What connection does the party of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson have to the party of Barack Obama and Kamala Harris?
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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Part I – Pre-History of Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism
Waking Up
In 2001 Barbara had her awakening to the disasters that capitalism caused. This started as part of the 9/11 events, beginning after the response to the supposed attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. It became immediately clear the US would respond to the attacks with military action against whatever country seemed most vulnerable and had access or proximity to resources, in this case oil. The attacks were supposedly coordinated by al-Qaeda, a radical Islamic group founded by Osama bin Laden and headquartered in Afghanistan. We firmly believed, with documented evidence, that the US attacked Iraq instead even though Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with the attacks. The US wanted control of Iraq because of their large reserves of oil. In fact, they were the second largest oil exporting state at that time.
As soon as the news came of the World Trade Towers being hit, Bruce said that something was fishy. From that time forward Barbara’s political life began. Watching the news was surreal and terrifying. Over and over again, images of the towers collapsing were televised. Talk of war began almost immediately, with George “W” Bush putting the blame on Iraq – with absolutely no proof. What was even more alarming was watching how people reacted to it. So many of them jumped on the bandwagon of war.
Making signs
Shortly after the attack Bruce – who had been a socialist for 30 years – talked Barbara into going to her first demonstration. Together we made signs to bring with us – “No War on Iraq”, “War is not the Answer”. Making the signs was so much fun. We got old cardboard cartons from the grocery stores along with some long lightweight sticks from lumber stores to hold them up. We brainstormed ideas for what to write. Bruce’s signs always had much more content than Barbara’s. Barbara went for the fewer words, the better.
First demonstration
The gathering, or demonstration, was held in Palo Alto, CA, just outside the Stanford University Campus. We had to park our car some distance from the crowd, and Barbara felt self-conscious carrying our signs. A radical political science faculty member, Joel Benin, who was pro-Palestinian, gave an impassioned speech. It was so sane, so true. People around us began chanting and we joined with them – NO WAR – NO WAR. This wasn’t a big demonstration, only a couple of hundred people, but everyone was in agreement that we could see where this drive to war was going, and we wanted to try to stop it. Barbara didn’t fully grasp the full implications of where the US was headed or what would be her involvement in the fight to stop it. Ultimately, that was the beginning of her journey to socialism.
Barbara has already written about much of this in My Journey to Socialism, some of which we’ve quoted here, which began after these attacks. Bruce was so happy to see her waking up.
Attending anti-war demonstrations
We went to anti-war demonstrations in San Francisco and Oakland, chanting “No Blood for Oil”. Many of the demonstrations and meetings were organized by San Francisco ANSWER, an anti-war group formed in San Francisco shortly after 9/11. On March 20, 2003, we marched with tens of thousands of people to protest the war on Iraq that Bush started that very day. We shut down the city. Aside from ANSWER, there seemed to be no large, unified movement to take action against the existing paradigm of US imperialism and capitalism. That is, there was no large movement until the Occupy Wall Street Movement in 2011 which was designed to protest income inequality and the use of influence of money in politics by occupying public spaces.
2004 – 2011 Looking for a Foothold
During this time period, we were searching for the best place for us to fit in and work towards changing the existing capitalist system. We had a book club together, just the two of us. We read and discussed The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Gregg Palast, Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins, The powers That Be, and Who Rules America, both by G. William Domhoff. We met every other week on the weekends for 2 hours. This helped to develop Barbara’s understanding of capitalism.
In 2008 the economic crash hit almost everyone. We each lost ¼ of our savings in our IRA accounts, even though we had our money invested in socially responsible companies. Since this was money we hoped to use to supplement Social Security, this was a very personal wake-up call, not just for us, but for many. Were we witnessing the collapse of capitalism, and its effects on ordinary people?
In 2009 we attended a KPFA townhall meeting. KPFA was our local radio station, representing a mix of New Deal liberals and Social Democrats. They featured people like Amy Goodman, Sasha Lilly, C.S. Soong, and Bonnie Faulkner. At that meeting Bruce spoke about why KPFA is supporting the Democratic Party. When the meeting was over, he was approached by a labor organizer who wanted to start an organization to try to coordinate the public education unions. We stayed with this group for about a year, attending meetings about once a month, but nothing ever came of it, so we left.
Part II – 2011 – 2012 – Turning Point – Occupy
Excitement of General Assemblies:
We were happy to see Occupy San Francisco and Occupy Oakland blossom in October of 2011 which lasted until the spring of 2012. We initially attended assemblies at the amphitheater in Frank Ogawa Plaza, right on the doorstep of Oakland City Hall. In San Francisco they were near the Ferry Building and at the bottom of the financial district.
The General Assembly (GA) meetings in both San Francisco and Oakland were electrifying. There were some extremely skilled facilitators. The GAs met every day and discussed how to regulate the public space that they had occupied and integrate the homeless community, which turned out to be a very difficult task. In San Francisco there were people who rode on a ferry that would stop by and watch the meetings. This was a good way to draw people in. Some of the members of the organizing committee of Occupy led tours around the Occupy camp to combat the propaganda against it.
Shutting Down the Port of Oakland
November 2, 2011, Occupy Oakland coordinated to shut down West Coast ports to make a statement that we would not go back to “business as usual”. The shutdown was a way of protesting the treatment of longshoremen and truck drivers, who were forced to work as independent contractors. They were then fired by port owners EGT and Goldman Sachs for wearing union t-shirts. We marched with 200,000 others from Oscar Grant Plaza to the ports. While the ILWU did not openly support the blockade, the rank and file and many former labor leaders did. Clarence Thomas, secretary/treasurer of the ILWU, was fully committed to this blockade, as he had been for many past blockades. We’ll never forget the power of the first speech we heard from him which began – “I’m Clarence Thomas – the REAL Clarence Thomas”. Jack Heyman, also with the ILWU, was another powerful and persuasive speaker.
The Challenges of the Working Committees
We joined some of the committees, but we noticed there was a real gap in ages in the members. The overwhelming majority of people were in their 20s, with the exception of the Committee for Solidarity with Labor. There were virtually no people in their 30s and 40s and only a handful of people like us in our 50s and 60s. We were both working full time and tried to join committees that would work with our schedules, but the organizers kept changing the days and times of the meetings. It seemed like, at best, most of the Occupy participants worked part-time or might have been upper middle-class people whose schedules were more flexible. The committees were not very solid.
People would float in and out. Any group could start a committee – even conservative committees like those who wanted to work with merchants were allowed. Committees were dissolved without letting the Occupy leadership know so you could join a committee and discover that it no longer existed. We found many of the meetings off-track and with members who didn’t have the basic social skills like asking a person “How are you? How are things going?” They lacked skills for building solidarity with strangers like tracking things a person may have told them and following up with a question like “what’s happening with that project you were working on?” They are skills like showing up to meetings on time and remembering to tell others if a meeting is cancelled. The Occupy movement was the best and the worst of anarchism.
Monday Night Occupy Meetings in the Women’s Building
When the police drove Occupy in SF and Oakland away from Oscar Grant Plaza in Oakland and the area outside the Federal Reserve building in SF the Occupy organizers decided to meet indoors. Speakers were arranged every Monday night to talk on various political and economic topics. On average, 50-75 people attended. We noticed how the cliquishness of Occupy in the public are continued into the events in the Women’s Building in SF. Bruce told Barbara that when he was meeting with the organizers of an economic forum that Barbara was standing by herself. Nobody introduced themselves or tried to introduce themselves. These folks were calling themselves socialists and yet they lacked the most elementary friendliness to others who were on the same page. We decided it was then that we felt we needed to stop trying to join other organizations and start our own.
Part III – History of Socialist PBC
2012 – 2014 Building Political Documents and Our Website
We began to develop our own organizational documents, including a manifesto, mission statement, our attitude towards politics, and developed a political practice. At first that seemed like a lot of work to Barbara, and she also wondered how we would get people to join us. We had many meetings, just the two of us, to hash out the development of our perspective. Our main purpose was to provide a forum for exposing capitalism and spread the word to the public.
In spite of this challenging work, the creation of this site was so much fun. The first area we wanted to cover included telling people who we are and what we’re about. It included our mission statement – which was to become one of many eddies for:
- “Exposing the predatory, incompetent, and irrational practices of capitalists to direct human social life.
- Engage in collective political actions that throw a monkey-wrench into and slow down or disrupt the profit-making mechanisms of the system.
- Weave and expand the fabric of a growing body of workplaces under worker self-management.”
Barbara switched from full-time to part-time work, allowing her more time to work on developing our book clubs that were focused on educating people about the reality of capitalism and the havoc it’s wrecked in the world. From 2012-2014 we tried to do outreach by having in-person book groups.
In April 2014 our first step was to create a website, Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism. Through our Occupy contacts we found a wonderful tech guy named Jeremy who, with our input, created the website that we still have today. Our baby was gestating. It was scary for Barbara to learn how to manage a website. While she had considerable work experience using numerous platforms, managing a website is a whole other ballgame. At a ridiculously low cost, Jeremy built our WordPress site. He patiently showed Barbara the basics and was the best tech teacher we have been able to find since then. He never spoke to her in tech-speak. Sadly, he has disappeared from our lives, even though we’ve tried hard to reach him. Since then, we have struggled to find someone to help us with our site, as well as with social media.
In November 2014 we wrote our first post – titled The Collapse of Capitalism. In it you will see that our economic situation has only gotten worse since then. In addition to all the things we listed, we’re now dealing with the economic fallout of Covid, hyper-inflation, and a rush to war with Russia.
We added a slider at the top of our page that, in addition to The Collapse of Capitalism, included the Personal Impact of Crisis. In that section we asked the question “What caused the crisis?” We gave 4 reasons for this. We then proposed “Making adjustments within the system” asking 6 questions of readers. Finally, we asked the question “Are there alternatives”?
The next section was titled Alternatives to Capitalism. We gave examples of workers’ self-management, workers’ control, and worker cooperatives – all of which currently exist and often are more successful than capitalist businesses.
The next section was titled History of Workers’ Councils so readers could see this is not just an unrealistic pipe dream. There is a 150-year history of worker self-management.
Finally, we included a section titled Local Workplace Democracy that allowed readers to learn about some of the local cooperatives in the US.
On our site we included sections on Our Manifesto, Our Process Politics, Our Mission Statement, Calendar of Radical Events, Submission Guidelines, Films, Books, Our Mythological Story, Our Allies, and Getting Involved.
2014 – 2016 Richard Wolff – Democracy at Work
Around the same time, Richard Wolff, the Marxist political economist, began to give public talks about the crisis in capitalism and workplace democracy as an alternative. In one of our book clubs, we began reading his book, Capitalism Hits the Fan. We attended one of several talks by Wolff and met our soon-to-be comrade, K.J. Noh, who was petitioning for some local cause. We asked him to join our book group and he did, adding an international perspective from his own personal experience of growing up in South Korea. We also discovered he was an extraordinary writer. We cited some of his publications on our site. One of the best was “The Economic Myths of Santa Claus“, published in CounterPunch on Christmas day, 2014.
After a year in our book clubs, which drew between 4 and 6 people, K.J. said to us that the book clubs really were not the way to go in this day and age. He said we needed an electronic presence. He recommended 3 newsletters we could write for and said our focus must be international in order to keep his interest. We followed his suggestions, and our website and FB page likes grew.
We also became involved with Richard Wolff’s Democracy at Work project in 2014. This was an organization developed by Richard Wolff that had chapters in numerous cities and states to support and teach people about the theory and viability of worker cooperatives to combat capitalism by democratizing our workplaces. People were either encouraged to study cooperatives, provide educational forums for cooperatives, or even start a cooperative.
Why We Left Democracy at Work
We discovered that Democracy at Work was very loose in its structure. People like us who were long-time socialists were mixed in with people who neither cared nor knew nothing about socialism, and simply wanted to start a small business. Many of the groups throughout the country were uneven in terms of their commitments and we were disappointed that Rick did not take a firmer stand in directing what we were doing. In fact, the management of these groups was left to someone else, and Rick had very little engagement with the groups.
2016-2022 Coming into Our Own
Social Media Ups and Downs – FB and Twitter
Since Jeremy set up our website, we have had consistent problems finding someone to help us. Jeremy was so good at explaining things clearly, teaching us how to create posts and perspectives, add to our pages and change our images. Since that time – in 2014, Barbara has mostly figured stuff out on her own and has become our house techie. WordPress is not a user-friendly platform and learning how to manage it is not obvious or intuitive. We need a professional, who we’ve only recently found, who can help us navigate that.
Someone who earlier helped us enormously was Sameer, who lived close to us in Oakland. He was also great at explaining things in non-tech speak. However, he’s moved on to bigger and more lucrative projects. We’ve since discovered that it’s very hard for technical experts to be able to communicate to non-experts in an understandable way what they’re trying to do – or trying to teach us to do.
