from the U.S. administration that has threatened to jail James Risen, the New York Times reporter who refuses to finger the sources for his reporting on CIA misconduct. And as we well know, Washington would like to throw Julian Assange in a prison hole for life.

    Let’s cite some recent and forgotten history of targeting journalists. We recall the U.S./NATO bombing of the Serbian Radio and Television (RTS) in April 1999, killing sixteen people in the destroyed building. There was last year’s killing of at least 13 Palestinian journalists during Israel’s most recent assault on Gaza (http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2014/08/gaza-journalists-israel-palestinians/), backed and subsidized by the United States, and decades of systematic Israeli censorship and closures of Palestinian newspapers in the Occupied Territories.

    We recall the U.S. sponsorship of Central American death squads that murdered journalists en masse — along with tens of thousands of unionists, students, priests, peasant organizers and entire villages – during the 1980s.  Without going through other examples — including the British record in the north of Ireland or the French in Algeria — it’s important to say that freedom of the press is a vital and indispensible democratic value but not particularly some treasure of “the West.”

    Indeed, we on the left uphold press freedom and other democratic rights for real, in a way that imperialist states and governments never do and never will. 

    We see the murder at Charlie Hebdo not as “an attack on the West” but as an expression of the “clash of barbarisms” that has been astutely analyzed by Gilbert Achcar (see the interview on “Democracy Now,” January 8, http://www.democracynow.org/2015/1/8/a_clash_of_barbarisms_after_paris). From the 9-11 attacks to the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, to the rise of the ”Islamic State,” the ongoing tragedies in Pakistan and Syria and elsewhere, and the rise of Islamophobia in European countries and the USA,  racialized imperialism and the worst elements of religious-totalitarian fanaticism feed upon each other.

    We deeply mourn the targets of the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, and that’s not because we can claim “je suis Charlie.” In upholding the precious right to ridicule those in authority – a right which is equally if not more important than the right to elect them – Charlie Hebdo seems to us to have sometimes sought to produce shock for its own sake, indeed sometimes resorting to mockery at the expense of communities that are marginalized and vulnerable to attack in France (as they are in the United States as well).

    That is not our method — but that is not why the Charlie Hebdo staff were attacked.  They were massacred at the hands of an extremist faction that seeks, first and foremost, to control the lives and the thoughts of Muslim communities in the Middle East, in Europe and everywhere.  Those communities are in reality the first targets of these killers, just as they will also be the likely victims of racist and bigoted revenge attacks. Above all, we stand in solidarity with those communities, and particularly with those who have bravely stood up to denounce the murders as a much worse attack on their people and their religion than any satirical or blasphemous cartoons could ever have been.

    Press freedom and democratic rights are priceless in their own right, and for those fighting for liberation from racism and imperialism they are most important of all.

    David Finkel is a member of Solidarity and an editor of Against the Current.

    Photograph – Human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh of Iran shows her solidarity with the victims of the Charlie Hebdo killings.

  • Public Employees in New York

    ImageReview of: Richard Steier, Enough Blame to Go Around: The Labor Pains of New York City’s Public Employees. Albany, New York: Excelsior Editions/State University of New York Press, 2014. 304 pp. US$24.95  (paperback).

    Two things I know to be true about Richard Steier. He is the best full-time reporter on the New York City labor beat. He is also the only full-time reporter on the New York City labor beat.

    That is no mean praise. Sure, The New York Times’ Steve Greenhouse does yeoman work as its national labor reporter, and the city’s union doings are covered sporadically by the dailies, but with the Times and the tabs, if it does not have a business angle or a political angle or a sports angle or an education angle or does not prefigure a strike that threatens to close the city down, it is not news.

    It is to Steier, who thinks that what happens to working people on the job and in their unions is well worth knowing. It is Steier who knows union leaders and their industries, knows elected union officers sometimes act heroically, if rarely. It is Steier who unfailingly listens to what workers say. Like James Thurber’s description of the good newshound, Steier “gets the story and writes the story.” That skill and that sensitivity are amply on display in his There’s Enough Blame to Go Around: The Labor Pains of New York City’s Public Employees Unions. The book is a selection of his writing from 1996 to the present. With the exception of an introduction, conclusion, and section updates, all first appeared in his must-read and widely circulated weekly The Chief, which he edits. Know that the book is no simple cut-and-paste job, but shows the utility of covering closely the progression of stories over time.

    And what stories! They have the quality of a Grand Guignol, as Steier captures a real-life demimonde inhabited by thieves and poseurs who prey on the poor, whether they be union leaders running the table and stealing the chairs or elected public officials who think smart budgeting means shilling for the city’s already undertaxed corporate elite by instituting austerity programs whose savings come from either contract takebacks or employee layoffs. In the extreme case of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, that meant layoffs only for workers whose locals failed to endorse him, something even Michael Bloomberg never tried.

    That skill at showing who gains and who loses what came early in his career. It is from a piece that he refers to, but sadly does not appear in the book, in part because it deals with a private-sector strike and was not written for The Chief. Its provenance and the context in which it was written shaped for better or worse his subsequent career. Not only does it show what Steier could do, but what he still does.

    On strike at the New York Post in 1993, he penned a guest op-ed indicting Post owner Digger Murdoch in the then extant New York Newsday for forcing the work stoppage. It was a column that effectively ended his daily journalism career, not to mention his position as the Post’s city hall labor reporter. Here, he slammed the billionaire press baron Murdoch for moving “to emasculate a union by stripping many veteran workers of their jobs and most of the money ear- marked for retirement. . . . He has demanded a four month period during which he can fire editorial, advertising and circulation employees without regard to seniority and with no employee right to arbitration. Any union that agrees to these conditions might as well roll over and—well, it wouldn’t have to play dead, because it would be dead.”

    With the severance offer a pittance, Steier wrote that “Murdoch’s offer is like asking them to eat mud and pretend it’s chocolate pudding.”

    I will say it again. Steier wrote this while on strike himself, and as an op-ed for a competing daily. Years later, he would call the editorial flacks at the Post and News corporate New York and city hall’s “off-payroll publicists at the tabloids.”

    That truth telling is abundant in the new book, where he charts the history of labor union leaders, some of who start out as paladins and end up as tyrants.

    There are precious few heroes in the book, and where there are, as when he speaks glowingly of teachers union President Randi Weingarten, the yardstick he uses is not necessarily that they are superlative leaders, but that they don’t loot the union’s treasury. His focus, like his paper, is on New York’s municipal unions and those private employers such as school bus drivers.

    With the exception of Robert Fitch’s Solidarity for Sale, I do not know a treatment of labor in New York that uncovers so many toads from under so many rocks. His treatment of turbulent AFSCME District Council 37, New York’s omnibus civil service union that, until outstripped by the United Federation of Teachers, was the city’s largest public employees union, is required reading. From the autocratic Victor Gotbaum and the ineffectual, bordering-on- complicit Stanley Hill, to the trusteeship of Lee Saunders and the reconstituted machine of near-nonagenarian Lillian Roberts, leadership of the union by its executive directors (elected by delegates, not by membership poll) was shared by the satraps of the five largest unions. Even Saunders’s efforts to clean out the corruption did not touch the central element behind the rot: the inability of the broad membership to vote the rascals out.

    Steier charts the labor history of Giuliani, whose articulated vision of a smaller but better-paid work force shows him keeping only the first promise. Steier quotes Ed Koch’s apt observation after District Council 37’s endorsement of Giuliani for reelection in 1997 that “unions are engaged more in saving unions than saving the world.” Or when Michael Bloomberg’s minions fed the New York Post disinformation that the top five earning firefighters were going out with mammoth pensions. Mammoth they were, but not to those who actually fought the fires. The lucky few were but members of the fire commissioner’s management team. Steier notes how “even prior to 9/11, better than 60 percent of the firefighting force was retiring on disability pensions., reflecting both the physical grind and the accumulation of toxins in their lungs from fighting fires and the build-up of diesel fuels from their trucks inside the firehouses.”

    Steier slams both Bloomberg and neoliberal State Governor Andrew Cuomo for blaming city and state deficits on workers’ retirement plans as “riding a ballooning of pension payments over the past decade that is the result of abnor- mally poor stock market performance and a screw-the-future decision by a previous governor and mayor that depleted the retirement funds of the cushion for the time when the stock market would fizzle.”

    He describes Jim Butler, quondam leader of 7,500 housekeepers, janitors, dietary workers, and nurses’ aides at the city-owned hospitals, for earning

    $285,000 while his workers were among the lowest paid in the city. It was not always thus. Butler, who coined the slogan “Fired Up, Can’t Take No More” and who in his time was a model militant largely responsible for keeping Coney Island, Elmhurst, and Queens hospitals open as public facilities, ended his career before his ousting as a well-paid husk. This was once someone whom even his fierce opponent and eventual successor Carmen Charles could say that “Jim Butler is responsible for my being a labor leader. The first time I went to one of his union meetings, it lit a fire under me.”

    Asked by Steier what happened, Charles said she did not know. “He had a great vision. Sometimes people lose that vision.”

