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  • 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

     

  • ‘Anyone but Bibi’ Strengthens the Israeli Right Wing

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    [Editors’ note: The Da’am Workers Party is an Israeli revolutionary socialist organization formed by Palestinian and Jewish activists in 1995. The party initiated the formation of the WAC-MANN trade union movement that aims to organize sectors and populations traditionally neglected by Israel’s mainstream union federation, the Histadrut, and does so based on an explicitly anti-corporate, anti-austerity platform. It opposed the Oslo accords, but supports a two state solution based on the 1967 borders and the dismantling of all settlements. In the last Knesset election, Da’am ran with a Palestinian feminist, Asma Aghbaria-Zahalka, at the head of its list. This article was published on the Da’am website on Dec. 20, 2014.]

    Herzog and Livni join forces

    We’re headed for elections again. Less than two years have passed since the meteoric ascent of the “brothers” Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett, who forced Binyamin Netanyahu into a coalition without the ultra-orthodox parties, and already Netanyahu is dismantling the government to seek a fourth term. His dream is to go back to the “ideal” composition of the previous government, which brought together the ultra-orthodox, Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, and Ehud Barak’s Labor party. But it is not at all clear that Netanyahu will manage to make this dream come true. He now faces a broad alliance of his past victims, including the ultra-orthodox, Lieberman, Lapid, Tzipi Livni, Moshe Kahlon, and Labor head Isaac Herzog—all past ministers in his governments.

    What brings Lieberman together with Herzog, or Kahlon together with Lapid? Only hostility for Netanyahu and the desire to bring him down. Other than that, they represent a mishmash of opinions, portending anything but a stable coalition. Therefore, these elections again herald a shaky coalition, with or without Netanyahu.

    The Right has made up its Mind, while the Left Stutters

    The impossibility of a stable coalition comes from current political forces’ inability to decide on two central questions: the fate of the occupied territories and the place of Arab citizens in this country. These two questions are inseparable, as the fate of the occupied Palestinians projects directly on the fate of the Palestinian citizens of Israel.

    In these two questions, the Israeli Right under Netanyahu has made a clear decision: The Oslo Accords are dead, the idea of a Palestinian state is discarded, and the alternative is now Palestinian autonomy, entrenching the status quo. As for the Palestinian citizens of Israel,  the Nation-State Bill put forward by the Right asserts that Israel is first and foremost Jewish, its democracy subordinate to the state’s Jewishness. Therefore, the civil standing of the Arab citizens is subordinate to the state’s Jewish character.

    These two questions are no doubt always at Israel’s doorstep. You cannot postpone them indefinitely in favor of a social agenda, or to combat socioeconomic gaps, or to protest the price of cheese and housing. The European parliaments are now reminding us that the world is sick of Occupation and war. The total destruction of the four towers in Gaza, decisive in ending the past summer’s war, has been termed a war crime by Amnesty International.

    The recent events in Jerusalem mark the end of an era as well. The racism reflected in Amir Benayoun’s lyrics has spread everywhere. Ministers and MKs’ racist statements against Arabs also spur on the rise of extremist Islam, and mutual hatred makes life here intolerable for all those who wish to live in a normal country and to educate their children on the values of democracy and equality.

    The Right, headed by Netanyahu and Bennett, has forced through a clear agenda, an agenda that challenges the Zionist Left. The Right says No to a Palestinian state, proposing that Israel be a racist state rather than a democratic one. And what does the “anything but Bibi” camp say? Nothing, essentially. In the face of the Nation-State Bill it proposes that we make do with Israel’s venerable Declaration of Independence. As to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Labor head Isaac Herzog proposes “getting Abbas into Gaza” for regional peace. These answers are not substantially different from what the Right has to offer.

    The Left’s conciliatory and cowardly stance towards the Right has led to its diminishment and retreat. The Zionist Left is afraid to confront the Right, preferring to reach an understanding with the settlers at the expense of an understanding with the Arab citizens. The Zionist Left, including Meretz, is a Jewish separatist Left. Its isolationism bolsters the Right’s position that there is no partner for peace, and that the root of the conflict lies in the Arab refusal to recognize the Jewish state.

    The Israeli Left, which aspires to a democratic, liberal, and egalitarian state, has no future if it does not join forces with those elements among Israel’s Palestinian citizens who also espouse values of democracy and tolerance, opposing isolation and religious extremism. The religious extremism is not Jewish-Israeli society’s problem alone. It has long been a boomerang, projecting into Arabic society and consuming all that is good in it. The Arab equivalent of the Jewish-Israeli Shas party is the Islamic party, and the Arabic twin of Zionist Messianism is the Islamic Messianism of ISIS and of the northern branch of the Islamic Movement. The extremists on both sides are thriving at the expense of the divided Jewish and Arab moderates.

    Israel Has to Decide: Jewish or Democratic

    The Zionist Left’s decision to unite in an anti-Netanyahu bloc runs parallel to the aspiration among the Arab parties to unite and run a joint Arab ticket. However, make no mistake, even if the Islamic Movement runs with Balad while Hadash runs alone, this does not make Hadash a joint Jewish-Arab ticket. Hadash relies on Arab votes to pass the electoral threshold. It practices a nationalistic rhetoric in order to compete with the other Arab parties: in fact it speaks with two tongues, two messages, one in Arabic and the other in Hebrew

    The differences between Hadash and the Islamic Movement reflect ideological and political divisions within the Arab world, between political Islam and Communists, whereby the Communists do not hesitate to support dictatorial regimes so long as they are secular. So for instance, in Palestine the Communists support Abbas; in Egypt they support General Sisi; and in Syria they support Assad, while the forces of political Islam work to topple him.

    Hadash’s electoral considerations in refusing to merge with Balad are not too different from those of Meretz in refusing to merge with Labor. The fact that Jews and Arabs run separately six decades after the foundation of the state is a badge of shame for both the Zionist parties and the Arab parties. Both prefer narrow electoral interests over addressing the crucial questions facing Jews and Arabs alike.

    The coalition which Herzog proposes with Livni, Lapid, Lieberman, Kahlon, and the Haredi Orthodox, does not portend real change—not economically, and certainly not diplomatically. The failures of Barak, Sharon, Olmert, and Livni to reach a peace agreement only strengthened the Right, which claims they were “willing to make all the concessions and still the Palestinians rejected them.” The truth is, these leaders negotiated with the Palestinians for one purpose only: to avoid deciding the questions left open in the Oslo Accords, which were supposed to be discussed in the permanent agreements—the status of Jerusalem, the future of the settlements, and the problem of the Palestinian refugees. They all worked as one to postpone the inevitable, creating more mistrust, leading to wars, and strengthening the Right wing, which bases its popularity on hatred of Arabs.

    Those who now rush to vote for the Jewish “anything but Bibi” bloc or the “Arab parties” bloc have some serious soul-searching to do. The real question is not what will happen if Netanyahu assumes the role of Prime Minister yet again. The urgent question is what disaster we will inherit from an alternative coalition devoid of any program, lacking the courage to tell Israeli society what needs to be said: if we want peace and democracy, we have to evacuate the settlements and recognize East Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state. If we want to fight racism, we first have to recognize the fact that Israel’s governments so far have deepened the discrimination and alienation of the Palestinians living in Israel.

    Israel has to decide whether it is Jewish or democratic. The Israeli Right has solved this deep-seated contradiction, by simply declaring that the State’s Jewish character wins out against its democratic character. Compared to the Right, the Left stutters and tries without avail to square the circle.

    The political platform we need is based on two clear principles: the end of the Occupation and an egalitarian state. The only way to handle Netanyahu and the Right is to form a broad Jewish-Arab front, based on these two principles. Running separately just strengthens the Right and widens the gap between Jews and Arabs.

    Against the backdrop of rising racism and the diplomatic dead end, it is becoming clearer that the inevitable can no longer be postponed. Voices in Israeli society are growing stronger in calling for the creation of a joint Jewish-Arab front, an alternative to the Zionist and Arab parties alike. This is the order of the day, and every democrat and peace-lover, Jewish or Arab, must work to create a joint political framework for the benefit of Jews and Arabs alike.

    – Translated from the Hebrew by Michael Sappir

  • The Politics of Dead Cops and the Coming Repression

    There’s blood on many hands tonight. Those that incited violence on this street under the guise of protest, that tried to tear down what New York City police officers did everyday.  We tried to warn it must not go on, it cannot be tolerated. That blood on the hands starts on the steps of city hall in the office of the mayor.

    — Patrick Lynch, President of the police union in NYC (December 20, 2014)

    “We have, for the first time in a number of years, become a ‘wartime’ police department. We will act accordingly.”

    — Statement widely attributed to the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association

    Already a suspect in the shooting of his girlfriend earlier that morning in Baltimore, Ismaaiyl Brinsley ambushed NYC police officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos Saturday afternoon as they sat in their patrol car in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Brinsley had recently posted his plans on Instagram—to kill two police officers as an act of revenge for the killing of Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York and Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Brinsley killed himself after being pursued by responding officers. New York City now stands on the brink of a police mutiny, as the killing of these two police officers has heightened tensions over policing in the city with the largest police force in the country.

    Lynch, the NYPD’s union chief has consistently challenged Mayor de Blasio’s leadership, here holding him and the movement that has arisen in opposition to police violence and unaccountability, responsible for the police deaths. The former mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, also used the recently killed cops to criminalize the movement. Never one to fall short in a hyperbole competition, Giuliani’s identification of Brinsley’s ‘accomplices’ aimed even higher than de Blasio, with Giuliani stating, “We’ve had four months of propaganda—starting with the president—that everybody should hate the police.” New York’s former governor George Pataki took to Twitter, which I guess is an accepted Gubernatorial forum for the expression of grief over two dead police, with the following: “Sickened by these barbaric acts, which sadly are a predictable outcome of divisive anti-cop rhetoric of Eric Holder and Mayor de Blasio.”

    These ‘us versus them’ dichotomies and bombastic finger-pointings are not exceptional in this country today, they are standard political maneuvers designed to obscure, intimidate, and silence. A rational person might attempt to add that the sole perpetrator of this crime, the only one responsible (in any way whatsoever) for the death of those two officers in Brooklyn, is dead. That is a fact that Giuliani, Lynch, Pataki and others will try to make taboo, unthinkable, unpatriotic, etc., but it is a fact that is hard to refute.

    These statements are for political effect, but who is the target? Is it de Blasio? Obama? No. Quite clearly the target of the NYPD’s moralistic monologue is the movement as a whole—each and every person who has taken to the streets in the past few months, all across the country, to say no to police killings of unarmed Black men, no to racial profiling, no to the racist drug war, no to all forms of state-sanctioned racism. Whether you were using your body to stop traffic on the highway, or you were holding a sign standing on the sidewalk; whether you seek to abolish the police, or simply want a criminal trial for Darren Wilson in St. Louis or Daniel Pantaleo in New York—if you see yourself in any way affiliated with the movement that has arisen in the past months to try and put an end to racist police practices, you are the target of this sabre rattling. Moving forward, movement solidarity will be key as the NYPD’s talk of “war” starts to materialize into physical repression and various power holders start handing out respectability badges to anyone who will throw more militant or radical protesters under the (armored police) bus.

    Which Lives Matter?

     ”The cops stop you just cause you black, THAT’S WAR!

    Run your prints through the system, THAT’S WAR!
    When they call my hood a drug zone, THAT’S WAR!
    Slum lords charge me for the rent, THAT’S WAR!
    Why they so rich and we poor, THAT’S WAR!”