Sameer introduced us to Susan Tenby in 2016 – who was able to help us with our social media. She taught us how to make our Facebook and Twitter pages more visible and appealing. We are so lucky to have found Susan. We were a small, community organization trying to get our message out. When we started working with Susan our visibility was very low. Susan did a comprehensive audit of where our social media stood when we started working with her and helped us track its rapid change. We were not getting a whole lot of attention on our website or through our social media. She gave us a crash course on how to turn that around and in a very short period of time our visibility skyrocketed. Each session with her was packed with techniques and ideas we never would have known about. She’s also terrific at adapting to each individual’s learning style.
Susan also introduced us to Colleen Nagel, an SEO expert and digital marketing. These terms were completely unfamiliar to us. SEO means Search Engine Optimization and is the process used to optimize a website’s technical configuration, content relevance and link popularity so its pages can become easily searchable, more relevant, and popular, and as a consequence, search engines rank them better. In other words, it’s the process of making a website better for search engines, like Google. We began to understand how to make more sense of our analytics, although we’re still struggling to figure out WHY our followers like some of our posts and tweets better than others.
Where we needed help was in translating the analytics into verbal meaning. The deeper step, after understanding what these numbers mean, was to understand the causal dynamics which produce an increase or decrease in viewers and attention span. The next step was to develop a plan for increasing the number of followers after we were able to analyze what’s actually happened up to then. We never felt that we got that help
All of this cost money, of which we didn’t have a lot. We have never asked for donations or “supporters” for our site. Barbara’s income at that time consisted of a small retirement fund, Social Security, and a modest IRA. Bruce worked as an adjunct faculty member. As he’s written in his article “Capitalist Economic Violence Against Road Scholars: Now You’re Hired, Now You’re Not” his income was never completely stable and, of course, they paid adjuncts at a much lower rate than they paid faculty. In fact, today there are adjuncts who are living in their cars because they can’t afford to pay rent. We simply couldn’t afford to pay what Colleen was charging.
We then moved on to 2 more people whose entire focus was to install SEO optics. While we got some help from this, we found that both of them explained things in tech-speak and were not easy to communicate with.
Finally, we tried working with Liz and her sister. Liz was an editor of one of Bruce’s books and claimed to have some technical skills. But she didn’t have a Mac like we do and was not good at explaining things so that wasn’t much help. Her sister did have a Mac and was good at explaining things but worked full time, had small kids and was erratic in her response time.
Flying High
Between 2014 and 2016 we worked hard on learning how to get our message out through Facebook and Twitter. We learned how to “boost” our articles, Facebook’s language for paying them to promote it. We were able to select what type of audience we were trying to reach and where they were likely to be geographically. As we started to boost articles either we or one of our comrades had written, we began getting a lot more attention on Facebook. Our Facebook boosted posts for our articles ranged from 5,000 to 10,000 readers. A couple of them reached 20,000. Between 2016 and 2019 we were getting about 1,000 page likes a year, reaching thousands of people each week. At that point we had gained a total of 3,400 page likes.
Twitter was much slower to get off the ground. We began to understand the importance of hashtags and which hashtags were more likely to get attention. We also came to see the importance of liking, commenting on and retweeting the tweets of people who were following us. Our followers have increased steadily since we’ve been doing this. However, we still lag behind the attention we were getting on Facebook, and we would like to understand why.
Facebook Attempts to Clip Our Wings
In early 2020 Facebook stopped allowing us to boost our articles. The reason they gave was that since we are posting “political content” we must be registered as a political organization with the IRS. As you can imagine, we did not want to do that. When Facebook first started doing this, we were able to mount arguments that not all of our articles were, in fact, political. Well, of course they were, but not “political” in the way they were framing it. After a while, they simply stopped allowing us to boost them at all, no matter what our argument was. About the same time, we noticed that our typical daily reach (how many people saw the article) was shrinking dramatically. Whereas our daily reach used to be in the thousands, they are now in the hundreds. The same thing has happened with our engagements (how many people actually look at our post or click on a link we’ve provided) Our total page likes have gone from an average of 30 a month to less than 10. That’s because the only people who see our posts are the ones who have already liked our page! Our reach now is about one third of what it used to be. We have read that the same dramatic drop happened to World Socialist Website, The Greanville Post, and many other socialist sites.
Our Work Schedules for PBC
Since the very beginning, we each put in a minimum of 15 hours a week, often more, including Saturdays and Sundays. We have 2-hour weekly meetings to discuss what we’ve done during the week and what we want to do for the coming week. We give ourselves “homework”, then report in on the results of that homework at our weekly meetings. We jokingly call these meetings, our “Central Committee” meetings.
We write almost all of our own articles. After editing them and finding images for them we publish them and then also send them to other websites for publication. We have tried to find other comrades to write articles for publication for us also. We wanted to be able to include authors on our site beyond just the two of us. While we did, in fact, get a few people to write for us, it often required a lot of work on our part to help them frame their work. Of course, we did all editing the articles. We publish an average of one article every three weeks.
For our daily posts, every morning Bruce searches for an article online from a number of trusted sources, that usually focuses on the decay of capitalism. We also want very much to spread the word of the success of worker-owned cooperatives to the public. This lets them see that there is a way to work other than for “the man” and create a new society. He writes a post about the article, finds an image to go with it, and then sends it to Barbara. Barbara edits his post, puts it up on our site and shares it to FB and Twitter. We then share that article to our Facebook groups.
We have been doing all of this every day, every week, every month since we began our electronic outreach. This is a joy for us. We call Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism “our baby”. She’s now almost 10 years old and stable. She will be thriving when we can get the technical and social media support we need. When people ask us if we’re retired, we start laughing. Barbara always says she’s working harder than she ever did, she just doesn’t get paid for it! There are few things we would rather spend our time on than Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism.
Thank you for reading our history, and please consider joining us by reading and sharing our articles and posts. Together we are strong. Together we can change the world.
The post Bringing our Socialist Baby to Life: History of Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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As you know, I have other gigs, other ways to express ideas, and construct my own analysis in my own life. Experiences turned into philosophy. Or, anti-philosophy to invent self.
This piece is in the local rag, again, Newport, Lincoln County, Oregon. On the coast. (see story/Op-ed below — Newport News Times.)
Yes, the world is a microcosm in places wherever you find yourself, if you are willing to explore how universality is a common thread for most people, excluding the elites and rich and super-rich and sociopaths in those classes as well as down and dirty people born from a bad seed or with the evil encased in DNA. If you are willing to believe that not all humanity and all cultures frame their needs and wants and goals the same, but that we mostly want peace, prosperity, justice and a safe, clean, working world.
You can look at, say, Israel, and see that that apartheid state, that colony, well, the roots are there to apply the same sort of overall logic of oppression and land theft and human subjugation we see in the White United States of America. Imagine, ripping land away from people — Original Peoples — and then creating a policy of civilian (white) patrols and military patrols as part of an eradication policy to rid people of their ancestral land, but to rid the people altogether. Call it Indian Removal, Pacification or Assimulation, but like modern day “Israel,” the policy then was to remove people from being. From a future. From their right to travel freely. The system then got legalized, full of the lies of governments breaking treaties (all of them) to facilitate Manifest Destiny and Expansion for the rich. Those sociopaths I allude to above!
Now, again, more patronizing “month” number 12 to give lip service to Black people of this land. Black History Month now, in a time of right-wing hate of alternative (real) history and overall white disgust for the lives of Blacks now and Blacks then. This month of Netflix Black specials and other lip service fandangos seem like another blip on the screen of this out and out systemic and over hatred of people questioning their place here.
Black Lives Matter — the movement — was better than, well, nothing, and, sure, capitalism and egoism did take it down the ugly road of cooption and Hollywoodization. But. Yes, police are murderers, and so is the military, and then, defacto, we as taxpayers and citizens are part of that murder inc. See-speak-hear-rebuff no evil? Amerikkkaaah.
Then, this concept of wanting a campus with some semblance of “pacification” makes sense in this time of outright bigotry. Cancel Culture is an outgrowth of the fear porn Media have served up. Ivory Tower pencil necks, many of them in the Chosen Few class, they have messed up college, for sure. Bowing to elites, to the professional managerial class, and then fawning the super-stars of Capitalism, well, that’s the new normal for millions.
But throwing out the babies with the bathwater, that is the new normal with blogs, podcasts, YouTube shows, and infinite blathering on Instagram and TikTok lambasting everything tied to liberalism, to socialism, to a new way forward.
If you were to come back from the dead, say, dead in 1957, there would be an amazing schizophrenia buzzing in your head with all of the noise, the digital dimwit traffic, all of it, bombarding you dead sucker each second of the resurrection. To believe universities would not be subject to virtue signaling and cancel culturing, and to believe that snowflake making would not be the outgrowth of this dastardly warring, mean, racist society, that is, if you don’t get cause and effect, the why and how, then you have had to have lived in a toxic bubble of echo after echo of your own malfeasance.
What is good about Black Empowerment and Black History is certainly demonstrated by folks over at Hood Communist and Black Agenda Report, to name just a few. Black Alliance for Peace is another group. But most people do not tie into those sites, those thinkers on those sites.
The problem is that in USA, everything is turned into celebrity fawning or celebrity denigrating. Of course, Whoopi Goldberg is too rich and too stupid to understand what she was attempting to say on that stupid show about the Holocaust not being about race. She gets suspended for two weeks. Bizarre. All of it. The fact I am writing about it!
Of course, we have endless prattling and war mongering from African Americans, who should know what their place has been in the eyes of all administrations, even the one with the mixed race Obama. Blacks do not live in a democracy, and Biden is a racist, and, the systems in this country are against Black empowerment. And, yes, against worker empowerment. Against all people of color and those whites, too.
What passes for leadership is always a joke played upon Black people. The high water mark of the CBC being the “conscience of the congress” is long gone. No one can look to them on the issue of Ukraine or anything else. The people must restore the historical Black radical consensus as a matter of survival. —
“It all makes sense” that in 2022, with the fear porn of billionaires and millionaires holding a thousand axes above our heads, those of us in the 80 Percent Class, with the Holly-Dirt engine of triple lies, with the Media in bed with the Deep-Shallow-Military State, with lab coat-wearing billionaires getting platforms to yammer on and on about universal yearly vaccinations for everything on planet earth; with the world going digital before our very eyes, with privatization on steroids; with a world so confused and dazed it collapses every minute; and with the gear work of the slick and $2000 an hour racists working their magic to get the masses, the working class, the middle class, all lathered up and hateful against youth, the old, the homeless, BIPOC, educated, uneducated, sick, worn down, poor, all of this and more, as I say, it all makes sense that we are on a collision course of lack of solidarity. Big Time.
Try talking sense to anyone, and the conversation ends up spiraling into a cesspool of, well, Americana Amnesia. Americans the Children. Americans the Red-White-Blue Consumers. Americans the Nanny-Held Citizens. All those Americans Making a Buck Anyway Possible. A Little Bit of Poison in Air-Water-Soil-Food? The price to pay for capitalism. Capitalism with a big C for CANCER.
Remember, mostly, though, this America was created by religious zealots, by profiteers, mercenaries, Christian extremists, racists, superstition peddlers, peddling PR and smear and lies with a sucker is born every minute snake oil and poison gruel for children ethos.
Capitalism is the outgrowth of that theft of land and deployment of slaves to till the land, plant the crops, harvest the cotton, etc., etc.
Black History Month My Ass! We need daily rolling strikes. Shut them down, these planned pandemic psychopaths. Shut down these hoarders, these Bezos Yacht Boys. Shut the Musk Military Magic down. All of them need to be, well, you know, Exterminate All THOSE Brutes!
Black History Month Through the Eye of the Needle
It’s an adage by P.T. Barnum: “A sucker is born every minute.” In the USA, there are so many suckers now who don’t know their country’s history. It takes people from other countries to give them our history lessons.
When it comes to the struggles of Latinos, Asians, Native Americans and African-Americans, the racist systems in place – even in 2022 – work to continue making Americans more ignorant.
I’ve been teaching for going on 50 years. I’ve mentored many in community colleges, universities, K12, special programs for gifted and talented, gang intervention projects, refugee centers, military compounds, prisons, and homeless programs.
In a public arena where debate should take place by deploying critical thinking and rhetorical skills, most people who espouse banning books, who have no idea what the history of the USA is through the eyes of minorities or women, and who have no clue about other countries, I find can’t hold onto their prejudices and biases when up against smart, schooled and experienced debaters.
I’ve had many a run-in and debate with racists, sexists, and bigots. One thing they have in common is fear permeated with an undeserved sense of entitlement.