    One labor leader who started out as a shop floor militant in 1963, only to cuddle up to  Giuliani was Charlie  Hughes, whose members  held non- pedagogical school titles with the Board of Education. Hughes, president of the largest of the Council’s “Big Five” unions, would by 2000 receive a lengthy prison sentence for stealing two million dollars in dues from the local’s trea- sury. Unlike Butler, who despised Giuliani, Hughes hosted a reelection party for the mayor at his Queens Village home in 1997. The endorsement was payback for the mayor’s allowing Hughes to represent the thousands of school aides hired after the teachers’ contract freed teachers from lunchroom duties.

    As much dirt as is mucked here, Steier is no weasel-like Walter Winchell (and he certainly does not write in staccato Winchellese) or a sort like Drew Pearson who assumed union leaders were by nature corrupt or venal. He assumes nothing except that the corrupt do not make for charming stories when they betray of their own members.

    He certainly knows that there is skullduggery on the part of union leaders, as with electrical workers and onetime Central Labor Council Leader and Queens Assemblyman Brian McLaughlin, who is now serving prison time for stealing upwards of three million dollars from numerous labor and charitable institutions (including a Little League team he coached). Steier calls the McLaughlin saga “No Bribe Left Behind.”

    His tale of Transit Union leader Roger Toussaint reads like a greek tragedy where hubris wins out over decent aspirations. Coming into office at the head of the Transportation Workers Local 100’s long-standing opposition caucus (how Toussaint came to lead that ticket is not told), Steier paints a portrait of a leader degraded into a tin-pot. Early in his presidency, when new mayor Michael Bloomberg boldly and unceremoniously inserted himself into the union’s 2005 negotiations with the Metropolitan Transit Authority, the state body that runs the city subways, buses, and much of the suburban rail lines, Toussaint was widely reported as telling the mayor to zip it. “With a single impolite suggestion that the mayor hold his tongue, Toussaint propelled himself forward as the tough guy in the city needed at a time when union leaders had been known for a series of corruption scandals,” Steier writes.

    The soon-to-be-settled contract, with modest raises but strong language aimed at quashing management abuses, was singular in being won by a new, Trinidad-born union leader with no bargaining experience. Yet the ratification margin of victory, just 60 percent, was treated by Toussaint less as a victory than as an insult, and Steier insists the transition from working class hero to paranoid schemer gestated here.

    Typically, Steier’s profiles of Toussaint, which in many ways were more congratulatory than those he made for others, came with a price. Toussaint cut off Steier and The Chief’s reporters from any public comment, which only made Steier and his staff dig harder.

    If there is a weakness in the book, it is typified by the Toussaint section, which goes long on Toussaint’s personal faults—his firing even allies at a moment’s notice for the mildest expressions of independent thinking was just part of the problem—and short in surveying the structured relations any union president would have with the moribund Metropolitan Transit Authority and a politically divided union. What the book could use is an analytical framework for understanding why union officials so frequently turn from being leaders and fighters to Judas goats and management enablers; from working class heroes to thieves, petty tyrants, or both.

    Saying that, Steier’s work takes guts, not just in the timely writing but in the republishing of what could be dismissed as old news; at least old to city-based labor activists and those reading Steier religiously. Legendary San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen famously bragged that he never read his old columns. How many scribblers can stand by their work a week after publication, let alone years or decades? Steier can. His is still instructive.

    So if journalism is the first draft of history, the book’s descriptive power alone means Steier does not need to work on a second draft.

    Michael Hirsch is a New Politics board member. This article first appeared in Working USA, Sept. 2014.

     

  • NPA Statements on Charlie Hebdo Killings

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    Following are the two statements issued by the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) of France after the January 7 killing of Charlie Hebdo joournalists in Paris. – Dan La Botz, Co-Editor

    A Barbarous and Reactionary Act

    The attack against the editorial offices of the newspaper Charlie Hebdo has provoked indignation and anger against this blind murderous violence against journalists and newspaper staff. The attack aims at spreading terror against the freedom of expression  and the press in the name of reactionnary and obscurantist prejudice.

    We have often debated and polemicized with the journalists and illustrators of Charlie Hebdo as well as engaging in common campaigns with them.

    The NPA expresses its solidarity with the family and friends of the victims, the journalists and staff at Charlie Hebdo.

    But we will not enter into a national union with the sorcerer’s apprentices who flirt with racism, stoke hatred against muslims and foreigners or will use this trajedy to enact new laws against civic rights. They bear a heavy responsibility for the current xenophobic climate. Both camps are ennemies of democracy, freedom, as well as the working class and all those in solidarity with it

    Holland and National Unity – Anger and Indignation Misdirected

    François Hollande, once again, even in this dramatic situation, did not have anything to say.

    Throughout the country people are expressing their indignation, anger, revulsion against the pure and simple execution of independent, free and satirical, anticonformist, journalists, this putting to death of Charlie Hebdo, and Hollande is praising a united France, calling for national unity. In doing so he justifies the wars that he and his government are carrying out against the peoples in regions of the world where plundering and military interventions organized by the great powers are sowing misery and chaos.

    It is because the NPA is fully solidarity with the journalists, the employees, the victims of the barbaric and reactionary attack against Charlie Hebdo and its journalists that we are not joining this national unity, with this coming together of France.

    We say no to falling in behind this government, which is waging war against working people; behind Sarkozy who, is saying the same thing as Hollande; or behind Marine Le Pen who is using it to conduct a racist and xenophobic campaign under pretext of fighting against Islamic fundamentalism.

    It is their policy, social and democratic regression, social that secretes this obscurantist cruelty, this contemptible violence which aims at sowing terror, against freedom of expression, freedom of the press in the name of reactionary and obscurantist prejudices.

    The answer is not national unity but the workers’ movement, working people again the offensive to bring society out of regression, of the chaos into which capitalist policy has plunged it.

    We will express our solidarity with the victims of terror in complete independence of their national unity.

    Montreuil 7 January 2015

    *Keith Mann translated the first document. The second was trasnlated by International Viewpoint.

    Cartoon by Lucille Clerc, Paris.

  • Mexico – The Year in Review

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    President Enrique Peña Nieto, who had been so successful in advancing his fundamentally conservative economic program during his first year and a half in office, suddenly faced a serious challenge beginning in September 2014 when police apparently cooperating gangsters killed six students, injured at least 25 injured, and kidnapped 43 in the town of Iguala in the state of Guerrero.

    Protest demonstrations demanding that the students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College be returned alive, led by parents, students, and teachers quickly spread from Guerrero to Mexico City and around the nation. An international solidarity movement has also developed, with demonstrations at consulates in several countries.

    At about the same time, it was revealed that the president and his wife Angélica Rivera occupied a home that was owned by a major government contractor, while Secretary of Finance Luis Videgaray had similarly bought a home from a contractor. These revelations of conflict of interest at the highest levels of government, not so different from those portrayed in Luis Estrada’s new political satire film The Perfect Dictatorship, shocked even the jaded Mexican public. The exposé of wrong-doing at the top combined with large social movements from blow created a national political crisis that continued until the Christmas season led to a pause in the protests. The entire situation—the killings, the role of the police, and the corruption at the highest levels of government—has also created an international preoccupation with the Mexican situation.

    Economic Problems

    The economic and social crisis has been exacerbated by the country’s economic problems. World oil prices collapsed during the second half of 2014. Between June and November the price of oil fell from $107 per barrel to less than $56 a barrel on Dec. 15. Since Mexico depends upon oil for a large part of its government revenue, this must almost certainly lead to cuts in government programs of all sorts. As oil prices fell, so did the value of the peso, falling from 12.02-per-US$1.00 to 14.39-per-US$1.00, a decline of roughly 16%, leaving the peso at a two year low. Overall, the Mexican economic growth has been slow, expanding by only 1.1 percent in the first nine months of 2014 (the last quarter figures are not yet available). At the same time, Mexico’s debt has continued to grow, and the country may have to take out more loans to compensate for lost oil revenue.

    On the twentieth anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Mexican economy had failed to grow as promised, and it has not improved the wages and standard of living of most Mexicans. The Mexican capitalist class has continued to enrich itself, while the middle class lives in economic insecurity, and the working class and the poor continue to see little improvement in their lives. Mexico has 27 billionaires. The top five and their corporations are Carlos Slim Helú (Carso), Germán Larrea Mota-Velasco (Grupo México), Alberto Baillères González (Peñoles y Palacio de Hierro), Ricardo Salinas Pliego (TV Azteca) y Eva Gonda Rivera (Grupo Femsa). Slim is worth US$29.6 billion. A year ago, Mexico’s wages fell below those of China, about 20 percent lower, and there has been no improvement since then. There are 119.7 million Mexicans of whom 52.3 million live in poverty, some 8.2 million of those are indigenous people.