    — Dead Prez “That’s War!”

    On December 13th, the NYPD and their supporters gathered at City Hall. A common sight at the rally were t-shirts that read, “I Can Breathe“ mocking the dying words of Eric Garner—who died as a result of an NYPD chokehold that was caught on video. The officer responsible for the chokehold, Daniel Pantaleo, did not have to face criminal charges, further igniting demonstrations in NYC and across the country. When your pledge of support for the police revolves around mocking the dying words of a Black man at their hands, your ability to draw a distinction between a) that support and b) celebrating Black death, is negated—if such a distinction could have been drawn in the first place. Authoritarian, childish, and shameless—these expression of mockery for the dead belie a white chauvinism that has always supported more aggressive or militaristic policing and the unlawful killing of Black people. Those that defer to the type of fear-mongering and moralistic manipulation being flaunted by the likes of Patrick Lynch and Giuliani are the domestic chicken hawks in what has been a one-sided war. The police want a return to business as usual. They are not content with the fact that an officer choked a father of six to death using a banned chokehold, on videotape, who was not physically resisting them, and still did not even need to face a trial. They want people to stop talking about it, stop demonstrating, stop calling for investigations—to stop acting like Eric Garner’s life mattered.

    Any challenge to the complete autonomy of the police, any effort to hold them accountable will elicit various efforts from the police to preserve their power. De Blasio is getting pressured simply because he isn’t actively helping the police criminalize and smash the protest movement. Lynch of course sees de Blasio differently, saying two days before the Brooklyn cops were shot: “He is not running the city of New York. He thinks he’s running a f—g revolution.” Right now it isn’t really clear who is running New York City. De Blasio certainly isn’t leading any revolution. However, it is certainly becoming clear to more and more people that nothing short of a revolution will destroy white supremacy and the political charades that surround it.

    A State of War: de Blasio Grudgingly Puts on the Uniform

    On Monday, de Blasio gave a statement which clearly conceded to the NYPD pressure:

    “It’s time for everyone to put aside political debates, put aside protests, put aside all of the things that we will talk about in due time. That can be for another day.”

    De Blasio’s paternalistic dismissal of the movement’s concerns, as if people have been protesting in the freezing cold because they have nothing better to do, shows how quick a liberal Mayor will be to betray those standing for social justice when the police dogs start barking into microphones. De Blasio’s effort to get the NYPD off his back, shifting that weight fully onto the shoulders of the movement and the Black community, illustrates a central reason why a young black man is killed by police every 28 hours. When push comes to shove, and it rarely does, the police go to great lengths to ward off the formation of any type of systematic accountability for police misconduct.

    The police are not going to regulate themselves; and like any bureaucratic organization, will constantly try to command as much power and resources as they can while insulating themselves from accountability to anyone outside the organization. As recent events have clearly illustrated, state prosecutors, who are not fully independent of the police, cannot be counted on to enforce the law against cops who kill or maim. Politicians, even someone like de Blasio that has been openly critical of the Chief Bratton’s “broken windows“ style of policing, find themselves quickly isolated politically when the police as an institution start throwing their weight around. People have been protesting because of two clear miscarriages of justice, but also how frequent these injustices take place all over the country, and the whole set of institutional arrangements that produce and reproduce stories like Mike Brown’s and Eric Garner’s. De Blasio’s softer criminalization of the movement—his patronizing ‘why don’t you all just stay home’—is infuriating and puts demonstrators at further risk, but is ultimately not surprising. Whether he was bullied into making the above statement or not, he has made clear where he stands. The movement doesn’t have time to wait, or to get in line behind de Blasio or any other simple-minded person swayed by disingenuous whining from the likes of Giuliani or the police union. This isn’t a game, or a ‘political debate.’ Cops aren’t getting killed every day, but young black men are. There is a war going on. There has been a war going on for a very long time. All de Blasio’s statements elucidate is that it takes some people longer to fall in line than others.

    The Smear Campaign: To Criminalize & Divide the Movement

    The extent to which de Blasio chooses to let the NYPD use the death of these two officers as a pretext to politically run the city and militarily ‘wage war’ in Brooklyn and elsewhere remains to be seen. However, any social movement that lets the police or the mayor determine what their politics and tactics will be is doomed to failure.

    Because they know he’s good for apologizing on behalf of the ‘black community’ for things that aren’t even real let alone their collective fault, the Right got Al Sharpton to make a statement that validates their delusional fantasies about the dead police officers being a product of the ongoing racial justice movement. Sharpton said:

    “We have stressed at every rally and march that anyone engaged in any violence is an enemy to the pursuit of justice for Eric Garner and Michael Brown. We have been criticized at National Action Network for not allowing rhetoric or chanting of violence and would abruptly denounce it at all of our gatherings.”

    This type of validation of a baseless smear against the movement, and effort to stifle dissent is egregious enough in itself. It is positions like this (as well as other things) that have gotten Sharpton so squarely rejected by many in this movement. However, in a moment and a place where two cops were just killed, the head of the police union is declaring war, and several New York protesters, including members of the Trayvon Martin Organizing Committee are facing charges for alleged assault on undercover police officers, this divisiveness goes far beyond a standard level of simple treachery. The police will gladly use whatever political capital they can muster from these killings to repress and intimidate the movement, possibly starting with those they have in custody and those with pending charges. Principled people not only have an obligation not to feed into this, but to ready themselves for attacks on the street or in the courts, and to defend those that end up getting targeted by the state. All mass social movements are comprised of people with different politics deploying sometimes different tactics, but towards a general common end. Solidarity may not be sufficient for success, but it is necessary. Movements should never be browbeaten into ineffectiveness to show loyalty to their enemies, who would use violent acts that have no connection to the movement as a pretense for the movement to destroy itself.

    This movement has persisted because of the personal risks prominent movement members have taken to keep the movement going, the collective courage of demonstrators to withstand assaults from police for simply marching in the street, and the boldness of demonstrators all over the country who have tirelessly occupied highways and government buildings. Ferguson Action released a statement hours after the shooting in Brooklyn that condemned the murders but called this political maneuvering on the part of the police for what it is: “Today’s events are a tragedy in their own right. To conflate them with the brave activism of millions of people across the country is nothing short of cheap political punditry.” A demonstration has been called for this coming Tuesday in New York City to shut down 5th Avenue and will surely be of added importance given this tumultuous political situation. The hubris of the police, exploiting their own tragedy to avoid accountability and to thwart peoples’ right to protest, may end up driving wedges in the movement, or it may just further mobilize a city tired of being patronized and bullied.

     

    Mike King is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at SUNY-Oneonta.  King is a contributor to Killing Trayvons: an Anthology of American Violence. He is currently working on getting his first book published, entitled When Repression is Not Enough: The Policing and Social Control of Occupy Oakland.  He can be reached at mikeking0101(at)gmail.com.

     

  • Activists Blast NYPD Attempts To Silence Movement For Change

    ImageNew York, NY — Activists issued a scathing statement this afternoon in response to recent attempts by the NYPD to silence the efforts of citizens seeking justice for victims of police violence.  The letter, drafted by Ferguson Action, and cosigned by over a dozen grassroots organizations takes aim at PBA president Patrick Lynch and Commissioner Bratton for their reckless attempts to conflate constitutionally protected protest activities with the tragic murders of officers Ramos and Liu:

    “The events of this weekend are tragic.

    “We renew our condolences to the families and friends of those injured and killed this weekend. As those who stand with the victims of police violence, we know all too well the deep sense of loss that a community feels when they lose a loved one. They are in our thoughts and prayers as we continue our movement for justice.

    “This is not a time for political grandstanding and punditry. Unfortunately, we continue to see elected officials and police leadership twist this tragedy into an opportunity for them to silence the cries for justice from families who have lost their loved ones to police violence. Our families matter, too.

    “Those exercising their First Amendment rights to secure a justice system that works for ALL are being thrown under the bus by police departments and their union leaders who want to skirt their responsibility to our communities.

    “This weekend, Patrick Lynch used his role as the President of the largest police union in New York to essentially declare war on Black communities. This is unacceptable and should be condemned. Under his leadership, the police union has resisted nearly every positive criminal justice reform— including the end of discriminatory stop and frisk practices, protecting the Miranda rights of those arrested, and inviting community input in the creation of policies that govern the police.

    “Commissioner Bratton must also immediately end his shameful attempts to use the deaths of these officers to attack democracy by advancing unfounded claims to connect this tragedy to protests. A troubled young man who began his day by attempting to kill his ex-partner, shot two officers and then killed himself has nothing to do with a broad non-violent movement for change. The NYPD is conveniently ignoring the facts surrounding this tragedy in order to score cheap political points.

    “Commissioner Bratton and Patrick Lynch must immediately apologize to New Yorkers who desperately want change in the city. Mayor DeBlasio and other elected officials should condemn these opportunistic distractions that attempt to avoid meaningful reform.

    “A concerted attempt to defame the millions who have acted on behalf of those lost to police violence proves that the NYPD leadership has no intention of creating any trust between this department and the communities they purport to serve.

    “Our communities are in crisis. We’ve responded by meeting in our homes, offices, and schools— and walking out of them, with our hands up. Thousands of others have organized small actions that when woven together have tremendous impact. The problem isn’t the diverse voices that participate in dissent, a cornerstone of our democracy.

    “The problem is a discriminatory pattern of police violence that continues unabated and that police brass don’t care to stop it.

    “This movement was sparked by the grief that millions across the country have felt. Joining Eric Garner, Mike Brown and Tamir Rice are the thousands of lives lost in the last decade to police shootings. We are in the streets because we are fighting for the right to live our lives fully and with dignity, without the threat of unconstitutional police violence and repression.

    “Our work continues and we invite those who stand on the side of justice to join us.”

    Ferguson Action
    Black Lives Matter
    Brooklyn Movement Center
    Black Alliance for Just Immigration
    ColorofChange.org
    Hands Up United
    National Domestic Workers Alliance
    Dignity & Power Now
    Dream Defenders
    Organization for Black Struggle
    Million Hoodies Movement for Justice
    Concerned Citizens for Justice
    PICO Network
    Southerners on New Ground
    TransAfrica
    Project South
    Audrey Lorde Project
    Hello Racism
    Youth United for Change
    Baltimore Algebra Project

    This statement was posted on the website of Ferguson Action.

  • Dreamed a Dream by the Old Canal…….

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    This year marks 100 years since the birth of Ewan MacColl. Born James Henry Miller in Salford on January 25,1915, he adapted the stage name of Ewan MacColl to acknowledge his strong Scottish heritage. 

    MacColl became a great influence on the folk music scene of the 50’s and 60’s and wrote several songs mostly relating to working class identities. One of his compositions has gone on to become a much loved staple of ballad singers across Britain and afar.

    Dirty Old Town was written by Ewan MacColl in 1949. The song offers a snapshot of life in the industrialised town of Salford in Manchester, where MacColl was born and reared. 

    The song was composed by MacColl for a play he wrote called Landscape with Chimneys. Dirty Old Town served as a three minute musical interlude during a difficult scene change in the play. Like the song, the play was set in Salford but the song outgrew the play and took on a life of it’s own when the folk ballad scene became popular.

    MacColl intended to sing the song with no instrumental backing but by the mid 1950’s he had recorded it with Peggy Seeger and the Ramblers, along with the help of renowned folk music collector Alan Lomax. Since then, several artists have covered the song including The Pogues in 1985, Donovan in 1964 and Rod Stewart in 1969 among many others.

