21st Century Internationalism of the Oppressed

[We are re-posting this essay by Bill Fletcher because he offers a compelling response to an argument that has been circulating all too widely in left circles. We are using the version that appeared on ZNet, Sept. 17, 2021. — Eds.]

The US Left has largely lost the ability and/or willingness to have serene debates and exchanges. All too quickly differences, sometimes negligible, are elevated into splits. And, worse, those holding opposing views are treated as ‘enemies of the people’ or simply soft-headed, recalling the danger of firing squads that have been frequently used against political opponents (note to reader: remember the end of the Grenadian Revolution in 1983).

Keeping this in mind the following is offered as a response to a recent piece by Ajamu Baraka, “We Can No Longer Avoid Raising the Contradiction of the Western Imperial Left’s Collaboration with the Western Bourgeoisie,” in Black Agenda Report (1 September 2021). This response is offered carefully because this is not a personal debate, despite the condescending tone of Baraka’s piece. Our differences do not revolve around any question as to the Baraka’s dedication and commitment, nor his insight into many issues facing the globally oppressed. He and I have known each other for years and, despite differences, have had a comradely relationship. In the context of his recent essay, however, I respectfully believe that his framework is muddled, incorrect and stuck in a perverse version of a pre-1991 world. We will leave aside Baraka’s insults to Gilbert Achcar. They are not only unfounded and inappropriate, but they are based on little other than Baraka’s disagreements with Achcar’s views, which he misrepresents, engaging in ad hominem insults (e.g., “Eurocentric armchair commentator”) that show he doesn’t have a clue of who Achcar is. The tone of the tirade almost sounded like a preface to the “Dozens,” an old African American exchange between potential foes in which they malign the other person by, among other things, talking about their opponent’s mother.

The fundamentals of our differences come down to, how does one understand the question of the internationalism of the oppressed? In order to answer this, there are two basic principles we start with: (1) a concrete analysis of concrete conditions, and (2) the law and nature of contradictions. We will attempt to apply both in our reply.

The nature of the moment

Until the collapse of the USSR, the world was enmeshed in several overlapping contradictions including, between the USA sphere of influence and the Soviet sphere; the struggles for independence and national liberation, largely in the global South; struggles within the respective spheres of the two superpowers; and struggles of workers and other oppressed strata for emancipation across the planet. During this period, the so-called Cold War, where the USSR, China and several other countries were frequently identified with the cause of socialism and where, in many cases, workers and oppressed classes had succeeded in overthrowing formal capitalism and foreign domination, much of the Left fell into the fateful habit of deciding upon what stand to take on international matters not based on a substantive analysis but based largely on which countries fell on which sides of particular issues. And, to a great extent this seemed to work. After all, the USSR, for instance, tended to support national liberation struggles—though not consistently—and the USA generally opposed national liberation struggles and did whatever it could to subvert efforts in the global South towards national sovereignty (and to subvert other progressive struggles). It was the main purveyor of global violence, as so eloquently phrased by Martin Luther King. Western Europe, Japan, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, though periodically at odds with the USA, generally fell in line when the USA snapped the whip.

The fact that the general outlines of an analysis appeared to work deluded too many of us into believing that it could replace an actual analysis of conditions. And this is where our failures began.

Baraka is absolutely correct in emphasizing that there is a long and ignominious history of social chauvinism by much of the organized Left in the global North, to which I would add a history of social chauvinism by numerous otherwise progressive movements—beyond the Left—in the global North. The infection of imperial consciousness became clear even in the international Communist movement by the 1930s when many revolutionaries in the global South felt betrayed by the approach of communist parties in the global North (and by the USSR) when too many of those latter parties abandoned the struggle against colonialism in the name of building anti- fascist fronts against the Germans, Italians and, later, the Japanese. This sense of betrayal led to splits in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America and, in some cases, the creation of new revolutionary formations (with often complicated politics).

By the late 1960s/early 1970s, global capitalism was in the midst of major changes and the Soviet bloc was beginning to enter a period of severe—and ultimately fatal—crisis. National liberation movements had won major victories and there were efforts underway to reshape the global scene. The counterattack from the global North, however, was vicious and came largely in the form of the assertion of neoliberalism and the imposition of new forms of dependence—rooted significantly in finance and debt—on the countries and peoples of the global South.

Time and space do not permit an exhaustive analysis of that period. Suffice it to say that the direction taken by China after the death of Mao, along with the ultimate collapse of the Soviet bloc, opened a new and unexpected world. Not an “end of history,” but an entry into the hegemony of neo- liberal globalization. For these first decades of the 21st century we have been living under that hegemony, though in the recent past it has begun to crack, due to internal and external pressures (and with ultimate results that are unpredictable at this juncture).

The elimination of the Soviet bloc and the victory of neoliberal hegemony created challenges for countries in the global South which were following what the late Egyptian Marxist theorist Samir Amin would call “national populist projects.” By “national populist projects” Amin was referencing those regimes that had emerged out of anti- imperialist struggles but were not committed—in any serious/consistent way—to a socialist path, sometimes asserting themselves as non-aligned between the two superpowers, e.g., Egypt under Nasser. Many such regimes were able to survive through playing one superpower off again another, though this did not always succeed.

With the collapse of the second superpower and the rise of neoliberal globalization, the national populist projects which were already in crisis due to internal contradictions—including class struggle, women’s movements, ethnic contradictions, democratic governance challenges—fractured. This took multiple forms including the adoption of parliamentary systems, massive privatization and deregulation, and other programs to align with the needs and desires of global capitalism. While this was underway, the parties and individuals leading the national populist regimes were immediately plunged into a legitimacy crisis. These regimes had relied on their left-wing, anti-imperialist rhetoric, as well as domestic economic programs (e.g., import substitution; major public sector labor) in order to hold high the banner of national independence and one or another form of a radical image. This clashed with the facts on the ground.

The legitimacy crisis was not simply a public relations challenge. Struggle was breaking out within these states against the regimes. Sometimes led by forces to the left of the regime; other times by forces to the right of the regime (and sometimes both), these struggles were asserting that the regimes were abandoning their base; abandoning the people. One example of the ramifications of the legitimacy crisis unfolded in what came to be known as the Arab democratic uprisings or the “Arab Spring.” These insurrections, all beginning peacefully, were a challenge not only to pro-Western regimes, e.g., Egypt, but also to regimes that had emerged from the national populist projects, e.g., Syria.

Much of the Left in the global North immediately found itself in a major dilemma. It was a dilemma that emerged in the context of how to understand the regime of the late Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and his adoption of structural adjustment and domestic repression; it was the dilemma in the face of the vacillations of Ghana’s Jerry Rawlings vis a vis global capital; it was a dilemma that accompanied the wars that led to the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia and the rise in various forms of chauvinism, including within parties laying claim to being on the Left; and dilemmas that have followed the Arab Spring, such as in the case of today’s Nicaragua with the strange and tragic direction of the repressive Ortega regime. What should be the stand of the global Left when masses of people are demanding change in these former national populist, allegedly anti-imperialist states? It is to this that Gilbert Achcar wrote his important essay in The Nation (“How To Avoid the Anti-Imperialism of Fools,” April 6, 2021), and it is about this that Baraka has no answers other than support anyone who speaks out against imperialism, even if in speaking out their voices are, at best, hollow and even when they are tyrannical governments oppressing political activists that are much more radically anti-imperialist than them.

After the uprising of the 17th of June The Secretary of the Writers’ Union Had leaflets distributed on the Stalinallee Stating that the people Had forfeited the confidence of the government And could only win it back By increased work quotas. Would it not in that case be simpler for the government To dissolve the people And elect another?—Bertolt Brecht

In looking at any situation it is incumbent upon the Left to identify the various contradictions that are putting the phenomenon in motion. As such, we must shy away from assuming that there is anything approaching a clash of monoliths and, rather, understand the dynamism that exists within and between social formation. Baraka appears to have missed this point or simply disagrees. Thus, his starting—and ending—point appears to be that it is the job of leftists in the global North to oppose our own oppressors and it is our job to support, in the global South, all those who speak out against, or may even be at odds with, our oppressor. As such, it is not only about what is transpiring in the global South but also one’s attitude towards another imperialist state such as Russia, that also belongs to the global North, even though it is a rival of the United States and its Western allies.

This view immediately runs one into a cul de sac. If this is the approach, what does this mean regarding what has been called proletarian internationalism or what I reference as the internationalism of the globally oppressed? While it is never the responsibility of a Left in one country to instruct the Left in another what to do, it is our job to identify ways and means to build solidarity with and between forces that are rooted within and advance the interests of the oppressed (in the struggles against capitalism, authoritarianism, etc.). This necessitates an examination of the nature of a particular state as well as the social forces on the ground. The case of Syria is instructive.

Baraka would have us believe that the Assad regime is anti- imperialist and stands against the objectives of the USA. Further, that the USA is the main problem in Syria. Yet his arguments are only assertions and are not backed up with any genuine data. In what sense, is the Assad state democratic and representing a broad swath of the population? How does one explain the Assad regime’s assassinations of participants and leaders in the 2011 protests? How does that characterization of the Assad regime fit with its intervention in Lebanon in 1976 to crush the Palestinian movement and the local Left on behalf of Washington? How does it fit with the war against Palestinian camps waged in Lebanon in the 1980s up until the expulsion of Yasser Arafat from Northern Lebanon? How does it fit with the participation of the Assad regime in the US-led war against Iraq in 1990? How does it fit with the incarceration and torture of thousands of communist activists? What does one make of the Assad regime’s use of barrel bombs against civilian populations? In what sense is the Russian bombing of hospitals in liberated territory an act of progressive solidarity?

Silence. There is no reply other than to challenge the authenticity of those of us on the Left who argue for an anti- imperialist AND anti-dictatorial politics of emancipation.

In any social movement, there are multiple and contradictory forces, each struggling to lead, each in complicated relationships with one another. Revolutions or insurrections that commence in the absence of a leading organization, e.g., a party or front, run into myriad challenges in terms of direction. What is the tendency of such movements? Are such movements advancing a set of progressive politics or do they constitute a counter-revolution?

If there is to be a debate, then the debate should be on matters such as these with an attempt to identify the true facts and correct stance rather than a debate based on assertions regarding what one would prefer to believe.

The question of solidarity of the globally oppressed must begin with a focus on the oppressed themselves. Baraka focuses on the struggle between governments. I start from a different standpoint: the question of the people. It is flowing from the question of the people that one can situate the larger context. In looking at Syria, for instance, what were the nature of the demands of the mass movement? Why was it that the response of the Assad regime was bloody repression? What does that response represent?

In the current Myanmar crisis, there are those who see this entirely through the lens of the USA/China contradiction, thus their conclusion is that the opponents of the coup are somehow dupes of US imperialism. The immediate question, however, is whether there is a legitimate struggle within Myanmar against repression and corruption (not to mention, against Islamophobia!)? If there is, how does that struggle fit into the contention between the USA and China? And, of course, in what ways can we, in the global Northern Left, be of support to the forces on the ground fighting against the coup people?

Rather than throwing around ridiculous insults, we would suggest that brother Baraka engage in a discussion about the concretes of international solidarity of the oppressed. Rather than solidarity taking the form of what is sarcastically referenced as “resolutionary socialism,” what are the concrete steps that can be taken? First, we begin with an appreciation of what is unfolding on the ground. The assumption that the USA is behind everything is not only USA-centric, but it also starts to feel more like the conspiracy theories that entrance the political Right. What are the contradictions that are being played out? Who or what is the principal enemy of the people in that social formation at that moment?

Second, what or who are the progressive forces and by what yardstick does one assess them? Particularly if there is no organized left or no hegemonic party, in what sense would one conclude that an opposition is progressive or not? What is the nature of the regime? What are the demands of the masses? These are the sorts of questions that must be answered in the concrete rather than in the context of abstract rhetoric.

Third, in what way can the global Northern Left be of assistance (and not interference)? Are there policies that need to be pushed with our respective governments? Are there mass activities, e.g., boycotts, divestment, direct action, aimed at an oppressive regime that can be exemplary of true solidarity? This is highlighted because many in the US Left have abandoned the demands for any action by the USA government on the basis that there is nothing that the USA government can or should do (or worse, that we, on the Left, should demand nothing of the USA government other than to cease and desist). The irony here is that during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), the US Left was actively in favor of the USA, Britain and France providing direct, military assistance to the Spanish government against the fascists. It is important to remember that even with the danger of fascism, a threat to humankind, the demand for US assistance to the Spanish government came while the USA was still perpetrating crimes against the people of Latin America. A demand for a change in USA policy vis a vis Spain was not inconsistent with opposing the USA role in Latin America.