    While Mexican economic and social conditions have not improved, tighter U.S. border controls and President Barack Obama’s policy of much higher rates of deportations have led to a dramatic decline in the number Mexican undocumented migrants. Approximately 229,000 Mexicans apprehended by the Border Patrol in Fiscal Year 2014, compared to 809,000 in 2007. Still over ten percent of all Mexicans live in the United States. There has for years been speculation that closing the escape valve that allowed many Mexicans to find employment in the United States would lead to increasing social unrest in Mexico. To what degree this may have contributed to the current wave of protest is unclear.

    Why did nationwide demonstrations break out over the killing of the Ayotzinapa students? After all, since Felipe Calderón launched the drug war in 2006 as many as 100,000 people have been killed, 20,000 disappeared, and 1.5 million displaced. It may be that the events in Guerrero were simply the drop that made the cup of anger run over. But there is also the sense that the young men and women of the Rural Normal College, almost all of them from poor peasant families, embodied the future and the hope of Mexico. The disappeared Ayotzinapa students, whose photographs have been carried on placards in demonstrations throughout the country, put a face on all of those tens of thousands who have been disappeared in the last eight years. The students, most of them leftists, were also linked to a group—the dissident teachers’ movement—that had the power to mobilize and advocate on their behalf.

    The movement from September to December of 2014 has been one of pain, anger, indignation, demanding an end to the corruption and violence in Mexico. At the same time, it represents a political threat to the president and the ruling party on the eve of the Mexican mid-term elections. Beyond the elections Andrés Manuel López Obrador, leader of the Movement of National Regeneration Party (MORENA), and, completely independently, Catholic Archbishop Raúl Vera as well as leaders of several left organizations, have called for a constituent congress to write a new constitution and reform the Mexican state. Vera, who has a long history of sympathy with movements from below, has called for a “citizens’ constituent congress” for the “refoundation of Mexico.”

    In response to the protests, to the general social and economic crisis, and to demands made by some on the left that he resign, Peña Nieto made it clear that he was prepared to use his office and the power of the state to maintain the status quo. He suggested that protestors were simply attempting to destabilize the society and made it clear that he and the Minister of the Interior and the head of the military stood ready to use their power to restore law and order. At the same time, the president shrewdly allowed the demonstrators to exhaust themselves in countless protests and marches as Christmas approached.   

    Mexico: Reform or Revolution? Or Neither?

    A number of journalists have suggested that Mexico might be on the verge of profound change. The Huffington Post suggested that Peña Nieto might resign. Telesur, the pan-Latin American television network headquartered in Caracas has suggested that the Ayotzinapa protests might lead to a revival of guerrilla organizations. As did the McClatchy media. The Christian Science Monitor went further, suggesting that Mexico was on the verge of a revolution and needed a new Francisco “Pancho” Villa or Emiliano Zapata (two men who despite their idealism and courage lost the last revolution). All of these reports represent ungrounded and farfetched speculations. In truth, Mexico is not in a pre-revolutionary situation much less a revolutionary crisis, and it is highly unlikely that the current political crisis and the wave of protests will even succeed in bringing about reform. The absence of an organized and political working class movement in these protests is significant (more on this below).

    Peña Nieto, the PRI, and the Mexican state remain in control in Mexico—albeit the usual exercise of power in midst of tremendous turbulence which results from the enormous power of the drug cartels, the existence of community self-defense organizations, and regional autonomous organizations, the most important of which is the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Chiapas. Though Mexico has the highest levels of social conflict in years, Peña Nieto’s government still has a firm grip on power. Moreover, it should be remembered that the United States government will never permit: 1) the coming to power of a left government either through election or revolution; 2) a military coup; or 3) a total breakdown in social order. The United States must maintain a nominal democracy in Mexico, because it cannot preserve democracy in North America and in its “own backyard” (as Mexico is always so disrespectfully called), it will lose credibility throughout the world. To say nothing of the billions of dollars of U.S. investments in Mexico that must be preserved. Consequently, Washington has spent $3 billion in the last six years on the Mérida Intiative, a border security, counter-narcotics, and counterterrorism program established by the George W. Bush administration in 2008. The U.S. Defense Department also spends millions of dollars to train the Mexican military. The United States will not permit Mexico to go South.

    Disaster for the PRD

    While the events in Guerrero have produced a crisis for Peña Nieto and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), they have also been a disaster for the left-of-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). Both the mayor of the town of Iguala, who is believed to have sent the police to repress the students, and the governor of the state of Guerrero were PRD local leaders. The PRD, which had just celebrated its 25th anniversary, was already in serious problems before the recent events. Tainted with corruption and frequently paralyzed by political in-fighting among the rival cliques that dominate the party, the events in Guerrero proved the last straw for founder Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas who founded the party, for his closest associates, and for many other PRD members who have left the organization.  

    Cárdenas is not the first to leave the PRD. Two years ago Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his followers left and formed MORENA, the Movement for National Regeneration. MORENA originally grew up inside the PRD as López Obrador’s personal following, then he led his followers out of the PRD and formed MORENA as an independent organization November 2012 received its legal ballot status in July 2014 and became the MORENA Party.

    MORENA was one of three would-be parties that were accredited last summer, the other two being the Humanist Front (Frente Humanista or FH), a conservative party, and the Social Encounter Party (Encuentro Social – PES), another conservative party based on the Evangelical churches, bringing the number of electoral parties in the country to ten. To become a party, according to the 1946 electoral law, the three pretenders had to demonstrate that they had a national presence, now defined as 220,000 supporters or more in a large proportion of the country’s states and municipalities. In order to maintain their party registration, each must win at least 3 percent of the vote in the 2015 elections.

    Of the three parties seeking legal status, MORENA was by far the strongest. FH had 270,966 accredited members and 221 district assemblies and PES had 308,997 members and 236 district meeting, while MORENA had 496,729 members and held 30 (out of 32) state-wide assemblies.

    Further left on the political spectrum, the People’s and Worker’s Political Organization (Organización Política del Pueblo y de los Trabajadores – OPT) held its first national convention in Mexico City on Dec. 12 and 13 with 200 delegates in attendance. Founded in 2011, the party now has local chapters in 16 of Mexico’s 32 states. Martín Esparza Flores of the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME), which has been the driving force behind this party, opened the convention.

    The OPT, which opposes capitalism for both its economic and its environmental consequences, denounced the PRI, the PAN, and the PRD as parties of capital, but did not criticize MORENA. The party decided to support a rate-payers’ strike by users of electricity, to support the construction of a new workers federation, and to participate in the left unity congress in late January.

    Many Parties—Little Democracy

    Mexico’s political spectrum now looks like this: there are ten parties, six of which are conservative and four of which are on the left. The conservative parties are the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which is in power; the National Action Party (PAN) which held the presidency during the previous two terms; the Ecological Green Party (PVEM), a satellite of the PRI; the Nueva Alianza (NA) which is the party of the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE) and is also allied with the PRI; and the two new conservative parties FH and PES. On the left there are the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD); the Workers Party (PT) which came out of the Maoist movement; the Citizens Movement (MC – formerly Convergencia); and now MORENA.

    According to María Marván Laborde of Excelsior, based on federal electoral statistics, some 13 million Mexicans are affiliated with one or another of the political parties. The existing parties’ numbers are as follows: The PRI has 5,848,944 members; the PRD, 3,435,979; the PVEM, 947,346; the PT 892,756; MC, 795,281; NA, 639,174; and the PAN, 271,632.

    How, one might wonder, has the PAN with so few members been able in the past to win the presidency and sometimes control about a third of the congress? The answer is that the PAN has relied heavily on its influence in the media. What is clear above all from these statistics is the enormous electoral capacity of the PRI which not only now plays a dominant role in the media but with its allies the PVEM and NA controls or influences about 7.5 million party members, that is about half of all party members. Party members alone are not everything. López Obrador and his followers demonstrated in 2006 and again in 2012 that they are capable of organizing hundreds of thousands of people in massive demonstrations and sit-ins.

    López Obrador, who has indicated that he will be a candidate in 2018, continues to be a charismatic populist whose actual politics are not so different than those of the PRD. López Obrador, has not been implicated in the Ayotzinapa events—though, when he was the PRD candidate for president in 2006 and again 2012, López Obrador did campaign alongside and was photographed with the Iguala mayor and with the governor of Guerrero. What effect the recent protests over Ayotzinapa will have on the future of López Obrador and his party remains to be seen. Certainly on the basis of past experience it is not clear that López Obrador and his party have the ability to win a majority or even the necessary plurality of the vote.

    The Far Left

    The Zapatista Army of National Liberation, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in January and saw its Subcomandante Marcos supposedly step down from his role as leader and spokesperson, remains the most significant organization on the far left in Mexico. On October 8, the EZLN mobilized 20,000 of its members and followers in a march in San Cristóbal de las Casas in support of the Ayotzinapa students, the families and friends, saying, “Their pain is our pain.” Yet, while strong in Chiapas, the EZLN does not play a significant role in the national social and labor movements in Mexico.