We’ve reached a point in the USA where dumb-downing vis-à-vis superficiality, lack of reading, a disregard for community engagement, and all that poisonous influence of “entertainment” consumed have created a large section of Americans who have zero concept of the power to change.
There is no doubt this country is based on exploitation, land theft, breaking every treaty signed with the First Nations tribes. This is a country that rose to success through slave labor – black slave labor. This is a country determined to expand by hook or by crook through Manifest Destiny and Imperial overreach.
It’s not to say other countries do not have these damning elements to their pasts. The point is, though, Americans are in a paradigm shift of consciousness. Black History Month is just one of many “months” or weeks to rethink bad history, lies and propaganda perpetrated by the dominant race. Native American Heritage Month and banned book week are two topics I have explored here.
The issue at hand is, of course, February’s Black History Month. The work of researchers, internationally-traveled writers, educators, philosophers, anthropologists and sociologists is solid around this emerging history.
There is no Critical Race Theory conspiracy to denigrate the “white race.”
Paul Robeson — singer, athlete, actor, and, socialist Black man — stated: “My father was a slave and my people died to build this country and I am going to stay here and have a part of it just like you…. The answer to injustice is not to silence the critic but to end the injustice.”
I consider Black intellectual, Cornel West, a friend, and I’ve marched with him in Seattle during Occupy Seattle. At Green River College, where I taught, we filled an auditorium with people wanting to hear him. I’ve written a story on him.
He’s smart, Christian, ministerial, deep into music, a writer and a public thinker. He is not a fan of Obama, Bush, Biden, Trump or Clinton. I know no person who is an avowed racist, white supremacist, or on a spectrum of angry history-denying white person I have taught and counseled who really could argue themselves out of a paper bag when faced with anti-racists. Think of anti-racists like Angela Davis (writer, Black Panther, educator) or Raoul Peck (filmmaker of HBO’s “Exterminate All the Brutes”) or Gary Howard (“We Can’t Teach What We Don’t Know: White Teachers, Multiracial Schools”).
I’ve been in Gary’s diversity workshops in Tacoma, and I have been in trainings with others, like Brown Eagle with Spokane’s Medicine Wheel Academy. I’ve worked with Winona LaDuke and have been a counselor for African-American ex-New Orleans Saints Toussaint Tyler.
Everywhere I have lived, worked and taught at I’ve found myself in a milieu of learning about other people: people that historians have lied about, that is, those whose ability to be humans and citizens in this country has been systematically thwarted through vicious systems of oppression. List some of them as sundown laws, red lining and overt racism and lynching.
When I taught mostly white students at Gonzaga University, many had never known the story of Emmett Till, the boy who was murdered by racists, and whose body was dumped in a river with a cotton gin fan wrapped around his neck.
His mother had an open casket funeral attended by thousands in Chicago. He was kidnapped, shot and disfigured by white guys because of a “wolf whistle” directed at one of the cracker’s wives. They got off free. However, with so much entitlement, they were paid for a magazine article and admitted to torturing and killing the 14-year-old Emmett August 28, 1955.
The entire world heard about Emmett’s case. His disfigured face was photographed by dozens of journalists. His murder by racist whites in Mississippi kick-started the civil rights movement, even before Rosa Parks refused to sit at the back of the bus.
I was 19 years old when President Ford officially recognized Black History Month in 1976. Plain old white guy Gerald Ford stated he wanted all Americans to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”
This was a no-brainer for me. My old man, in the Army for 32 years, recounted how three of his servicemen were refused food in Kentucky. That eatery then became off-limits for soldiers. There was a big movement to list all other places that refused service to Blacks, Latinos, Asians and Native Americans.
That was before I was born. It’s great to have these celebrations for Blacks’ accomplishments, but really, overlooked and denied now is the price African Americans have paid to reach their aims. Sometimes these struggles to live, work, vote, and excel were set into stone by racist courts, racist businesses, and racist communities.
Change is always in the wind. Let’s hope more Americans get smart sooner than later. People live their histories. Listen to them.
The post To the Victor Go the Spoils first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Why Sylvia MattersHow many of you about to read this have heard of Sylvia Pankhurst? Our guess is, not many. She seems to have fallen through the cracks of socialist and suffragette movement literature. Her mother, Emmeline Pankhurst and sister, Christabel Pankhurst are still looked up to as leaders in the suffragette movement. What is overlooked is the fact that they only supported suffrage for women who had property. This, of course, completely eliminates women in the working class and women who are poor. Sylvia, on the other hand, devoted her life to supporting those women and giving them a voice. We find it ironic that Emmeline and Christabel were considered rebels even though later in life both became pro-war, conservative and religious fundamentalists. However, it was Sylvia who was the true revolutionary. Her name and work should become familiar to all socialists, and especially feminist socialists. Sylvia is an important woman to know about for all women – and men – who want to learn about the history of significant women in the struggle for socialism and women’s equality.
Sylvia lived a life of courage, strength, and conviction. Born in 1882 into an upper middle-class family in Manchester, England, her parents were founding members of the Independent Labor Party. Both Richard and Emmeline Pankhurst were firm supporters of women’s rights. Sylvia grew up attending public talks, demonstrations and surrounded by friends of her parents who were considered radicals.
We learned all this from reading Rachel Holmes’s book Natural Born Rebel: Sylvia Pankhurst.
Political Work
In her long years as a socialist and feminist she never stopped working, whether in the arts or in politics. Her early years until the Russian Revolution were dominated by the Suffrage movement. After the Russian Revolution she devoted herself strictly to socialism and supported the Russian Revolution for the first four years. However, she ultimately split with Lenin over his reinstitution of a partly capitalist economy. Sylvia became associated with the Soviets, or workers’ councils, and advocated for them as political bodies over parliaments. She opposed fascism in both the 1920s and 1930s and supported Ethiopia against both Italian and English imperialism.
Sylvia moved to Bow in the East End of London in 1912 when she was 30, a traditionally working-class neighborhood. It was here that she set up the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). Emmeline and Christabel did not approve. She did many things to support working women and women whose husbands were away at war. She established a café that was free, called Cost Price Restaurant. She also put women to work by organizing a cooperative toy factory. She established The Mother’s Arms, a school for toddlers whose mothers were working. At this school the children were taught according to the Montessori method. When the children arrived in the morning in dirty and torn clothing, they would be given uniforms to wear while their clothes were washed and mended.
Sylvia was extremely imaginative in her strategies and tactics in agitating and organizing as a suffragette. She regularly gave public talks and handed out pamphlets, often on the streets, agitating and encouraging women to fight back against the oppressive system in which they lived. She marched in more demonstrations than she could count. In fact, she said later in life that she didn’t like to go on walks unless they were marches of protest. She constantly outfoxed the police who tried to shut these events down and arrest her, smuggling herself into meetings where she was banned. She hid inside furniture, and impersonated a pregnant woman by stuffing newspapers down her dress. She was full of surprises.
Sylvia was arrested 15 times in her life campaigning for the rights of women. It’s been said that the 19th century – extending into the early 20th century – was the century of the penitentiary. Over one 18-month period she was imprisoned 13 times. This had adverse effects on her health throughout her life. In fact, it’s remarkable that she lived to be 78. The first time Sylvia was arrested, for yelling and causing a ruckus in court in defense of other women being sentenced in 1906, when she was only 24, she was placed in the harshest division, the third division. In the third division the women were denied their own clothing, reading, and writing materials, and were fed rotten food. She endured torture through force-feeding because of her fasting as a means of rebellion. All of this changed her life – physically and politically.
She took part in demonstrations where women were dragged down side streets, beaten up, and sexually assaulted by the police, as they were on Black Friday, November 18, 1910. In 1913 the government passed a bill called Temporary Discharge for Ill Health because they feared that too many women would die, turning the public against them. The suffragettes called this bill “The Cat and Mouse Act”. They were released on the terms that they would be returned to prison when they had regained their strength. However, most of them went to “safe houses” till they were stronger, then promptly returned to militancy. They were awarded medals by other suffragettes when they were released which they wore with pride. Emmeline was never subjected to force-feeding because she was too high-profile among the middle and upper-middle classes. Sylvia was subjected to it repeatedly.
Sylvia had constant fights with her mother and sister over her desire to combine feminism with work in the Labor Party. As a result, she was driven to the margins of the suffragette movement in Britain. The gap between she, her sister and her mother widened when she campaigned against British involvement in World War I. The differences became an abyss when Sylvia supported the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution.
As early as 1921, Sylvia understood the dangers of fascism and though her involvement in socialist parties waned, she was a life-long fighter against fascism. During the 1930s she became involved in the cause of Ethiopia and its fight against Italian fascism. She defended Ethiopia against all imperialist stirrings, including that of Great Britain. By the end of 1950s, with her 30-year soulmate Silvio Corio dead and constant harassment from the British government, there wasn’t much left for her in England. She was invited by the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie to move to Ethiopia. She spent the last four years of her life there involved in plans for improving their educational and health care systems. She was beloved by Ethiopians and when she died in 1960 she was honored and buried along with all the other Ethiopian fighters against fascism.
Skill in the arts
She was multi-talented in the creative arts. She was a good enough artist to receive a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in 1900. Her drawings and paintings were rooted in the experience of the working class. She created portraits of workers both on and off the job, as well as of women in prison. She used her skills to design leaflets, posters and banners for up-coming protests and strikes. She was conflicted throughout her life about whether or not to focus on her art or to focus on her political activism. In fact, she managed to incorporate both into her work.
She also wrote plays and as she got older, she wrote mammoth sized books on the suffragette movement as well as the cultural history of Ethiopia. She regularly wrote articles for her own and other publications. The first newsletter she published after she moved to the East End of London was the Women’s Dreadnought, which later became the Worker’s Dreadnought. The tile came from a type of rope with a knot at the end of it that women used to protect themselves from attacks by the police and others during demonstrations.
Personal Life
Sylvia’s father, Richard was a radical lawyer whom she loved dearly and who was a significant influence in her life. Her father gave her a great deal of intellectual support and their home was filled with books along with a revolving door of guests from all kinds of social movements. He was a suffragette from before Sylvia was born. Her father was an atheist. He led Sylvia to agnosticism through reading and rational argument. She later became an atheist as well. She met Eleanor Marx, Wilhelm Liebknecht, many revolutionaries, and radicals, and listened to discussions on Fabianism, socialism, and Marxism in their home.
Sylvia’s relationship with her mother and older sister was stormy from early on. She spent many long years trying to gain her mother’s approval despite their deep political differences during and after the Russian Revolution.
Sylvia had two major loves in her life. The first was a long affair with socialist Keir Hardie that lasted for about 15 years. Hardie was committed to staying with his wife, and Sylvia grew impatient with his being on the road constantly and his affairs with other women. They were great political collaborators when they worked together and Hardie looked after her when he was in town. He was probably her greatest political influence. However, she had to keep their love for each other secret from the rest of the world. Her second major love was an Italian anarchist named Silvio Corio. Silvio moved in with her and supported her work during the 30 years they were together. He cooked, did carpentry, and they collaborated in the production of newspapers Sylvia founded and wrote for. They never married but had a child, Richard Pankhurst, born in 1927.
Shortcomings
Sylvia had many of the quirks that are all too typical of socialists. Her eating habits were terrible and erratic until Silvio started cooking. Her clothes were terribly out of date, and she walked around at times with her blouses inside out. She did not have good boundaries and she went to prison too many times for her to not pay for it with her health. In spite of plenty of positive feedback from all those whom she encountered throughout her life, Sylvia wasted way too much time trying to get her mother’s and sister’s approval. We found ourselves hoping for her mother to die so Sylvia would stop obsessing about her. Despite that, she charmed everyone and her house in East London was a popular watering hole for socialists and Pan Africanists. She created in her home a similar atmosphere as her father Richard created for her growing up.
In reading her biography, we realized we have mixed feelings about her. There are obviously things we love about her. We love her move towards socialism and even militancy. Her refusal to remain attached to the original suffragette mantra or votes for middle and upper-middle class women took tremendous courage, particularly as it meant going against what her mother and older sister promoted. She steadfastly rejected the institution of marriage, and while she had two great loves in her life she never married. She was brave to have a child out of wedlock in moralistic Britain in 1927. Her artistic skills and how she used them in the service of promoting issues she valued were considerable. She had the ability to move people and be persuasive with her speeches. Her speech impediment, which made her pronounce her ‘r’s as ‘w’s – she talked about “wevolution” and the “misewies of the industwial worker”, only made her more human and lovable. She was an excellent, indefatigable writer, and spread the value of socialism and equality in her own publications and those of others. Her relationship with her son, Richard was a strong one, and she led by example, helping him to grow into as much of an activist as she was. She even went on Richard’s honeymoon with his wife Rita (with Rita’s permission). They moved with her to Ethiopia and are all buried in the same sacred place in Ethiopia.