    Dirty Old Town plays out as a love song against the backdrop of gritty industrialisation. The singer takes his girl for a stroll down by the canal tow path as it is the only place which isn’t touched by the grime of factories and the dirty smoke of chimney stacks.

    The gasworks croft, which is mentioned in the first verse, was a patch of wasteland next to the gasworks, while the old canal is the old Manchester Bolton and Bury canal. The sirens mentioned in the song resonate from these canals. At the time the song was written, Manchester played host to heavy canal traffic and Salford in particular was very busy, so much so that ships often sounded their sirens.

    MacColl’s conscious leanings were on the far left of the political spectrum and the socialist voice of the northern working class shines through Dirty Old Town.

    MacColl’s song concerns life in Salford but it could be about any town in any country. When Luke Kelly brought it to the fore with the Dubliners in the 1960s, there then came a common misconception that the song was about Dublin! It’s easy to make that mistake because Dirty Old Town is a simple yet powerful song which resonates with many across Britain, Ireland and further a field with it’s tale of a working class life.

    While many love songs in the folk ballad scene were set by riverbanks or meadows, Dirty Old Town is set in industrial reality, where courting is done beneath the shadow of tall chimney stacks instead of willow trees!

    It’s a song packed with the smell and sounds of a working class town, the narrator hears the sirens from the docks and smells the spring on the smoky wind, but there lies within the song a rebellious streak which is MacColl’s voice sounding for the destruction of the town and the rebuilding of new one. The singer repeats the words of the title twice at the end of each verse, just to solidify the state of mind he is in when describing the place he calls home, which he sees as just a dirty old town.

     While MacColl wrote so poetically about how the smoke from the steam set the night on fire and how he could smell the spring on the smoky wind, he reserved the last verse for a tint of regret for living in such a town, he wants to cut it down like an old dead tree.

    The song reflects MacColl’s love-hate attitude with the working class realities of Salford. He composed a song full of contrasting feelings, even the title, Dirty Old Town, denotes disgust in the narrator.

    Some controversy did arise from the song. ‘Smelled the smoke on the Salford wind’ was an original line in Dirty Old Town but, members of Salford council were displeased and even asked MacColl to change the lyrics. The line was subsequently changed to ‘smelled the spring on the smoky wind’ but for many who later recorded the song, they stayed true to the original lyrics because it painted a perfect portrait of the realities of Salford in 1949.

    The song is an ideal snapshot of life in a town built on industry but the Salford of today is a far cry from the one Ewan MacColl wrote about in 1949.

    The gasworks have since been demolished and the factory walls where the singer courts his girl are now sites full of expensive apartments while the steam trains that set the night on fire are now electric trams.

    The song remains a simple one with a strong working class voice, and in recent years urban renewal in Salford has brushed away some of that grit that drench through Dirty Old Town, but as long as the song lives on so too does the smoky romanticism of towns such as Salford and beyond.

    I met my love by the gas works croft,

    Dreamed a dream by the old canal,

    I kissed my girl by the factory wall,

    Dirty old town, dirty old town.

     

    Clouds are drifting across the moon,

    Cats are prowling on their beat,

    Springs a girl from the streets at night,

    Dirty old town, dirty old town.

     

    I heard a siren from the docks,

    Saw a train set the night on fire,

    Smelled the spring on the smoky wind,

    Dirty old town, dirty old town.

     

    I’m going to make me a good sharp axe,

    Shining steel tempered in the fire,

    Ill chop you down like an old dead tree,

    Dirty old town, dirty old town.

     

    I met my love by the gas works croft,

    Dreamed a dream by the old canal,

    I kissed my girl by the factory wall,

    Dirty old town, dirty old town.

  • Cuba – A Personal Reflection

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    When in 1959 I was fourteen, my socialist, pacifist father gave me a gift subscription to Liberation, the leftist magazine sponsored by the War Resisters League that was published from 1956-1977. My parents had divorced and I lived with my mother in the town of Imperial Beach, California, on the Pacific Ocean and the Mexican border, while my father lived in Chicago. Liberation was my father’s way of seeing to my political education from a distance. In the pages of Liberation I first read C. Wright Mills’ essay (later a book) “Listen Yankee” as well as other articles about the revolution in Cuba.

    I became a convinced supporter of the revolution against more than 60 years of domination by American mining companies, sugar companies, and gambling casinos—and behind the latter the Mafia. I was enthusiastic when in 1960 Castro’s new government began expropriating both domestic and foreign capitalist property and applauded when in May of 1961 Castro declared Cuba to be “socialist.” I was appalled by President John F. Kennedy’s organization of the Cuban exiles’ invasion of the Bay of Pigs and delighted to see it so rapidly crushed. I have to say that while I opposed it, I didn’t fully understand in 1960 the significance of the U.S. embargo of Cuba that would help to keep the country economically isolated and to keep its people poor for decades.

    By the late 1960s my sympathy for the African American civil rights movement and for the anti-Vietnam War movement had brought me into socialist circles where, while organizing to end the war, we also discussed and debated the nature of what later came to be called “really existing socialism,” that is, the character of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, North Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba. I became drawn to the International Socialists (IS) whose intellectual leader was Hal Draper, and, after reading his famous essay “The Two Souls of Socialism,” became convinced that all of those countries were not socialist at all. Their Communist parties ruled from above, while socialism had to be created and developed democratically from below. They were all variants of “bureaucratic collectivism,” that is, they were nations where the Communist Party had merged with the state to become a new ruling class over the workers and peasants who were not permitted to organize independently in political parties or democratically controlled unions and social movements to defend their interests. Sam Farber’s books and articles on Cuba further convinced me that Cuba was a unique Caribbean variation on the theme of bureaucratic collectivism.

    A Critic of the Revolution—and a Defender of Cuba

    I still believed that the Cuban Revolution of 1959, led by the radical lawyer and politician Fidel Castro, had been progressive vis-à-vis the United States, but it seemed clear that once Castro’s 26th of July Movement—which already has such Stalinist leaders as Raúl Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara—merged with the Communist Party in 1961, and at about the same time chose to ally Cuba with the Soviet Union, that things began to change fundamentally. The revolution was transformed and ceased to be progressive. By the early 1970s Cuba had structurally assimilated to the Soviet Union, adopting comparable party, governmental, state security, and economic structures. All independent social and political organizations were either taken over by the state-party or shut down. Cuba became a one-party state under the direction of the Communists and their leader Fidel Castro. Democracy it seemed to me had disappeared from the Cuban Revolution. I and many of my comrades came to the conclusion that it would take a new revolution to overthrow Castro’s Communist government and bring democracy and genuine socialism to the island.

    The Mariel Boatlift of 1980 seemed to confirm this. In the early 1980s I was working as a community organizer with Catholic Theology of Liberation activists at St. Thomas of Canterbury Church on the Northside of Chicago where the liturgical committee had become inspired and influenced by the theology of liberation. Together we organized the Comité Latino to deal with housing and other issues and I became its organizer. Most of our members were from Mexico and Guatemala, though there were also South Americans, including some Chilean exiles. This was not long after the Mariel Boatlift when Castro permitted 125,000 Cubans to leave the island, many of them freed from prisons and some from mental institutions, a good many of them Afro-Cubans and some of them unwanted homosexual men.

    So it was not entirely surprising when one day a graying Afro-Cuban man named Gabriel walked into one of our meetings and joined our group. I asked him about his background and he explained that he was one of those who like Huber Matos had fought for the revolution, but turned against it as it became clear to him that Castro was a Communist. He had spent more than twenty years in prison in Cuba. Gabriel had been a Cuban nightclub singer and still had a marvelous, rather tinny voice that sounded like the great Cuban singer Arsenio Rodríguez. Gabriel made a wonderful addition to the Comité Latino and its singing group.

    The Mariel Boatlift was a tremendous indictment of the Castro regime. Still, I believed that it was important to defend the Cuban nation and the Cuban people from the United States government and from the reactionaries in the Cuban exile community in Miami. When I lived in Mexico City in 1996 two planes of a U.S.-based Cuban exile group called Brothers to the Rescue, which had on several previous occasions violated Cuban airspace, were shot down by Cuban planes. The event lead to an international controversy because the planes had not yet entered Cuban airspace when they were shot down, and because the standard procedure when such incidents occur is for the offended nation to force the planes down, not shoot them down. The United Nations Security Council passed a U.S. resolution condemning Cuba. While the Cuban government may not have handled the incident correctly, still I thought that the United States and the Cuban exiles were clearly the aggressors and Cuba the underdog whose right to independence and security had to be defended.

    I and my friend Peter Gellert—who unlike me was and is a strong supporter of the Cuban government—collaborated to write a joint statement criticizing the United States, supporting Cuba’s right to defend itself from U.S. inspired incursions into its airspace,  as well as calling for a protest at the U.S. embassy in Mexico City. I remember being delighted to see our friend the writer John Ross walking up to join our demonstration of American and Mexican opponents of U.S. policy toward Cuba. The Brothers’ 1996 incursions into Cuban airspace became the pretext for the passage of the Helms-Burton law, which strengthened the U.S. embargo of Cuba, even further isolating the island and hurting the Cuban people.

    A Guest of the Mexican Embassy in Cuba

    It was not until 2000 that I first visited Cuba under quite unique circumstances. In 1986, still living in Chicago, I had become friends with Ricardo Pascoe Pierce, then a Congressman for the Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT) in Mexico. He had come to the United States to bring greetings to the founding convention of the new socialist organization Solidarity of which I was and remain a member. Ricardo later left the PRT, migrating with the historian Adolfo Gilly and others into an organization called the Movement toward Socialism (MAS) and then into the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) led by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. Their efforts to bring Cárdenas to the presidency failed and it was the right which finally ended the rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

    When Vicente Fox of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) became president in 2000, he chose Jorge Castañeda Gutman, a former Communist, to become the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Communism was just a youthful episode in the life of Castañeda who had been born and bred in Mexico’s clase política, his father, Jorge Castañeda y Álvarez de la Rosa, having also served as Mexico’s Minister of Foreign Affairs during the administration of José López Portillo (1976-1982). But to return to the story, having become Foreign Minister, Castañeda in turn chose my friend Ricardo to become the Mexican Ambassador to Cuba, the only member of the PRD in the administration.

    I contacted Ricardo, interested to learn about how he saw his role in his new position, and he invited me to visit him in Havana and be a guest at the Mexican Embassy in the beautiful Miramar neighborhood. Off I went. When I arrived, I asked Ricardo why he had taken such an important position in a rightwing government, he told me that he felt that only a leftist like himself could defend the historic relationship between Mexico and Cuba. Ricardo was busy most of the time with his diplomatic business, including discussions with Castro, so I spent a week exploring Havana.

    I went, for example, to meet a representative of the Cuban labor unions, who explained the unions’ role in Cuba, but could not explain to my satisfaction why workers were not permitted to organize independent unions of their own choosing. I was also interested, however, in meeting with critics and opponents of the Castro government, so I asked Ricardo whether his embassy might be able to provide me with such a list. After Ricardo gave me the list, I went and visited dissidents of all stripes. The U.S. State Department clearly inspired some of them, though others like Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas were genuine advocates of political rights, and then too there were the intellectuals whose economic institute had been closed because they had made what turned out to be premature proposals to create market socialism. While several of the opponents wanted to change the political system, I met none working to bring democratic socialism to the island. I know such Cuban socialists exist, but found no way to contact them.