    Experts contend that there are some 40 armed guerrilla organizations in Mexico, some fade away and new ones arise every year. Several have issued new manifestos or released new communications this year in response to the disappearance of the 43 students. The Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) which operates principally in the state Guerrero, but also in several other states, is one of the most important. Many believe that the Popular Revolutionary Front (FPR), a Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist party that appeared and played a role in the so-called Oaxaca Commune of 2006 is linked to the EPR. There are also several other Trotskyist, Maoist, and Guevarist guerrilla groups, each of which has a toehold in one or another social or labor movement. None of them seems to play a major role in the new wave of demonstrations over the Ayotzinapa students.

    Relief for the Beleaguered Labor Unions?

    The basic panorama of the Mexican labor unions has not changed much in the last few years, except that the unions—most of them linked to the ruling party, violent, corrupt and colluding with the employers to keep wages low, and enriching the union officers and labor lawyers—have gotten smaller, representing few workers. A study published in October 2013 found that the percentage of unionization in the economically active population had fallen from 10.6 to 8.8 percent. But as Graciela Bensusan, the author of the study, stated, very few of these can be considered real labor unions.

    The Congress of Labor (CT) and the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), both loyal to the PRI, authoritarian and corrupt, continue to dominate the Mexican unions, while the more independent National Union of Workers (UNT) remains weakened ever since it lost the support of the National Union of Social Security Workers (SNTSS) whose former leader endorsed the pro-business National Action Party (PAN). Within the UNT, the Authentic Labor Front (FAT) continues to play a leading role in offering proposals for a more democratic union movement and a more democratic society. The New Labor Central formed in February under the leadership of the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) and the National Coordinating Committee of the Teachers Union (la CNTE) with some fanfare has yet to make its mark.  

    The previous administration of President Felipe Calderón of the National Action Party (PAN) (2006-2012) proved to be a disaster for the labor unions, especially those that acted independently. Calderón drove into exile Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, the leader of the Mexican Miners and Metal Workers Union (SNTMMRM) and attempted to destroy the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) by liquidating the Mexican Light and Power Company and firing 44,000 workers. The Peña Nieto administration appears to be attempting to remove these two longstanding issues from its agenda, but given past history one has to doubt the sincerity of the government’s promises.

    Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, who has led the Mexican Miners and Metal Workers Union (SNTMMRM) from exile in Vancouver, British Columbia since 2006, announced that, now that here are no outstanding charges against him, he will return to Mexico in January of 2015. After the Pasta de Conchos mine disaster in which 65 miners died, when Gómez Urrutia declared the incident to be a case of “industrial homicide,” Grupo Mexico, a mining company, and the Mexican government waged a war against him. The government accused him of having embezzled US$55 million from his union’s members, while Grupo Mexico and the government colluded to break the union at the important Cananea mine. The United Steel Workers of Canada and the United States and the International Metalworkers Federation helped him to escape to Canada and to survive there.

    On eleven occasions Gómez Urrutia and his lawyers proved the charges against him to be false and finally it seems, the government has given up its persecution of the miners’ leader. Still one wonders if another charge will not be made if he returns. And if Gómez Urrutia does return—he has pledged to return on several occasions in the past but then did not do so—it will represent a victory for him, for his union, and for union power and workers’ rights in Mexico. It will also be an act of great courage, for surely the government and company that wanted him imprisoned and his union broken will attempt one way or another to eliminate him from the scene.

    The Electrical Workers Union

    In October of 2009, Calderón seized the Light and Power Company, and fired the workers, hoping in that way to destroy the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) which was also a leader in the movement against privatization. While most of the SME members accepted their severance pay, about 16,000 continued for years to fight to be reincorporated into the workforce of the successor company, the Federal Electrical Commission (CFE). Now the Mexican Ministry of the Interior has signed an agreement with the union that will allow the workers to form a cooperative which will provide services to the CFE. At the same time, the union, which celebrated its 100th anniversary this year, will negotiate a collective bargaining agreement with the cooperative, which allows it to continue to exist as a legitimate national labor union. While this is not exactly what the union had been demanding, it does appear to represent some sort of resolution to the conflict and will theoretically provide employment to the union’s members.

    Teachers Mobilize against Education Reform

    The State Coordinating Committee of Education Workers of Guerrero (CETEG), a dissident caucus within the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE), has played a major role in mobilizing around the attack on the students of Rural Teachers College of Ayotzinapa. CETEG members have marched and demonstrated, struck and seized government buildings, burned down the town hall of Ayotzinapa and the PRD headquarters in Chilpancingo, as well as taking control of the toll booths on the Highway of the Sun between Mexico City and Acapulco. Teachers, students, and parents have also taken over dozens of towns in the state of Guerrero, throwing out the sitting officials and putting others in their places.

    The National Coordinating Committee of the Mexican Teachers Union (la CNTE), which has been involved in similar protests throughout the country, has also continued to organized against the Education Reform passed by the Mexican Congress in the last days of the Calderón administration. Teachers have criticized the reform which established examination for both students and teachers as part of a neoliberal project aimed at weakening the union and privatizing education. La CNTE has called for a national strike, not only of teachers but of all of the institutions and organizations related to education, and directing participants to seize government buildings and the offices and facilities of transnational corporations. La CNTE wants an end to the Education Reform, a return of all workers’ rights that have been taken by the government, and the expulsion of Juan Díaz de la Torre, the current to officer of the Mexican Teachers Union. Elba Esther Gordillo, the former head of the union, remains in prison following her arrest by Peña Nieto’s administration in February of 2013.

    Oil Workers Union on a Slippery Slope

    Mexican oil workers stand on a slippery slope, their future insecure. The passage of President Peña Nieto’s Energy Reform Law in 2013, which would permit the Mexican Petroleum Company (PEMEX) to contract with private parties for a variety of services, raised the question of the future of the Mexican Petroleum Workers Union (STPRM). The union, headed by Carlos Romero Deschamps who is also a PRI Senator, is notoriously authoritarian and corrupt, as argued over the years by many failed rank-and-file reform movements. Some informed sourcs have speculated that in order to smooth the way for the institutional transition, Peña Nieto, as he did with Gordillo of the teachers union, might send Romero Deschamps to prison. During another period of economic transition, former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari in 1989 sent police with bazookas to blow down the doors of the former head of the Petroleum Workers, Joaquín Hernández Galcia, better known as “La Quina,” who was arrested, tried, and imprisoned. (He was amnestied in 1997 and died last year.)

    On the other hand, Peña could hardly ask for a more politically pliant and servile union leader than Romero Deschamps. In any case, the union’s members face dramatic changes whoever is in power in their union. Under the Energy Reform Law, the union has already been excluded from the company’s administrative council. The contracting out of services to private corporations, many of them foreign, must necessarily lead to a reduction in the union’s workforce, and likely also to changes in work rules and wages. PEMEX has 150,000 workers on the payroll, most of them unionized, as well as 95,000 retirees who received company pensions. The union’s plan is to negotiate future contracts that change fixed pensions into private investment accounts. When back in the 1990s the Mexican railroads were privatized, they eliminated something like 100,000 union workers, and it would not be surprising if something similar happened to the petroleum workers.

    Conclusion

    With the resurgence of a broad opposition movement in Mexico, the last four months of 2014 represented a dramatic turn in the fortunes of the government of Enrique Peña Neto and his PRI party. The Ayotzinapa solidarity movement and the call for a constituent assembly to “refound” Mexico represent serious social and political challenges to the president, the ruling party, and to the existing political system. At the moment, the working class remains on the sidelines more spectator than participant. Social change in 2015 will depend in large measure on resurgence of working class activity as well.

  • An Early Activist Critiques Stalin’s 1934 Antihomosexual Law

    [This article, titled “A Chapter of Russian Reaction,” translated into English here for the first time, was written in German by longtime homosexual activist Kurt Hiller (1885–1972) from London and published in the Swiss gay journal Der Kreis in 1946. Hiller had been active in Germany’s first homosexual-rights organization, the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäre Komitee (Scientific Humanitarian Committee), headed by Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935). Founded in 1897, the committee was Germany’s most prominent gay group. Its central campaign was reform of Paragraph 175 of the penal code, which criminalized “unnatural lewdness between persons of the male sex.”

    In the group’s first meeting following World War I, in August 1920, it set up a united-front “action committee” of gay groups to fight for repeal of Paragraph 175, and Hiller was chosen to head it. At the 1928 congress in Copenhagen of the World League for Sexual Reform, Hirschfeld read a paper on the subject of homosexual oppression written by Hiller titled “Appeal to the Second International Congress for Sexual Reform on Behalf of an Oppressed Human Variety.”[1]

    Hiller’s article “Ethical Tasks of Homosexuals” is one of the most compelling to come out of the pre-Stonewall gay movement. It first appeared in the July 1913 issue of the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for Intermediate Sexual Types), the publication of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee. (My translation of this article can be seen here: http://www.williamapercy.com/wiki/index.php?title=David_Thorstad.)

    As John Lauritsen and I wrote in our book on the early homosexual rights movement: “The last of an irregular series of ‘Newsletters’ of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee was published in February 1933, by Kurt Hiller. In July of the same year, Hiller was arrested and sent to the Oranienburg concentration camp. He was fortunate to be released nine months later, after nearly dying from mistreatment in the concentration camp, and he left Germany.”[2] Here is an excerpt where Hiller speaks in German about his experiences in Nazi captivity: http://www.etuxx.com/diskussionen/toene/hiller.mp3.