We also were impatient with the amount of time Sylvia spent focusing on the suffragette movement before she moved closer to socialism and anti-militarism. While she supported the working and lower classes, she did not spend time systemically organizing the entire working class, not just women. Even though she knew socialists like Eleanor Marx, Karl Liebknecht,
Alexandra Kollontai, Rosa Luxembourg, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn she never committed fully to being part of a socialist organization after she lost interest in the Russian Revolution. Instead, she wasted her time dogging the likes of Winston Churchill, writing letters, and sending petitions for change in parliament. What does this have to do with socialism? Britain has consistently proven itself to be extremely conservative and reactionary. Why couldn’t she understand that?
Finally, her insistence on going on hunger strikes, water strikes, even sleep strikes while in prison – all of which ruined her health, was hard to read. This, to us, smacks of martyrdom. We believe that in order to be effective in creating change, the individual must take care of themselves. It’s much more difficult to lead a revolution if you are strong in spirit but weak in flesh.
Quality of the book
Size of the book
Sylvia Pankhurst had a long and eventful life, so it is understandable that her biography would be a big book. What do we mean by big? Between 400-600 pages. Rachel Holmes’ book is 976 pages. There is just too much unnecessary detail, such as the names of every person she engaged with and every event she took part in. One of us had to have her book broken down and bound into 3 separate books so she could more easily hold it.
Jumping around within a single chapter
A second problem is that the chapters don’t stick with simple chronology. For example, a chapter roughly covering the period of 1917-1918 will have references to events that happened ten years before and 10 years after. We were constantly trying to figure out exactly what period the author was describing.
Lack of structure within or across chapters
When we read, we like to see the skeleton of a chapter in the form of subheadings that are clear and not cutesy. In other words, within a 20-page chapter there might be five subheadings. That way, before reading the chapter we tie the subheadings together so we can say to ourselves, “Ah – so this is where this is going”. There was none of that.
We also would have really appreciated a list of her milestones – bullet points of years and events that might cover 3 or 4 pages. Is it too much to ask to be given a map before beginning the journey? We don’t like mysteries. We want to know where we are going to determine if we want to go there at all.
The distribution of focus
We felt there was way too much time spent on the suffragette movement for the first half or more of the book. We also felt there was too much time spent on Sylvia’s relationship with her mother and sister. We found it surprising that the life of Sylvia’s romantic companion of thirty years, Silvio, was given so little time. Lastly, Sylvia’s relationship with socialism was essentially dropped after about 1927. Surely Sylvia has opinions about what became of the Soviet Union. What did she think about the Spanish Civil War and the anarchist collectives and the workers councils in Spain which lasted for 3 years and involved millions of people? Would she not care about worker self-organization which was like the Soviets on a much grander scale? How she might have felt about Khrushchev’s revelations?
In spite of these criticisms Rachel Holmes is a good writer and kept us engaged. We were very happy and pleased to learn about the life of a wonderful heartful revolutionary as Sylvia Pankhurst. She was, indeed, a natural born rebel.
The post Renaissance Woman Sylvia Pankhurst: Feminist, Artist, Council Communist, Anti-Imperialist first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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A year ago, it seemed possible that the country might get its first truly positive immigration reform since the 1986 “Reagan amnesty.”
The incoming Biden administration was proposing legislation that would allow most of the country’s 10 to 11 million undocumented immigrants to apply for legal status. The outlines were subsequently included in the Build Back Better bill, but the Democrats had to pare the reform back in order to win approval from the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, under the arcane Senate reconciliation process. The Democrats’ most recent proposal was just a limited parole for some 6.5 million immigrants, and even that concession wasn’t enough for MacDonough. She nixed the plan on December 16.
This latest setback for immigration reform came little more than a week after the Biden administration restarted one of Donald Trump’s most vicious anti-immigrant policies, the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), better known as “Remain in Mexico.” President Biden terminated the program in January but bowed to an August federal court order to restore it. MPP forced tens of thousands of asylum seekers to stay in dangerous areas of northern Mexico; human rights organizations reported more than 1,500 crimes against these asylum seekers under Trump.
Meanwhile, the White House has continued another Trump policy on its own — the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of would-be migrants under Title 42 of the U.S. health code. And on December 16, the administration withdrew from negotiations to settle lawsuits brought by migrant families separated under the Trump administration. The move seemed to be a response to unhinged criticism from right-wing politicians and media.
2021 didn’t bring anything like the progress many immigrants and their allies were hoping for. But sustained grassroots organizing could turn the situation around in 2022.
Collective Action
The failure to win reform this year certainly isn’t the fault of the immigrant rights movement. Through steady organizing and mass actions like the 2006 “Day Without an Immigrant” protests, immigrant activists have built up popular support to the point where a majority of likely voters now support a legalization for most of the undocumented. It’s unlikely that the Biden administration would have included a progressive immigration proposal in its agenda without the years of activism by immigrants themselves.
Democratic centrists definitely deserve their share of the blame. But even an actually progressive Democratic Party would have faced major obstacles in the current state of the U.S. political system, with its anachronistic electoral procedures, a Congress bound by obscure rules and traditions, a judicial system packed with reactionary judges and a political class corrupted by barely disguised bribes from the superrich.
Under these conditions, even moderate and popular demands can’t be won through elections alone, whether they concern global issues like climate change or specifically U.S. issues like gun-control measures. The country faces an impasse that can only be addressed through a strong social movement, one as broad and militant as the labor movement of the 1930s and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Progressive politicians themselves acknowledge this. In a joint interview with Noam Chomsky on the Laura Flanders Show in October, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) emphasized the need to “reengage our capacities outside our electoral system, whether it’s withholding labor or other sorts of grassroots actions.” She noted that “there is a point of collective action that becomes too difficult for the ruling class to ignore, because it then starts to threaten their legitimacy.”
An Injury to One
There’s already a wide area of agreement among progressives which can serve as a minimum program for such a movement. One example is Bernie Sanders’s list of priorities in what he calls the “fight for economic, racial, social and environmental justice for all.” The political class tends to dismiss Sanders’s proposals as too radical, and yet the Vermont senator remains one of the nation’s most popular politicians, far more popular than right-wingers like former President Trump.
While undocumented immigrants only represent 3 percent of the U.S. population, they are far more important to U.S. society than their numbers indicate. Undocumented workers make up about 4.6 percent of the country’s labor force and account for more than 20 percent of the employees in many low-wage construction and service jobs. Some 5.5 million undocumented workers are employed in sectors the U.S. government has designated as “essential.” The undocumented also play a major role in their communities. About 16.7 million U.S. residents, nearly half of them citizens, have at least one undocumented family member living with them; in New York City alone, some 1 million people — 12 percent of the city’s total population — live with one or more undocumented immigrants.
Lack of legal status is harmful for the undocumented themselves and their families, but many others are also impacted. The lack of labor protections reduces wages for unauthorized workers — by some 11.5 percent, according to one estimate — but it also creates a drag on wages for other workers in the same occupations. Denying the undocumented affordable health care endangers the rest of the population; the pandemic has been a powerful reminder that viruses and bacteria don’t check immigration status as they spread from person to person. And the constant threat of deportation creates emotional and psychological stress not just for the immigrants and those close to them, but also for the communities that rely on their labor, on the small businesses they run, on their help in health care and home care, and on other services they provide.
These secondary effects of keeping millions of people out of legal status constitute a perfect illustration of the old Wobbly slogan: “An injury to one is an injury to all.”
Countering the Xenophobia
The greatest injury lies in the rulers’ use of anti-immigrant fervor to keep working people, both recent arrivals and those born here, from uniting in their own interests.
Throughout U.S. history, working people have been held down by their own prejudices, including xenophobia. It has plagued the country since colonial times, and it operates in tandem with racism. Most immigrants in recent decades have been people of color, including Black people, who suffer from even worse treatment than other migrants. But with immigrants, racists don’t need to disguise their racism with code words and dog whistles: popular discourse already vilifies immigrants as “aliens” and “illegals.” Thus, Fox News host Tucker Carlson only gets a slap on the wrist when he rants that immigration “makes our country poorer and dirtier.” Donald Trump feels free to call the presence of immigrants an “invasion,” clearing the way for a fellow bigot to gun down 22 “invaders” as they tried to shop in a Texas Walmart.
Right-wing politicians and media understand the power of this rhetoric. They knew what they were doing when they spent most of 2021 promoting a fictional “border crisis” to distract their audience from the year’s actual crises: the ongoing pandemic, climate-related disasters and Trump’s bungled self-coup.
Prospects for a progressive mass movement remain good, despite the setbacks in recent months. The potential was visible when millions of people took to the streets in the 2020 Black Lives Matters demonstrations, the largest series of protests in the country’s history. But movement-building requires the hard work of educating and organizing, and this can’t be done without directly countering xenophobia, without recognizing that immigrants and their rights are an integral part of the struggle.
Immigrant rights groups will continue to focus on legalization. “New year, same opportunity to deliver citizenship to millions of undocumented folks,” United We Dream, a large youth-based advocacy organization, tweeted on January 1. But immigrant activists also “understand that our progressive visions are interconnected,” the group’s Greisa Martínez Rosas noted in a January 6 press release.
A January 5 op-ed by Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Voces de la Frontera, a low-wage and immigrant worker center in Wisconsin, presented a similar perspective. Neumann-Ortiz outlined a strategy that combines grassroots electoral work with workplace organizing, utilizing both “strategic alliances” and “the power of the strike.” She emphasized the importance of linking “the immigrant rights movement with climate justice, labor and anti-poverty movements. More solidarity is needed to advance a bold progressive national agenda.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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The world is in a period of global unrest. Since the financial crisis of 2008, every region of the globe has experienced levels of mass protest unprecedented in recent history, from the Arab Spring in the Middle East and Black Lives Matter in the U.S., to the farmers’ protests in India and the recent upheaval in Kazakhstan.
Yet decades of social movement struggle haven’t produced a break from capitalist domination, and in most places they have failed to even accomplish the more modest aims of reform. Meanwhile, the global climate crisis has added another layer of urgency to the task of social transformation.
What can past struggles teach us about the possibility of achieving a liberated world? In this interview with Truthout, Gareth Dale, co-editor of Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age, explains how his new volume attempts to answer this question by examining “revolts in the neoliberal era that … give glimpses of radically transformative potential.”
Anton Woronczuk: Why should the left study unsuccessful attempts to transform society?
Gareth Dale: A question that has exercised parts of the left is how will global capitalism meet its end: by destroying the conditions that enable complex social life or through radical social transformation? The latter is clearly preferable, however unlikely it currently appears. If we’re ever to see socialist revolutions, they will arise from situations of dual power, in which institutions centered among workers and oppressed communities challenge the established structures of domination at every level, from workplaces and neighborhoods up to the nation state and globally.
Such scenarios are rare, but their condition of possibility is the mass uprising. Even the revolts in the neoliberal era that we discuss in this volume give glimpses of radically transformative potential. And when they’re crushed or co-opted and contained, when the rehearsals become reversals, even then, some participants will have gained a concrete vision of revolutionary potential that points beyond the bourgeois framework. The chapters in this volume gather and analyze those visions. They study the detailed movement dynamics and strategies in each case, asking such questions as why the “whip of repression” could spark a rapid radicalization of protest, how reformist elements were able to clip the wings of mass insurgency, or how movements based around labor or around resistance to oppression, or the despoliation of nature, managed — or failed — to link up.
What are some general lessons for social movement organizers in Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age? What was common among the struggles that won enduring reforms or carried the struggle, in a sense, as far as it could go?
The most universal lesson is that mass upheavals are not timetabled; they take even the most starry-eyed activists by surprise. Another is that they’ve been more frequent in the neoliberal era than in any previous period of comparable duration. As recently as 1989, on the bicentennial of the French Revolution, it was fashionable to commit revolution to the Museum of Historical Curiosities — but in that same year the East German masses arose, and many more revolutionary episodes were to follow. Since the volume was completed, mass revolts have occurred in Algeria, Belarus, Hong Kong, Myanmar, and Sudan, to mention only a few, and even as we speak, another is kicking off in Kazakhstan.
And yet, in the neoliberal era no uprisings have seriously fractured the framework of capitalist domination. The reasons for this are many; we discuss them in the volume. One major factor is the capacity of representative democracy to absorb and integrate radical movements. We should recall that the neoliberal age was also one that saw political systems across much of the world shift to liberal democracy.