    On the Streets of Havana

    Most interesting, of course, were the conversations with ordinary Cubans. I went on Sunday morning and walked to the Iglesia de Jesús de Miramar, interested in hearing what the priest would say in his sermon. The terrible sound system with its speakers spitting static made that impossible, but after the service I went up to the front of the church where a young Afro-Cuban woman was leading a discussion group. This was a meeting of the church’s youth group to whom I explained that I was an American academic interested in how Cubans felt now that the Communist government had ceased persecuting the Church. They told me that Catholics still faced discrimination and only a Communist Party membership card would allow them to enter professions such as journalism.

    One evening crossing Havana’s Plaza Vieja, a woman stopped to ask me if I could give her money to buy milk for her baby. In the bar one saw young women, jineteras they are called, who accept food and gifts from foreigners in exchange for their companionship, but don’t consider themselves to be prostitutes. Often teachers, social workers, or other educated women, many hope to establish a relationship with a foreigner who will take them away from Cuba. On one of the nicer streets off the plaza, a street lined with shops and a good bookstore, I saw a cop hustle two Afro-Cubans off the street. I asked the men, both handsome and nicely dressed, why the police had given them the bum’s rush, to which one replied, “They don’t want black men approaching the European women.” A white Cuban gigolo with a European woman would not have been so easily identified by the police.

    I went to visit the Cementerio de Cristóbal Colón, curious to see among other things the grave of the leftist Antonio Guiteras (1906-1935) but found myself walking and talking with a man who was visiting the grave of his wife who had died only a year before. Suddenly listening to the man tell me about his deceased wife and how much he had loved her, one remembered that whatever the politics of a country as a certain level, life, love, and death persist. Leaving the cemetery, I went to a restaurant and was handed the menu with four pages of interesting dishes, only to find after asking for a few different items, that there was only available: fried chicken.

    Like everyone, I talked to my cab drivers. When I asked one older driver how he felt about the revolution now, forty years later, he replied, “I was a poor boy from a village. I fought for the revolution. It has given me everything. My children are doctors and lawyers. I would defend it with my life.” I asked the same question of my next cab driver, a young man who told me, “I am a gynecologist, but to supplement my income I drive a cab. The revolution was important, but today we need change.”

    Ricardo provided me an opportunity to see Cuba at an interesting moment in its development. Ironically, I helped to contribute to Ricardo’s downfall as ambassador of Mexico to Cuba. Having so often been the guest of Ricardo and his wife Luz (María) in Mexico and then in Cuba, I wanted to return the favor, so while working as a visiting professor in the Latin American studies program at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in February 2002, I arranged for Ricardo to be invited as a featured speaker there. Ricardo and Luz came and stayed with us at our home in Cincinnati.

    We held a dinner that night for Ricardo and Luz, but, just after our meal ended in, a group of Cubans in Havana had invaded the Mexican Embassy, imitating the event that had given rise to the Mariel Boatlift years before. Had Ricardo been in the embassy at that moment, perhaps he would have been able to handle the situation which in his absence became an international incident. At our house, Ricardo was on the phone all night talking with Mexico City and Havana and left the next morning. Meanwhile there were reports that he had been at the University of Miami (in Miami) not at Miami University (in Ohio), implying he was in league with the Miami reactionaries. When Ricardo had the temerity to tell Castro that no violence should be used in removing the Cubans from the Mexican embassy, Castro told him that no one should tell him how to deal with Cuban affairs.[1]

    That minor international affair was followed by the more significant incident at the Monterrey summit where Jorge Castañeda reportedly told Castro “to eat and leave” in order to avoid Fidel crossing paths with U.S. President George W. Bush, ending the long period of mutual support between Cuba and Mexico. Castro loathed Castañeda—he called him “diabolical” and “Machiavellian”—not only for bringing up at the summit the issue of Cuban political prisoners, but more importantly for turning Mexico away from Cuba and toward the United States. The conflict with Castro ended the diplomatic careers of both Ricardo, who was forced out of his post in 2002, and Castañeda who resigned in January of 2003.

    While teaching courses in Latin American Studies at Miami University of Ohio from 2001 to 2006, particularly the historical survey of Latin American culture courses, I frequently discussed Cuba. The university’s students, mostly from the leafy suburbs of Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, and Chicago, generally had conservative attitudes, so I found that I had to explain the role of Spanish and American imperialism, disabuse them of their simplistic, conservative anti-Communist attitudes toward Castro and Cuban Communism, while at the same time attempting to give them the basis for a more sophisticated critique of Cuban Communism inspired by my socialism-from-below politics. I would have them both look at Cuba’s health statistics, far superior to those of several developed and developing countries, but also have them watch Before Night Falls, based on Reinaldo Arenas’ biography of the same title which discusses the persecution of homosexuals in Cuba, as well as reading articles from NACLA on the increasing racism in Cuba. My several years of teaching at Miami University gave me—and I hope the students—a more nuanced understanding of Cuba, its government, and its society.

    Change Has Come and Will Now Come Faster

    Change began to come to Cuba with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. Suddenly Cuba lost the hundreds of millions of dollars in economic support upon which it had relied for decades. The collapse of the economy led to hunger and by 1994 there were protest demonstrations calling for “Libertad!” Castro and the Communist government demonstrated their tenacity but also their adaptability as, forced by circumstances, they began to modify Cuba’s political economy. Dozens of foreign companies were invited to invest in Cuba’s petroleum, nickel, and tourist industries, among others. Cuba also permitted tens of thousands of its citizens to create their own small businesses and to make a profit. Since 2008 when Raúl Castro became president, the rate of change has only accelerated, creating a Communist state that oversees a mixed economy of nationalized and private enterprises. Now this situation has culminated in an agreement with President Barack Obama to restore the normal relations between the two countries that ended in 1960 when I was a boy in high school reading Liberation magazine. The restoration of normal relations and the end of the embargo are to be welcomed.

    While the new agreement will create new economic opportunities—capitalist economic opportunities on both the island and in the United States—the question is will it create real possibilities for democracy. A remark by María Elena Hernández, a senior Communist Party official at the main hospital in the city of Cárdenas, is not encouraging. “We’re going to be like China or Vietnam,” she says, “a socialist country with capitalism. It’s going to be hard, but it’s necessary for the revolution.” China and Vietnam have experienced the development of a hybrid or transitional society, where their citizens are oppressed by the Communist government and exploited by their capitalist employers—the worst of both worlds.

    There is serendipity in the current situation: the Cuban bureaucracy is anxious to save itself and its political control and American capitalists want to bring Cuba back into their sphere of influence. What seems to be missing from the equation, or apparently present only in very limited ways, is an expansion of political democracy that could provide opportunities for the self-organization of the Cuban working class. We know that there are in Cuba a variety of leftists—traditional social democrats (not today’s austerity Social Democrats), anarchists, and revolutionary socialists—who believe in the centrality of democracy to the establishment of socialism. At the same time, there is a working class whose pent-up desire for a higher standard of living, while maintaining their social welfare system, will lead to conflicts with both private employers and the government in the coming years. It is these two forces—the left and the labor movement—that might once again put on the agenda a struggle for a Cuba which is both libre y socialista.

    [1] Ricardo Pascoe Pierce, En el Filo: Historia de una crisis diplomática (México: Ediciones Sin Nombre, 2004), pp. 295ff.

     

  • Post-racialism and the New Civil Rights Movement

    ImageAs the shouts of “Black Lives Matter” reverberate from the streets of Ferguson, Missouri to the bridges of New York City, mass protest is once again raising the issue of the persistence of racism, both institutional and individual.  Young people, especially from within the black community, have assumed leadership by mobilizing in the tens of thousands and proposing new and insistent generational demands.  Young white allies have joined in these mobilizations, taking up the slogans and reiterating the demands for justice.On the other hand, merely parroting the slogan of “No Justice, No Peace!” cannot transform white allies into committed anti-racist activists.  While it seems that the ideology of “post-racialism” has now been buried under the bodies of so many unarmed black victims of police violence, the lingering appeal of “post-racialism” requires anti-racist whites to critique the mystifications that have inhered in that ideological formation.

    In combating the white blind spot of “post-racialism,” it is necessary to acknowledge the continuing centrality of race in the United States.  As a consequence of historical amnesia, social blinders, and cultural constructs, the reality of white supremacy remains invisible to the vast majority of whites.  Even those young cosmopolitan whites sympathetic to the new civil rights movement want to transcend race without the difficult task of engaging in long-term and radical political struggle.  As argued by bell hooks, “while today’s youth are eager to live in a world where racism does not exist, they do not want to do the political work of changing themselves or society” (Where We Stand, 81).

    Post-racialism feeds on the work of social scientists, like William Julius Wilson, and policy-makers, like Barack Obama, who continue to de-emphasize race and stress class and universalist approaches to ending racial injustice. Invariably, such perspectives diminish the need to continue race-based remedies in the face of racial inequities, often highlighting, in the process, alleged pathologies among the poor and people of color.  In critiquing Obama’s eliding of racism and poverty, Tim Wise asserts that “it has been a common trope of post-racial liberalism…to pay homage to the stark history of racism, (and) then switch gears and ruminate on how the problems of poor people in so-called ghettos are now distant from the mistreatment that so often met their ancestors” (Color Blind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equality, 37).

    More perniciously, Obama’s policies and failures to contend with deepening racial inequalities and the larger context for aggressive policing further reinforce the illusions of post-racialism.  Some African-American progressives and radicals like Cornel West have taken to admonishing Obama’s inability to address the very real economic and social dislocations that have fallen especially on people of color (as in the recent housing debacle).  Indeed, in Obama’s response to the murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, he has continued to sidestep the structural racism that is embedded, especially, in the criminal justice system.  As asserted by Keeanga-Yamahta Taylor in her recent Jacobin article: “That Obama and Holder have launched initiatives to address policing in black communities, and yet phrases like ‘racial inequality’ (and) ‘mass incarceration’… are never invoked, raises questions as to whether this is a serious inquiry or a stalling mechanism designed to give the impression that action is being taken while they buy time in the hopes that black Americans will cool off” (“No More Eric Garners,” 12/13/14).      

    Instead of a vigorous anti-racist program, some white intellectuals and multiculturalist critics have rallied around anti-racialism as a way to deflect a more radical critique of the persistence of white supremacy.  Indeed, as argued by Alana Lentin in an article in the August 2011 issue of Feminist Legal Studies, “the post-racial agenda is intimately related to the rise of diversity as a less discomforting way of admitting that full equality has not yet been secured” (164).  So, instead of defending affirmative action in hiring and education, liberals have relied on diversity as a strategic demand, as in, for example, the University of Michigan Law School court case.

    On the other hand, there are those progressive and radical whites committed to an anti-racist practice and politics.  Such white anti-racism is not without its own contradictions and ideological impediments.  One possible ideological impediment, advocated by those attached to the journal Race Traitor, is a call to repudiate one’s whiteness and the privileges that go along with it as a form of radical and contemporary abolitionism.  For other anti-racists, like Mark Warren, such a position is less political than it is moral.  According to Warren, “stressing privilege as a strategy to engage whites seems to emphasize the wrong thing.  It focuses on the narrow and short-term benefit whites receive from racial hierarchy rather than the larger interest in a racially just future.  Alone, it seems to engage shame and guilt rather than anger at injustice and hope for a better future.”  For Warren, wallowing in guilt will only impede “a willing acceptance of the responsibility to act” (Fire in the Heart: How White Activists Embrace Racial Injustice, 85 & 225).  From a similar perspective, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva maintains that “anti-racist whites cannot just be ‘race traitors:’ they must engage in struggles to end the practices and the ideologies that maintain white supremacy” (Racism without Racists, 183).