    The tsarist law punishing homosexual sex was abolished following the Russian Revolution. But in 1934, less than two decades later, Stalin recriminalized same-sex sexual acts. When André Gide visited the USSR in 1935–36, he reported that homosexuals were considered counterrevolutionaries.

    Hiller says that “even the dumbest peasant could grasp the cruelty and idiocy” of laws against same-sex behavior. No doubt. But there was virtually no criticism of Stalin’s antihomosexual policy from any communist (or even oppositionist) groups until after the 1969 Stonewall Riots that gave a new impulse to the struggle for gay rights and sexual freedom that had begun in the middle of the nineteenth century. The erasure of almost all leftist support for gay rights following the reaction under Stalin, and the dearth of criticism of the USSR’s antisex policies, make Hiller’s article all the more striking. It is written in his usual pithy style and is a unique document that deserves to be rescued from oblivion.

    An earlier article by Hiller covering the same ground, and also criticizing the ban on abortion, titled “Retreats in the Soviet Union,” was published ten years earlier, in 1936—just two years after the new law was promulgated. It appeared in the exile publication Sozialistische Warte: Blätter für kritsch-aktiven Sozialismus, whose many contributors included a variety of adherents to different tendencies, including Thomas Mann and Leon Trotsky. Hiller repeated the stinging conclusion to that article—a criticism of leftist apologists for the USSR—in the introduction to his 1946 article below.

    The notes are mine.—DT]

    ●   ●   ●

    Whatever one might think of the Soviet Union, it unquestionably merits recognition for two services of historic significance: having undertaken the first tremendous, radical experiment in socialism and, with enormous sacrifice of life and property, having actively helped bring about the collapse of the satanic mob rule of the Nazis. One can’t be thankful enough. But acknowledging this in no way means castrating oneself critically and turning into a devoted eunuch of Moscow, who stands with crossed arms before his pasha, whose edicts he, for Allah’s sake, under no circumstances dares to contradict. I would expect even of honest European communists to despise, together with me, him who accepts, if Moscow commits them, such reactionary acts that he would never accept if bourgeois or social-democratic governments were guilty of them.

      —   K.H.

    The Russian penal code of 1845 threatened same-sex acts between adults with “third-class punishment, second degree,” that is, with banishment to the lesser removed regions of Siberia (in a penal colony) and prior to that ten to twenty whiplashes. That was under Nicholas I! In 1903, Nicholas II gave his people a new penal code that provided for not less than three months’ prison for same-sex acts without aggravating circumstances. Even with aggravating conditions the acts were punished relatively mildly: imprisonment for not less than three years for seduction of minors from 14 to 16 years of age, and of children under 14—forced labor for not more than eight years. Even the remaining acts clearly deserving punishment—abuse of someone in one’s care, the mentally ill, the unconscious, sexual coercion, and blackmail—were punished similarly. The 1917 October Revolution did what Cambacérès, in the Napoleonic Code, had already done a century earlier: it removed punishment for simple same-sex intercourse without aggravating circumstances . . . Lenin and his friends were thus not just economic and social but also cultural revolutionaries.[3]

    However, this repeal was in reality not at all so “revolutionary.” In a modest sense, it was progressive; it simply implemented the liberal-bourgeois, radical, rational intent of the eighteenth century, which had already been implemented in the Latin countries in the first half of the nineteenth century, precisely under French influence. (Chinese and Islamist rationality had preceded this.)

    After less than two decades, the Russian Revolution revoked this change. On March 7, 1934, the RSFSR (that is, Soviet Russia, but not the entire Soviet Union)  promulgated a new law on the criminal responsibility for “pederasty,” as follows:

    § 154 of the penal code of the RSFSR is expanded in the following manner: sexual intercourse of a man with another man (pederasty) will be punished with imprisonment of three to five years.[4]

    Our criticism is not aimed at the second paragraph of this new § 154a (not quoted here), for it criminally establishes a very justifiable social protection; the outrageous retreat lies in the first paragraph. It is a retreat compared to the legal situation prevailing in the majority of all bourgeois states, including formerly fascist Italy and the clearly nonliberal Poland of the Pilsudski period. In the severity of its punishment it is even a step backward compared to the tsarist law of 1903.

    A biological minority that, as such, is neither superior to nor inferior to, neither socially useful nor socially harmful to the majority, and at most can only be harmful insofar as attempts are made to repress and persecute it, which, if it is not hard as steel,  distorts the character of these human beings and ruins their nervous system—this in itself healthy variety of person, which can be seen throughout all eras and among all peoples, is represented among a not insignificant number of distinguished artists and thinkers (as well as among human trash and the lowest criminals—but can normal love deny the fact that most criminals love in the normal way?)—this minority is here prevented from expressing its fundamental human rights by the most brutal threats from a state that is not led by a Hitler, but rather sings its praises internationally as the realization of freedom for all humanity.

    Or rather, tries to prevent, through a completely unsuitable means. This law is not only brutal and reactionary, it is also senseless. While it no doubt forces the same-sexer into lies and dirty hideaways, it is no more able to force him to be ascetic than a law against sexual intercourse could force the normal majority of the population to abstain from sex. Even the dumbest peasant could grasp the cruelty and idiocy of such a law.

    On the other hand, we find the belief that by legally punishing men who love men they can be changed into men who love women, despite the shocking ignorance of matters pertaining to psychology that it reveals, sometimes even among geniuses. I don’t know whether Barbusse and Gorky were geniuses; I know only that they sometimes expressed the stupidest opinions about the problem of homosexuality and that their influence in Moscow in the area of cultural politics was considerable (the same is true of the individual psychologist Alfred Adler, who did not hesitate to teach that homoeroticism was nothing more than bad intentions: anyone who really wanted to could love in the “correct” way). In the March 1, 1926, issue of the Paris journal Les Marges, Henri Barbusse denounced the same-sex inclination as “a sign of deep social and moral decadence on the part of a distinct part of present-day society,” namely (he was a Marxist), the propertied class. And as to Maxim Gorky, it is credibly reported that he exclaimed: “Destroy the homosexuals and you destroy fascism!”[5] Only a few leftists will acknowledge that this way of thinking is itself fascist. To be sure, the great earth-shaking changes of terminology have nowadays even seized the terms of both the Left and the Right . . .

    The statements of both writers, as well as the ridiculous theories of that Doctor Adler from Vienna (one of the old defectors from Freud), reveal one thing: the instinctual hostility of these gentlemen to a type of human being that, based only on their feelings, they find peculiar, incomprehensible, and strange. One can really only compare this instinctual hatred for what is strange to racism—which they completely reject. In other respects, what these writers say betrays considerable social ignorance. Anyone who has to some degree investigated the sexual-sociological subject knows that among the proletariat sexual anomalies, including same-sex sexuality, are no less prevalent than among the bourgeoisie, and that neither in Germany nor in other countries did or does man-man love have a monopoly in nationalistic circles. That it is more common in professional armies and uniformed male groups than elsewhere is undeniable, is freely acknowledged by the psychologist from the start, and bears no relation whatever to the nature of the political views prevailing in such armies or groups. A red sailor, for example, is disposed to engaging in man-man love relationships or practices to the same extent as a brown or black sailor—not because women are lacking, but because men for whom the lack of women is of no consequence and who feel happiest in a vigorous male-only milieu (which they might not even be consciously aware of) eagerly seek out professions that tend to reflect their ideal in this regard. Defenders of the Russian government say that it was compelled to adopt that law because groups of lovers had arisen in the Red Army that had become the focus of opposition (“Trotskyist”) propaganda.[6] The theory that there was such a cause-and-effect link between homoeroticism and political opposition is more naive than naive. The shoe is on the other foot: governments that consider it appropriate to persecute same-sexers will certainly not arouse any sympathy among them, let alone possibly even change political love into political hate.

    If these governments respond by saying that friendship or enmity of this tiny minority is all the same to it, that it has no weight, then they are punishing their own lies.[7] For why persecute a minority of no significance? In fact, one would search in vain for a rational motive behind this shameful legislation. What is decreed here is uncontrolled instinct—or cynical intent to cajole the uncontrolled instincts of churchly conservative circles, whose backing one wants to secure by Machiavellian means. At best, the decision was made by ignorance based on false authorities, and the generally dull, narrow-minded impulse toward the past—that impulse that recently, in the realm of foreign policy, led, with aspirations going as far as Libya, to exuberant, hyper-tsarist imperialism.


    Notes

    [1] Kurt Hiller, “Appeal to the Second International Congress for Sexual Reform on Behalf of an Oppressed Human Variety,” trans. John Lauritsen, in John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864–1935), rev. ed. (Ojai, Calif.: Times Change Press, 1995), 106–14; originally published by the Red Butterfly, 1970.

    [2] Ibid., 47.