Beyond the matter of demands on government, there are direct steps that can be taken in solidarity with progressive social movements and/or against oppressor regimes. By way of an example from history, it was during the US Civil War that British dockworkers refused to unload cotton from the Confederacy that was slated to land in Britain. Even though this had an impact on their living, they practiced solidarity. Since that time we have seen examples of dockworkers around the world practicing solidarity both in the context of trade unionism but also in the context of the fight for social justice. It is incumbent upon the global Northern Left to expand our parameters when it comes to conceptualizing concrete internationalism of the globally oppressed, looking at the actions of sectors, such as dockworkers movements, as one of many examples of that which can be undertaken.

Concluding thoughts

Ajamu Baraka’s passionate essay actually told us nothing regarding what the global Norther Left should do to advance international solidarity among the oppressed other than to oppose everything that the USA does. We are sure that such a position is self-satisfying since one need not open one’s eyes to reality but only must swing broadly and hit whatever is in the way.

If politics were so easy…

A better starting point would be to always ask, as did Lenin, “…who stands to gain?” Or, further, what is the principal contradiction in a specific setting (and how do secondary contradictions act upon it)? When looking at the international arena asking such questions can only lead to a productive answer if one realizes that the planet, while composed of countries, is more than anything else made up of peoples and social movements in struggle. Afghanistan – Don’t Look Away: A Crisis for the Whole of Humanity

Protest for women’s rights in Kabul on Sept. 3. Source: https://tinyurl.com/4j42hw9j

The defeat of the U.S. and the seizure of power by the Taliban mark a real turning point. This reveals both imperialism and fundamentalism as obstacles to human emancipation at a time when Afghan women are leading the resistance.

Not the Same as the Fall of Saigon

The sudden collapse of the U.S.-supported Afghan government has left the ultra-fundamentalist Taliban in charge of the entire country, at least for now. For twenty years, the U.S. occupation propped up a nominally democratic but utterly corrupt kleptocracy and a military with 300,000 troops, at least on paper, with the support of local and U.S. air power. In addition to tens of thousands of U.S. ground troops, allied countries like the UK, Germany, France, Canada, Australia, Netherlands also sent substantial forces in the early years. Despite this, and in defiance of all estimates of the strength of forces on the ground, some 50,000 lightly-armed Taliban fighters seized the entire country in a series of lighting offensives in August, the most humiliating defeat for Washington since the fall of Saigon in 1975.

At the outset though, it is necessary to state that the kind of forces that defeated the United States in 1975 were entirely different from the Taliban. While the Vietnamese National Liberation Front was certainly Stalinist and hardly socialist humanist, it nonetheless represented a national liberation movement led by the country’s most popular nationalist leader, Ho Chi Minh, who had been leading the anticolonial struggle for 40 years. The NLF upheld women’s equality (many of their combat troops were women), free education for all, and land reform. And at least on paper, it opposed discrimination against oppressed minorities, although it soon reneged on this promise. In contrast, the Taliban openly state that they intend to make women second-class citizens, that they will discriminate against religious and ethnic minorities like the mainly Shia Hazara community, and that they will do nothing to change property relations.

Some similarities do exist, however, between the South Vietnamese regime propped up by the U.S. and the Afghan regime it installed and supported for 20 years at a cost of more than $2 trillion. As in Vietnam, huge stocks of the latest U.S. weapons were left behind. But the Afghan regime was even more brittle than the South Vietnamese one, which held out for several years — even after the U.S. withdrew most of its ground troops — before collapsing in 1975. It at least had something of a social base in the relatively privileged Catholic minority that had been favored by French colonialism in a predominantly Buddhist country.

The U.S.-Installed Karzai-Ghani Regime The Afghan regime, directly installed by Washington, never developed a social base of any kind. It existed mainly through lavish U.S. funding. This led to huge profits for U.S. “defense” contractors. The Karzai-Ghani regime depended upon a number of local warlords, most of whose forces originated as parts of the fundamentalist mujahideen who fought against Russian occupation during the 1980s, with support from the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. In this sense, the regime was deeply Islamist too, though not as extremely so as the fanatical Taliban. This meant that most of the non-Taliban factions with real power, i.e., with control of arms and militias, were at best “moderate” Islamists (Bruno Philip, “Les talibans, stricts ‘imitateurs’ du Prophète,” Le Monde, September 9, 2021). This could be seen in the constitution, in the court system, and in administration at local levels. In addition, these warlords and the other arms of the Afghan government were notoriously corrupt. Examples include schools paid for but never built and the pervasive “ghost battalions” of the Afghan army where there were no soldiers but the money was siphoned off by officers.

At a broader level, the massive poverty endemic to the rural areas, inhabited by over 70% of the population, not only failed to lessen but actually increased under the U.S.- installed regime. Added to this were the incessant bombings and military raids in rural areas by U.S. forces targeting Taliban but often hitting civilians. (Anand Gopal reports in heartrending detail on this in a manner surprisingly uncritical of the Taliban in his “The Other Afghan Women,” New Yorker, September 6. 2021.) The whole world witnessed an example of this, for once visible because it occurred in the heart of Kabul in broad daylight at a time when the international media had gathered to witness the final U.S. withdrawal: An August 29 U.S. drone attack on a supposed ISIS target instead killed 10 civilians, among them seven children. These kinds of attacks, persisting for years, created an atmosphere of despair and hopelessness in which economic privation played no small part. As Gallup reported on a poll it conducted that sampled the entire population in 2018, “Afghans’ ratings of their own lives are lower than any other population’s worldwide,” adding, “Almost no Afghans see their economic situation improving anytime soon” (Steve Crabtree, “Afghans’ Misery Reflected in Record-Low Well-Being Measures,” Gallup, October 26, 2018).

The August 2021 regime collapse, although sudden in its final form, was a long time coming. The U.S. government realized it had been defeated at least by 2020, as the Trump administration agreed to a total U.S. withdrawal in direct negotiations with the Taliban. The Biden administration continued this policy, which had two basic aspects: the United States would withdraw by the end of August 2021 and the Taliban would not attack U.S. forces during the period of withdrawal. Both sides kept the bargain, with no involvement on the part of the Afghan people or the Ghani government, with the latter not even included in the negotiations.

The Taliban: Past, Present, and Future

Who are the Taliban? Without detailing their history, which is generally known, let me quote Middle East scholar Juan Cole on their relationship to Islam as a whole:

“In my view, the Taliban resemble the Ku Klux Klan. New York Times journalist David Sanger complained when I said that, saying that the Taliban took over a whole country and the KKK is a fringe. But I’d just like to point out that the KKK had enormous influence in the Democratic Party in the 1920s and that it took over the state of Indiana for a while in the 1920s, having the governor, a majority of the state assembly, and 250,000 cadre members. And today’s KKK was an important constituency for Trumpism and influential on the former guy’s policies.”

“What I would say about the Taliban is that they are an outlier in the Muslim world. The old Taliban had been formed in seminaries of the Deoband school of Islam. I think of Deobandis as sort of like Haredim or ultra-Orthodox among Jews. The school developed in British colonial India and was a way for Indian Muslims to assert their identities against British Christian rule and the Hindu majority. It is a sectarian movement and the vast majority of Indian Muslims rejected it. Its seminaries in northern Pakistan attracted Saudi funding, and so some seminaries mixed Deobandi teachings with some ideas from the hard line, rigid Saudi Wahhabi movement. But the Taliban were also the result of the chaos and violence of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan” (“Taliban ‘Islam’ versus the Islam of the Prophet Muhammad and the Qur’an,” Informed Comment, August 18, 2021).

In power from 1996-2001, the Taliban barred women from any participation in school or in work outside the home and imposed the austere burqa, executed “impure” women and gay men, killed many members of the Shia Hazara community, and blew up the majestic Bamiyan statues of Buddha, one of the world’s great cultural heritage sites — on the grounds that the statues represented a false religion based on “idolatry.” They also banned music and have done so again.

Since the Taliban seized power in August, they have issued contradictory statements and engaged in equally contradictory actions. Some of this can probably be attributed to duplicity, a calculated delay in introducing their harshest ideas and measures until they have consolidated their power. But some of this is a reflection of real disagreements within the group itself, as seen in the September 14 row at the national palace between two factions, after their chief diplomat Mullah Abdel Barodar seems to have lost a power struggle to the even more fundamentalist Haqqani network. Historically, the latter has had a stronger relationship to Pakistan’s fearsome military intelligence organization, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and to Al Qaeda as well. As is well known, the ISI aided and trained the Taliban before 1996, giving them modern tanks, which led some to quip that they arrived at Kabul in 1996 armed with a lot more than the Quran. The ISI also gave the Taliban refuge in Quetta, Pakistan right up through today, after the U.S. invasion of 2001 drove them from power in the wake of the September 11 attacks by their Al Qaeda allies. This time of course, a huge stock of U.S. weapons has fallen into their hands.

Since taking Kabul in August, the Taliban have begun to bar all women from secondary school and government workplaces, although they have announced that at some future date, they will allow them to return in strictly gender-segregated spaces. There were initial hints that they would set up an “inclusive” government involving people like corrupt former President Hamid Karzai, something some “progressives” who focus exclusively on anti-imperialism were all too happy to credit. But when the interim government was actually announced, it was all old-time hardliners, with nary a woman, a Hazara (c. 10% of the population), or even a Tajik (c. 25%). Instead, they were almost entirely drawn from the Pashtun ethnic group, who represent a plurality of the population (c. 40%), and who have always constituted the Taliban’s social base. There were, however, two ministers drawn from the Uzbek minority (c. 10% of the population). Interestingly, the head of the Pakistani ISI, Faiz Hameed, was photographed on his way to meet with the Taliban leadership on September 4, a few days before the new interim government was announced, and was blamed for the elevation of the most reactionary elements. What is clear is that there is no pretense of elections, an Islamic republic, or anything of the sort. Instead, a theocratic-monarchical Islamic “Emirate” is to be established. Will they succeed?

The Afghan People Refuse to Be Silenced

Except in places like their old base in Kandahar, the largest city in the areas where the Pashtun population predominates, there has been at best silence in the wake of the Taliban takeover. Afghanistan in 2021 is not the same as in 1996, with a population that is much more urbanized and cosmopolitan, with millions of educated women and youth, and with a vibrant civil society that developed alongside the U.S. occupation — and the regime it installed — that includes relatively independent media and other cultural institutions.

To take one example, let us listen to Hjalmar Jorge Joffre- Eichhorn, German-Bolivian cultural worker and editor of the recent book, Lenin150:

“The yearning at the heart of our theatre activities was a more just, democratic, peaceful, and beautiful Afghanistan for all Afghans, independent of their ethnic group, sex, or religious orientation, and free of constant interference from false friends near and far. Our morale was one of defiance, outrage, and anguish about what at the time were thirty years of uninterrupted war, the havoc it had wreaked on the lives of millions of innocent people, and a culture of impunity sustained by a global alliance of fundamentalist warlords, both so-called Christian and so-called Muslim, whose insatiable hunger for power and money kept feeding the war machine with the bodies of the righteous.”

“Yet our spirit was also full of hope and resolve, especially to the extent that our theatre activism began to convert what Dr. Sharif called ‘tears into energy’…:

No desire to open my mouth What should I sing of…? I, who am hated by life. No difference to sing or not to sing. —Nadia Anjuman

It was in those moments of radical fragility that we realized that another Afghanistan was possible, that the theatre could make a unique and powerful contribution to this possibility, and, perhaps most importantly, that the only people capable of carrying out this endlessly obstructed transformation were those Afghan women and men no longer willing to accept that they were born for nothingness; with trapped wings and a sealed mouth, as slain Afghan poet Nadia Anjuman (1980-2005) so hauntingly wrote” (“In Search of Lost Hope: Theatre Against All Odds in Afghanistan,” Howlround Theatre Commons, May 15, 2018).

Kabul 2021 is a far cry from Kabul 1996. At that time, the population had shrunk to 300,000 amid sieges and rocket attacks. Today, the city has six million inhabitants, while half of the national population was born after 2001. With overstretched military forces of about 50,000 in a country of some 40 million people, it is unclear if the Taliban will be able to take full control very soon, especially with winter coming on and a food crisis looming.

In the days after the Taliban took over Kabul, street protests led by women began and have persisted for weeks. On August 19, some 200 young women and men gathered in the streets of Kabul to protest Taliban policies while waving the national flag that the Taliban has replaced with one evoking their “Islamic Emirate.” Taliban soldiers soon arrived, insulted the women as “indecent,” and beat up the men, firing on and wounding some of them.

Their struggle is emanating from a sense of anger, despair, and dread. In a poignant interview, Roya Mandegar, a social worker who lives alone as a single woman in Kabul, stated in an incredibly brave interview: “I am an atheist and a feminist. I never stayed at home on March 8 [International Women’s Day]. We fought for twenty years so that girls could wear colorful clothing in Kabul. Today the city has become quiet and empty. I am walled into my apartments, which I change regularly. My heart is burning with distress. All the work of these twenty years was reduced to naught in the space of one night” (Ghazal Golshiri, “A Kaboul, le désespoir de ceux qui restent,” Le Monde, September 1, 2021).