Of the insurgencies featured in the book, many began in undemocratic conditions and dissipated when democracy was attained. Radical-democratic aspirations found themselves tamed, diverted and confined within the liberal-market transition. East Germany and Czechoslovakia (1989-90) and South Africa (1990-94) fit this pattern. However, as neoliberalism became globally dominant, the tenor of insurgent episodes altered somewhat. The examples from this century discussed in the volume, including Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia and Egypt, all evolved in clear opposition to the neoliberal order.
The most radical of them occurred in a liberal democracy: Bolivia in 2000-03. There, during the “water war” and “gas war” centered on El Alto, workers and peasants united to wage a formidable struggle. Drawing on longstanding cultures of resistance, notably indigenous radicalism and also revolutionary Marxism, they created a network of insurgent power in the form of peasant assemblies and neighborhood councils. Their strength grew from the connections forged between the spontaneous popular risings and the more durable organizations. That combination is indispensable to any successful mass rising.
A final lesson: Our case studies all warn of the dangers of seeking ruling-class allies. In Egypt, to give a particularly blood-soaked example, the civic movement hooked up with the military in June 2013, in joint opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood government. The result of this error was counter-revolution and the violent repression of all opposition forces — whether secular or Islamic.
You wrote about the 1989 revolts in Central and Eastern Europe for this volume. One of the section’s interesting claims is that the collapse of the Soviet Union wasn’t solely due to economic decline, but also due to internal resistance from workers against the state. What is the importance of putting the working class back into this history?
The 1970s-1980s economic stagnation that resulted from the USSR’s inability to adapt its state-capitalist structures to a globalizing world economy while maintaining its military spending and regional hegemony, was of fundamental importance. But we should note that earlier workers’ revolts had constrained the room for maneuver of Moscow and its allied regimes. One such was the June 1953 uprising in East Germany. It was crushed by Soviet tanks but it also forced the East German regime to divert funds to welfare, slowing the pace of capital accumulation.
When mass insurgency reappeared in 1989, the bulk of the movement was working class, and at key moments industrial action was significant — notably the wildcat strikes of early October that played a key role in toppling the Berlin Wall. That this is ignored in most of the literature reflects a general trend. Mainstream accounts of mass rebellions invariably downplay their working-class constituencies. Whether in Algeria, Belarus, Myanmar, or Sudan, or indeed Kazahktsan right now, street demonstrations took the headlines but strikes were critical to the rebellion’s momentum. With their self-confidence and media contacts, middle-class individuals and organizations “grab the mic” and push their perspective to the fore.
Nevertheless, we must acknowledge a reality: Since the early 1980s we haven’t seen uprisings that center on the militant and independent activity of workers, and, relatedly, few mass movements have aspired to systemic social transformation. An example Sameh Naguib discusses in the volume is Egypt. There, industrial action was central to resistance in the years that preceded the revolution of 2011, and strikes played a critical role in deposing President Mubarak. But the industrial action in workplaces and the political protests in public spaces remained largely separate.
Roughly over the last decade, the United States has seen mass uprisings in the form of Occupy Wall Street, teachers’ strikes, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. Repeatedly after these upsurges much of the organized left focused on pushing forward its demands through presidential and midterm elections. What do the “revolutionary rehearsals” in this volume tell us about the fate of movements that made electoral victories their primary strategy?
Needless to say, there are very good reasons to organize and campaign in the electoral arena. But when grassroots mobilization is suppressed on the grounds that it conflicts with electoral interests, this saps the popular energies in which, ultimately, all leftist success is rooted. The volume is littered with examples of electoralist strategies demobilizing radical-democratic movements. Claire Ceruti’s chapter on South Africa shows that mass mobilization was decisive in bringing apartheid to its knees, but as soon as the African National Congress (ANC) scented the whiff of elections it moved to stabilize bourgeois order and reined in the township and workplace agitation. The upshot: The nation’s (overwhelmingly white) ruling class maintained their villas and their other kleptocratic spoils, while the Black masses remained in penury.
In Zimbabwe, one of several African revolts discussed by Leo Zeilig, the trade union federation set up a political party that was initially based among the poor, but when electoral objectives came to prevail, its social justice commitments withered and fell away. In Indonesia, the subject of Tom O’Lincoln’s chapter, a spirited left arose within a mass revolt, but its dominant strategy envisaged emancipation as following two separate steps: first, democratization, and only later a struggle for socialism. In practice, this led them to tail behind the established bourgeois political forces.
U.S. politics is different in some respects to Zimbabwe or Indonesia, but the electoralist dynamic is essentially the same. Look for example at the electoralist demobilization of the Black Lives Matter rebellion. As antiracist protesters diverted their energies from public protests to the phone banks, the streets were claimed by Trumpist forces, leading ultimately to their own mini-uprising: the occupation of the Capitol building. If the electoralist left identifies too closely with America’s plutocratically-managed democracy, it’ll risk ceding initiative for future “revolutionary rehearsals” to the far right.
Colin Barker and Neil Davidson, both of your co-editors of this volume, passed away in 2019 and 2020, respectively. Tell us a little bit about who they were and their legacy.
The volume was Colin’s brainchild. In a sense it’s a sequel to his Revolutionary Rehearsals which appeared 35 years ago. He and Neil were inspiring figures on the socialist left in Britain. This was so in their activism — they were both immersed lifelong in campaigns, coalitions and revolutionary organizations, always with humanity and humor — and in their ideas. Each of them focused on central problems in Marxist theory, particularly states and revolution.
Neil’s topics were nations and nationalism, then Scotland’s bourgeois revolution, and “uneven and combined development” and finally bourgeois revolution in general. His major work, How Revolutionary were the Bourgeois Revolutions?, revived and clarified the concept of bourgeois revolution, by which he refers to state transformations that establish independent centers of capital accumulation.
Colin, meanwhile, was writing on state theory, and on the workers’ uprising in Poland of 1980-81. Later, he brought social movement theory and Marxist theory into conversation, exploring the relationships between class struggle and social movements. He looked at the role of mass struggles in driving meaningful socialist change, and was very partial to the words of Marx on why revolution is indispensable to a socialist transition: “not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.”
Revolution, in the sense of the sort of historical uprising narrated in the case study chapters and also in the deeper sense of fundamental societal transformation, provides the subject for Colin and Neil’s valedictory essays that bookend the volume. In their different ways, both are assessing the long-term possibilities of system-transformative change, and exploring what revolutionary politics can mean in non-revolutionary times.
That global capitalism has entered a turbulent era is a safe bet today, with the probability of future pandemics, the certainty of increasing climate chaos, and the tensions and likely clashes between the declining U.S. imperium and its challenger to the East. Neil’s chapter discusses the relationship between such structural changes and the appearance of “revolutionary conjunctures” (such as arose in the late eighteenth century, the 1840s, 1917-23, 1943-48, and 1968-76), as well as the various senses of “the actuality of revolution.” One of these senses, he writes, concerns revolutionary preparedness: “the understanding that all forms of mass self-activity can be preparations for some greater moment of social transformation, if they are treated as such.” Although we can try to hasten the arrival of the next revolutionary conjuncture, it is not in our gift to initiate it. The key thing is to recognize the conjuncture, if and when it arrives, and to act accordingly.
Note: Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age is published by Haymarket Books. Read an excerpt here.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Colin Barker, a leading Marxist intellectual who was based in Britain, died in 2019, before the publication of his final work, Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age, in 2021. This extraordinary volume, published by Haymarket Books, examines the events and outcomes of mass uprisings between 1989-2019 in Central Eastern and Eastern Europe, South Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia, Bolivia, Latin America and Egypt.
In this excerpt from the chapter titled “Social Movements and the Possibility of Socialist Revolution,” Barker discusses the strategic barriers which movements must overcome in order to “break out beyond the anticipated script” of isolation, compromise, demoralization and defeat.
The key organising focus of any new left movement in the future may not be the workplace, though it will — somehow — necessarily have to confront and defeat boss power at work; otherwise a whole part of life experience (which actually absorbs more of the time and energy of working people now than it did in the previous generation) will be untouched by movement impulses. And it will have to find ways to get beyond a series of barriers that, up till now, have mostly contained and constrained the movements of recent decades.
The first of these is the isolation of movement activity to particular social sectors or geographical locations. This may be institutionalised […] and in the practice of classic social democracy, which reserved “political struggle” for the parliamentary party and “economic struggle” for the unions. In Argentina the movement of workers in the “recovered factories” was barely connected to workers in “regular employment” where Peronist unionism acted as a restraint on solidarity. The “Oaxaca commune” of 2006 was — rather like the earlier Paris Commune — restricted to a particular city and region, and thus open to eventual defeat by organised state power. The difficulty is to find ways to express cross-movement solidarity in action. Here strategic questions arise. In Argentina, the Peronist unions held back workers’ struggle in 2001, yet they could not just be “written off.” Ordinarily, as they have demonstrated on several important occasions over the past decade and more, Argentinian unions have a capacity to mobilise many more forces than does the (very fragmented) left in all its forms. As elsewhere, the problem is to convert unions into fighting organisations with a wider and more transformative perspective than their incumbent bureaucracies. That, after all, was the underlying secret of the Chicago Teachers’ victories: an organised left caucus won their union membership to a more vibrant and democratic vision of the very meaning of their union, one that meant reaching out to their students and their parents in a common struggle for the future, not just of teachers’ pay and jobs, but of education itself. In short, just as “isolation” is not a natural or inevitable conditions, but depends on a definite politics, so combating it calls for a different politics. Further, the nature of that “different politics” itself requires critical exploration. A radical politics that relies, for example, on pre-existing “identities” (for example, a narrowly conceived “class membership” or “racial / gender solidarity”) is liable to miss both the actual differentiations in experience among those assumed to share the same identity and the real potentials for “cross identity” solidarity among those who share similar problems: Mistaken theory and practice on the left can itself contribute to maintaining the isolation of movement sectors.
Secondly, there remains a problem with a century-long history: in countries where parliamentary democracy allows the possibility of the election of “left governments,” what is — and what can be — the relationship between such governments and popular movements? Does the pursuit of parliamentary office ever aid or always hinder the aim of radical emancipation? The question has assumed some prominence in recent years, notably with respect to the “Pink Tide” governments of Latin America, the Syriza government in Greece and the prospects for new left parties like Podemos in Spain. Is the very existence of parliamentary government an inherent and impassable barrier to social revolution?
Experience to date has not been encouraging to those who seek to combine left parliamentary government with social movements as a route to social transformation. In Latin America, as Jeff Webber, Jorge Sanmartino and others have stressed, popular movements in 2000-2005 placed an emphasis on mass direct action, grassroots popular democracy often in assembly form, and the “de-professionalisation” of politics. The popular organisations they built combined confrontation with the state with the development of new forms of governance-from-below that seemed to “prefigure” a post-neoliberal and even anti-capitalist society that many in their ranks aspired to build. However, the initiative in these movements passed to a series of more or less progressive governments, who drew on the movements’ energy to get into office but simultaneously limited those movements to “subaltern participation,” defined as the pacifying incorporation of popular sectors into the gears of the capitalist state. Movements’ capacity for further development of their autonomous and antagonistic confrontations, and therefore also for the further development of alternative visions, has been contained and reduced as they have been “domesticated.” None of the left governments managed to alter the underlying pattern of capital accumulation they inherited. Especially once the global economic crisis began to be felt directly in the region, and leftist governments began cutting public spending and services, a space has emerged for some resurgence of the right. In Greece, where there was no ballast of raw materials exports to stabilise the crisis, the Syriza government simply gave in dramatically to the demands of the “Troika,” leaving the movements that had put it in office betrayed and disoriented.
It remains a possibility that a pathway to a revolutionary reconstitution of society might begin with the election of a left government to parliament. But any such left government would be placed under immense pressure to contain its supporters’ hopes and demands, and to evade efforts to control it from outside and below. Were it — against previous form for such governments — to promote further radicalisation of movements, it would provoke a full-scale crisis with capitalist power. In such conditions, any beginning with elections would transform quite rapidly into a very different situation of direct confrontation between movements and capitalist power, involving major ruptures and the splitting of political forces, more akin to a revolutionary situation than to “normal politics.” At the heart of any such situation would be a critical question: Do those in government (as is likely) seek to temporise with capital and to demobilise the popular forces, or do they contribute to developing the means and the popular will to carry movements’ own power forward, laying new and broader bases for a wider emancipation? In such a scenario, any value a left government might have would be outweighed by a developing popular insurgency. Elections, whether of presidents or governments, happen. For movements, the question that really matters at such moments is whether they focus on their own self-developing projects and their own self-organisation, or allow their own self-diminution and disabling by others’ priorities.