    Yet, young whites, in particular, are evidently acting, through their participation in the post-Ferguson demonstrations, in the struggle to dismantle the structural racism inherent in the criminal justice system.  How they embrace an anti-racist practice over the long-term is an open question. Holding signs with the slogan that “Black Lives Matter” is only a first step in contesting the lingering traces of a discredited post-racialism.  The long journey to destroy all the vestiges of structural racism will require extraordinary efforts to enact the most radical demands of the new civil rights movement, including listening to and accepting the front-and-center role of young people of color.

    *Fran Shor is an Emeritus Professor of History, Wayne State University, a member of the Michigan Coalition for Human Rights, and an active participant in post-Ferguson demonstrations.

                

  • Catholicism: The New Communism?

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    Last week, as yet another mega-typhoon laid waste to the Philippines, the leaders of 183 capitalist governments met in Lima, Peru to face the imminent threat of climate catastrophe at a U.N. Climate Conference called COP20. (Yawn.) In case you missed the headlines (they were small), the world leaders agreed to nothing.[1]

    Since the fiasco of the Helsinki Summit, it has become obvious that the U.S. and the other governments, all of them dominated by mega-banking and energy corporations, are quite simply unwilling to make actual commitments to reduce carbon emissions. This year at Lima, with the human race spinning at an ever more accelerated rate towards extinction, the U.N. chose to invite Shell and other big energy corporations to participate inside the conference, while keeping protesters (indigenous, climate refugees, peasants, climate justice activists) miles away under military guard in U.S.-style ‘free speech zones.’

    Bishops: End Fossil Fuels Now!

    The only voice within the Conference that dared to call for an end to the use of fossil fuels was that of Catholic Bishops from every continent. The Bishops also urged nations to keep the rise in global temperatures below 1.5°C (rather than the proposed 2°C). Moreover, they explicitly pointed to capitalism as the basic cause of impending global catastrophe and called for a new economic order:

    The main responsibility for this situation lies with the dominant global economic system, which is a human creation. In viewing objectively the destructive effects of a financial and economic order based on the primacy of the market and profit, which has failed to put the human being and the common good at the heart of the economy, one must recognize the systemic failures of this order and the need for a new financial and economic order. [2]

    In other words: “System Change, Not Climate Change!” What more could one ask for? This slogan happens to be the name of the minuscule, far-left, ecosocialist coalition I am active in. The only difference is that the Catholic Church has 1.2 billion members.

    Unfortunately, the Bishops’ remarkable declaration was not reported in any major media that I could find. And even Amy Goodman, who broadcasted her progressive ‘War and Peace Report’ www.democracynow.org live from Lima all boring week, failed to note it. However, it is not really a surprise in the context of the rapid changes in Catholic attitudes in the less than two years since the ascension to the Throne of Saint Peter on Feb. 28, 2013, of Pope Francis, of whom more in a moment.

    “While this is a first by some markers,” writes Jeff Spross of Climate Progress, “the Bishops’ statement also continues a long tradition of engagement with environmental issues and climate change by the Catholic Church.” Pope Francis himself has made the religious case for combating climate change, warning that “if we destroy Creation, Creation will destroy us!” Francis has also singled out the destruction of the rainforest as a “sin,” and is working on an official papal encyclical tackling the environment and humanity’s relationship to it. ”[3]

    Catholicism and Communism

    These radically anti-capitalist Catholic positions have got me wondering: “Is Catholicism the new Communism?” “Rome the new Moscow?” “The Church the new Comintern???” What a paradox! Growing up as a ‘red diaper baby’ during the Cold War, Catholicism seemed to me synonymous with militant anti-Communism (not to mention militant virginity). New York’s powerful Cardinal Spellman was a virulent McCarthyite, and the martyrdom of Cardinal Mindszenty in Hungary (persecuted first by both fascist and then communist regimes) made folks forget the complicity of Pope Pius XII with the Nazis – based on their common hatred of Communism.

    Then, in 1958, things changed radically with the election of Pope John XXIII. The Vatican Council proclaimed the Christian doctrine of ‘a preferential option for the poor.’ Liberation Theology, which affirmed the right to resist oppression, spread all over Latin America. I was privileged to witness it in action in Nicaragua in 1984 during the U.S.-sponsored Contra war. Indeed, my years of activism in the Latin America solidarity movement had convinced me that Liberation Theology Catholics were consistently more revolutionary than Leftist of all stripes.[4] But sadly by the 80s my comrades among activist priests and nuns were being side-tracked and persecuted by the new dispensation in the Vatican after the election of fervently anti-Communist Polish Pope in 1978.

    Reaction and Disgrace

    John-Paul II put the Church firmly back on the side of the privileged. Then the 2005 election of former Hitler Youth Josef Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI set the Church on an even more reactionary course, turning back the clock on women and reproductive rights, offending Moslems, trying to cover up major scandals over pedophile priests and Vatican finances, and launching an inquisition of progressive U.S. nuns, accused of feminism and meddling in social issues.

    So severe was the disgrace to the Church’s reputation, that Benedict took the unprecedented step of resigning more or less in disgrace in Feb. 2013, but by then even the most loyal Catholics had given up on the rigid, self-protective, seemingly immovable Church hierarchy. ‘New Pope? I’ve Given Up Hope’ headlined Gary Wills in the N.Y. Times. In my own analysis (‘Pope Quits: So What?’[5]) I contrasted the history of popular movements inspired by Christianity’s radical social content and the Church’s vast potential for good with the apparent death-grip of the geriatric, reactionary hierarchy on the institution. But my conclusion was nearly as despairing.

    A Miracle?

    I didn’t dare dream that a mere twenty months later Benedict’s successor, Pope Francis, would have called a World Meeting of Popular Movements and invited to the Vatican organizations of the marginalized and excluded of all ethnic and religious origins — landless campesinos, urban workers from the informal sector, recyclers, struggling native peoples, women demanding their rights, etc. (Oct. 2014) There, in the presence of Bolivia’s radical President Evo Morales, Francis declared that “ solidarity with the poor is the very grounding of the Gospels" and that "Agrarian reform is not only a political need, but also a moral one!" These sound like the words of a popular leader, reaching out to his base.

    “It was the direct involvement of Pope Francis that drove the event,” according to Canadian delegate Judith Marshall reporting in Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal. Her amazing report is definitely worth reading in full.[6] “As the newly installed head of a major institution of the global establishment, Pope Francis has arguably made the Papacy the most radical and consistent voice in pointing to the profanity of global inequality and exclusion. He has also repeatedly named the inordinate power of multinational corporations and finance capital as key factors in reproducing global poverty and destruction of the planet […] The meeting was built on the strength of the Pope’s long-standing connections with these key popular movement leaders in Argentina.”

    Who is Pope Francis?

    Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1936. After working briefly as chemical technician and a night club bouncer, he joined the progressive Jesuit order, became a priest during the heyday of Liberation Theology and got involved in social movements.

    As a bishop, Bergoglio had already developed an incessant but discreet support for workers and their organizations. The anecdotes are without number: solidarity with persecuted militants, support for campesino organizations, protection for peddlers, promotion of “shanty town priests”, accompanying factor workers who had reopened closed factories and a forthright attitude of struggle against exploitation and exclusion, traffic in persons, drug-trafficking and the consumer culture. All of this, added to his legendary austerity and simple life style, his constant interpolation against the self-satisfied life style of the petty bourgeoisie, postmodern consumerist hedonism and “elite progressivism”, had made him an uncomfortable figure, not only for the reactionary right but also for the liberals of the centre.”[7]

    Francis is the first Jesuit pope, the first from the Americas, the first from the Southern Hemisphere and the first non-European pope in over 1,000 years. These ‘firsts’ signify a major shift in the power equilibrium within that vast Internationale of the global poor. The Catholic (‘Universal’) Church is the only actually existing organized world-party. Its vast wealth and influence are now in Francis’ hands. Imagine, for example, that this Jesuit remains true to his Order’s mission and devotes some of the billions salted away in the Vatican to promoting Catholic education on a global scale, teaching billions of poor children how to read, write, think for themselves in a world organization that affirms the right to resist oppression. If the Church truly stands for ‘System Change Not Climate Change,’ this it itself would be a revolutionary development, and we have only just seen the beginning.

    How Did this ‘Miracle’ Happen?

    How did such an openly radical priest manage to get elected? Francis’ absolute authority at the apex of the hierarchy is a major defeat for the old power brokers who would rather see the living Church wither on the vine than compromise, as witness their circling the wagons during the pedophile priest scandals, their adamant refusal to allow priests to marry or to give women a sacerdotal role of some sort in order to keep the parishes alive, and their unwillingness to fund Catholic education — once the Church’s proud monopoly and major source of its ideological influence. The Catholic hierarchy (like the military, the world of finance, and the Communist nomenklatura) has long functioned as a closed corporation, a state within a state, impenetrable, opaque, a law unto itself, protected by its intimate ties with other corrupt hierarchies in politics, the military, banking, law enforcement and the Mafia.

    The Vatican bureaucracy sits on a pot of gold equal to the wealth of many nations, and one can only imaging the silent struggles going on right now behind the closed walls of the Curia over control of that wealth as Francis and his allies conduct their purge of the apparatus. These developments may take time.

    Excluding Divine Intervention, what made this revolution within the Church possible? The most obvious answer is that the Church had reached a dead end. The faithful were leaving in droves, the priesthood was dying out with few new recruits, especially among ‘Europeans,’ and the laity were in despair. Another reason is the demographic shift among practicing Catholics. There is also the solid organization and discipline of the international Jesuit Order whose attempts to take over the Church and influence in Latin America go back centuries. (Not for nothing did members of the Communist International think of themselves as ‘red Jesuits.’)

    Breaking Through Parish Walls

    To these material explanations I would like to add another, less obvious: the Internet and social media. Whereas over the centuries, the hierarchy has had a monopoly of communication, all of it top down. Today, Catholic lay people are no longer isolated, voiceless and passive before immense wealth and influence of the hierarchy. Just as Guttenberg’s movable type helped catalyze the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century by making the Bible accessible to the laity, so the Internet in the 21st century may have catalyzed the unprecedented resignation of arch-conservative Pope Benedict XVI and the Church’s apparent new course under Francis.

    As Internet guru Clay Shirky points out, “social tools don’t create collective action, they merely remove the obstacles to it.”[8] Shirky cites the example of the campaign among lay Catholics to end sex-abuse of children by priests. It began in the 90s when victims started coming forward and the scandals were exposed in newspapers like The Boston Globe, but the Church hierarchy, led by Cardinal Law (himself guilty of protecting pedophile priests by rotating them through new, unsuspecting parishes), was able to squash the victims’ movement.

    The instigators were denounced via press and pulpit and banned from Church facilities, while lay groups were forbidden to organize outside of their local parish. However ten years later, Cardinal Law was forced to resign in disgrace after Internet tools had enabled victims to aggregate their testimony, post it on line, spread information and organize nationally and internationally. Meanwhile, the revolt against the coddling of pedophile priests has caused the laity to openly question reactionary dogmas like refusing Communion to divorced and LGBT Catholics and maintaining the celibacy of priests.