In smaller cities, the Taliban have tightened the screws more than they have dared to do in Kabul. In the days following the Taliban takeover, the city of Herat saw very few women on the streets without their faces covered, this in what has been one of the country’s most liberal and cultured cities. Women students were being prevented from going to the university. Most ominously, black marks were being placed upon homes occupied by Hazaras or single women. (Jacques Follorou and Ghazal Golshiri, “La vie au jour le jour sous la férule talibane,” Le Monde, August 24, 2021).

But by September 2, resistance broke out in Herat as well, as several dozen women marched through the streets after the Taliban announced that the new government would include no women. They demanded that this policy be reversed, focusing their overall slogans on the right to “education, work, and security” (Sharif Hassan, “Afghan Women Stage Rights Protest After a Taliban Leader’s Remark,” New York Times, September 3, 2021).

On September 4, about a hundred women demonstrators again confronted the Taliban in Kabul. After Taliban soldiers surrounded them and a leader started to order them to disperse over a megaphone, one daring woman briefly snatched away his megaphone. But the Taliban thereupon beat the demonstrators with metal rods and scattered them.

Five days later, in Kabul on September 8, several small rallies protested the interim government’s lack of inclusivity, especially its exclusion of women. In one of these actions, demonstrators began their action in the Hazara community: “No women, no Hazara. It’s completely wrong.” They marched across the city, arguing their way past armed Taliban checkpoints. But as they reached the center of the city, the Taliban set upon them, and did so even more harshly on two male journalists covering the event. These Afghan men were beaten mercilessly, and later showed their scars to the media. On the same day, the Taliban announced it was re-establishing its religious police apparatus, the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice (Nabih Bulos and Marcus Yam, “In Kabul, Women Challenge Taliban,” Los Angeles Times, September 9, 2021).

The next day, women gathered for a similar protest in Mazar-i- Sharif, a smaller city with a history of opposition to the Taliban, in part due to its cosmopolitan location on the border with Uzbekistan. The small demonstration was kept that way by the Taliban, who cordoned them off immediately, preventing both other women and male supporters from joining in. They then proceeded to arrest the male supporters and some of the women demonstrators. Away from the cameras, one of the women organizers was detained, brutally beaten, and threatened with worse if she talked about it afterwards. According to one report, during the demonstration, “some of the bravest women put their hands on the guns of the Taliban, shouting that without these weapons, they wouldn’t be so sure of themselves.” Clearly, Afghan women are “the last rampart against the Taliban,” as a French journalist reported (Jacques Follorou, “Le femmes, dernier rampart antitaliban,” Le Monde, September 13, 2021).

The persistent demonstrations by Afghan women and their supporters stand out all the more for two reasons: (1) They are continuing even as the resistance led by some former government ministers and mujahideen commanders in Panjshir Valley seems to have collapsed very rapidly, at least for now. (2) Unlike in Iran in 1979 or Egypt in 2011, women demonstrators and their male supporters in Kabul and Mazar-i- Sharif are facing armed security forces who don’t even necessarily speak the local language (Dari or Uzbeki) but not mobs of hostile local men. For in addition to the men who have openly supported them — and remember that most women have already been driven off the streets by Taliban pronouncement — it appears that the urban population, both male and female, is either indifferent or hostile to their new Taliban rulers.

Where To Now?

Russia, China, and even Iran — and of course the Taliban’s longstanding ally Pakistan — have to one degree or another embraced the Taliban’s rise to power in the hope of regional stability. For its part, the U.S. government’s unstated position is not all that different by now, despite years of fighting the Taliban. First, it is notable just how much care the U.S took to do nothing to antagonize the Taliban in its final months in the country in order to get its own troops out safely. Second, as revealed in an unguarded moment by no less a personage than Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley, the biggest fear the U.S. has about the future is not repression of the Afghan people (of course not!) but instability. Evoking the danger of a war between pockets of ISIS and the Taliban inside Afghanistan, Milley opined, “I think there’s at least a very good probability of a broader civil war, and that will then in turn lead to conditions that could in fact, lead to reconstitution of al Qaeda or a growth of ISIS” (Carolyn Vakil, “Milley Says Civil War ‘Likely’ in Afghanistan,” The Hill, September 4, 2021). Reading between the lines, one could say that the U.S. also wishes any kind of opposition to the Taliban to die down, even progressive opposition.

But longterm “stability” under the Taliban is not very likely. To be sure, they are rooted in the country’s largest ethnic group, the Pashtuns, but they are still a minority of the country. Moreover, the Taliban’s reactionary ideology is not shared without opposition even inside the socially conservative Pashtun community, let alone a multi-ethnic and increasingly urbanized country. Even if they are able to consolidate their rule over a population so tired of war that any kind of peace might seem in Hobbesian fashion to constitute an acceptable result, they lack the capacity — or even the desire — to bring about improvements in the conditions of life and labor for the population. Overall, the situation is bleak in the immediate term, as Afghanistan is coming under the rule of one of the most retrogressive regimes on earth at a time of food shortages, general economic deprivation, the destruction of war, Covid-19, and severe drought.

At this juncture, it is of paramount importance that the international left, human right groups, feminists, and other progressives not look the other way, but continue to expose the situation and to support as best we can our Afghan brothers and sisters. This means everything from public anti- Taliban and pro-feminist demonstrations as occurred recently in Paris, Los Angeles, and other cities, to the fight for the right of Afghan immigrants and refugees to cross borders and receive our welcome.

The Forgotten History of William McCarthy and Boston Teamsters Local 25 William J.McCarthy of Boston Teamster Local 25, former president of the Internantional Brotherhood of Teamsters.

Editors’ note: This is the second of two articles with background about the union’s recent history, intended to inform readers about the election of officers now taking place in the Teamsters union (International Brotherhood of Teamsters).

At the first 2021 Teamsters debate, candidate for General President (GP) of the International Brother of Teamsters (IBT), Sean O’Brien had the arrogance to introduce himself by saying: “Good evening brothers and sisters, my name is Sean O’Brien…I’m a proud fourth generation Teamster out of the greatest local union in the entire country…Local 25.” In fact, the history of Teamster Local 25, which has some accomplishments to be proud of, is in recent history largely shameful.

Unfortunately, most working teamsters do not know the history of the IBT let alone of Local 25—nor why O’Brien would suggest that Dan Tobin and Bill McCarthy were great Boston Teamster leaders. This article will demonstrate that O’Brien’s assessment of Local 25 is incorrect. But more importantly it will show that by understanding the Teamsters past, union members can acquire the ability to become agents of their own history and change its course.

In 1988 William “Bill” McCarthy became the last of the Teamsters leaders chosen without a vote of rank-and-file members to become General President. He was born in the Charlestown sector of Boston in 1919, which is home to troubled Local 25. As an adolescent growing up in the Great Depression era, McCarthy did what some other kids his age engaged in: stealing. Like other juveniles in urban centers during the most difficult of economic times in American history, he became a hoodlum tailgater—stealing off the backs of trucks that transported goods all over the New England area as well as from the docks of Boston harbor.

In the glory days of Prohibition in the 1920s, the city of Boston was typical of an American city where organized crime found its footing.[1] After President Franklin Delano Roosevelt repealed Prohibition in 1933, organized crime activity transitioned into labor racketeering and loansharking with money sometimes looted from union funds. Legend has it that when Bill McCarthy was fifteen years old, he stole a car and took Boston police on a high-speed chase. The young hoodlum ditched the car near the offices of Local 25 and hid in the cab of a tractor-trailer. According to this tale, McCarthy and the driver of the tractor where he had hid became friends, and Bill persuaded the older man to teach him to drive the big rig. Eager to start a career as a truck driver and join the Teamsters, in 1936 McCarthy reputedly stole a blank baptismal certificate and falsified his birth date so he could qualify for a chauffeur’s license to become a driver and union member. However true the story may be, tales such as this one are a traditional part of the lore of Boston’s tight- knit ethnic communities, whether Irish, Italian or some other immigrant group.

McCarthy joined the Teamsters as a driver at the age of seventeen in 1936 and gradually moved up the bureaucratic ladder of the union. In 1941 he was assigned as shop-steward and elected business agent in 1947. He began his career at the headquarters of Local 25 in a time when organized crime had become a concern in the media and among politicians. Many large cities and states had become preoccupied with the way organized crime had infiltrated interstate commerce trough labor racketeering. Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver held hearings in 1950 and 1951 that were broadcast on television and brought into American living rooms the faces of assorted mobsters who speaking live on television claimed their Fifth Amendment, declining to testify on the grounds they might be incriminated. Despite their tight-lipped responses, Americans were disturbed by the role of criminals in the unions.

When McCarthy took over as head of Local 25 in 1955, just next door in the Winter Hill neighborhood of Somerville—James “Buddy” McLean a hoodlum, a truck driver, and member of Local 25 had made a name for himself as founder and leading boss of the Winter Hill Gang. One of the gang’s most profitable criminal enterprise became the hijacking of trucks whose drivers were Teamsters—and most of those crimes were inside jobs. Among other Somerville hoodlums and Teamsters were men like McClean’s right-hand man, Howie Winter, Joe “Joe Mac” McDonald and Jimmy Sims. Sims was best known for his expertise as the quickest car-stealing whiz in Boston. In the Winter Hill neighborhood, locals bragged that Simms could hot-wire a Ford in thirty seconds.[2] All these Winter Hill boys were celebrated in their neighborhood for their criminal knack and toughness. A generation younger than McCarthy, they were also praised by the Teamster leader as they reminded him of his own juvenile delinquent past. Their affiliation benefitted both as McCarthy used the Winter Hill Gang to enforce his policies against any dissenters, and the gang members used their membership at Local 25 to divert attention from their criminal activities.

The Winter Hill Teamsters came to dominate the rackets of northern Boston that included running numbers, loansharking, warehouse burglaries, bank robberies, armored-car heists and truck hijackings. Upon the murder of McLean in 1965 during the height of the Somerville and Charlestown neighborhood gang war, often referred to as the Boston Irish Gang War, Winter inherited control of the gang. Both McLean and Winter had been close friends since childhood and they had both joined Local 25 at the age of fourteen.[3] When Winter took over the Winter Hill Gang, he sought to expand his criminal enterprise into the greater Boston area, so in 1975 he recruited South Boston’s most feared gangster, James “Whitey” Bulger to join him. At the time Winter didn’t know that Whitey was an informant for the FBI working to take down the Italian gangs in the North End and other Winter Hill Gang associates. With the assistance of Whitey, in 1979 Winter was indicted for money laundering, income tax evasion and horse-race fixing. With Winter behind bars, Whitey proceeded to take control of the Winter Hill Gang and expanded the gang’s criminal enterprise beyond New England. At Local 25, his main man, James Flynn, took full control of the local’s motion picture division’s ongoing extortion policies. Flynn who is still alive was a close friend of Sean O’Brien’s father William “Billy” O’Brien and for over thirty-years the two worked together in Local 25’s movie division as crew chiefs.

By 1960 the McClellan hearings chaired by Robert F. Kennedy had exposed the involvement of La Cosa Nostra (LCN), that is the Italian Mafia, in trade unions which at the time had more rank-and-file Teamsters in New England than any other region in the country.[4] Based in Providence Rhode Island, the Patriarca crime family led by Raymond Patriarca, Sr. for many years the boss of the New England LCN, had exerted influence over the regions Laborers International Union and the Teamsters. In Boston’s Italian North End, which is located south of Charlestown just across the North Washington Street Bridge, was the headquarters of Boston’s underboss to the Patriarca crime family, Jerry Angiulo. Located just a few minutes away, McCarthy, the head of Local 25, fell under the spell of the North End’s Italian mob underboss.

Through the first half of the 1960s, the IBT under Hoffa had gone to war with the federal government over the union’s obvious ties to the Mafia. But in July 1964, Hoffa finally lost that battle and was found guilty on two counts of jury tampering and embezzlement of union pension funds. He was sentenced to thirteen years in prison. In less than four years, Kennedy’s efforts resulted in the indictment of 201 Teamster officers and the conviction of 126 of them.[5] Hoffa managed to stay out of prison for three years until his appeal was denied in 1967. While in prison Hoffa left the union under the tutelage of his own personal gofer, Frank Fitzsimmons who allowed the LCN to further take control of the IBTs decision making. In 1969 McCarthy with the blessing of the LCN was appointed International Vice-President.

In 1972, again with the nod of the Patriarca crime family, McCarthy gained another appointment as principal officer of New England’s Teamsters Joint Council 10. By the 1970s the LCN’s labor racketeering had become the top organized crime priority for both the FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ).[6] A decade later the 1983-1986 work of the President’s Commission on Organized Crime (PCOC) left no doubt about the LCN’s firm grip on organized labor.[7] When Fitzsimmons died of lung cancer in 1981, Roy Williams replaced him as General President. Williams who later admitted to being under the control of Nick Civella, boss of the Kansas City LCN family told the PCOC, “every big local union…had some connection with organized crime.”[8] In fact the PCOC found evidence that the LCN had influence in over thirty-eight IBT locals and joint councils, including Boston’s Local 25 and New England’s Joint Council 10. By March 1986, the PCOC had urged the DOJ to bring a civil Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO) lawsuit against the IBTs international officers and their LCN associates.