    [3] Cambacérès (1753–1834) was a lawyer during the French Revolution best known for drafting the Napoleonic Code, a civil code that was promulgated by Emperor Napoleon in 1804. The Constituent Assembly abolished the ancien régime law against sodomy when it revised the penal code in 1791. Cambacérès was openly homosexual. His tomb is in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

    [4] This refers to the first part of the article. The second part provided for up to eight years in prison “if the act was accompanied by taking advantage of the dependent position of one of the partners, by the use of force, or if it was conducted as a profession or publicly. All republics were required to insert the statute unchanged into their codes. In effect, the law raised homosexuality to the level of a state security matter, constituting a peril to the moral fabric of society” (Lauritsen and Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement [1864–1935], 78). RSFSR stands for Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.

    [5] Gorky’s statement is in his article “Proletarian Humanism,” Pravda, May 23, 1934, 3 (quoted in Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001], 189–90). According to Healy, the slogan actually reads “Destroy the homosexuals—Fascism will disappear,” but it has generally been mistranslated as “Destroy homosexuality and fascism will disappear,” which obscures its “unmistakably genocidal resonance” (332n37).

    The full Barbusse quote is: “I consider that this perversion of a natural instinct, like many other perversions, is a sign of deep social and moral decadence on the part of a distinct part of present-day society.” It appears in a feature in Les Marges titled “Homosexuality in Literature” in which writers were asked to state their views on three questions: (1) “Have you noticed that the homosexual preoccupation has grown in literature since the war?”; (2) “Do you think that the presentation of inverts in the novel, in poetry, or in the theater might have an influence on morals?”; and (3) “If you believe that one must fight against this tendency, by what means? If you believe one must tolerate it, for what reasons?” Some three dozen writers responded, with views of homosexuality ranging from favorable to hostile to ironic.

    [6] So far as I can determine, the (Trotskyist) Left Opposition to Stalin never made an issue out of the recriminalization of homosexual behavior under Stalin. Here, Hiller’s mention of opposition propaganda as “Trotskyist” most likely refers to the fact that the Stalinist Communist parties often denounced opposition to their policies as “Trotskyite.” They still do. In 1964, in Prague, I spent an evening with a Communist Party history teacher, and when I criticized the Soviet Union for not doing more to aid the Vietnamese in their struggle against the United States, he replied: “We have a lot of trouble with our Trotskyists.” At the time, the Trotskyist movement had no influence at all in Czechoslovakia.

    [7] The notion that the homosexual minority had no “weight” is of coincidental interest in that during the debates on homosexuality and gay liberation inside the Trotskyist U.S. Socialist Workers Party in the early 1970s, the leadership, in a “Memorandum on the Gay Liberation Movement” (adopted in August 1973), argued that gay liberation related to a “relatively narrow sector of the population,” lacked the “potential mass” and “social weight” of movements for women’s and black liberation, and was “much more peripheral to the central issues of the class struggle” than those movements. It said that it would be a mistake for the SWP to “generally assign comrades to this movement.” The SWP has never published this “Memorandum.” It is discussed in my article “The Socialist Workers Party vs. Gay Liberation (or The Cuckoo Builds a Strange Nest),” available at http://www.williamapercy.com/wiki/index.php?title=David_Thorstad.

     

    David Thorstad is a longtime gay activist, coauthor of The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864–1935), and editor of Gay Liberation and Socialism: Documents from the Discussions on Gay Liberation inside the Socialist Workers Party (1970–1973). His writings are available at www.williamapercy.com/wiki/index.php?title=David_Thorstad. He can be reached at binesi@gvtel.com.

     

  • As Mexican President Peña Nieto Visits White House, Protestors Demand His Resignation

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    President Barack Obama received Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto in the White House on January 6 where the two men reportedly talked principally about economic affairs, security issues related to the international drug cartels, and immigration issues. But in front of the White House some 200 Mexican Americans demanded Peña Nieto’s resignation for his handling of the killings and kidnappings that occurred in Iguala, Mexico, in September.

    The protestors who had come to the White House from Mexican activist organizations in Washington, D.C., New York, Philadelphia, North Carolina, and in one case as far away as Kansas City, as well as a small number who came from Mexico, chanted slogans and held signs and banners demanding justice for the 43 kidnapped students of the Rural Normal School (teachers college) of Ayotzinapa, Guerrero. Some carried sticks topped by flowers with a portrait and information about each one of the 43 missing students.

     

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    One woman speaker said, “We are here to demand justice for the Ayotzinapa students, but we demand that Peña Nieto resign.” Other speakers talked about the more than 100,000 deaths and 20,000 disappearances resulting from the Mexican government’s war on drugs during the presidencies of Felipe Calderon and Peña Nieto, about the Mexican government’s corruption, and about the authorities’ impunity. Periodically the protest demonstrators counted up from 1 to 43 and shouted, “They were taken away alive, and alive we want them back.”

    The protests began at 9:00 a.m. with a march through Washington, D.C. neighborhoods to the White House and continued there until 3:00 p.m. When at the end of the meeting with Obama, Peña Nieto left with his entourage, the demonstrators chanted in Spanish and English, “Asesino! Killer!” During the protest musicians played and sang songs of protest, while a group of indigenous dancers from the Ayotzinapa New York Coalition performed a traditional dance and indigenous religious ceremony.

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    Following the protest about 70 people from the various city and state organizations gathered at the St. Stephen & the Incarnation Episcopal Church to discuss the next steps for the Ayotzinapa solidarity movement. While no firm final decisions were reached, the solidarity activists talked about the possibility of taking the case to the United Nations, of a tourist boycott of Mexico, and about other forms of protest and pressure. The Ayotzinapa activists pledged to continue and to build the movement in the New Year.

    In Mexico the movement for justice for the Ayotzinapa victims and their families has called for a national and international day of action on January 26.

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  • The U.S. and Mexico: Hand-in-Hand in Human Rights Violations

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    Though little-noticed by the U.S. media, events north of the border bore striking similarities to developments in Mexico in 2014. Like in the mass protests that arose south of the Rio Bravo and then rapidly extended worldwide over the police killings and forced disappearances of the Ayotzinapa rural teachers’ college students in Guerrero, Mexico, the catalyzing issue in El Norte was police violence.

    In the two NAFTA nations, questions of race and class, police militarization, political corruption, justice system breakdown, economic inequities, and systematic human rights violations provided the contextual kindling for national conflagrations.

    In a recent press commentary on the links between Ayotzinapa and the police killings of unarmed African American teen Mike Brown and others in the U.S., Aïda Hernández, professor and researcher with the Center for Higher Studies and Research in Social Anthropology in Mexico City, contended that both instances expose the outrage that “poor young indigenous people and African Americans are
    disposable in racist and racialized societies.”

    In the case of Ayotzinapa, Hernández wrote, the fact that the majority of the 43 students disappeared last September were of indigenous heritage was a “little discussed” issue even while racist messages pertaining to the students were posted in social media and conveyed in the mass media.

    On a similar note, a pre-Christmas piece by Reuters lent more credence to charges of widespread racial profiling by the New York City  and other police departments.

    Interviewed for the story, 25 current and former African American New York cops reported their own personal run-ins with white officers, including harassment, gun-waving threats, arbitrary stops and searches and even excessive use of force.

    “There’s no real outlet to report the abuse,” former New York Police Department captain and Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, was quoted by Reuters.

    In the U.S., the August shooting death of Mike Brown by white officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, thrust police violence, racial profiling and militarization onto the center of the national political stage.

    Yet, the dress rehearsal for the showdown was staged months earlier after homeless camper James Boyd was shot to death firing squad style by two members of the Albuquerque Police Department.

    The shooting sparked the most intense demonstrations in the Duke City since the early 1970s, with protesters successively occupying Central Avenue, briefly blockading Interstate 25, installing a “peoples’ assembly” at an abruptly canceled city council meeting and conducting a peaceful sit-in at Mayor Richard Berry’s office.

    But in an exaggeration of both the tone and physical impact of the demonstrations, the actions were sometimes mischaracterized as “violent protests” in the commercial media, especially by Associated Press stories that were picked up by other media outlets like KUNM-FM.

    In contrast, displays of militarized police power that stunned the U.S. during last summer’s Ferguson uprising, were front and center in New Mexico the previous March. After Albuquerque, an uprising against police brutality shook Salinas, California, where four Latino men were shot and killed by local cops earlier this year.

    When the police killers of Mike Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York were later exonerated, protests erupted in nearly 200 U.S. cities and continued well into the traditionally apolitical holiday season, just they did in Mexico against the attacks on the Ayotzinapa students.

    In the U.S., an unprecedented blockade by thousands of people of the emblematic Mall of America in Minnesota occurred only days prior to Christmas.

    The December slayings of two New York City police officers by a man with a criminal history and no known connection to the protests, purportedly in revenge for the Brown and Garner killings, prompted provocative statements by the New York City police union leadership  vowing "wartime policing" and holding that Mayor Bill de Blasio had "blood on his hands."

    If the vows are carried out, they will only confirm what critics have been saying all along: U.S. policing is an "us versus them" enterprise in a one-sided contest of militarized cops against the public, especially people of color.