There is a third barrier, noted by several of our authors. While we have witnessed widespread and active resistance to the priorities imposed by neoliberal states, that resistance has, to date, also been marked by the weakness of alternative projects based on enlarging emancipation and democratic control. It’s not that they have been completely absent, but they have seemed underdeveloped and only partially articulated, in part because of the sectoral isolation previously noted, and in part because old languages of liberation are no longer trusted and new ones still await their crafting. Small coteries may be rehearsing them, but their flowering depends on new popular upsurges that affirm their relevance. If, across Latin America, where many of the impulses of the early 20th century were felt most strongly, the “cycle of revolt” is now in decline, local questioning and reformulation are as likely as an immediate explosion. As Raúl Zibechi commented: “When major historical processes come to an end, and in turn major political defeats transpire, confusion and despondency set in, desire intermingles with reality, and the most coherent analytical frameworks blur.” The struggles of the past two decades posed questions and suggested partial answers that will remain part of activist milieux as topics for debate and development. One key idea, taking partial shape in popular movements across several continents, and now awaiting its next development was that movements’ own self-generated organisations and practices can and should provide the basis for the constitution of society, economy and politics. It’s not likely we have heard the last of that idea.
Fourthly, that idea requires political embodiments in the shape of organisations, networks and coalitions which take “emancipation from below” as their underlying principle. It’s difficult to foresee the forms that such bodies might take, and how they might emerge to claim some kind of hegemony within movements. Those who already recognise the practical need for them require healthy doses of modesty and openness to diversity of expression if they are to make headway.
Finally, if the Bolsheviks in 1917 were already clear that their own revolution could only succeed if it spread, the further development of global capitalism in the past century has only reinforced that notion. “Socialism in one country” was always a reactionary as well as a utopian idea. But how might practical internationalism be promoted today? In a decade when the inherently global threat of climate change has become ever more prominent, and when millions of migrants and refugees are forced to flee new apocalypses, a new revolutionary internationalism becomes ever more urgent.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Chile has become the global capital of resurgent opposition to neoliberalism and resistance to fascism, electing the world’s youngest president, Gabriel Boric, a 35-year-old former student protest leader. Boric, a member of Chile’s congress since 2014 and law school graduate, will lead the country’s first left unity government since the bloody United States-backed military coup which overthrew democratically elected leader Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973 (the “other September 11”).
The left’s decisive victory in Chile, with about 55 percent of the vote, came amid a large turnout of women and youth. This included a 1-million vote margin over his far right opponent, José Antonio Kast, who positioned himself as an heir to the legacy of the Gen. Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. Boric’s mandate simultaneously embodies the hopes awakened by Chile’s national popular uprising in October and November 2019, and a rejection of Kast’s embrace of, and personal connections to, the Pinochet regime. These included his older brother’s strategic roles as head of the country’s central bank and labor minister. Kast waged a campaign characterized by racist, xenophobic and patriarchal appeals to the need to restore “national security” and “order,” and to defend “traditional family values” in the wake of the 2019 protests.
The result marks a historic shift which has widespread implications for the U.S., for the Latin American and Caribbean region, and globally. Similar hopes were awakened 50 years ago by President Allende’s Popular Unity government in Chile, which was targeted by the U.S. during the Richard Nixon administration and specifically by Henry Kissinger, first as national security adviser and then as secretary of state, and eventually overthrown with U.S. encouragement.
Thousands of victims were killed, disappeared, tortured and exiled throughout 17 years of dictatorship under Pinochet, who turned Chile into a global model for the neoliberal orthodoxy associated with the disciples of Milton Friedman and the “Chicago Boys.” The so-called “Chilean Miracle” was closely aligned with the politics of President Ronald Reagan in the U.S. and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom. This model was soon emulated regionally, with disastrous results, in countries such as Peru, Ecuador, Argentina, Colombia and Mexico, and globally through the so-called “Washington Consensus” promoted by the U.S. through the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
Many in Chile and Latin America are waiting to see how the U.S. will react to a Boric administration and a governing coalition that includes Chile’s Communist Party as a partner. As more people around the world view the U.S. and the European Union as threats to global democracy, social movements throughout Latin America and beyond are mobilizing to defend the democratic result of Chile’s elections, as they did during Pinochet’s dictatorship.
Boric’s victory reflects a new alignment of political forces in Chile which displaces the center-left and center-right blocs which have dominated the spectrum and alternated in power since Pinochet’s ouster in 1990. Boric’s “new left” leadership first emerged while he was a student activist within the context of national student protests in 2006, 2009 and 2011, which laid the foundation for the 2019 uprising. The massive 2019 protests led to a November 2019 civic pact which initiated Chile’s current constitutional reform process as well as the emergence of the broad left coalition that eventually backed his presidential candidacy.
Boric’s election also reflects an emergent regional trend, coinciding with Xiomara Castro’s November election in Honduras and Luis Arce’s October 2020 election in Bolivia, which in each case effectively reversed coups in 2009 and 2019, respectively, that sought to shift both countries back into closer alignment with the U.S. This left trend also includes the victory of Pedro Castillo in Peru.
The president-elect’s four-year term will coincide with Chile’s promulgation of a new constitution, intended to dismantle almost 50 years of authoritarian hegemony. The Boric presidency thus has a historic opportunity to complete Chile’s prolonged democratic transition and process of transitional justice.
The new leader pledged in his first address as president-elect that his approach would be focused explicitly on the promotion of “truth, justice, reparations and guarantees of non-repetition” as guiding threads for his administration’s policies. Boric also prioritized satisfaction of the demands of Chile’s powerful women’s and Indigenous movements as central driving forces in his agenda. This will likely include redefinition of Chile as a pluri-national and pluri-cultural state, as Bolivia did in its 2008 constitution, and new guarantees for reproductive rights and LGBT rights in a country where they have been traditionally restricted.
Boric’s campaign was notable for taking an eco-socialist approach to environmental issues. His election night speech included an explicit rejection of the controversial $2.5 billion Dominga iron, copper and gold mining project promoted by the Andes Iron company in the Atacama desert, 500 miles north of Santiago and near a conservation area that is home to 80 percent of the world’s Humboldt penguins. “Destroying the world is destroying ourselves. We do not want more ‘sacrifice zones.’ We do not want projects that destroy our country, that destroy communities, and we exemplify this in a case that has been symbolic: No to Dominga,” he said. Outgoing conservative Chilean President Sebastian Piñera recently had to fight off an impeachment process based on his family’s role as investors in the Dominga project, as revealed in the release of the “Pandora Papers” by the International Consortium for Investigative Journalism.
The new administration’s approach will be centered around an overall commitment to advancing human rights, and is specifically focused on the implementation of economic and social rights to lay the foundation for a dignified life for all Chileans, including rights to health, education and housing. The emphasis here is on reversing the impact of neoliberal policies which have deepened poverty and inequality and undermined the rights of pensioners. This approach is being combined with an emphasis on promoting a “care economy” centered around reinforced state public health guarantees in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Difficult tests lie ahead for the Boric presidency, as it navigates contending visions of left politics in Latin America in the current historical moment. Boric identifies with certain dimensions of the most progressive currents in European-style social democracy. This is reflected in his campaign’s emphasis on state guarantees of economic, social and cultural rights, and climate justice. But these characteristics are combined with the “bottom-up” politics that characterize Latin America’s most powerful social movements for human rights, grounded in the demands of the poor and other marginalized sectors. These are also shaped by feminist demands for equality and against sexual and gender violence; by Indigenous peoples for autonomy and self-determination and against extractivist mega-development policies and paradigms; and in defense of migrant rights. This is a more complex mix than is suggested by analyses that reduce Latin America’s left to polarized camps that are either “statist” or “anti-state” (or autonomist), and thus necessarily in conflict with each other. Boric’s trajectory and horizons suggest a much more fluid relationship between the state and social movements. But the question in practice will be the extent to which Boric’s administration is directly accountable to the social movements which made his victory possible.
He will face key tests as the constitutional reform process evolves, which is intended to culminate in a referendum on approval of a new text sometime after July 2022. It is likely that the new constitution will take historic steps in recognizing the rights of women, and for the first time, of Indigenous peoples, among other important reforms. Measures of this kind will generate pressures on Boric to reaffirm or retreat from his campaign platform. The elected assembly which is drafting the text — the first in the world of its kind to have gender parity — is significantly to the left of Chile’s congress, and of Boric’s second round campaign, which successfully contended for a decisive slice of a bloc of centrist voters.
But Boric’s mandate was also spurred by a significant increase in turnout that was concentrated among women and younger voters, and overall by those who supported the massive 2019 protests. The balance struck in governance and implementation between these sectors will shape the new governing coalition’s aspirations and their limits.
Global and national markets have already reacted negatively to Boric’s victory, which will accelerate pressures by global capital and its local allies to moderate his campaign pledges. Boric will have to navigate the increasingly intense regional and global rivalry between traditional U.S. hegemony and China’s ascent, as a Latin American country which has positioned itself as a key player in the Pacific Basin. China and other Asian countries are by far Chile’s most important trade partners (57.7 percent of exports in 2020), far outpacing North America (U.S. and Canada 15.2 percent), other Latin American countries (13.1 percent including Mexico) and the EU (12.2 percent).
Moreover, it is closer, deeply troubled U.S. allies such as Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia and Haiti that have much lower levels of democratic legitimacy and human rights compliance, compared to states that may become potentially more independent of U.S. domination, such as Chile and Peru. Honduras is a much more problematic case because of its greater vulnerability to more direct forms of U.S. intervention related to the drug war and longstanding processes of forced migration. The exercise of U.S. hegemony through sanctions tends to strengthen its targets rather than weaken them, and to harm the most vulnerable sectors in countries that have been singled out in this way. There is also extensive debate about the empirical evidence either way in terms of the impact of such measures on the supposed promotion of democracy.
This is further underlined by how U.S. sanctions against Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, which violate international law and are deeply rooted in Cold War assumptions and methods, have themselves undermined democratic options within those contexts. Potential center-left victories that are on the horizon in 2022 in Colombia and Brazil will provide additional tests for these overall trends, as the U.S. scrambles to respond. The Biden administration’s actual response to the left’s victory in Chile, and that of global and national capital, in practice, beyond the traditional rhetoric of welcoming messages, will be a crucial indicator.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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One of the most damning assessments of COP26, the UN climate conference being held in Glasgow, came from Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate activist:
‘#COP26 has been named the must excluding COP ever.
This is no longer a climate conference.
This is a Global North greenwash festival.
A two week celebration of business as usual and blah blah blah.’And, indeed, if you scour news reports from COP26 they yield a familiar litany of political rhetoric and weasel words: vows, pledges, promises, commitments, sign up, phase out, green investment, innovation, transition, progress, scaling up, carbon credits, bending the emissions curve, net zero, 2050, 2070.
To quote from King Crimson’s ‘Elephant Talk‘:
‘Arguments, agreements… articulate announcements…Brouhaha, balderdash, ballyhoo…It’s only talk…cheap talk…double talk.’
Juice Media, the campaign group who ‘make honest Government ads’, exposed the dangerous and misleading nonsense behind ‘Net Zero by 2050’:
‘There’s a huge gap between our promises and where we need to be. We don’t talk about that gap coz that would entail a complex process called “Being Honest”. Being Honest would mean admitting that we’re failing. And we can’t do that coz then we’d have to stop failing. That would mean ending fossil-fuel subsidies and banning all new gas, coal and oil projects.’
The satirical government ad continued:
‘So being honest isn’t an option for us. Which is why we’ve come up with the next best alternative: Net Zero by 2050…which risks setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond our control.’
Nature, the leading science journal, reported last week that top climate scientists – co-authors of a report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – are sceptical that nations will rein in global warming. Moreover:
‘Six in ten of the respondents [climate scientists] said that they expect the world to warm by at least 3 °C by the end of the century, compared with what conditions were like before the Industrial Revolution. That is far beyond the Paris agreement’s goal to limit warming to 1.5-2 °C.’
The news report added:
‘Most of the survey’s respondents – 88% – said they think global warming constitutes a “crisis”, and nearly as many said they expect to see catastrophic impacts of climate change in their lifetimes. Just under half said that global warming has caused them to reconsider major life decisions, such as where to live and whether to have children. More than 60% said that they experience anxiety, grief or other distress because of concerns over climate change.’
‘An Orchestrated PR Scam’
A powerful thread on Twitter by conservationist Stephen Barlow echoed our own experiences and insights from observing climate conferences over three decades:
‘I’m starting to get the impression of COP26 as a contrived stitch up. Where world leaders get to present their inadequate action as fixing the problem. This really is dangerous stuff. You see I remember the 1992 Rio Earth Summit well.’
Barlow expanded:
‘After the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, political leaders, fossil fuel companies and general vested interest gave the impression the problem was fixed, that there was no need for people to turn to green politics, because mainstream politics had fixed the problem.