In April 1983, Williams resigned as IBT president after a jury sentenced him to fifty-five years in prison following his conviction for attempting to bribe Nevada Senator Howard Cannon in favor of votes blocking interstate trucking deregulation. With the LCN bosses’ approval, the GEB chose Cleveland’s Local 507 boss, Jackie Presser as new GP. He was the son of well distinguished labor racketeer William “Bill” Presser—a high-ranking officer that had held numerous offices within the IBT and sat on the board of the troubled Central States Pension Fund. According to the PCOC, Local 507 was “infested with LCN associates and convicted felons.”[9] Presser’s ascendency to the union’s top position took place with the blessing of Cleveland mob boss Angelo Lonardo and other Midwest and East Coast families.

As rumors swirled after Ronald Reagan’s reelection win in 1984 that the DOJ was preparing to launch a civil RICO suit against the Teamsters, Presser playing victim responded: “Takeovers of unions are nothing new—Communists and Fascists have been doing so for decades. However, it is a sad day in the history of the United States and the American labor movement when such tactics are employed.”[10] The IBT organized a few rank-and- file rallies against the government’s proposed suit and 264 members of Congress delivered a petition in December 1987 urging Congress not to file the civil RICO lawsuit against the IBT.[11] Nevertheless, U.S Attorney Rudy Giuliani proceeded to file the much much-anticipated civil RICO complaint against the IBT in June 1988.

Meanwhile in Boston, movie crew Teamsters like Jimmy Flynn went on to develop the most notorious and long-lasting reputations of mobbed-up Local 25 members. His legacy goes back to when Buddy McLean founded the Winter Hill Gang in 1955. Flynn grew-up with McLean, Howie Winter, “Joe Mac” McDonald and car thief—Jimmy Sims. He was an original member of the Winter Hill Gang and became a high-ranking member of Local 25’s movie crews.[12] His mugshot also appears on the FBI’s 1975 organizational chart of the Winter Hills Gang.

In 1997 Flynn managed to play a part as judge in the 1997 hit film Good Will Hunting starring Matt Damon and Robin Williams. Flynn’s part as judge in the film was amusing considering he had been indicted and tried for the 1982 murder of another Local 25 Teamster and associate of the Winter Hill Gang, Brian “Balloonhead” Holloran. When a warrant for his arrest was issued, Flynn went “on the lam” for two and half years. In 1986 Flynn was finally put on trial, but on the stand was able to establish that he was nowhere near the murder site. In 1999, Kevin Weeks who was Whitey Bulger’s personal bodyguard disclosed the description of the Holloran hit. Both Whitey and his right-hand man Steve “the Rifleman” Flemmi had committed the hit themselves.[13] The trailer on the 2015 film Black Mass starring Jonny Depp as Whitey Bulger depicts the Hollaran hit. Ironically, according to IGN Entertainment both Flynn and Billy O’Brien sat on the Winter Hill Gang movie negotiations.[14]

The 1980s would become the most embarrassing and turbulent of times for the Teamsters as the Reagan administration waged open war against organized labor and Republicans introduced so-called right-to-work legislation in several states. Fitzsimmons (1981), Williams (1983) and Presser (1988) all finished their presidencies in legal trouble and as disgraced FBI informants against their mob bosses. In 1988 McCarthy succeeded to the general presidency after a divisive political struggle within the mob controlled GEB in a nine-to-eight vote. The civil RICO suit had already been filed when he was sworn in. But more important to note is that McCarthy was not promoted to the highest office of the Teamsters based on his merits and working-class fighting credentials as O’Brien seems to have suggested. McCarthy was a loyal puppet of organized crime and he himself had allowed gangsters and thugs to infiltrate the ranks of Local 25 and Joint Council 10 going back to the days he had gained control of their offices in 1955 and 1972.

The 113-page civil RICO complaint filed by the Southern District Court of New York (SDNY) in short accused the Teamsters of being a subsidiary of organized crime. McCarthy as head of the union was forced in March 1989 to agree to a consent decree that would rid the union of corruption and organized crime involvement. The consent decree also required several amendments to the IBT constitution that included rank- and-file members gaining the right-to-vote for the GEB and ending the undemocratic and nepotistic system of appointments. From 1988 when McCarthy was appointed General President till the election of 1991, he proved to be incompetent, incapable and weak. The daily newspapers and television news stories about the Teamsters further tarnished the reputation of the Boston leader.

McCarthy had initially announced that he would seek reelection, but he was quickly forced to abandon his candidacy when he failed to secure the support of the majority of the GEB. With the infiltration of Winter Hill Gang thugs at Local 25 and the constant stories making the headlines of the troubled local on the front pages of The Boston Globe and The Boston Herald, in 1991 McCarthy subsequently lost his local election to George Cashman, an opportunist disguised as a reformer. McCarthy followed with his resignation as president of Joint Council 10, which he had ran since 1972. He retired from the Teamsters in utter disgrace.

Is this what the aspiring candidate for Teamsters General President-Sean O’Brien has referred to as the greatest Teamster local in the country?

O’Brien is a byproduct of a tradition of organized crime that is unique to Boston Teamsters Local 25. But it should come as no surprise to Teamsters. O’Brien’s own father was part of the criminal element that has roamed the halls of Local 25 since the days when William “Bill” McCarthy took control of the local in 1955 and allowed the Patriarca crime family to control him and the Winter Hill Gang to run Boston’s rackets.

[1]T.J. English, Where the Bodies Were Buried: Whitey Bulger and the World That Made Him, (Harper Collins: New York, 2015), 75.

[2] Howie Carr, Hitman – The Untold Story of Johnny Mortorano: Whitey Bulger’s Enforcer and the Most Feared Gangster in the Underworld, (Doherty Associates Book: New York, 2011), 185.

[3] George P. Hasset, “New Book Offers Inside Look at Winter Hill Gang Story,” The Somerville Times, December 16, 2010.

[4] TJ, English, Where the Bodies Were Buried, 76.

[5] Charles Brandt, I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran and Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa, (Steerfoth Press: Hanover N.H.), 181.

[6] James, B. Jacobs, Mobsters, Unions and the Feds, (New York University Press: New York, 2006), 2.

[7] James B. Jacobs, Breaking the Devil’s Pact: The Battle to Free the Teamsters from the Mob, (New York University Press: New York, 2011), 2. [8]PCOC, The Edge: Organized Crime Business, and Labor Unions, Washington D.C.: U.S Government Printing Office, 1986, 89.

[9] The Edge, 105.

[10] Kenneth C. Crowe, Collision: How the Rank and File Took Back the Teamsters, (Scribner Press: New York, 1993), 67.

[11] James B. Jacobs, Busting the Mob: United States V. Cosa Nostra, (New York University Press: New York, 1994), 182-83.

[12] Howie Carr, Hitman, 185.

[13]T.J. English, Where the Bodies Were Buried, 318-319.

[14] IGN Entertainment, “Winter Hill Gang Nets True Crime Figures,” June 17, 2012.

The Significance of Occupy Wall Street

[Ten years ago Occupy Wall Street, a national mass movement against economic inequality and the influence of corporate money in politics, began in New York City and then spread across the country until it involved tens of thousands in dozens of other cities and towns. Occupy’s slogan “We are the 99%”–referring to the mass of ordinary working people as opposed to the top 1% with their trillions–captivated the public imagination. The Occupy activists in the United States and then in countries around the world created encampments that served as launching pads for mass actions of all sorts. Utopian in the best sense of the world–suggesting that another different and better future was possible–Occupy profoundly changed public consciousness. The inspiring Occupy movement was crushed violently by local police forces, state troopers, and federal agencies, thousands arrested and several indicted on a variety of charges. At the time, the movement failed to create a political vehicle, but its energy later flowed into the presidential campaign of democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. The following piece originally published by Solidarity on August 9, 2012 attempted to capture the experience, to analyze it politically, and to ask how such a movement might become more effective. – Dan La Botz]

The Occupy Movement, the first such broad, national, multi- issue, mass movement in forty years, represented a test for the revolutionary socialist left in several senses. First, would the left recognize its important and immediately move to become an active part of it and work within it to help provide leadership? Second, would the left during Occupy be able to both appreciate its strengths and develop a critique of its weaknesses and limitations? Would it as the same time be able to conduct socialist propaganda and recruit to the socialist movement? Third, would the left in retrospect be able to analyze and learn from the Occupy experience in order to prepare itself for future movements?

The following document is seen as part of the process of understanding and analyzing Occupy and what proved to be the most important development of the Occupy movement–its interaction with the labor unions. This interaction represented the greatest challenge to the movement and to those of us who seek to understand it and learn from it.

The Movement Begins: Occupy! We are the 99%

The Occupy Wall Street movement – beginning in Zuccotti Park near Wall Street in New York City in mid-September 2011 crying out against the overbearing power of the corporations, the enormous inequities of American society, and the inordinate role of money in politics – spread within a few weeks across the country. The brilliant slogan “We are the 99%” captured the imagination not only of the participants, but of large swathes of the broader American public as well, and for good reason. Over the previous decades, there had been an epoch- making upward re-distribution of income to the top 1% and above, and capital and the rich had established the sort of stranglehold on politicians and government not seen since the Gilded Age. During the fall months of 2011, thousands participated in Occupy encampments in cities from coast to coast while tens of thousands participated in marches and protest demonstrations organized by the movement, and Occupy emerged as the largest and most important social movement in the United States since the 1960s and 70s. Occupy Wall Street and its offspring were the first serious response from working people and the citizenry at large to the economic crisis of 2008, playing the role that in another country or in earlier times might have been played by a mass labor movement or an emergent populist or socialist party.Occupy’s declaration represented a wide-ranging radical challenge to the economic and political establishment and to the status quo such as we had not seen since the civil rights/Black Power struggle, the anti-war movement, and Students for Democratic Society (SDS).

When the Occupy movement began, the rightwing Tea Party movement dominated American newspapers, radio and television news and commentary, but almost from the moment that it appeared, Occupy took center stage. Virtually the entire political establishment was pushing austerity as its basic response to the economic crisis, and, only weeks before the Obama administration, following its own Bowles-Simpson commission, had proposed a “grand bargain” for reducing government spending and balancing the budget, especially by reducing social security, Medicare, and Medicaid. But, in a matter of months, the Occupy movement had changed the national conversation from the Tea Party’s rightwing agenda of tax-cuts and budget cuts to discussions of the inordinate salaries and bonuses of the bankers and CEOs, the financial contributions of the wealthy to the politicians, and, above all, the economic crisis facing tens of millions of Americans. Obama himself had to drop, for the time being—until after the election—all talk of belt-tightening. Occupy criticized the continuing high rate of unemployment, the foreclosures on homeowners, the inadequacy of the health system (including Obama’s health plan), and the crisis in the costs of higher education. While never explicitly anti-capitalist and certainly not pro-socialist, Occupy’s critique of the economy and politics tended to challenge the system as a whole—and the system was capitalism even if it usually went unnamed. The movement’s cry, “We are the 99%!” rang out not only in the stone canyons of Wall Street, but also in cities, towns, and university campuses across the United States and soon reverberated around the world as Occupy sites were established in countries in Europe and Latin America. The International Context

The Occupy movement in the United States arose, in part, out of the succession of extraordinary mass struggles that exploded onto the global scene in response to the world economic crisis, demanding democracy and opposing austerity. The Arab Spring that began in December 2010 saw huge social movements against the region’s dictators that in the following months forced governments from power in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. At the same time there were major uprising and huge social protests in Algeria, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco and Syria and other countries in the Arab world and in Muslim countries in Africa. The protests in Tahrir Square involving tens of thousands in January of 2011 provided the model of the occupation of the public square, as Egyptians engaged in massive civil disobedience which had been preceded by and was accompanied by strikes. Demands for an end to the Mubarak government and its fierce repression combined with demands for lower prices and higher wages. At the same time, in Israel, a social justice protest movement of hundreds of thousands arose over issues of inflation, health care and education, crying, “We want social justice!”

Inspired by Egypt and the Arab Spring, in Spain groups such as Juventud sin Futuro (Youth without a Future) and others brought together hundreds of smaller organizations, all of them calling upon young unemployed workers to occupy the public plazas on May 15, giving rise to the M-15 or indignado movement. The indignados demanded jobs, opposed cuts in social welfare, and opposed the Spanish political system and its parties. By June the demonstrations had spread to 80 Spanish cities and the occupations of the plaza were accompanied by huge protest demonstrations and marches.

In Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece, especially in Greece, there were also in this period large labor union protests and strikes, particularly of public sector workers, including general strikes against austerity. All of the protests and upheavals in both Europe and the Arab world represented responses to the economic crisis of 2008, though as in the case of Tunisia, Egypt and other Arab countries, the crisis also provided the occasion to deal with longstanding issues of authoritarian governments, the lack of political and civil rights, and the poverty of millions. In those cases, the crisis was the detonator of long pent up explosive forces in the society.

“Game over” for Ben Ali in Tunisia. Photo: Fethi Belaid/AFP/Getty Images

The Background of Occupy in United States

The Occupy movement’s antecedents can be found most clearly in the anti-globalization and global justice movement that preceded and then rapidly expanded after the Battle of Seattle, the massive environmental and labor protests against the World Trade Organization’s Ministerial Conference in Seattle, Washington in 1999. The Battle of Seattle, bringing together a range of environmental organizations and unions such as the United Steel workers, Teamsters, and International Longshore and Warehouse Union to shut down the streets of Seattle, provided a model of militant direct action against corporate globalization. Never anti-capitalist, the global justice movement’s massive and militant demonstrations of radical youth, environmentalists, and labor unions at a series of international trade and policy meetings of government and corporate leaders around the world over several years represented a significant, radical social movement, if not a national mass movement such as we had seen in the 1960s and 1970s or as we saw again with the coming of Occupy.

The immediate predecessor of Occupy Wall Street was the Wisconsin protest of 2011 against Governor Scott Walker’s anti-union legislation, which saw tens of thousands, and at moments as many as 100,000 people protest at the capitol building, as thousands actually occupied the building, and teachers engaged in wildcat strikes. The Wisconsin protests—though the labor bureaucracy and the Democratic Party ended them as quickly as possible and then succeeded in channeling the movement into the recall efforts and electoral politics—provided the model of the occupation of public space, mass protests by working people, and wildcat strikes. Wisconsin, occurring at the same time as the Egyptian occupation of Tahrir Square provided the prototype for Occupy Wall Street.

The extraordinary potential of the Occupy movement, and the threat it came to represent to today’s political-economic establishment, resulted from its ability to speak effectively to the unprecedented concatenation of politico-economic cum ideological conditions that emerged with the outbreak of the global crisis from 2007-2008. The historic movements of the 1960s had arisen at the high point of postwar capitalist prosperity and profitability, in the wake of more than two decades of unprecedented real wage increase for large sections of the working class, and at a time at which the surpluses/taxes/income available to the political establishment enabled it to respond to mass pressure from below with a succession of substantive reforms and with relatively little coercion (leaving aside, of course, the unending campaign of repression against the Black movement, especially as it moved into the northern cities and extended its program from rights to socioeconomic justice). The sustained improvement in living standards for large sections of the population brought capitalism to the height of its prestige, while the expansion of the welfare state had the effect of strengthening the then hegemonic statist-liberal ideology and the political parties and institutions associated with it (including, to a greater or lesser degree, the Republican Party). As a consequence, the mass movements of the period never found a basis for challenging capitalism as a system and could be, and were, re-absorbed to a large degree within the left-wing of the political mainstream, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.

In telling contrast, Occupy emerged four years into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, which had itself broken out at the end of a very extended period of slowed growth, stagnation, and relative decline for American capitalism. Average real wages had failed to rise for close to four decades, the welfare state had virtually stopped growing, and inequality of income and wealth had reached levels not seen since the nineteenth century. Both political parties had long since ceased even to promise significant social reform, but devoted themselves, for the most part, to the use of the state as an engine of plunder and upward redistribution of wealth.

Both parties and all wings of the capitalist class were completely committed to the neoliberal ideology that dominated the globe, but neoliberalism had little to offer the great majority of the working class, whose members, to the extent they possessed any sort of economic world view, probably accepted that “there is no alternative.” The old stalwarts of statist liberalism, the vastly diminished trade union movement and Black movement, remained nominally committed to it, but were so dependent upon the DP, and so profoundly weakened by that long term position, that they were incapable of pushing for it; statist liberalism was dead, practically speaking. Meanwhile, the DP, led by its actually dominant DLC, took these forces entirely for granted while attempting to cement their ties with sections of capital and conservative constituencies in the South and elsewhere.

The great housing price run-up of the decade before the crash of 2008 may well have provided the material basis for something of a renewed commitment to the free market for a not insignificant part of the population. But, when the housing bubble burst and the Great Recession ensued, bringing widespread misery, the willingness of the political elite to provide trillions to bail out the financier-lenders, while doing nothing whatever for the great mass of household- borrowers, brought deep disillusionment and an instant discrediting of the system, along with a profound anger at the bankers and the politicians who obviously served them. It was this sudden far-reaching, but hitherto largely unexpressed alienation on the part of broad sections of the working class from a political-economic system that was offering them only worsening economic conditions and deepening humiliation that opened the way for Occupy. The Nature of Occupy

Occupy, because it was a national movement across the United States where economic, social and political conditions vary greatly, necessarily had different experiences and different characteristics in different areas. Yet it also had many commonalities. We might note some of the differences: Occupy Wall Street involved far more students and youth than most other Occupy sites. While most Occupy groups were mostly white, there were in Atlanta and Oakland larger numbers of African Americans and Latinos. There were also commonalities: Occupy was in part a coming together of activists from many movements. Watching any of the demonstrations in any city on any day, one saw pass by demonstrators wearing T-shirts and jackets with all the logos of all the movements that have touched the country in the last two decades: anti-war, LGBTQ, foreclosures, unions, and civil rights. Walking among them were others new to the movement, blue collar and white collar workers, often carrying their hand painted signs with slogans like “Create Jobs, Reform Wall Street, Tax the Wealthy More,” and “The People are Too Big to Fail” (a reference to the argument that the U.S. government had to save the banks because they were “too big to fail”). The sense of optimism that the movement was creating was expressed by one sign down at Wall Street that read, “This Is the First Time I’ve Felt Hopeful in a Very Long Time.”

The movement had a utopian character in the best sense of that word. Many of those involved in Occupy wanted not only to overcome the immediate effects of the economic crisis—they wanted a better life, a better country, a better world. Many joined the movement because of the sense of community that it had created; a community which they believed prefigured in a small way the national community they desired. The movement as such had no ideology. Occupy was populism of a left wing sort: the people versus big business and bad government. Though there are anarchists and they gave it some of their style, it is not an anarchist movement. Though there are some socialists in it, the movement is by no means socialist. What was perhaps best and most exciting about the movement was the confluence of the many social movements with middle class and working class people who have come down to Wall Street or in some other town or city down to Main Street to say, “We’ve had it.” The utopianism of the movement has inspired ordinary people to think and to say, “We can live differently, we must, and we will.”

The Rejection of Politics

The Occupy movement defined itself negatively as the rejection of traditional social movements and political organizations which had so often failed. Movements, unions and parties all had representative and delegated leadership structures where the leaders soon escaped the control of the members. Occupy would have none, adopting the old slogan: “We are leaderless. We are all leaders.” Other organizations operated through cumbersome forms of government and administration which made government opaque. Occupy would operate simply through its apparently transparent general assemblies and its participatory and autonomous action committees. Other groups made demands. Occupy declined to make specific demands in large part as a defense against cooptation by the Democratic Party, the labor unions, and the left all of which urged the movement to define itself by a list of economic and political demands. Demands seemed to be the first step toward institutionalization and co-optation. While all of Occupy’s practices may be criticized, they arose as part of a healthy rejection of everything of the undemocratic, bureaucratic, and stifling about typical movements, unions and parties. Occupy represented an idealistic if naïve attempt to begin society and politics anew, transparent, democratic, and participatory.

Occupy generally rejected politics in all its many varieties. Politicians of the usual Democratic Party sort were generally unwelcome. Socialist speech making, so often condescending, and the distribution of socialist literature, so often pretending to direct the movement, was seen as divisive and frowned upon. The Libertarian Party and the Ron Paul supporters who at moments colonized Occupy were tolerated only as individuals, not as partisans. The Green Party generally received greater tolerance, since it was perceived to share the Occupy movement’s general environmentalist sentiments. Occupiers often spoke against political parties and candidates, but almost never in favor them. Yet, while it was hostile to politics in the electoral sense, Occupy was, despite its apolitical character, a kind of unofficial party of the exploited and oppressed 99%.

The Threat Represented by Occupy

The Occupy general assemblies, however ill-conceived and difficult their actual functioning, represented a model of participatory democracy in dramatic contrast to the undemocratic character of American government and administration at all levels. Occupy’s kitchens, libraries, medical services, and security teams all organized on a voluntary and cooperative basis provided an alternative model of society. The occupation of public parks and other public spaces in urban areas provided both an assembly point and a staging array for forays into the heart of the city to challenge powers-that-be and to mobilize society’s underdogs and its disaffected. Occupy sites throughout the country became a rallying point for unemployed twenty- and thirty- somethings, for older workers, some of them corporate employees and professionals who had lost their jobs, for students facing high tuitions and mounting debts, for labor union activists, leftwing radicals, and for the homeless who had been living in the parks before the movement began.

The combination of a radically democratic movement, with the socially disaffected, and with workers employed and unemployed, together with leftists, and all of it taking place in the heart of the city and poised to mobilize at a moment’s notice in forays against banks and corporations, posed a serious threat not only to city governments and the corporate elite headquartered downtown, but also represented a general and potentially more dangerous threat to the system and the state precisely because it might be only the beginning. The perception of this threat would lead to massive and sometimes brutal repression by the mostly Democratic Party mayors and city councils throughout the country, apparentlyin coordination with the Obama administration in Washington. Occupy encampments were demolished, as occupiers were manhandled and roughed up, beaten, gassed, and arrested by the hundreds. Throughout the country there were thousands of legal actions against occupiers ranging from tickets and fines to misdemeanor and felony indictments. Altogether there were 7,361 arrests in 117 cities in the United States between September 2011 and July 2012. The authorities also sought to link Occupy to leftwing group and brought charges of terrorism and use of violence against persons in Cleveland and Seattle who could be linked to or had been involved in or been on the periphery of Occupy movement. The repression of the Occupy movement with its thousands of arrests, its brutality, and its allegations of terrorism can only be compared to the Wilson’s repression in World War I, the Red Scare of the 1920s, the McCarthyism of the 1950s, and the violence against the African American movement in the 1960s and 1970s. An incident of police brutality at Occupy UC Davis, involving the casual pepper spraying of students engaging in non-violent civil disobedience, quickly became an internet meme.

Occupy and the Unions

Some union activists, of course, had been involved in Occupy Wall Street from the very beginning. The AFL-CIO and major international unions initially reacted quite positively to Occupy, offering it support and resources. During early October, 2011 , when Occupy Wall Street movement was threatened with eviction, Rich Trumka, president of the AFL- CIO spoke out in support of Occupy Wall Street. At the same time several major New York public sector unions, led especially by Transport Workers Union Local 100, turned out thousands of their members to support OWS in a huge and dynamic demonstration in Foley Square, which gave a hint of the huge political potential of an alliance between Occupy and the labor movement. This was not simple solidarity; it was also an attempt by the unions to tap into the new movement’s sudden and spectacular success in mobilizing thousands against corporate power and social inequality. Unions not only mobilized their members in early October, they also donated money, provided food, and in the case of the United Federation of Teachers provided space for Occupiers. The unions returned to support Occupy in the huge action of November 17 when tens of thousands marched in NYC and thousands more in other cities around the country and around the world.

The appearance of the unions thrilled the Occupiers who suddenly saw their movement swell, but it also threatened them. The presence of Transport Workers Union Local 100, the union that runs the cities trains and buses, was particularly encouraging to the movement. Yet many Occupiers felt that the unions had their own agenda, and some worried that agenda included support for the Democrats and the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, who many occupiers saw as responsible for or at least complicit in the government’s pro- corporate policies. The unions’ ability to mobilize thousands of workers both astonished and frightened Occupiers who felt that they might simply be overwhelmed by the labor movement.

Occupiers Thrilled and Threatened by the Unions

The Occupiers fears deepened when Mary Key Henry, the president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), speaking just before the November 17 mobilization, invoked Occupy’s 99% slogan as she endorsed Obama for reelection. She then went on to be arrested with the Occupiers at the Brooklyn Bridge, apparently using Occupy to promote herself, the SEIU, and the Obama campaign. Many Occupiers felt fearful as the shadow of SEIU, one of the country’s largest and fastest growing labor unions, began to fall over the movement.

Occupiers, many of them more middle class than working class, and many young and without any union experience, didn’t know much about unions or how to deal with them. Few recognized that unions themselves were complex organizations, or that different unions had different politics, and that union leaders and rank-and-file members often had quite different interests. A few Occupiers, often socialists who had worked with unions, were savvier about the ins-and-outs of the union movement. Some of them in New York City, aware of a lockout by Sotheby’s auction house of 43 members of Teamster Local 814, had organized Occupiers to join the Teamsters in September in disrupting an auction and “shaming” patrons. While the Occupy labor committee helped the Teamsters in their protests against the lockout, a deep or lasting relationship between Occupy and the union was never built.