    Meanwhile, scenes of law enforcement on a war-time footing are readily evident in the Mexican landscape, where legions of armed security forces roam the streets with high-powered weapons and military-use vehicles. Often decked out in combat fatigues, they are soldiers, marines, state police, municipal police, bank guards and private security personnel of all brands.

    Both the U.S. and Mexico are embroiled in seemingly endless wars- against terrorism, drugs, immigrants, drunk drivers, etc. On the U.S. side, the estimated military-related costs incurred since the 9-11 attacks range from the Congressional Research Service’s  low ball figure of $1.6 trillion to the staggering $4.4 trillion (or more) calculated by Boston University Professor Neta Crawford and others, according to a story on the CommonDreams website.

    Washington's enormous expenditures, increasingly funneled into the hands of private contractors, were made during years when millions went without jobs; social services were cut; aid to the states was slashed; a whole generation of college students was entrapped in deep debt; and an emblematic U.S. city, Detroit, was allowed to sink into ruin. And still, the wars go on and on…

    Some are making the connections between police violence, military spending, the drug war, human rights violations, and foreign policy. By November, signs proclaiming "Aytozinapa-Ferguson" began appearing at U.S. protests against police brutality. In early December demonstrations against U.S. security aid to Mexico, targeting the $2.1 billion anti-drug Merida Initiative (also known as Plan Mexico) that provides law enforcement training and equipment to the Mexican government, were held in more than 50 U.S. cities. Young Mexican immigrants were among the principal conveners of the action.

    "This is a community effort by Mexican residents of the U.S. who don't want our tax money to finance the Mexican government, which is corrupt," said Karla de Anda, one of the protest organizers.

    "We are tired of the support that the U.S. government gives to the security forces in Mexico, which have tortured, disappeared and killed thousands of people," activist Roberto Lovato told CNN en Espanol.
    After six years of Merida, Washington and Mexico City can lay claim to successes in capturing and eliminating leaders of organized crime like Chapo Guzmán, but it would be folly for  the two governments to credit their joint security program for fundamentally disrupting the overall drug and organized crime business or ending high levels of violence, both of which grind along in the cycle of business as usual.

    The post-2008 Merida Initiative, it must be remembered, was implemented-in fits and starts that included a partial suspension of payments precisedly over human rights issues in Mexico- during the years when violence soared to new heights south of the border and left more than 100,000 murdered, at least 23,000-plus disappeared and more than 250,000 persons forcibly displaced from their homes and communities, according to conservative estimates.

    In 2015 the Merida initiative is likely to be the focus of renewed scrutiny, thanks to Ayotzinapa and other atrocities like the June 30 slayings of 22 people by the Mexican army in the state of Mexico.
    More and more, both Washington and Mexico City are frequent occupants of the international human rights hot seat.

    Recently, both governments have been taken to task or seriously questioned by the United Nations, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the European Parliament, the Permanent Peoples Tribunal, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and others.

    While the breadth and scope of alleged human rights violations is far too long to expound upon here, the brief list includes torture, police violence, femicide, forced disappearance, and racial profiling.

    “Despite the great economic and social differences that separate (Mexico and the U.S.), racism, impunity, state violence and criminalization of social protest unite the realities on both sides of the border,” wrote Hernández.

    The year 2014 put the NAFTA partners-and the world-on notice that respect for basic principles of life is sacrosanct. It's simply not acceptable to torture people or disappear them into oblivion. It's not okay to shoot civilians in the back. And government fudgings of the truth, cover-ups, policy change simulations, and impunity are less and less tolerated by civil societies that are finally re-asserting themselves after many years of slumber.

    Reprinted courtesy of Kent Paterson and Frontera NorteSur: on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news, Center for Latin American and Border Studies, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico. For a free electronic subscription: email: fnsnews@nmsu.edu

  • The Alternative in Cuba

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    On December 17, 2014, Washington and Havana agreed to a path-breaking change in a relationship that, for more than fifty years, was characterized by the United States’ efforts to overthrow the Cuban government, including the sponsorship of invasions, naval blockades, economic sabotage, assassination attempts, and terrorist attacks.

    The new accord set free the remaining three members of the “Cuban Five” group held in U.S. prisons since 1998 and, in exchange, Cuba freed the American Alan Gross and Rolando Sarraf Trujillo, a previously unknown U.S. intelligence agent imprisoned on the island for almost twenty years, in addition to over fifty Cuban political prisoners. Far more consequential are the resumption of official diplomatic relations and the significant relaxation of travel restrictions and remittances to Cuba.

    The agreement covers the political normalization but not the full economic normalization of relations: that would require Congress repealing the Helms-Burton Act, signed into law by President Clinton in 1996.

    Past Failures

    There were previous efforts to resume political and economic relations between the two countries since the United States broke ties in early 1961. The most important was undertaken by the Carter administration, which in pursuing an initiative originally undertaken by Nixon, renewed secret negotiations with the Cuban government in 1977, when the Cuban exile right-wing in South Florida was still a negligible political force.

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    The two countries made mutual concessions that included the establishment of diplomatic “interest sections” in Washington and Havana and the lifting of the ban on tourist travel to the island, a restriction later reinstated by Reagan in 1982. In the wake of the Carter-Castro negotiations, the Cuban leader released most political prisoners, of which about 1,000 left for the United States, and in 1979, Cuban-Americans were, for the first time, allowed to visit their relatives on the island.

    Yet the reconciliation process came to a halt. While the presence of US troops throughout the world was taken for granted by Washington as an imperial entitlement, the deployment of Cuban forces in Africa became an obstacle to the normalization of relations. Many in the US blamed Castro’s foreign involvement as the decisive reason for the collapse of the talks both under Nixon and Carter. But there were other more important factors at work.

    For one thing, the Carter administration was itself divided on the question. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance supported the resumption of normal relations with Cuba, while Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s powerful national security adviser, opposed the move. But it was domestic political developments in the US unrelated to Cuba, that ultimately stopped the process.

    The American right was becoming agitated over the negotiations concerning the transfer of the Panama Canal back to the Panamanians. In September 1977, Carter suspended negotiations with Cuba until after the Canal treaties were ratified by the Senate.

    The suspension turned out to be indefinite. Faced with attack over Panama, the Carter administration decided to shore up its right flank by adopting a tougher posture on Cuba, a stance that was shortly after reinforced by the victory of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, and by the political weakening of the Carter administration as a result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian hostage crisis.

    American Capitalists Approve

    Why did Obama succeed where previous US administrations failed? More than anything else, the end of the Cold War, the departure of Cuban troops from Africa, and the less militant stance of Cuba in Latin America have, through the years, qualitatively downgraded the importance of Cuba in American foreign policy, as witnessed by the fact that practically all US government strategic studies in the last two decades don’t even mention the island.

    At the same time, however, the American capitalist class, except for its most right-wing fringe, has come to support not only the reestablishment of diplomatic relations, but even more so the elimination of the economic blockade. This has been the position adopted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers in the last several years, and also the general stance taken by the business press. Business columnists have been arguing, with more than a grain of truth, that massive American investment and trade with the island would “subvert” and eventually overcome the Communist economic system, as has been happening in China and Vietnam.

    Moreover, after exemptions to the U.S. economic blockade allowing the export of agricultural goods and certain processed goods to Cuba were authorized by the Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act of 2000, firms such as Cargill, Archer Daniel Midland and Tyson Foods got involved in trade with Cuba. After the current December 17 agreement, other corporations, such as Caterpillar and Pepsico joined in supporting it. During the last several years, dozens of business people and politicians, particularly from the South, Midwest and Southwest have been visiting the island and discussing with the Cuban government future economic prospects especially if the blockade is repealed.

    Reflecting the attitude of their business constituents, many Democratic and Republican politicians, such as Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, have been advocating political and economic relations with Cuba. It remains to be seen whether these forces will be strong enough to amend, if not repeal, the Helms-Burton Act and allow for a full normalization of economic, as well as political, relations with the island.

    The Exile Community is Changing

    As the Cuba issue lost importance after the end of the Cold War, and as major business sectors have begun to favor economic and political relations with the country, the right-wing leadership of the Cuban exile enclave in South Florida remains the only political force firmly defending the blockade. Its political clout was particularly important in a closely divided state like Florida, where Cuban-Americans account for around 5 percent of the electorate.

    But the conservative exile generation of the sixties has been dying out and by now the growing majority of the Cubans residing in Florida came to the United States since the eighties. In contrast with the older exiles, many of these people regularly visit the island and are more concerned with the welfare of their Cuban relatives than with Cuban exile politics. It is no wonder then that public opinion polls have shown that a majority of the Cubans and Cuban-Americans residing in Florida favor a change in policy leading to full relations with the island.

    Nevertheless, many of these people are not yet citizens and affluent, conservative Cubans still have great power over the media and political system. The three Florida representatives in Congress of Cuban origin are still right-wing Republicans strongly committed to the blockade.