‘In the following years, in the 1990s, we had oil companies taking out big full page adverts in BBC Wildlife Magazine, National Geographic, etc, saying how they were switching their business model to renewables.
‘Politicians presented all these rosy views of green growth, all sorts of carbon trading schemes and generally giving off the impression that the problem was fixed, and the future was green.’
He rightly concluded:
‘The problem is, unlike the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, where it took nearly 30 years to find out everything we were promised was a scam and it just kept on getting worse – in 30 years time (in fact far less) we are going to be in serious trouble.
‘This is as evil as it gets. This is an orchestrated PR scam to carry on with business as usual. Where various elements like politicians, the mainstream media, billionaires, royalty and vested interests, combine to maintain business as usual, with fraudulent presentation.’
Investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed, who has repeatedly exposed the reality of UK foreign policy, recently reported that the British government is seeking trade deals with carbon-lobbying countries who have attempted to weaken a scientific assessment report being prepared by the IPCC. The countries include Saudi Arabia and the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, along with Brazil, Argentina, Japan, Norway and India. Indeed, the UK is actively seeking to promote increased fossil fuel production in nearly all those countries, including Saudi Arabia – the world’s second largest oil producer.
Ahmed noted that last month, on the eve of COP26, foreign secretary Liz Truss flew to Saudi Arabia and Qatar to explore a potential trade deal with the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
He added:
‘According to the UK Department for International Trade’s Exporting Guide to Saudi Arabia, some of the biggest opportunities for UK investment are in expanding the kingdom’s fossil fuel sector.’
The export guide proudly states:
‘There are significant opportunities in Saudi Arabia’s energy market for UK businesses, especially in oil and natural gas.’
Ahmed continued:
‘Increasing the kingdom’s natural gas production is a particularly lucrative area for UK industry. The DIT notes that Saudi Aramco, the kingdom’s giant oil producer, is exploiting natural gas reserves off the Red Sea coast to support increased domestic demand, which will involve using deep water technologies for drilling below 1,000 metres.’
He summed up:
‘Britain’s intent to ramp up fossil fuel production in partnership with some of the world’s biggest obstructers of climate action raises urgent questions about its role at COP26.’
That is an understatement. Then again, who believes that a corrupt Tory government – led by a shambling, elitist, racist, serial twister of the truth – would ever actually take the serious actions required to tackle the climate emergency?
‘Systematically Corrupted By Vested Interests’
The climate campaign group Insulate Britain, who have blockaded several roads in multiple actions in recent weeks, said:
‘As will become clear after COP26, our government has no intention of taking the necessary action to protect its people. It has broken the social contract – the unwritten agreement in which we agree to obey the government’s laws and in return it will protect us.’
In particular, Insulate Britain:
‘have exposed the government’s refusal to act on home insulation as cowardly and vindictive and their refusal to protect our country and our children from the climate crisis as genocidal and treasonous.’
Those are strong words. But climate campaigners from Extinction Rebellion (XR) also made clear that:
‘Nothing on the table in the run up to COP26 has resembled a compassionate and functional response to the crisis. The Climate and Ecological Emergency is a Crime Against Humanity perpetrated by the rich and powerful, and the COP process is systematically corrupted by vested interests – national, corporate and financial.’
The environmentalist group Global Witness assessed that there are more fossil fuel lobbyists present at COP26 than even the largest delegation from any country. They reported:
‘At least 503 fossil fuel lobbyists, affiliated with some of the world’s biggest polluting oil and gas giants, have been granted access to COP26, flooding the Glasgow conference with corporate influence.’
Moreover, reported Global Witness:
- If the fossil fuel lobby were a country delegation at COP it would be the largest with 503 delegates – two dozen more than the largest country delegation [Brazil].
- Over 100 fossil fuel companies are represented at COP with 30 trade associations and membership organisations also present.
- Fossil fuel lobbyists dwarf the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s official indigenous constituency by around two to one.
- The fossil fuel lobby at COP is larger than the combined total of the eight delegations from the countries worst affected by climate change in the last two decades – Puerto Rico, Myanmar, Haiti, Philippines, Mozambique, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Pakistan.
- 27 official country delegations registered fossil fuel lobbyists, including Canada, Russia and Brazil.
On day 1 of the conference, XR had already declared that COP26 was a ‘failure’ and the conference itself ‘a crime against humanity’. XR spokesperson Jon Fuller pointed out the responsibility of the media to:
‘form an analysis of the situation, delving beyond presenting the views of different parties to the reality of what has been achieved and what the consequences are for ordinary people. If they fail to do so they continue to be guilty of the same crimes against humanity as the world leaders who have gathered at 25 previous COPs, claiming progress in spite of a complete failure to stop emissions rising.’
Of course, as Media Lens has demonstrated over the past two decades, the state-corporate media, including BBC News, are indeed complicit in crimes against humanity.
Last year, the BBC took £300,000 in advertising revenue from Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, Aramco. The BBC does not carry advertising in the UK, but it does so abroad where much of its output is supported by commercials.
Jim Waterson, the Guardian’s media editor, reported that:
‘Big fossil fuel companies have spent approximately $660,000 (£483,000) with the BBC on US-focused digital adverts since 2018, according to projections produced by the advertising data firm MediaRadar. Most of this came from the national Saudi oil company – although BP, Exelon and Phillips 66 are among the other fossil fuel business[es] estimated to have spent five-figure sums advertising on the BBC’s digital outlets.’
He added:
‘The real figure for how much the BBC is making from large fossil fuel companies could be much higher when other forms of advertising are taken into account.’
Meanwhile, BBC News programmes and high-profile BBC journalists continue to channel government propaganda on climate, with minimal scrutiny or genuinely countervailing voices. An extended appearance by Greta Thunberg on the Sunday morning Andrew Marr show on 31 October was a rare exception.
More typical was Laura Kuenssberg’s relentless tweeting of government talking points:
‘PM says score in the match btw humanity and climate change is now, 5-2, or 5-3, not 5-1 at half time, which was his assessment a few days ago – if you hate the metaphor, let’s say, progress, but not yet enough’
This tweet from the BBC political editor managed to capture both:
1. the pathetic state of the ‘democracy‘ that ‘elected’ Boris Johnson as Prime Minister.
2. the crass, subservient nature of much of BBC News.
As US journalist Glenn Greenwald once observed:
‘The worst media in the democratic world is the British media, and it’s not even close.
‘I know it’s hard for people in other countries who hate their own media to believe, but whatever you hate about your country’s media, the UK media has in abundance and worse.’
The pathetic state of much of what passes for ‘journalism’ in the UK was summed up by investigative journalist Matt Kennard’s recent observation:
‘The British Journalism Awards [are] sponsored by Starling Bank, Gilead pharma, Google, Ovo Energy. The capture of our political, media and cultural systems by corporations is absolute and the root of problem. Rejecting + replacing corporate media is prerequisite to real democracy.’
And real democracy is a prerequisite for tackling the climate emergency before it threatens to engulf humanity, driving us towards extinction.
The post “A Crime Against Humanity”: The “Greenwash Festival” Of COP26 first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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It was ten years ago this week that thousands of people from across the country and from different social movements started an occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC that lasted six months. The action was called “Stop the Machine, Create a New World” to reflect the two-pronged approach of resistance to harmful policies and practices and building positive alternatives. The coalition behind it was the October 2011 Movement, named similarly to movements that arose in Egypt, the January 25 movement, and Spain, the May 15 movement. Popular Resistance was born from that October 2011 coalition.
During the winter and spring of 2011, major protests that occupied public space occurred in countries throughout the Arab world, known as the ‘Arab Spring.’ Occupations also took place in state capitals across the United States, beginning with Madison Wisconsin in February. Most of the protests were focused on opposing austerity measures, worker exploitation and other human rights abuses. The October 2011 protest, which sought to spark an ‘American Autumn,’ also explicitly opposed war – the October 6 start date was chosen to coincide with the beginning of the new austerity budget and the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan.
Organizers of the October 2011 coalition began meeting early that year in January to plan a campaign that would challenge the power structure effectively. The traditional tools of democracy were not working to counter growing wealth inequality, austerity and wars. Throughout 2011, the more than 100 organizers from across the nation worked tirelessly to bring groups that worked on different issues together, to plan strategy and logistics and to promote the campaign. In July, the Occupy Wall Street action was announced, and October 2011 organizers participated in that planning too. Nobody knew what the result of our work would be but by that fall, people were holding public space and taking militant action from coast to coast. The Occupy Movement took off.
To mark the tenth anniversary, I spoke with Bill Moyer of the Backbone Campaign (click here for that interview) and Chris Hedges, a noted author and host of On Contact (click here for that interview), about the political and economic environment in 2011 that gave rise to the Occupy Movement, the lessons learned and what is happening now. The Occupy Movement had a tremendous impact that is still being felt today but we continue to face many serious crises.
This is a good time to reflect upon what Occupy/October2011 did right and how that could inform our current organizing. Here are a few of the lessons:
- Our crises are systemic: The Occupy Movement successfully challenged the idea that our inability to meet our basic needs for health care, housing, education, food, income and more is due to some sort of personal failure. It exposed the fact that our major crises are systemic in nature, rooted in the capitalist economy and the corrupt and anti-democratic political structure that protects the interests of the wealthy elites without regard for people’s needs or protection of the planet. This was a sea change for a brain-washed public that had been taught the US was a place of opportunity if “you just work hard enough.” No longer did people have to feel shame for not having access to health care, for being in debt, losing their homes or living in poverty. Understanding the systemic nature brought people out of isolation to work together to change the system.
- We are powerful together: Related to the above is that the Occupy Movement showed the power of working in solidarity with each other and recognizing that our issues are connected. Philanthropy for non-profits in the United States is designed to keep people in silos, working on their one particular issue, and competing with each other for resources. The Occupy Movement turned that on its head. The organizers came from a variety of organizations working on different issues who united around general agreement that they faced the same obstacle – the rule of money that puts profit over the human needs. There weren’t any funders or major organizations controlling the coalition. This solidarity scares the power structure.
- We are leader-full: The Occupy Movement was leader-full, not leaderless. This is a point that Kevin Zeese frequently made in response to the common misconception that there weren’t any leaders. There were no single leaders and decision-making was largely made using consensus. Organizers (leaders) worked to put the structure of the action together but not to control it. They created working groups to provide food, medical care, education, action planning, media, and general assembly facilitation. This created space for people to gather, talk and plan. Organizers, many of whom were experienced activists, mostly stayed in the background.
- Occupy challenged the white savior complex: The Occupy Movement succeeded in challenging the white savior complex – mostly-white organizations or individuals speaking for people in oppressed communities and the assumption that the oppressed cannot organize and advocate for themselves. People and communities, the ones on the ‘front lines,’ were prioritized to talk about their issues and to lead actions. White activists were encouraged to speak less and listen more. Immediately after Occupy, the Tar Sands Blockade, which was led by indigenous activists, took off. Since then, other indigenous-led campaigns and those for low wage workers and immigrants and against racially-biased police violence and mass incarceration have gained more prominence.
- We learned new skills: Similarly, the Occupy Movement introduced people to activism and taught them new skills. General assemblies were held at Occupy encampments across the country in which people learned how to listen to each other, discuss issues and make decisions as a group. Hand signals were used so people could express themselves and participate in the assemblies more easily. Occupy practiced a form of participatory democracy. Indeed, a major concept promoted in the Occupy Movement is that we need to practice what we are working to create as we organize. If we aspire to a non-hierarchical society, then we have to practice using non-hierarchical structures. Social movements in the United States have matured since Occupy.
- We must be independent of the capitalist parties: Despite efforts by a few to funnel the Occupy Movement into the Democratic Party, the movement was not tied to any political party. That independence is critical for success. As soon as a movement becomes subservient to the agenda of a political party, especially one of the oligarchic parties, it excludes people and loses its power. Instead of putting pressure on elected leaders, it becomes a tool for them to maintain power. Of course, there were people from the Occupy Movement who entered electoral politics. That is to be expected from any movement. The best position for a movement is to be feared by the power structure. Members of the ruling class are not our allies.
- We must save ourselves: People in the United States are manipulated by the power structure into believing that we can elect our way out of this situation. There is no political figure/savior who is going to rescue us from the crises we face, especially in our mirage democracy. Elections are largely distractions from the long term work of movement building. We are the ones who must take action in whatever way we can. Many of us working together as a movement of movements can succeed. To learn more about how movements have an impact, visit the free Popular Resistance School.
Overall, the Occupy Movement has had a huge impact in the United States that will ripple out for years to come. It changed the national dialog on wealth inequality and the corruption in our political system and empowered many people to fight for their rights.