    The Internet did not cause this potentially momentous change, but social media and its world-wide reach enabled the smoldering revolt of the Catholic laity to overcome the institutional barriers that enabled the hierarchy to isolate and dominate the rank-and-file movements for reform and renewal. What is striking in today’s revolution within Roman Catholicism is the intersection of ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ forms o organization. For if horizontal internet networking has given the Catholic laity a chance to come together and express itself, the capture of a powerful vertically-structured Catholic ‘world-party’ by progressive forces opens huge possibilities for human liberation and perhaps a chance for the planet to avoid climate catastrophe.

    Nuns Vindicated

    Let us end this hopeful story with the news, released today, of another victory for the progressive Catholic rank-and-file: a Vatican report reversing Benedict XVI’s crude attempt to stifle the socially-engaged, self-governing orders of U.S. nuns, accused of preaching ‘feminism’ and advocating ‘social justice.’ Catholics across the country had been stunned and outraged by the Vatican’s attempt to threaten the women who have been the backbone of this church for centuries. Thousands of faithful Catholics held more than 50 vigils across the country and more than 57,000 people signed a petition organized by the Nun Justice Project in support of the nuns. With these actions, Catholics made it clear that they stand in solidarity with the sisters and their good works among the poor and marginalized.[9] As of today, they are vindicated.

    The report concluded by citing Pope Francis’ call “to create still broader opportunities for a more incisive female presence in the church.”[10] Meanwhile, it also transpired today that Pope Francis brokered the agreement between Obama and Raul Castro to resume diplomatic relations after more than a half-century of U.S. sanctions against Cuba, long condemned by the rest of Latin America. Also, it was the Holy Father’s birthday. Mazeltov, Francis!

    [1] I exaggerate. The world leaders formally agreed that each country will prepare its own voluntary goals in preparation for next year's Paris Climate Summit. The Lima conference was thus not a ‘failure’, but a success (for the corporate agenda).

    [2] Matt McGrath, "Global group of Catholic bishops call for end to fossil fuels," BBC News, Lima, Dec. 10, 2014.

    [4] For example they supported the distribution of lands abandoned by émigré landowners, while the Sandinistas refused to give legal titles to poor peasant occupiers, thus undermining their own popularity during the Contra war.

    [7] According to Juan GRABOIS, activist in the Movement of Excluded Workers and as one of the national coordinators of the Confederation of Popular Economy Workers in Argentina, quoted by Marshall, above.

    [8] Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, 2008.

    [9] Erin Seiz Hanna, The Vatican's Fear Tactics Will Not Work, Room for Debate, New York Times, June 12, 2012.

    [10] Laurie Goodstein, "Vatican Report Cites Achievements and Challenges of U.S. Nuns," New York Times, Dec. 16, 2014.

     

     

  • DSA on Normalizing Relations with Cuba

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    The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) celebrates the Obama administration’s move toward the normalization of diplomatic relationships between the United States and Cuba. This change in U.S. foreign policy will help bridge the divide between U.S. and Cuban residents.

    We believe that increased cultural exchanges will improve the quality of life of both peoples, as will easing the flow of remittances from the Cuban-American community to family members in Cuba. But normal diplomatic relations are not enough; DSA will work with others to pressure Congress to end the unproductive and unjust trade embargo that remains in effect.

    DSA remains steadfast in its support of those working for full democracy and human rights in Cuba (dissidents both within and without the Communist Party). DSA believes, as Rosa Luxemburg did, that the right to dissent and to form free political associations and parties must be an integral part of a socialist society. Thus, DSA will continue to support organic Cuban dissident and reform movements that are working to democratize the country's political and economic institutions.

    DSA has always condemned the long-standing efforts by our own government to undermine the stability of Cuba. Our government's actions were never designed to aid the Cuban people, but instead to appease right-wing U.S. citizens of Cuban origin and punish a country that rejected imperialism and neoliberalism. We hope that the normalization of foreign relations will curtail negative U.S. actions in the future.

    While much remains to be changed in U.S. foreign policy and Cuban domestic policy, DSA celebrates the coming end of more than fifty years of U.S. efforts to isolate Cuba diplomatically. But our work is not done; we will join with others to pressure Congress to end the inhumane and counterproductive economic embargo. For now, we applaud the Obama administration for working to restore diplomatic relations with Cuba, for an improvement in the human condition, even if limited, is a victory for social justice.

    Passed by the DSA National Committee on December 17, 2014.

    See the DSA website at http://www.dsausa.org/ for this and other statements.

     

     

     

  • Lost to Idealism: The British Left Choose Rhetoric over Reality

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    In the United Kingdom, we are accustomed to progressives conducting their arguments in confident terms of complete inevitability. Progress is a one way street, and we are marching ceaselessly along it towards the end of history, almost without trying. 

    It is odd that people who would eschew totally any notion of God, or of some providence or direction behind the course of the world expect the march of political, and especially social reform, to continue unabated, propelled only by a curious momentum of its own. It's an attitude more befitting an obscure religious sect than a movement rooted in the cut and thrust of a modern democracy.

    At its worst the new left, convinced of its pre-eminence, appears self righteous and hostile, lacking in perspective. In the Marxist Spiked magazine, Frank Furedi claims that “In the 21st century, university students are more likely to demonstrate on behalf of censorship than they are to struggle for freedom of speech”, as campuses across the country succumb to myopic and divisive identity politics. Meanwhile, Guardian writer Julie Bindel complains that the activities of the “new wave” of feminism seem “more like censorship than progressive politics” after a month of twitter fuelled bans, boycotts and forced apologies.

    Behind this trend is the adoption of an abstract view of politics, replacing older theories rooted in the practicalities of life, or indeed reality itself. A movement increasingly based on social media and impassioned polemics does not win elections easily, and it leaves us perplexed when voters ignore the tide of history and give progress a bloody nose. We've started viewing actual political change as being born of lofty principle alone, instead of resulting from objectively measured material factors.

    This is a rejection of the fundamental logical mechanism of cause and effect, and in politics and the media it is beginning to show. The black and white view of the world is encouraging mob-like tendencies in thought and action, as is evident from the aggressive culture wars now common in our society, which never really used to be a feature of British life. The left's new mindset is pushing them further from dialogue with the center, and from government. It is all a long way from how things used to be.

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    Nearly 70 years on, the 1945 government of Clement Attlee remains the greatest and most enduring source of inspiration to the British left. This was a government that created the NHS, nationalised heavy industry (taking some 20% of the British economy into public hands) and instituted numerous reforms to improve labour relations and workplace safety, and it remains a lodestar of the Labour movement in Britain. This year the annual conference of the Labour Party saw general secretary Iain McNichol invoking the “spirit of 1945” as the party gears up for the general election. Post-1945 saw such a comprehensive socialist restructuring that in retrospect it can be considered a revolution, made all the more remarkable for the consensus it enjoyed throughout society, even, to some extent, from conservatives.

    But while our modern leftists believe that the mantle of progress forged in the struggle against Nazism should fall naturally to them as a matter of course, they ignore completely the very particular factors behind the creation of mainstream democratic socialism, assuming that a reformist consensus with particular historical origins will just perpetuate itself indefinitely into the future.

    The post-war reforms owed their success to some very unusual circumstances. The violence and economic destruction of the war had impoverished the country, and a large proportion of the British establishment, including many conservatives, were convinced of the need for heavy reform to address the rampant hardship and inequality, a mood that was represented by the 1942 Beveridge Report, which declared war on the five “great evils” of squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease, and was perceived to give a green light to socialist government. It would have been impossible to create the NHS or the welfare state before the war, as the necessary consensus did not then exist.

    The Labour Party's reforms had been given legitimacy by the war. “Nationalisation took place in an altered economic environment, brought about by the imperatives of wartime planning” wrote historian John Bew. “It was the universality of provision which was intended to form the basis of a new contract between citizen and state”, the need for such a change having been made clear during the conflict.

    Furthermore, mobilisation, requisitions and the general move to a war footing set precedents for government intervention in society and the economy to a degree that would be very extreme today. For example, Labour officially nationalised Britain's railways in 1948, but they had arguably been under state control, more or less, since the beginning of the war. It was not as if the government had to force their point of view across in the way they would have to if they were to renationalise them today. Big state advocates won over the right wing by providing a patriotic basis for statism as a means of defeating the enemy, creating an entire generation of conservatives which lacked their modern counterparts' hostility to government.

    More importantly, the war years also provided Labour with their required voters. Millions of people, many of them already living with material deprivation, experienced bombing, conscription and food shortages, causing enough misery to drive ambitions for reform amongst the public. People became used to big government in their lives as they were bombarded with propaganda newsreels, public information posters and books, and were confronted with a highly visible military presence. Several million citizens served for years in the armed forces, some enjoying a standard of living that had been unattainable in civilian life. Many valued the communitarian attitudes created by the way society was ordered in the war years, and did not want to return to the inequality and hardship of the 1930s.

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    So if Attlee's effective but fairly moderate socialist reforms owed their success to an extreme historical context, what hope do we have today? It seems all great revolutionary change in history was the result of severe unhappiness at the foundations. The conclusion we are left with is that the old quarters from which change used to spring will no longer deliver, simply because modern western countries do not put their citizens under the same level of duress that they used to, or expect them to weather the poverty that was once commonplace. And while we would expect future reform to be driven by the marginalised elements of society, it is crass to regard their suffering as a reliable source of reformist momentum. Instead, we must look elsewhere and adapt to operating in a world that is simply more conservative, in that it has, so far, successfully avoided significant material want and conflict between established powers, and is therefore able to avoid radical change.

    Western countries remain affected by inequality of income and opportunity, unemployment, poor education, substandard living conditions, inadequacies in the provision of medical treatment and welfare and unrepresentative government. But this doesn't mean that reform will spring automatically from this discontent. The evils of today are more insidious than the overt deprivation that prevailed until the mid twentieth century. And if it took a world war to create a modest welfare state, it will take a lot more to enact the change the modern left likes to think it could produce with a single term in government.

    Today, we feel the loss of a statist consensus, and have certainly never seen support for government intervention to the degree that existed in the war era. The modern Labour Party is trying to reintroduce socialism with no effort at collectivisation or nationalisation, but rather with liberal rhetoric backed up by vague promises to safeguard an unambitious welfare settlement. Its languid efforts are more about being seen to say the right things than establishing de facto socialism on the ground.

    Over the past few decades, union membership has decreased by several millions, participation in elections has declined, and billions of pounds' worth of assets has left the auspices of the state through privatisation. It has damaged both the potency of the state and of communitarian values in society. Trying to introduce socialism to a post-thatcherite society, from which collective values have been absent for years is doomed to fail, unless Labour first commits to restoring a sense of collective responsibility that the 1940s took for granted. Future economic and social reforms will have a secure foundation when mass participation in politics is once again the norm, union membership is back up to its pre-1980s levels and Labour party membership is in the millions instead of the current 190,000. The left should have used their time out of government to work at these goals, or at least accept the scale of the problem. Expecting the initiative to swing back to the progressive camp of its own accord in a society that has been built by neoliberalism just isn't enough.

    *The author is an active member of Britain's General, Municipal and Boilermakers' Union.

  • Shummy’s Surrender: Democratic Governor of VT Goes South On Single Payer

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    “Vermont…is the only state with universal single-payer health coverage for its residents.”

          –James Fallows in The Atlantic, April, 2014

    For nearly four years, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin has been basking in the glow of press accolades like the one above.