In Chicago, where socialists organized a strong labor support committee and worked in alliance with reform-minded officials, rank-and-file groups, and leftist union members, relations between Occupy and the unions grew close. Occupy Chicago’s labor support committee organized a labor meeting in January of 2012 to discuss how to resist austerity that involved about 150 union activists. A local socialist Occupy activist described a “partnership” there between Occupy, the unions and community activists. The key factors in Chicago Occupy’s construction of successful relations with the unions seem to have been the presence of a large number of socialists, the existence of a rank-and-file caucus that had recently taken power in the Chicago Teachers Union, and local union officials anxious to find support for their various beleaguered organizations. The fact that there was not more conflict in Chicago between Occupy and the unions may be because the unions engaged in no mass struggles where Occupy’s more militant tactics might have challenged them. Occupy Oakland shuts down the port. Photo: Isaac Steiner

Occupy Oakland and the Port Shutdown

Occupy Oakland involved many activists from a militant multi- national working class community as well as a large number of socialists and anarchists from a variety of organizations. In order to deal a blow against the 1% and to support the ILWU’s longshoremen who were involved in a contract dispute in Longview, Washington, thousands of Occupy Oakland activists shut down the Oakland Ports more or less successfully on November 2, and again on December 12. While not entirely successful, the actions undertaken represented some of the largest, most militant, direct confrontations between working people and capital in decades, not only on the West Coast but anywhere in the United States. The ILWU, challenged by the Occupy movement’s militant direct action approach which threatened the union’s established relationships with the corporations that owned and managed the ports and docks, reacted by breaking off relations with Occupy. At one point ILWU officials from one local disrupted a meeting and assaulted Occupy and rank-and-file ILWU activists.

Why did the ILWU, one of the best unions in the country, turn in the end against Occupy? Labor unions in the United States, including those like the ILWU that we may consider to be the best, are dominated by a bureaucratic caste of privileged officials who have completely identified with the union as an organization. Their interests are in preserving the union as an institution and in maintaining their positions within that institution, rather than fighting for their rank-and-file members. On the contrary, in fact, if their rank-and-file members fight, threatening to unsettle their relationship to the employers or the government, they generally react quickly, often in collusion with management, to suppress the rank and file. The fight by rank-and-file members of the ILWU and Occupy Oakland which arose over the shutdown of the Oakland ports and Occupy’s involvement in the Longview struggle, led the ILUW national leadership and local officials to move to suppress both their own members and Occupy activists. In the end, the ILWU, forced the Longview local to accept sight unseen a labor contract with the employer and local officials were disciplined to have nothing to do with Occupy.

While this has been—with the exception of brief and intense moments of class conflict and major upheaval—the common reaction of labor union officials throughout the history of the American union movement, from the days of the AFL’s craft unions, through the CIO’s industrial unions, and through the AFL-CIO heyday in the “Golden Age” of American capitalism in the 1940s to 1960s, today union officials are likely to react even more quickly and vigorously to repress rank-and-file movements and class struggles because it is clear that in order to win, any fight will have to be tremendous. Such tremendous battles would turn the union movement upside down, no doubt breaking up old structures, ejecting all of the current labor union leaders, and leading to unforeseen consequences, since there is no predicting the outcome of a real full-scale battle between capital and labor. Occupy suggests that should it revive or should a new mass movement come along, we can expect labor leaders to react equally as fiercely against attempts to launch a real class struggle, either by their own members or by another movement.

The Winter of Discontent

The Occupy movement’s heroic period from September through early December of 2011 came to a close under the impact of nationally coordinated police repression exercised in dozens of cities, winter cold, and the fragmentation of the movement as it seemed to lose a sense of purpose and direction. By winter many had become frustrated with the general assemblies that made discussion and decision making virtually impossible, as well as with the lack of organizational structure and transparent leadership. With the loss of public spaces, some of the Occupy movements went indoors to private spaces, but with much smaller numbers.

The anarchists’ black bloc, violent protests had also become an issue. The Occupy Oakland protest became the occasion for anarchists and others organized in black bloc style and under the cover of the “diversity of tactics” slogan, to attack private property along the route of marches and nearby protests, leading to large scale violent confrontations with the police. The protests in Oakland and the anarchists’ apparent provocation of conflicts with the police, who were only too glad to engage them, led to a national debate both within and without the movement about the role of anarchists and anarchism. The anarchist domination of the movement in Oakland led to some disaffection from the movement by other groups and many individuals.

As the ability to organize militant mass actions and to engage in large scale civil disobedience declined, many Occupy groups turned toward community organizing, arguing that they were taking Occupy into the society. The sense of loss of size and momentum, combined with a lack of clarity about what projects and campaigns to take up, as well as a lack of clarity about long term objectives, led in many areas to fragmentation, sometimes into small rival groups in the same city.

The Socialist Critique of Occupy

All of us who participated in Occupy know how difficult it was to attempt to have an impact on the movement which was so large, so geographically expansive, so varied in social composition and political ideologies, and so committed to its populist forms of the general assembly and the autonomous action committees. Nevertheless, it was important at the time and is important now to make clear what we have seen as the movement’s strengths and weaknesses, many of which we have already described here. The lack of a democratic structure by means of which Occupy activists might have discussed ideas, adopted strategies, and chosen leaders has severely hampered the movement. While consensus can be a valuable method in certain types of organizations or as a stage in certain processes, in Occupy it has led to the “tyranny of structurelessness,” thwarting attempts to give the movement purpose and direction.

Leadership, that is, the lack of leadership, has also been a serious problem. The Occupy movement threw up leaders of all sorts, good, bad and indifferent, but Occupy’s official “leaderless” position has made it impossible to have a politically accountable, transparent and responsible leadership. Consequently without a democratic structure and without any clear and accountable leadership of the movement as a whole, in each city leadership was seized by or fell to autonomous action committees and affinity groups each of which pursued its own course. While there has been a lot of energy and creativity, and often class consciousness and combativity in those actions, all of that has tended to be diffused and dissipated in the kaleidoscopic variety of lectures, cultural events, marches, protest demonstrations, and civil disobedience actions. Occupy was in the famous phrase the “carnival of the oppressed,” but it was not the hammer of the oppressed.

Without a structure and without leadership, Occupy has proven incapable of putting forward either a strategy of struggle or a political program for the movement. The brilliant 99% slogan, the critique of social inequality, and the demand to get money out of politics, captured the imagination of the public. Occupy—and this was its great strength—tended to take up all of the important social issues facing us, from unemployment to housing , from education to health care, and many other issues large and small. Yet Occupy has failed to turn these ideas into a viable political program, that is, an alternative political economy which might have appealed to the American public. At the same time, it has failed to develop a strategy of struggle that might have taken the movement from the occupation of the parks to large scale confrontations with economic and political institutions.

Another problem has been that Occupy’s social composition in most places remained predominantly white. By and large, Occupy has failed to find a way to engage African American, Latino and immigrant communities. While in most cities African Americans and Latinos were among the leaders of Occupy, and while in some places activists of color rallied to the movement, still Occupy never had a deep involvement in communities of color. To its credit, Occupy in various cities created Occupy the Hood groups, many of them led by African American and Latino activists. Yet, those groups have had limited success in most places. Women and LGBT activists in many cities also complained that they suffered both exclusion from the leadership and harassment as participants, but also that they were told that their issues were divisive. Occupy has had less success in addressing that problem.

Why Has Occupy Stalled and Where Do We Go Now?

The principal reason that Occupy has stalled in most areas was simply the tremendous repression of the movement coordinated at the highest levels of the U.S. government and executed by state and local authorities – the sweeping of the occupiers from the parks, the enormous number of arrests, the violent physical attacks with truncheons, tear gas, and in some instances the firing of rubber bullets. When the Occupiers had been driven from the public spaces, the police occupied them. Behind all of this was a massive surveillance of the Occupy movement accompanied by schemes and plots created by police and agents provocateurs to entrap Occupy activists and then charge them with terrorism. Mostly Occupy failed to achieve all that it might have because it was violently strangled in the cradle by the police.

No one wants to be the coroner of Occupy charged with pronouncing it dead, but at the moment its vital signs are weak. The movement has lost its power to attract and to mobilize the tens of thousands that it did less than a year ago. Its vitality and creativity appear to have ebbed, its numbers seem to be shrinking, and consequently it has ceased to be so prominent in the press. In many areas, where Occupy once stood out as the symbol of opposition to the system or the establishment as a whole in all of its manifestations, it has now been reduced to working in a number of single issue campaigns, frequently in anti-gentrification movements of the working class and the poor of the center city.

As we write, at the end of July 2012, it seems unlikely that Occupy will be revived, though it might be. The question then becomes, what do we believe can be saved from the Occupy experience? First, we can save the lessons that we have attempted to draw out here, recognizing the great strengths of Occupy as one of those rare and beautiful social movements that rises up to challenge the system as a whole, but that in this case, unfortunately, was smothered in the cradle by state repression before it could mature enough to address the challenges it faced. Second, we can attempt to save the cadres created by Occupy, the men and women, young and old, who rallied to Occupy, saw the light, recognizing that the problem was the system of capitalism, becoming activists, and being transformed by the experience. We know that there will be other mass movements from below against this system, and we know that we will need more socialists to help provide leadership to the movement.

Dan La Botz is a Cincinnati-based teacher, writer and activist. He is a member of Solidarity’s National Committee.

Robert Brenner is the author of The Boom & the Bubble (2002), The Economics of Global Turbulence (2006), Property & Progress (2009), and an editor of Against the Current. He is also the director of the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at UCLA.

Joel Jordan was a leader of United Teachers Los Angeles for several decades, where he built successful rank-and-file efforts to win the union to an orientation of community partnerships to preserve and improve public education. He was active in the campaign for the Millionaire’s Tax.

French Anti-Pass Demonstrations on the Eve of the Presidential Election John Barzman was born in Los Angeles and lives in France. He is professor emeritus at the University of Le Havre in Normandy where he teaches contemporary history and American civilization. He was formerly an activist in the United States. He is the author of Dockers, métallos, ménagères : mouvements sociaux et cultures militantes en France 1912-1923. New Politics co-editor, Dan La Botz, conducted the interview.

New Politics – What are the recent demonstrations in France all about? Who is taking part in them? What do they want?

John Barzman – The present Saturday afternoon city center demonstrations in France began on July 17, in response to President Macron’s televised announcement on July 12 that the COVID epidemic continued to be a problem and his proposal to institute a «sanitary pass». This followed overly optimistic predictions that the end of the pandemic was in sight. The protests tried to influence votes on the law in the National Assembly and Senate until the measure was adopted July 24. They then shifted to encourage disobedience and resistance. Growing numbers of people attended until about August 14: hundreds of thousands in over two hundred cities, with larger turnouts in southeastern France where the far-right gets more votes. After that date, a slight decline was observed, possibly linked to the steady increase in vaccinations.

The initiators included dissident leftists from the CGT (France’s largest labor federation), France Insoumise (Jean- Luc Mélenchon supporters), SUD (a radical union federation), as well as the Gilets Jaunes, (Yellow Jackets), antivax conspiracy networks like Reinfocovid, New Age «self- development» gurus, and undercover far-right militants posing as apolitical citizens. Their immediate success was due both to growing discontent with the «anti-social» policies of the Macron government (retirement, downsizing public hospitals, unemployment compensation), authoritarian measures as well as his mishandling of the pandemic. They were also able to tap into pre-existing protests : surviving Gilets Jaunes groups, antivax actions visible on May Day for example, police and health workers’ actions, those who had participated in the «Nuit Debout» (Stay all Night) protests of 2016.

The Saturday rallies have few picket signs and banners; they rely mainly on social network interactions. They are officially «single issue»: only against the health pass, uniting non-vaccinated and vaccinated people, pro-vax and antivax. In fact they are overwhelmingly antivax and the most obvious target of hatred is President Macron. Under the influence of antivax and far-right groups, the slogans have sometimes added: «against obligatory vaccination», «freedom of choice» or simply «Freedom».

NP – What is the “pass sanitaire,” the health pass, at the center of these protests?

John Barzman – The sanitary pass is an electronic document (which can be printed on paper) to be shown by individuals (usually with their mobile phones) to controllers. It was to be used first, in July and August, in museums, restaurants, long-distance transport and the like, then, beginning on September 15, to verify vaccination or alternatively a recent negative test in «front-line» professions (health workers and others in contact with the public), under penalty of suspension from their job.

All parties of the left represented in parliament (France Insoumise, the Communist Party, PCF; EELV Greens, Socialist Party, SP; and their satellites) voted against the pass, but did not plan any action against it, either because they were on summer holidays, or more likely because they were almost totally absorbed by promotion of their candidates for the presidential elections scheduled for April 10 and 24, 2022. Trade union federations were also relatively quiet, leaving the field open to «bottom up» citizen initiatives and the far right. Focusing on the sanitary pass allows several sources of discontent to converge and produce an extremely heterogeneous movement. Here are some currents that caught my attention.