    And yet the fact that Barack Obama won 48 percent of the Cuban vote (and larger proportions among younger Cubans) in the 2012 elections is a clear indication of the political trends among Cuban-Americans away from right-wing positions on Cuba. Moreover, as the Cuban-American sociologist Alex Portes has indicated, the Cubans who have arrived since 1980 generally come from modest class backgrounds in the island and are hardly distinguishable from other Latin American immigrants in socio-economic terms. One wonders about the future of the Latin American “model minority.”

    The Cuban Road to China

    For its part, the Cuban government has been intent to find a way to resume diplomatic relations with the United States even though this may in the long run undermine its legitimacy as it won’t be able to blame the blockade for continuing political repression and economic woes.

    Ever since Raúl Castro assumed power — informally in 2006 and formally in 2008 — he has been moving towards adopting the Sino-Vietnamese model, meaning a state-capitalism that retains the monopoly of political power through the Communist Party, and that controls the strategic sectors of the economy, such as banking, while sharing the rest with a domestic and foreign private sector. But this has been a contradictory road where the Cuban government has tried to “have its cake and eat it too,” accompanying every economic change with restrictions that limit their effectiveness.

    Despite the rosy picture drawn by Castro sympathizers, such as Emily Morris in New Left Review, the results of the Cuban government’s new policies have been meager and unable to finally overcome the long economic crisis that has gripped the island since the Soviet Union’s collapse. The real wages of state employees, who still constitute the great majority of the labor force, had only reached, in 2013, 27 percent of their 1989 levels.

    Since 2008, spending on education, health, social welfare and housing have diminished as a proportion of the state budget and gross domestic product. Furthermore, for the last several years economic growth has been low (1.2 percent in 2014) and capital investment has been a meager 10 percent of the GDP compared with the average 20 percent for Latin America as a whole.

    Not surprisingly, Marino Murillo, Cuba’s Minister of the Economy, has said that the island needs at least 2 billion dollars a year in investment to achieve an economic takeoff. This is the key to Castro’s willingness to resume relations with the United States, especially in the light of the serious political and economic problems that Venezuela (Cuba’s principal ally) and Russia are currently facing along with the relative decline in growth of the Chinese economy.

    Castro has nothing to lose, since even if the Helms-Burton law is not amended or repealed, the Cuban economy is bound to benefit by the liberalization of travel and remittances recently decreed by Obama. For the Cuban leader, any benefit he obtains from the agreement may be the lever he needs to vanquish the resistance in his own bureaucratic apparatus to the full implementation of the Sino-Vietnamese model in the island.

    For his part, Obama must surely be conscious of the opportunity to reassert American political influence and its economic power in Cuba, aside from other real political benefits to be gained by this new agreement in Latin America and the rest of the Global South.

    The Alternative in Cuba

    Independently of the considerations that led the governments of Cuba and the United States to reach this agreement, it is a major gain for the Cuban people.

    First, because it acknowledges that the imperial power of the US was not able to coerce the imposition of its socio-economic and political system, handing a victory for the principle of national self-determination. It is up to Cubans and Cubans alone to decide the destiny of their country. Second, because in practical terms, it can improve the standard of living of Cubans and help to liberalize, although not necessarily democratize, the conditions of their political oppression and economic exploitation, making it easier to organize and act to defend their interests in an autonomous fashion against both the state and the new capitalists.

    This has been the case of China, where thousands of protests occur every year to protect the standard of living and rights of the mass of the population in spite of the persistence of the one-party state.

    Contrary to what many liberals thought right after the Cuban Revolution, the issue was never whether the end of the blockade would lead the Castro brothers to become more democratic. That possibility was never and is not in the cards, except for those who believe that the establishment of Cuban Communism was merely a reaction to American imperialism instead of what Che Guevara admitted was half the outcome of imperialist constraint and half the outcome of the Cuban leaders’ choice.

    What is real is the likelihood that the end of the blockade will undermine the support for the Castro government thereby facilitating the resistance and political formulation of alternatives to its rule.

    That Cuba will be free from the grasp of U.S. imperialism even if the economic blockade comes to an end is not likely. The more “normal” imperialist power broadly experienced in the Global South will replace the more coercive and criminal one of the blockade era, especially if a successful alliance develops between American capital and the native state capitalists of the emerging Sino-Vietnamese model, as it happened in China and Vietnam. Even at the purely political level, there are many conflicts that are clearly foreseeable, like, for example, one that was left unmentioned in the Obama-Castro agreement involving the return of revolutionary exiles, such as Assata Shakur, to prison in the United States.

    With the passing of the historic generation of revolutionary leaders within the next decade, a new political landscape will emerge where left-wing opposition political action may resurface and give strength to the nascent critical left in Cuba. Some may argue that since socialism of a democratic and revolutionary orientation is not likely to be on the immediate agenda, there is no point to put forward such a perspective. But it is this political vision advocating for the democratic self-management of Cuban society that can shape a compelling resistance to the economic liberalization that is likely to come to the island.

    By invoking solidarity with the most vulnerable, and calling for class, racial and gender equality, a movement can build unity against both the old and the emerging oppression.

    Samuel Faber is the author of several books on Cuba, most recently Cuba Since the Revolution of 1959: A Critical Assessment. This article originally appeared in Jacobin.

     

  • Solidarity with Black Lives Matter Movement

    ImageAs human rights organizations, representing struggles ranging from disability rights to labor rights to criminal justice reform, from migrant justice to climate justice, we recognize the struggle for black liberation as central to securing all of our human rights in a country founded upon systemic racism. [2]These unjust decisions are not an aberration. Every 28 hours, a black person in this country is killed by a police officer, security guard, or vigilante. [3] On an institutional level, most profoundly in the criminal justice system, human rights are violated and families devastated by a clear disregard for black and brown lives — locking up and deporting millions, targeting and harassing communities of color, and responding with lethal brutality. This struggle is exposing a system that has dual standards — one where white people are questioned and arrested, while people of color are being killed with apparent impunity.

    The national situation is mirrored here in Vermont. A black person in Burlington is 3.6 times more likely to be arrested than a white person, while the black-to-white ratio of incarcerated people in the state is 12.5 to 1 — making Vermont’s incarcerated population the second most racially unbalanced in the country[4] . Black and brown people in Vermont also face racial profiling in traffic stops and systemic racism in schools [5]. While progress has been made for bias-free policing through the efforts of migrant worker-led Migrant Justice, other Human Rights Council organizations, and sympathetic legislators white supremacy still has powerful weight over this state.

    We also recognize white supremacy as a tool of social control used for centuries by the ruling elite. Racism has taught poor and working-class white people to fear, blame, and target people of color instead of focusing attention on the elite who profit immensely from their exploitation and dehumanization. As an alliance of grassroots groups representing multi-racial, majority white working class communities, we, the Human Rights Council must reject divide and conquer tactics and build an anti-racist movement for human rights. We all have a stake in collective liberation for a healthy, just society grounded in love, solidarity, and dignity for all people.

    Our organizations do not claim to have the answers, but we can make concrete commitments. We pledge to:

    ·  Sign on to the national demands put forward by Ferguson Action.

    ·  Support people of color-led efforts to fight for racial justice in Vermont by listening, learning, and taking action, such as showing up for Black Lives Matter demonstrations, or supporting bias-free policing at the statehouse and in our communities.

    ·  Engage our membership in popular education around white supremacy and collective liberation. This means learning to lean into one another, and holding space for difficult conversations when they arise.

    ·  Prioritize the leadership of people of color staff, members, and volunteers within our organizations, while exploring how anti-racism and collective liberation can be centered in our day-to-day organizing and shared spaces with one another.

    We are honored and humbled to be fighting every day alongside communities of color in Vermont, across the country and around the world who are leading the way in organizing for the human right to housing, healthcare, education, work with dignity, a healthy environment, and the ending of mass incarceration and police brutality. In the words of Civil Rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”

    NOTES

    1]  “White Supremacy is a historically based, institutionally perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression of continents, nations, and peoples of color by white peoples and nations of the European continent, for the purpose of maintaining and defending a system of wealth, power, and privilege.” Elizabeth Martinez, anti-racist thinker, writer, and activist. http://collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/What_Is_White_Supremacy_Martinez.pdf

    2] While we don't mean to diminish state violence directed toward other communities of color, the #blacklivesmatter has confronted anti-black racism and the specificity and importance of black liberation. Read more: http://blacklivesmatter.com/

    3] https://mxgm.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Operation-Ghetto-Storm.pdf

    4] http://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/after-ferguson-a-consideration-of-race/Content?oid=2481031

    5] http://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/report-shows-racial-disparities-in-burlington-area-policing-now-what/Content?oid=2203940, http://bsdweb.bsdvt.org/Board/annualreports/Feb2013.pdf

    In solidarity,
    The Human Rights Council,
    350Vermont
    Green Mountain Self-Advocates
    ​Migrant Justice/Justicia Migrante
    Rising Tide Vermont
    Vermonters for Criminal Justice Reform
    Vermont Center for Independent Living
    Vermont Workers' Center                                                                                       Vermont State Labor Council, AFL-CIO