    Unfortunately, what was often misreported nationally as a done deal was far from it in Montpelier, the state’s capital.

    Top Democrats in the legislature were, in reality, not enthusiastic about providing tax-supported universal coverage. Shumlin’s postponement of key financing decisions until after his re-election this fall reflected his own ambivalence about the cost and complexity of the project.

    On Wednesday, December 17, the governor called a statehouse press conference to make a “major announcement.” That turned out to be good news for single payer foes locally and nationally—and bad news for campaigners to make “health care a human right.”

    Shumlin declared that “now is not the right time” to proceed with any fundamental overhaul of health care financing and delivery in Vermont. He claimed that the latest cost estimates for what’s known locally as Green Mountain Care (GMC) were higher than the $2 billion originally projected. GMC would create an “enormous” additional tax burden and high “risk of economic shock,” in a period when a “slower recovery from the great recession has tightened our state budget.”

    In short, the approach Shumlin has championed for nearly five years was “just not affordable” anymore. (For more on the governor’s reasoning, see: http://governor.vermont.gov/node/2164)

    What Shumlin called “the greatest disappointment of my political life” is, more importantly, a setback for single-payer efforts in  other states, including California. Frustrated and disappointed by Obamacare, health care reformers have been drawing much inspiration from the effort to transcend its limitations in Vermont.

    The Vermont Workers Center (VWC), a leading catalyst for real reform, fired back with a protest rally, in Montpelier, less than 24-hours after Shumlin’s announcement. VWC leaders denounced the governor for an “undemocratic decision” made “behind closed doors in close consultation with a select group of businesses” but “without public participation or broader input.” As the VWC noted:

    “We all currently pay for hodgepodge healthcare system—we just don’t pay in a way that leads to giving people access to care. Moving to a different financing mechanism has nothing to do with raising new money. Vermont’s businesses currently pay 80% of all private insurance premiums. Individuals who fall sick also pay a big chunk—through roughly $800 million in out-of-pocket costs. The governor’s task was to shift private payments to a more equitable, public financing mechanism. His task was not to find new money.”

    In addition to its other political fall-out, Shumlin’s surrender muddies one part of the narrative U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders plans to deploy against Hillary Clinton, if he joins her in running for president.  Sanders has been touting Vermont’s singular progress toward single payer during his out-of-state trips to explore a possible 2015-16 presidential campaign. Vermont’s independent socialist is expected to make an official announcement about his candidacy early next year. Despite Sanders’ support for Shumlin’s three gubernatorial campaigns, the governor did not consult him about his Dec. 17 announcement. Nor is Shumlin likely to endorse the state’s 73-year old junior senator, if both Sanders and Clinton enter the race.

    Potholes in the Single-Payer Road

    GMC enabling legislation was passed, with nationwide publicity and much local enthusiasm, after Shumlin was first elected in 2010. Act 48 committed his state to developing a first-in-the-nation approximation of a single-payer system covering all 640,000 Vermonters.

    As I reported then (and later in Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress), many potholes remained in the road to actual implementation of Green Mountain Care. It required a multi-year process fraught with potential financing disputes, technical and legal problems, and related political dangers for all involved.

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    Those most responsible for passage of Act 48—the grassroots labor, community, and health care reform mobilizers led by the Burlington-based VWC—worried, with good reason, that Shumlin and key Democratic legislators would lose their will or their way.

    Obamacare gave them a big opening to do this, along with much fodder for conservative foes of single payer. Vermont was forced to set up an insurance change and operate that for three years–with all of the Affordable Care Act’s attendant discrediting scew-ups—before seeking a federal waiver in 2017 permitting its preferred single-payer approach.

    This unhelpfully delayed any direct move toward elimination of private insurers, replacement of job-based medical coverage in the private sector, and consolidation the various tax-supported health insurance plans covering children, low-income Vermonters, and public employees—a major transition challenge on all fronts, whether undertaken sooner or later.

    Plus, the enabling language of Act 48, passed in 2011, left many important details undecided, including who would pay what for Vermont’s post-ACA system. In the last two legislative sessions, the VWC has consistently argued that financing costs “be shared equitably, which means that richer people—and more profitable companies—should pay proportionately more into the health care system than poorer people.”

    A Re-Election Scare

    Shumlin, in contrast, has been quite wary about raising taxes on big corporations or the wealthy. (His own net worth was estimated at $10 million when he was first elected.) The governor has framed his push for Green Mountain Care, quite conservatively, as a boon for business, declaring at a re-election rally in September that “we are moving forward on the nation’s first single payer health care system that contains costs, takes the burden off of employers, and simplifies the system for all Vermonters.”

    Later that month, he sounded a bit more tentative, telling a radio audience: “If we come up with a financing plan that doesn’t grow jobs, economic opportunity, and make Vermont more prosperous, trust me, we’re not gonna do it.” In the same interview, he declared himself to be “one of the most pro-business, anti-tax governors that you’ve seen in a long time.”

    Unfortunately, on November 4, this Republican-lite routine didn’t play well at the polls. Much to his shock and dismay, Shumlin was nearly defeated by his conservative GOP opponent, Scott Milne. (Shumlin beat Milne by less than 2,500 votes, with a Libertarian candidate draining more than 8,000 votes from his opponent.)

    During their race, Milne insisted that Green Mountain Care was already “dead” and that the governor was just waiting until after the election to make that official. As it turns out, Milne was wrong because Shumlin’s own re-election will not be finalized until the Democrat-dominated legislature meets on January 8 to pick the next governor, a process used in Vermont when no candidate wins more than 50 percent of the popular vote.

    The single payer movement also failed to get a boost from the race for lieutenant governor. The personally popular incumbent, Republican Phil Scott, defeated Dean Corren, a Vermont Progressive Party (VPP) candidate who ran with Shumlin’s backing but not that of leading State Senate Democrats, who backed Scott, a GMC critic. Corren’s 36% of the vote was the highest statewide showing by any Vermont Progressive other than Sanders in his ten federal races. Corren accused Scott and his bi-partisan supporters of undermining “single payer by spreading fear and uncertainty” rather than “actually figuring out how to do this.”

    Progressive Party Progress

    The VPP’s pro-single payer legislative candidates fared much better, giving the party its largest-ever presence in Montpelier next month. Vermont Progressives increased their caucus in the state House of Representatives from 5 to 7 members, while maintaining three seats in the 30-member Vermont Senate. Overall, the nation’s most successful third party ran 22 candidates this fall. State VPP chair Emma Mulvaney Stanak, a teachers’ union organizer, hailed her party’s progress as a sign that Vermonters “are increasingly tired of this stale, two-party system and are voting for alternatives.”

    After the election, Shumlin began back-peddling from his own much-touted, state-level alternative to the ACA. His administration postponed a Nov. 22 briefing about its proposals for Green Mountain Care. VWC supporters around the state began mobilizing for meetings scheduled for Dec. 4, 11, and 18 by the GMC Board, to solicit public comment.

    VWC board member Ellen Schwartz from Brattleboro and others began to sound the alarm. “Unless thousands of us make our voices heard, it is unlikely that the Gov. Shumlin’s proposed plan will remedy critical flaws of the existing insurance system, “ she informed readers of VTDigger, a local political blog. “”Unless we act, his proposal for health care benefits may well impose out-of-pocket costs, creating barriers to care. It is also likely to continue to exclude the very services that people are saying they need.”

    The VWC criticized Shumlin’s apparent tilt toward a flat payroll tax to fund the new system. The Workers’ Center renewed its call for a system of “equitable financing” that would replace deductibles, co-pays, and premiums paid by individuals or shared by employers and employees. VWC financing proposals included “taxes on earned and unearned income, a wealth tax and a progressive payroll tax for employers only, with exemptions for the smallest businesses.”

    A Protest In Montpelier

    On Thursday in Montpelier, more than one hundred Vermonters turned out, on short notice, for the VWC-organized demonstration against the governor’s decision. Among those protesting on the state house steps were supporters of the Communications Workers of America and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. For two months, 1,800 CWA and IBEW members have been on strike against FairPoint Communications, a troubled telecom firm that took over from Verizon in Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire six years ago.

    Health care cost shifting is one of main contract concessions these workers are resisting. Some old-timers among them went through a grueling four- month work stoppage over the same issue in 1989, when the local phone company in New England was known as NYNEX (later to become Verizon). The passage of the Affordable Care Act four years ago has done little or nothing to relieve management pressure on unions for medical benefit givebacks of the sort which triggered both strikes, a quarter century apart.

    Through the Workers Center and Progressive Party, many Vermont union activists, including some strikers, have been vigorous advocates of Green Mountain Care because it would get health insurance off the bargaining table. Until this week, they knew Governor Shumlin was a shaky ally at best.

    Now, it’s much clearer which side he’s on and what price they may end up paying, along with other Vermont workers, for long overdue change now deemed to be “premature.” Shumlin can rest assured that he’s not the only one “disappointed” by his sudden capitulation to the status quo, aided and abetted by key Democrats in the state legislature.

    Steve Early has been writing about Vermont politics since 1968, when he was a college student in the state. He is a former organizer for the Communications Workers of America in New England and the author, most recently, of Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress, from Monthly Review Press. The book reports on single payer campaigning and third party building in Vermont. He can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com

  • Exposing the FBI

    ImageReview of The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI, by Betty Medsger (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. 596 pages. Notes, Index. Hardcover $29.95; paperback $16.95).

    The Burglary tells the story of how, on March 8, 1971, in the midst of the Vietnam War, eight peace activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, in an effort to discover whether the FBI was working, illegally, to suppress American dissent. Spiriting away all the records in the FBI office, these daring men and women soon learned that this federal crime-fighting bureau was, indeed, engaging in a broad range of unlawful activities. They photocopied some of the most revealing documents and mailed them, in the name of the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, to members of congress and the press. After receipt of these materials, Betty Medsger, a journalist at the Washington Post, wrote an article published in that newspaper that sparked a public outcry.

    Up to this point, the FBI was an all-powerful, highly-regarded, and highly-feared agency whose underhanded activities had always been shrouded in the utmost secrecy. But, now, an ever-widening investigation began―by journalists, by the U.S. Attorney General, and, finally, by congressional committees. The result was explosive. As the criminal behavior of the FBI was laid out for all to see, the public was appalled by FBI lawlessness, J. Edgar Hoover (its director since 1924) died in disgrace, a few top FBI officials were tried and convicted for their criminal activities, and legal and administrative reforms were put into place to prevent a recurrence of the bureau’s misconduct.

    With the outbreak of the scandal, Hoover and the FBI fought ferociously to hide the FBI’s record and to salvage its reputation and his own. Hoover also launched a massive manhunt to identify and capture the burglars. But he failed on every count. Despite an enormous FBI effort, the burglars were never apprehended or even identified.

    Now, however, more than 40 years later, Medsger has identified them. She discovered them quite accidentally when dining in Philadelphia at the home of two old friends of hers, Bonnie and John Raines, who let slip the fact that they had participated in the burglary. Medsger convinced the couple that she should tell the full story of their historic act of resistance, that they should reveal themselves publicly, and that they should help her find the other activists involved. Ultimately, she located all the burglars and all consented to be interviewed. Five of them agreed to be publicly identified. This willingness to step forward after more than four decades in hiding was facilitated by the fact that the statute of limitations on their burglary had run out in 1976.