1) Small business owners, sometimes economically vulnerable, such as owners of restaurants and bars, theaters and clubs, personal care establishments, some of whom had benefited from the generous compensations distributed by the government during the early phase of the pandemic, feared that their recovery would be jeopardized by the pass.

2) A minority of health workers, overworked, underpaid, disoriented by the zigzags of government policy on the epidemic and lack of recognition of their efforts in underequipped and understaffed hospitals, also decided to refuse to comply.

3) Transit workers and some teachers wondered how they would be affected.

4) Followers of non-traditional medicine (naturopathic, homeopathic, yoga), opponents of over-reliance on medication and «Big Pharma», admirers of dissident medical researcher Didier Raoult, all of which already had a preexisting infrastrucure (Internet and street spectacles).

5) Some left militants claimed that the pass increased discrimination because of the lower rate of vaccination in underprivileged neighborhoods, due in reality to underinformation, undereducation, closure of health and other public service antennas, poor transit facilities, unemployment, and poverty.

6) In my opinion, police trade unions have not received the attention of the media in this series of events that they deserved. Just before, they were prominent in a May 19 protest in front of the National Assembly supported by all parties (left and right, except Mélenchon). The demonstration initiated by Alliance (a right-wing police trade union) asked for more funding, more freedom of action, less control of the police by the judiciary. The police claimed that photographers and journalists as well as reinforced state control of their day-to-day work (cameras, review boards) were an attack on «freedom». In July in the anti-pass movement, while police unions were preparing to bargain with the government on new improvements for the police force and rejection of massive demands for citizen oversight after incidents of police brutality, the police avoided the limelight. Nevertheless, they let it be known that the pass was unnecessary additional work for the police and the first month of demonstrations was free of any police interference. The predominance of the slogan «Freedom» in the abstract allows the unholy alliance of Gilets Jaunes who were brutalized by the police, and policemen who want to be liberated from burdensome citizen control.

7) Anti-authoritarian movements concerned with growing big business and state control over the media, used the internet to play a role, particulary on the social networks. They reject facial identification techniques, denounce public medical record leaks to private health insurance and pharmaceutical companies, and oppose state control over medical practices. This current was the most open to conspiracy theories and neo-fascist influences: they claim Macron is a dictator comparable to Hitler and Pétain, that they are the «Resistance», and that «international finance» is behind the vaccine, with the implication that Jews control the whole process.

NP – What is the role of the right in these demonstrations? Who makes up these rightwing groups?

John Barzman – Beyond the broad social and semi-political layers described above, two organized categories should be distinguished: issue-oriented groups and clearly identified ideologies and organizations.

The first category is best represented by Reinfocovid. It has appeared at various moments as denying the gravity of the pandemic, opposed to masks, or vaccinations, and now to the «pass» and to any «vaccinal obligation». It includes dissident embittered nurses, medical doctors, researchers, whose scientific credentials are often unclear. There are also parents concerned with the ability of their children to flirt. And internet influencers too. They tend to support Didier Raoult and his various proposals for alternatives to the best- known remedies, as well as guru Louis Fouché. After July 12, these networks encouraged the formation of Facebook pages titled «Anti pass sanitaire» followed by the name of a city or region, which immediately recruited hundreds of thousands of subscribers. They have equipment : sound systems, musical instruments, disguises (all-white uniforms), speakers and a hierarchy of influencers. They often admire the Trumpist movements of various kinds in the US and imitate their tactics.

The second category encompasses organized far-right groups, generally acting undercover or combining open interventions and quiet infiltration. The context is the decision of the main far right leader, Marine Le Pen, to present her party, Rassemblement national, as conventional republicans («banalisation») uninvolved in violence, and capable of uniting the French people («apaisement», «union nationale»). Her acceptance of the euro caused a split. Her number two leader, Florian Philippot, split and formed the Parti des patriotes with a more «sovereigniste» (nationalist) message. As Philipot was stagnating, he seized the opportunity of widespread social discontent, police demonstrations and the anti-pass moment to organize demonstrations in his own name, or in alliance with sections of the Gilets Jaunes. Other far- right groups known as «identitaires» have engaged in similar work. They combine this with infiltration of the broader movement promoting the actions called by their leaders, as well as the slogan «Freedom», and a ban on «corrupt» political organizations and trade unions. All of this is quite compatible with a future sudden call for unity behind the far right candidate, be it Marine Le Pen, Eric Zemmour, François Asselineau, or Nicolas Dupont Aignan, in exchange for prominent positions on the Marine Le Pen team. Or a far-right and right coalition, as advocated by Marion Maréchal Le Pen (Marine Le Pen’s niece).

Another strong far right current is the Catholic fundamentalist («intégrisme catholique») group Civitas. Most recently, this organization acquired a mass audience and experience with organizing demonstrations and tactical relations with middle-of-the-road allies, in demonstrations against the law extending the rights of homosexual couples to marry (the «Mariage pour tous» law) in 2012-2013, actions which were dubbed «Manif pour tous» (the demonstration for everybody). There has been a constant resistance since then to each new measure going in that direction, in the name of protecting children, a theme which reemerges today as «protect our children against the evil vaccine».

NP – What has been the position of the unions and the left in general on this movement?

John Barzman – As I mentioned earlier, all parties of the left voted against the «sanitary pass» in Parliament. Their arguments were that it was decided without consultation of opposition parties and social forces, it was counterproductive, inapplicable, resorting to repression instead of persuasion, in line with the authoritarian measures against social movements (law on security) and democratic rights. But none took any action ; their candidates or potential candidates for presidential contender or for leader of a united left-green opposition in the subsequent legislative elections, all feared alienating some key voters. Mélenchon tried to straddle the fence but his statements were attacked either by the pro-vaccine establishment or by the anti-vaccine street bullies. The trade union federations, CGT, CFDT, FO, FSU, SUD, also did not approve the pass, but took almost no action against it. Some rank-and-file militants joined the anti-pass movement individually. Sometimes they were able to win the approval of local trade unions in some cities or sectors (health, education, transit). This exercised pressure on the confederations which seem to believe they had better not alienate militants or potential voters in the forthcoming union elections (2022 also), adding to their paralysis. They have united (except for the CFDT) in calling for a major united mobilization and strike on October 5 around a number of social issues (wage levels, pensions, unemployment compensation, democratic rights). It remains to be seen whether this will be the beginning of a series of actions which marginalizes the anti-pass protest.

NP – What is the group Ensemble that you work with? What is it’s position?

John Barzman Ensemble! is an organization founded in 2013 to be the third pole in the Front de Gauche alliance of Mélenchon (Parti de Gauche), the PCF and others. It regrouped various tendencies coming from the Revolutionary Communist League – New Anti-Capitalist Party (LCR-NPA), self-management left (ex- Unified Socialist Party,PSU, members) and solidarity movements (ATTAC). It experienced a crisis in 2017 when Mélenchon broke with the PCF and Front de Gauche. Two public tendencies emerged from Ensemble!, the one joining France Insoumise and calling itself Ensemble Insoumis and the other remaining independent and working with France Insoumise as well as other movements (left greens, PCF dissidents, grassroots organizations). These two tendencies were able to preserve certain common structures of Ensemble!

From the beginning of the pandemic, Ensemble! organized a COVID group to analyse the issues, make periodic statements, and encourage initiatives. Both wings of Ensemble! participated. As it were, Ensemble! included renowned researchers, public hospital directors, as well as experienced trade unionists in the health sector (SUD and CGT), as well as elected officials experienced with health issues and many rank-and-file health workers.

This group immediately chose to disprove the arguments of the conspiracy theorists against vaccination in general, or against the breakthroughs in anti-COVID vaccinations. It put forward slogans such as (but not precisely):

– generalize vaccination with public services easily accessible in neighborhoods and workplaces

– against the sanitary pass; due process for employees threatened with punitive measures for not presenting the pass or not being vaccinated

– eliminate industrial patents for vaccines! create a public pharmaceutical industry! solidarity with poor countries unable to obtain the vaccine

– for a broad public health policy increasing proximity services, public hospitals, health training, wages and working conditions of health workers, for European and international coordination of public health policies

– the struggle for public health is part of the struggle for social progress and the environment: improve public education, public health, pensions, wages, democratic rights.

Some debate existed on whether employees subject to disciplinary measures should be supported by defending due process, or should also be vigorously encouraged to get vaccinated.

NP – Where do you see all of this going?

I am not optimistic. The fragmentation of the left has led to an almost certain second-round dual between Macron and Le Pen in 2022, with grave implications for the future of an explicitly left mass movement in France (the specter of Italy—where the left has been practically eradicated—is present). It has also weakened the left’s ability to take initiatives on the social front: national strikes, days of action, junction with non-union movements such as the Gilets Jaunes under pro-union conditions.

Perhaps the increased influence of the confusionist, conspiracy movements and far-right parties and action groups, will provoke a more vigorous search for different forms of united action in defense of democratic rights and social justice. Something like the anti-fascist movement of the 1930s. There is also a need for constant exchange between anti-neoliberal groups in a sort of federation, and a pole of clear-sighted activists inspired by past experience and active in grassroots movements. There are unfortunately no clear signs of this happening on a sufficiently large scale. Of course, there is always the hope of sudden large events and a rapid maturation of class-consciousness; but after forty years of retreat and defeat, that «rapid maturation» will have a long road to travel before constructing a movement capable of radically changing the system in the near future. Before the unforeseen May 1968 social explosion, there were signs in 1967 which experienced militant observers had detected, and which do not exist today.

Of course, I think that those who project a just-over-the-edge electoral victory of the left (Melechon, Green or Socialist) against a divided right and far-right as the solution, are heading for disillusionment as the state apparatus will resist and the social movement will not suddenly unfold its powerful wings. Likewise, those who exaggerate the consciousness, or potential consciousness of the existing Gilets Jaunes and anti-pass movements, and predict an explosion of anger that will discredit the winner of the French 2022 presidential elections, and pave the way for the election of radical reconstructionists ( who want a Constituent Assembly to found a new government) in the ensuing legislative elections, have little evidence to bolster their argument. Nevertheless, I remain optimistic that a new left can emerge.

U.S. Imperialism in Afghanistan and Beyond

After nearly twenty years of war and occupation in Afghanistan, U.S. armed forces finally completed their withdrawal on August 31, leaving the country in the hands of the Taliban, the organization that it had removed from power when the U.S. originally invaded in October 2001. Just a few weeks earlier, President Joe Biden had told a press conference that there were no significant parallels between the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and its final withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975. He added that “the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.” But by the time the U.S. left, the Taliban was back in control. And the chaotic scenes at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul in the weeks leading up to the U.S. departure reminded many of the desperate panic at the U.S. embassy in Saigon forty-six years before.

Of course, there are also many differences between Vietnam and Afghanistan. Facile analogies should be avoided. But by any measure, this was an ignominious defeat for the world’s most powerful military nation, only days before the twentieth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. When members of al Qaeda hijacked four planes and flew three of them into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon near Washington D.C. (the fourth crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after its passengers fought back), anti-war activists in the United States raised the slogan “Don’t Turn Tragedy into War.”

Some of us also pointed out that however unjustifiable the attacks, the U.S. government itself bore its own share of responsibility for them because of its long-term imperialist meddling in both the Middle East and Afghanistan.

In April 1978, the pro- Soviet People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) came to power following a military coup. It attempted to rapidly introduce a series of social reforms, but while its cadre may have Pentagon 9/12/01; Photo by Northhad the best of Dakota National Guard intentions, they had little support in the country at large. Its efforts produced a backlash, particularly in rural areas, which soon led to armed clashes.

The U.S. government, still stinging from its defeat in Vietnam, saw an opportunity. From the summer of 1979, it began secretly funneling support to government opponents. According to Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brezinski: …it was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention…. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

With the country spiraling towards civil war and a power struggle breaking out between different factions of the PDPA, the Soviet Union sent in troops in December 1979 to prop up a friendly government on its border. That same day Brezinski sent Carter a letter: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.”

In effect, that is what happened. The Soviet occupation lasted for over nine years. It was a brutal and bloody affair, which left over one million Afghans dead. But just like the U.S. in Vietnam, the Soviets were never able to defeat the rebels, who called themselves “mujahideen” or holy warriors, and who received billions of dollars of aid from Washington, first from Carter and then from Reagan.

The CIA also encouraged tens of thousands of Islamic radicals to come to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. They received training and weapons from the Pakistani security services, paid for by U.S. taxpayers.

The U.S. knew it was backing reactionary forces, but it was willing to do so to win the Cold War. And it worked. The occupation was a huge financial burden for Moscow, which finally withdrew in February 1989. Most commentators think that the impact of the war played a significant role in the collapse of the Soviet government two years later.