Occupation of public space is a tactic, not a revolution in itself. It was part of a take-off moment when an issue that resonated with many people came to the forefront. Social movements come in phases. The hard work of building on that take-off is where we are now. As the Popular Resistance School teaches, success comes when there is national consensus that there is a problem, the current system can’t solve that problem and that we need something new and when a proportion of the population acts on that national consensus.
While there have been some victories in the past ten years, conditions have continued to deteriorate in the United States. The political elites are failing to address the crises we face such as poverty, debt, the pandemic, the climate crisis and the growing national security state. The Biden administration is continuing many Trump administration policies, as Hedges points out in his recent article, “America’s Fate: Oligarchy or Autocracy.”
Just as they created the conditions for Trump to become President through their neoliberal policies that bailed out Wall Street instead of Main Street, the Democrats and their liberal cheerleaders are continuing to fail to provide real solutions to our many crises. Hedges writes, “The liberal class, fearing autocracy, has thrown in its lot with the oligarchs, discrediting and rendering impotent the causes and issues it claims to champion. The bankruptcy of the liberal class is important, for it effectively turns liberal democratic values into the empty platitudes those who embrace autocracy condemn and despise.”
A movement led by the working class and front line communities that has a vision of what we aspire to create and that is willing to take strategic action is essential. The seeds of that movement are scattered across the country and are blossoming into worker walkouts and strikes and direct action campaigns to stop deportations and fossil fuel infrastructure as well as debt and attacks on our education system. Others are growing into the alternative solutions we require such as worker cooperatives, public banks, food sovereignty, the abolition of police and prisons and more.
The best way to counter the rise of autocracy is to continue to expose injustice and take action to stop it while showing there is another way that will make everyone’s lives better and working to create that. Solidarity is fundamental. We have the power to create tremendous change in the United States if only we have the courage and discipline to use that power effectively. When times are hard, we can remember what Hedges concludes in the article cited above:
The post Ten Years Later: Lessons for today from Occupy first appeared on Dissident Voice.If we achieve nothing else in the fight against the oligarchs and the autocrats, we will at least salvage our dignity and integrity.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Is it possible to build social solidarity beyond the state?It’s easy to conclude that it’s not. In 1915, as national governments produced the shocking carnage of World War I, Ralph Chaplin, an activist in the Industrial Workers of the World, wrote his stirring song, “Solidarity Forever.” Taken up by unions around the globe, it proclaimed that there was “no power greater anywhere beneath the sun” than international working class solidarity. But, today, despite Chaplin’s dream of bringing to birth “a new world from the ashes of the old,” the world remains sharply divided by national boundaries—boundaries that are usually quite rigid, policed by armed guards, and ultimately enforced through that traditional national standby, war.
Even so, over the course of modern history, social movements have managed, to a remarkable degree, to form global networks of activists who have transcended nationalism in their ideas and actions. Starting in the late nineteenth century, there was a remarkable efflorescence of these movements: the international aid movement; the labor movement; the socialist movement; the peace movement; and the women’s rights movement, among others. In recent decades, other global movements have emerged, preaching and embodying the same kind of human solidarity—from the environmental movement, to the nuclear disarmament movement, to the campaign against corporate globalization, to the racial justice movement.
Although divided from one another, at times, by their disparate concerns, these transnational humanitarian movements have nevertheless been profoundly subversive of many established ideas and of the established order—an order that has often been devoted to maintenance of special privilege and preservation of the nation state system. Consequently, these movements have usually found a home on the political Left and have usually triggered a furious backlash on the political Right.
The rise of globally-based social movements appears to have developed out of the growing interconnection of nations, economies, and peoples spawned by increasing world economic, scientific, and technological development, trade, travel, and communications. This interconnection has meant that war, economic collapse, climate disasters, diseases, corporate exploitation, and other problems are no longer local, but global. And the solutions, of course, are also global in nature. Meanwhile, the possibilities for alliances of like-minded people across national boundaries have also grown.
The rise of the worldwide campaign for nuclear disarmament exemplifies these trends. Beginning in 1945, in the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing, its sense of urgency was driven by breakthroughs in science and technology that revolutionized war and, thereby, threatened the world with unprecedented disaster. Furthermore, the movement had little choice but to develop across the confines of national boundaries. After all, nuclear testing, the nuclear arms race, and the prospect of nuclear annihilation represented global problems that could not be tackled on a national basis. Eventually, a true peoples’ alliance emerged, uniting activists in East and West against the catastrophic nuclear war plans of their governments.
Much the same approach is true of other global social movements. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, for example, play no favorites among nations when they report on human rights abuses around the world. Individual nations, of course, selectively pick through the findings of these organizations to label their political adversaries (though not their allies) ruthless human rights abusers. But the underlying reality is that participants in these movements have broken free of allegiances to national governments to uphold a single standard and, thereby, act as genuine world citizens. The same can be said of activists in climate organizations like Greenpeace and 350.org, anticorporate campaigns, the women’s rights movement, and most other transnational social movements.
Institutions of global governance also foster human solidarity across national borders. The very existence of such institutions normalizes the idea that people in diverse countries are all part of the human community and, therefore, have a responsibility to one another. Furthermore, UN Secretaries-General have often served as voices of conscience to the world, deploring warfare, economic inequality, runaway climate disaster, and a host of other global ills. Conversely, the ability of global institutions to focus public attention upon such matters has deeply disturbed the political Right, which acts whenever it can to undermine the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, the World Health Organization, and other global institutions.
Social movements and institutions of global governance often have a symbiotic relationship. The United Nations has provided a very useful locus for discussion and action on issues of concern to organizations dealing with women’s rights, environmental protection, human rights, poverty, and other issues, with frequent conferences devoted to these concerns. Frustrated with the failure of the nuclear powers to divest themselves of nuclear weapons, nuclear disarmament organizations deftly used a series of UN conferences to push through the adoption of the 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, much to the horror of nuclear-armed states.
Admittedly, the United Nations is a confederation of nations, where the “great powers” often use their disproportionate influence—for example, in the Security Council—to block the adoption of popular global measures that they consider against their “interests.” But it remains possible to change the rules of the world body, diminishing great power influence and creating a more democratic, effective world federation of nations. Not surprisingly, there are social movements, such as the World Federalist Movement/Institute for Global Policy and Citizens for Global Solutions, working for these reforms.
Although there are no guarantees that social movements and enhanced global governance will transform our divided, problem-ridden world, we shouldn’t ignore these movements and institutions, either. Indeed, they should provide us with at least a measure of hope that, someday, human solidarity will prevail, thereby bringing to birth “a new world from the ashes of the old.”
The post Building Social Solidarity Across National Boundaries first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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On July 25, 2021, Tunisian President Kais Saied dismissed Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi, froze the parliament, suspended the legal immunity of parliament members and took control of the general prosecutor’s office. He warned against any armed response to his actions: “Whoever shoots a bullet, the armed forces will respond with bullets.” In the hours after Saied’s announcement, huge crowds gathered in his support in Tunis and other cities, while the military blocked off the parliament and state television station.
The popularity of Saied’s decisions stems from the legitimate anger of Tunisians against their country’s parliament, which has become very unpopular. When the president sacked the health minister after a botched handling of vaccine walk-in centres and ordered the army to take control of the pandemic response, popular protests took place against the government, culminating in the present-day power shifts. These conjunctural changes are embedded in a structural framework which has permanently characterized Tunisia after 2011.
Neoliberalism
On December 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi – a Tunisian street vendor – set himself on fire following yet another instance of harassment and humiliation at the hands of local police and municipal officials. Within hours of his self-immolation, protests began erupting across the town, rapidly gathering pace and spreading outwards to other urban centres. Bouazizi’s death was long and agonizing; when he finally died on January 4, 2011, the conflagration sparked by his act roared into the national capital. In a matter of days, dictator Ben Ali was forced into exile.
Tunisia’s people did not only oppose the political authoritarianism of the Ali administration, but also the neoliberal policies under his rule which created massive inequality, unemployment and widespread misery. The ruling elites completely ignored the latter dimension, choosing to impose further neoliberalism in the aftermath of the revolution. Tunisia’s current ruling party, the Islamist Ennahda, garnered votes as it had been outlawed under the Ali regime. Many people perceived it as revolutionary.
However, governments led by Ennahda implemented free market reforms in return for loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Fuel subsidy cuts, price rises and the dismantlement of public sector hiring synchronized with the enrichment of the bourgeoisie. Now, 10 years after the revolution, the rate of unemployment in Tunisia is nearly 18%. Max Ajl, Bassam Haddad, and Zeinab Abul-Magd note:
The state has absorbed the political effects of mass immiseration, distributing subsidies to popular classes to absorb social unease. Its primary role has been to contain the discontent by the carrot of subsidies and the stick of state violence while serving as a mechanism for increasing integration of Tunisia into the international division of labor: by increasing subjugation to the global law of value through currency devaluation, deepening trade agreements with the EU [European Union], and opening agriculture for foreign investment…Unrest has intensified. The government has become almost entirely a mechanism for ever-continuing accumulation.
Caesarism
Tunisian society – like any other society – is a totality structured in dominance. Among the various structural instances, one instance will have the dominant role: contradictions at other levels will find themselves displaced to this instance (thereby averting a revolutionary rupture) or many contradictions may become condensed in this instance (producing the possibility of a revolutionary rupture). The dominant instance will vary according to the social formation, but in all cases its role is determined – in the last instance – by the economy. In other words, the economy often exercises its effects indirectly by determining the specific efficacy of other instances.
Saied’s victory in the October 2019 presidential election displaced the economic limits of Tunisia’s post-revolutionary system to the level of politics. Disillusioned with the dysfunctional rules of status quo, Tunisians elected someone who sought to portray himself as an anti-politician. Running as an independent and nicknamed “Robocop” for his stern, monotonous character, Saied promised to crack down on corruption among the political class. His anti-corruption discourse steadily morphed into a wide-ranging narrative of anti-systemic populism; a desire for greater power soon made itself felt.
In April 2021, Saied declared, “The president is the supreme commander of the military and civilian armed forces. Let this matter be clear to all Tunisians”. A month later, Middle East Eye revealed the existence of a secret document, in which the president’s advisers invited him to carry out a “constitutional coup”. Thus, from the beginning, Saied’s presidency had the character of what Antonio Gramsci called “Caesarism” – a phenomenon in which an individual breaks the stasis in a socio-economic system by operating as an equilibrating factor between classes, demagogically representing the interests of the subaltern masses. Gramsci elaborates:
[T]he content is the crisis of the ruling class’s hegemony, which occurs either because the ruling class has failed in some major political undertaking for which it has requested, or forcibly extracted, the consent of the broad masses (war, for example), or because huge masses (especially of peasants and petit-bourgeois intellectuals) have passed suddenly from a state of political passivity to a certain activity, and put forward demands which taken together, albeit not organically formulated, add up to a revolution…The traditional ruling class, which has numerous trained cadres, changes men and programmes and, with greater speed than is achieved by the subordinate classes, reabsorbs the control that was slipping from its grasp. Perhaps it may make sacrifices, and expose itself to an uncertain future by demagogic promises; but it retains power, reinforces it for the time being, and uses it to crush its adversary and disperse his leading cadres, who cannot be very numerous or highly trained … When the crisis does not find this organic solution, but that of the charismatic leader, it means that a static equilibrium exists (whose factors may be disparate, but in which the decisive one is the immaturity of the progressive forces); it means that no group, neither the conservatives nor the progressives, has the strength for victory, and that even the conservative group needs a master.
In Tunisia, the hegemonic capacities of the post-2011 historical bloc gradually weakened as a neoliberal orientation came to be eagerly embraced by both Islamist and secularist political forces. The sporadic and inorganic nature of popular movements proved incapable in radically superseding this moribund conjuncture. Hence, Tunisians were gifted with Saied, who overcame the impasse by unleashing the Caesarist logic of delegation to a strongman. His ideological project has ended up with the current events, wherein Tunisians have been demobilized through a reconfiguration of the political arena. What should be the attitude of progressive sectors toward these transformations?
The leftist Workers’ Party of Tunisia (PCT) released a statement on July 26, 2021, condemning Saied’s moves and calling them a violation of the constitution. While acknowledging that the government has led the country into a deep economic crisis, PCT stated that Saied’s actions are not a solution to the problems facing the people as they threaten the country’s young democracy and have “launched a path towards re-establishing the system of absolute autocracy again.” The party has asserted that the way out of the crisis is “the work of the Tunisian people to establish a popular democracy based on the civil state, the power in the hands of the people, with sovereignty over the country’s capacities, resources and independent political decisions, and social justice and equality among all men and women.”
The post The Crisis in Tunisia first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Liberal appeals to truth will not stop fascists.
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The material causes of racial inequality can be overcome only with massive economic distribution.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.