    A major virtue of the book is its revelation of vast FBI criminality. Hoover’s secret FBI, as Medsger summarizes it,

    “usurped citizens’ liberties . . . and used deception, disinformation, and violence as tools to harass, damage and . . . silence people whose opinions the director opposed. . . . Agents and informers were required to be outlaws. Blackmail and burglary were favorite tools in the secret FBI. Agents and informers were ordered to spy on―and create ongoing files on―the private lives, including the sexual activities, of the nation’s highest officials and other powerful people. Electoral politics were manipulated to defeat candidates the director did not like. Even mild dissent, in the eyes of the FBI, could make an American worthy of being spied on and placed in an ongoing FBI file.”

    Medsger notes that “this extraordinary situation . . . thrived near the top of the federal government for nearly half a century, affecting the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans.”

    The FBI’s spying operations were extraordinarily extensive. All black college student organizations, for example, were placed under surveillance and infiltrated. Indeed, on some college campuses, every black student was placed under surveillance. Moreover, the FBI infiltrated the Congress of Racial Equality, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the NAACP. In fact, NAACP officials were under continuous FBI surveillance since 1923.

    COINTELPRO, only briefly mentioned in the Media files but more fully revealed in the aftermath of the Media raid, was perhaps Hoover’s most ambitious program of criminal activity. Created by Hoover in 1956 to harass Communists and other radicals, COINTELPRO was updated to COINTELPRO-New Left by the FBI director in 1968. This revised model was designed to “expose, disrupt, and otherwise neutralize” the New Left Movement by any means necessary, including spreading false, derogatory information about its leaders and organizations, creating conflicts among its leaders and members, burglary, and violence. It targeted nearly all social change movements, including the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the women’s movement, the gay rights movement, and the environmental movement. The FBI also secretly, and sometimes violently, attacked college campus and alternative newspapers. Medsger observes that the bureau worked at “forcing the publications to close, infiltrating them with informers, and threatening the credibility―and sometimes the lives―of their staff.”

    With the FBI operating almost everywhere, its records grew enormously, and eventually included 500,000 domestic intelligence files, each typically including several individuals’ names. Medsger writes of Hoover:

    “No part of the government or American life was outside his reach. He used his secret power to destroy individuals and to manipulate and destroy organizations. . . . He secretly punished people he regarded as wrong-thinking―civil rights leaders, senior members of Congress who questioned war policy, and also average people who wrote letters to a member of Congress or dared to express their dissent by appearing at an antiwar demonstration. In Hoover’s world . . . any American was fair game.”

    Not surprisingly, the FBI maintained files on nearly all well-known twentieth century writers and artists. To name a few: Sinclair Lewis, Pearl Buck, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Thomas Mann, Carl Sandburg, Truman Capote, Thornton Wilder. Lillian Hellman, Robert Frost, Graham Greene, Hannah Arendt, and Ray Bradbury. The FBI also kept files on leading publishers who, after all, had dared to publish many of these writers.

    Thousands of university faculty members were spied upon and many fired from their jobs as a result of FBI activity. A 1958 study found that two-thirds of the then approximately 2,500 social science faculty members surveyed had been visited by the FBI at least once, and a third of them had been visited three or more times. At the University of California at Berkeley in 1960―years before the student rebellion erupted there―Hoover assigned FBI agents to gather derogatory information about every one of the university’s 5,365 faculty members. Staff members, even at the lowest levels, were also investigated.

    Naturally, the American Civil Liberties Union was a key target of FBI surveillance, as were the conversations of the ACLU’s legal staff while they prepared their cases.

    Some of the practices of Hoover’s FBI are almost unbelievable. For example, it planted false rumors about the race of actress Jean Seberg’s unborn child, a dirty tricks operation that resulted in her nervous collapse, the death of her premature baby, and, ultimately, her own suicide.

    Perhaps the best-known example of FBI viciousness occurred in connection with Martin Luther King, Jr. The FBI plot against King included office break-ins, the use of informers, mail opening, wiretapping, and the bugging of King’s office, home, and hotel rooms. The FBI even attempted to convince him to commit suicide only weeks before he was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Hoover also instructed FBI agents not to inform King about threats against his life that it had uncovered. Hoover told President Lyndon Johnson that King was “an instrument in the hands of subversive forces seeking to undermine our nation.” It was King’s “I Have a Dream” speech that convinced FBI officials, including Hoover, that King had to be destroyed.

    Hoover was able to engage in these operations because they were kept secret, unexamined, and, for the most part, unknown even to his superiors, such as the attorney general and the president. Yes, in 1943, the U.S. Attorney General, learning of Hoover’s Custodial Detention Index―a list of more than 26,000 Americans who, in the event of war or a national security emergency would be imprisoned without charges or trial―ordered Hoover to end this program. Hoover said he did so. But he simply lied. The name of the program was changed to the Security Index, and it continued, unknown to Hoover’s superiors, under this new designation.

    Hoover also made himself untouchable thanks to a massive FBI public relations program. As Medsger notes, “he turned himself into the go-to government man for thoughts on crime, communism, war, religion, child-rearing, and even how to make the best popovers.” The material created by the FBI’s public relations division “ranged from manifestos against communism to children’s coloring books on crime to Mickey Mouse Club television episodes broadcast from the director’s office to confidential tips, true and untrue, to `friendly’ journalists about the personal lives of powerful people the director considered enemies of the bureau.”

    Another reason that Hoover remained unchallenged was that he had material in his secret files that enabled him to discourage people from getting in his way. Sometimes, he used this material to blackmail powerful individuals, including American presidents. Medsger shows that Hoover even succeeded in blackmailing President Richard Nixon.

    The peace activists who raided the FBI office and exposed the agency’s crimes emerge from the pages of Medsger’s book as tremendously appealing. Principled, thoughtful, and committed to nonviolence, they included a professor of religion, the director of a daycare center, a cab driver, and a graduate student. William Davidon, a mild-mannered physicist at Haverford College, was the initiator of their action and their ringleader. Appalled by the Vietnam War and increasingly aware of FBI activity to suppress dissent, Davidon had approached these antiwar activists individually with the idea of breaking into an FBI office to investigate the agency's possible misconduct. Although the activists were initially shocked by his proposal, they were also courageous people, disgusted by the war and inspired by the example of the daring Catholic pacifists who had raided draft board offices and destroyed their records. None had any skills as a burglar, and all of them―if arrested at some point, which seemed likely―had a great deal to lose. Bonnie and John Raines, for example, were deeply devoted to their three young children, and the thought of leaving them behind, while imprisoned for decades, terrified them. Nevertheless, they were determined to act.

    One of the key questions Medsger asks is: How did these activists find the enormous courage necessary to undertake this very dangerous, formidable task? Part of the answer, exemplified by the recollections of one activist, lies in their belief that inaction in the face of evil represented complicity. And this sentiment, in turn, reflected the widespread perception among activists that the “good” Germans had looked the other way in the 1930s and early 1940s while fascists carried out their murderous policies. Another major factor that bolstered their courage was their participation in the civil rights movement. A number of the burglars had already risked their lives during the 1960s by confronting the violent forces of white supremacy in the South. After that they not only understood the evil that lurked in their country better than did most Americans, but had acquired the courage necessary to confront it. Finally, by 1971, the Vietnam War had generated a climate of fierce resistance, daring, self-sacrifice, and widespread civil disobedience. As John Raines recalled: “Courage was natural. It was all around you.”

    Even though the activists were never caught and sent to prison for their bold venture, they did not have an easy time of it in the decades after 1971. Worried that they would be arrested and incarcerated for lengthy jail terms, they continued looking nervously over their shoulders for many years. In addition, to maintain the necessary secrecy about what they had done, they agreed not to discuss this crucial event in their lives with their friends and to sever contact with one another. The ensuing sense of isolation and lack of a psychological support network weighed heavily upon them. Nevertheless, none had any regrets about the Media break-in.

    In fact, their action―aside from ensuring a broad public recognition of the dangers posed by secret intelligence agencies―led to some very positive institutional changes. Appalled by Hoover’s nearly 50-year stranglehold on the FBI, congress set a ten-year term limit for its director. Congress also embraced the recommendation of the U.S. Senate investigating committee, headed by Idaho Senator Frank Church, that congress establish permanent congressional oversight of the FBI, with committees to do so established in both houses. In 1978, congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which established a federal court to review applications for warrants for electronic surveillance. Although congress failed to approve a new charter for the FBI, Attorney General Edward Levi established administrative guidelines for the agency. To open a full investigation, the guidelines required the FBI to have “specific and articulable facts giving reason to believe that an individual or a group is or may be engaged in activities which involve the use of force or violence and which involve or will involve the violation of federal law.” In addition, the guidelines stated that “government monitoring of individuals or groups because they hold unpopular or controversial political views is intolerable in our society.” In September 1980, two top FBI officials were convicted of criminal charges for illegal break-ins.

    But, thereafter, the pendulum began swinging the other way. Elected president in 1980, Ronald Reagan quickly pardoned the convicted FBI criminals. His attorney general, William French Smith, loosened the guidelines Levi had put in place. As a result, the FBI had fewer restrictions on what could prompt or continue an investigation, and the need for attorney general approval of some investigative methods was scrapped. In 1981, the FBI opened a five-year investigation of individuals and groups opposing Reagan’s policy toward Central America. It included widespread use of informers at political meetings; break-ins at churches, members’ homes, and organizations’ offices; and surveillance of hundreds of peace demonstrations. Among the groups targeted were the National Council of Churches, the Maryknoll Sisters of the Roman Catholic Church, the United Auto Workers, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador.

    After the attacks of 9/11, the FBI slipped back rapidly toward the Hoover practices. The bureau placed organizations under investigation because they opposed the war in Iraq, including the Catholic Worker movement and the American Friends Service Committee. Also, of course, under the Patriot Act and the further loosening of administrative guidelines, the FBI is but one of seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies sharing intelligence data gathered in the United States and around the world by the NSA. Medsger notes: “That information about millions of Americans . . . sits there, available as Hoover’s secret files were, for potential abusive use at any time.” Meanwhile, the FISA Court became a rubber stamp for the intelligence agencies.

    Medsger’s book not only provides a useful description of the FBI’s repressive practices, but is a gripping thriller. Although there are no murders, car chases, or desperate, hand-to-hand battles in it, the story is an intense, nail-biting one. On numerous occasions, the activists experienced un-nerving situations, as well as narrow escapes from discovery and imprisonment. Medsger has a great story to tell here, and―as befits a longtime journalist and former chair of the Journalism Department of San Francisco State University―she tells it very well. Furthermore, The Burglary is a meticulously-researched book, grounded in interviews with the activists and government officials (some of them from the FBI), the 33,698-page official record of the FBI’s investigation of the Media burglary, a broad range of other FBI documents, and important published studies of the FBI.

    Of course, The Burglary has particular relevance for the left. After all, the FBI’s police state tactics were directed largely at social change activists and organizations, and certainly played some role in limiting their success and, occasionally, in destroying them. In turn, most peace and social justice activists have learned from bitter experience that civil liberties are vital to social progress. It was no accident that the Media burglars came out of the peace and civil rights movements, or that the American Civil Liberties Union was launched by antiwar radicals in response to the U.S. government repression of socialists, anarchists, pacifists, and other dissenters during World War I. As the guardians of privilege and their opponents both understand, if a better world is ever to come to birth, freedom of political expression will be necessary.

     

    Lawrence S. Wittner, Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany, has written widely on peace movements and foreign policy. His latest book is What’s Going On at UAardvark? (2013), a satirical novel about university corporatization and rebellion.