U.S. officials broke out the champagne when Soviet troops left Afghanistan, but they left behind a country in virtual anarchy, with rival factions of the mujahideen fighting amongst themselves and a Soviet-installed president, Muhammed Najibullah, under siege in Kabul. The city finally fell to one mujahideen group in 1992. Najibullah was executed but the civil war continued until 1996 when the Taliban, a new force with its own highly rigid interpretation of Islam, took over an exhausted country with support from Pakistan.

The U.S. had won the Cold War, but it had also created a huge network of Islamic radicals trained in guerrilla tactics. One of the first non-Afghan volunteers to join the ranks of the mujahideen was Osama bin Laden, a civil engineer and businessman from a wealthy construction family in Saudi Arabia, with close ties to members of the Saudi royal family.

Bin Laden recruited 4,000 volunteers from his own country and developed close relations with the most radical mujahideen leaders. He also worked closely with the CIA, raising money from private Saudi citizens.

According to the Indian journalist Rahul Bhedi, “In 1988, with U.S. knowledge, bin Laden created Al-Qaeda (The Base): a conglomerate of quasi-independent Islamic terrorist cells spread across at least 26 countries. Washington turned a blind eye to Al-Qaeda, confident that it would not directly impinge on the U.S.” Instead, during the 1990s, the network that the U.S. had helped create was linked to terrorist attacks in the Philippines, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, France, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, China, Egypt, Algeria, and Morocco, as well as on U.S. targets.

“This is an insane instance of the chickens coming home to roost,” one U.S. diplomat in Pakistan told the Los Angeles Times. “You can’t plug billions of dollars into an anti- Communist jihad, accept participation from all over the world and ignore the consequences. But we did.”

The CIA had its own name for this phenomenon: blowback. Democratic Republic of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai (left), shakes hands and greets U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, as he arrives at the Presidential Palace in Kabul, Afghanistan on May 1, 2003. (DOD Photo by Helene C. Stikkel) (Released)

For the family members of the victims, the 9/11 attacks were a tragedy, but for the Bush administration and the U.S. ruling class, they were a golden opportunity.

Bush had come into office with the goal of reasserting U.S. power in the Middle East, starting with regime change in Iraq. In his book The Price of Loyalty, Bush’s first Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill, later revealed that discussions about invading Iraq began taking place in cabinet meetings in February 2001. What was needed was a pretext to do so.

According to insider reports from Richard Clarke, the administration’s “counter-terrorism czar”, and Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, within hours of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld were trying to use them as an excuse to overthrow the government of Saddam Hussein.

They were soon persuaded, however, that Iraq was a bridge too far. What they could get away with immediately was building an international coalition to invade Afghanistan. The plan was that this could then serve as a stepping-stone for a later attack on Iraq.

Of course, the public justification for the war was that the Taliban government was harboring Osama bin Laden, the alleged “mastermind” of the September 11 attacks. But the Bush administration was never serious about capturing bin Laden, who was much more useful as a bogeyman.

Soon after the attacks, Taliban government officials announced that they would extradite bin Laden to stand trial if, in accordance with international law, the U.S. government would provide evidence of his involvement. Secretary of State Colin Powell promised to issue a dossier documenting bin Laden’s role, but the dossier never appeared.

In late September and early October, political leaders in Pakistan proposed extraditing bin Laden to their country, where he could be tried by an international tribunal, but this plan was dismissed by the U.S. government.

The Australian journalist John Pilger quoted the response of one U.S. official: “casting our objectives too narrowly” risked “a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr. bin Laden was captured.” In other words, the U.S. was not interested in bin Laden or other al Qaeda leaders being handed over, because this would remove the rationale to invade Afghanistan, which the Bush administration was hell-bent on doing.

The claim made by Bush, and later repeated by Obama, that the U.S. had no choice but to invade Afghanistan was a transparent lie. The initial invasion was a one-sided rout. The Taliban was quickly swept aside, and the U.S. and its allies began the process of trying to construct a stable government that would be beholden to U.S. interests.

Almost as soon as the first phase of the war was over, the Bush administration began turning its attention to Iraq, first by making utterly implausible claims that Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein was in league with al Qaeda, then by spreading the lie that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction and claiming that this justified a preemptive attack.

Why the almost fanatical focus on Iraq? The most obvious answer was oil. “Regardless of whether we say so publicly,” said Anthony H. Cordesman, then as now an analyst at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, “we will go to war, because Saddam sits at the center of a region with more than 60 percent of all the world’s oil reserves.”

Shortly after taking office, the Bush administration commissioned a study from the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Houston’s Rice University—a think-tank run by James Baker III, Secretary of State for Bush senior, with an array of advisers from major energy and oil companies. The report, Strategic Energy Policy Challenges For the 21st Century, was issued in April 2001. It warned that the U.S. faced “unprecedented energy price volatility” and concluded:

The United States remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma. Iraq remains a destabilizing influence … to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East. Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export program to manipulate oil markets. Therefore the U.S. should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments. This was followed in May, with an energy report from the office of Vice President Cheney, which stated that the U.S. was increasingly dependent on imported oil and that it might be necessary to overcome foreign resistance to gain access to new supplies. The political scientist Michael Klare summed up the administration’s position as follows:

American efforts to obtain increased supplies of foreign oil will require more than trade deals and diplomacy—it will also require the threat of or the use of force to dissuade hostile forces from attempting to obstruct the flow of petroleum to the United States. This, in turn, will require an enhanced U.S. capacity to operate militarily in areas of likely fighting over oil…. And while these efforts have been accelerated since September 11, it is important to note that they began well before that date.

While an invasion of Iraq would certainly disrupt production and cause a sharp spike in the price of oil, the Bush administration bet that this would be a temporary phenomenon. With a U.S.-puppet regime installed in Baghdad, the hope was that within a few years there would be an abundant supply of cheap oil on the world market. According to Lawrence Lindsey, Bush’s former economic adviser, “When there is a regime change in Iraq, you could add three to five million barrels [per day] of production to world supply. The successful prosecution of the war would be good for the economy.”

Donald Kagan, a member of the neo-conservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a think tank with close ties to the Bush administration, put it even more bluntly: “When we have economic problems, it’s been caused by disruptions in our oil supply. If we have a force in Iraq, there will be no disruption in oil supplies.”

But it was not mainly a question of securing oil for the U.S. itself. Europe, Japan and China were far more dependent on Middle Eastern oil than the U.S. A military occupation of Iraq would thus intended to give Washington increased leverage over its main economic rivals. Moreover, U.S. control of Iraqi oil would undermine the power of the OPEC cartel, which had long been a goal of U.S. foreign policy.

But oil was only part of the picture. After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the U.S. had been left as the world’s only superpower. Maintaining this dominant position and preventing the emergence of a new global rival—in particular, China—now became a central goal of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, with Washington willing to use its military strength to ensure that it remained the dominant global power for the indefinite future.

The strategy was laid out in a document written by the PNAC in September 2000, which called for “maintaining global US pre- eminence … and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.” This would include using overwhelming military force to take control of the Gulf region, with its strategically vital oil resources.

But the report also noted that to implement such aggressive policies, “some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor” would be needed. From that perspective the 9/11 attacks offered the Bush administration a golden opportunity to put into effect plans that it already wanted to pursue.

Afghanistan, as noted, was seen as a stepping-stone to Iraq and the Gulf, but it was also important for other strategic reasons. The Marxist political analyst Gilbert Achcar noted at the time:

[T]he ideological framework created by 9/11 and the Afghanistan war provided an opportunity to establish a direct military presence not only in Afghanistan but in Central Asia, which, strategically speaking, is considerably more important. Countries like Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, where the United States set up air bases after 9/11, lie in the heart of the former Soviet Union. If you add to this the U.S. involvement in the Caucasus, you see that Washington is trying to set a military vise around the Caspian Basin, which is an important source of hydrocarbons, not only oil but especially gas.

Washington also hoped that a U.S. military presence at “the heart of the landmass extending from European Russia to China” would serve to keep both these rivals in check.

If these were the United States’ goals, it has failed to achieve them quite spectacularly. Far from keeping Russia and China in check, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq trapped the U.S. in a quagmire. At the end of two decades, Russia and especially China have not been weakened, but have emerged as more powerful military and economic competitors.

Meanwhile, the two occupied countries, along with other parts of the Middle East, have been devastated by U.S. intervention. A recent report from the Costs of War Project at Brown University estimated that between 897,000 and 929,000 people have been killed as a result of the U.S. “War on Terror.” Of these, the vast majority were from Afghanistan or Iraq, and at least 387,000 were civilians, the majority women and children. Other estimates put the numbers even higher.

The total cost of these wars has been over $8 trillion—a vast expenditure for a series of imperialist adventures that from the U.S. government’s own point of view have left it weaker, not stronger. U.S. imperial efforts in southwest Asia have failed to slow down the rise of Russia and China as military and economic competitors. Photo by Presidential Press and Information Office (Russia) The occupation of Afghanistan was characterized by twenty years of “chaos, corruption, and violence,” in the words of Ali M. Latifi, a freelance journalist based in the country. By early 2002, the Taliban had been virtually destroyed, but U.S. indifference to Afghani lives allowed it to gradually make a comeback.

Biden’s decision to withdraw troops was based on the calculation that the occupation was no longer serving U.S. imperial interests. There was also a miscalculation that the U.S.-backed government in Kabul would be able to hold out at least until the U.S. had left. The fact that the government of Ashraf Ghani and the Afghan military collapsed like a house of cards was final proof of the folly of the whole enterprise.

In a speech at the end of August, Biden claimed that the U.S. government had learned the lessons of Afghanistan. In reality, it has learned nothing. The withdrawal from Afghanistan represents not the end of U.S. imperialism, but simply a new phase, in which the administration intends to prioritize great power competition with Russia and China.

Obama attempted but failed to make a “pivot to Asia” during his second term. Biden hopes that disentangling from Afghanistan will allow him to succeed where Obama did not. Whether or not he can complete the shift remains an open question.

Following the suicide bombings outside the Kabul airport in the final days of the withdrawal, the New York Times reported that history had “got in the way” of U.S. attempts to extricate itself from Afghanistan.

American officials are reworking plans to counter threats that could emerge from Afghanistan’s chaos, according to current and former officials: negotiating for new bases in Central Asian countries; determining how clandestine officers can run sources in the country without the military and diplomatic outposts that provided cover to spies for two decades; and figuring out from where the C.I.A. could launch drone strikes and other Afghanistan operations.

For the rest of us, neither scenario—continued U.S. covert involvement in Afghanistan or a successful “pivot to Asia”—is anything to cheer about. The latter would simply increase the chances of military confrontation between the U.S. and China, while making the kind of global cooperation needed to address the climate crisis less likely.

In the early 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was at the peak of its power. It could have used the immense wealth and resources at its disposal to improve the lives of people around the world and to address major international problems. But that would have required not just better leaders, but the creation of an economic system in which human need and environmental sustainability, not the endless pursuit of profit, are the primary goals.

Imperialist wars in the Middle East and elsewhere, blowback like the 9/11 attacks, the new cold war with China, and the death spiral towards climate catastrophe, are the rotten fruits of capitalism. If we want to end them, we will have to replace the system that is their underlying cause.

First published by Tempest.

Settler Colonialism, Not a Nation of Immigrants

Review of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion. Beacon Press, 2021. 392 pages.[1]

You would be hard pressed to find anyone in mainstream society that would not say that the United States is a nation of immigrants. We are told this story about the US from day one. Though the view itself is well intentioned trying to show strength in diversity and multiculturalism, it continues to erase the true colonial history of the US.

The concept of a nation of immigrants was popularized by then senator John F. Kennedy in 1958 with his essay for the Anti- Defamation League entitled “A Nation of Immigrants.” Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in her extremely accessible book Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion argues against this notion specifically examining US settler colonialism and the story of the struggles immigrants face in the US.

As Dunbar-Ortiz says the “book is a call for all those who have gone through the immigrant or refugee experience or are descendants of immigrants to acknowledge settler colonialism and the Americanization process that sucks them into complicity with white supremacy and erasure of the Indigenous peoples.”[2]

This book comes out as schools are starting again. Throughout the summer we have seen the debate over the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in the classroom, despite conservatives’ lack of understanding of CRT. Twenty-eight states have introduced legislation, with eight of them passing legislation, that would make it illegal to fully discuss the role that racism, sexism and oppression has played in the US.[3] Without a doubt CRT is the new red scare in schools and conservative’s responses have been textbook McCarthyism. This book, like Dunbar-Ortiz’s others, will be under fire.

The outcry about discussing race and oppression in classrooms did not come out of nowhere. It has been a backlash to this country’s largest uprising following the murder of George Floyd, the anti-DAPL protest at Standing Rock, four year of the Trump administration and other resistance movements. Millions joined protests around the world and so many have started to critically examine US history. Historians like Dunbar-Ortiz and the late Howard Zinn have been targets since their scholarship has always gone against the unquestioned patriotic teachings in many schools.

—

Not “A Nation of Immigrants” is a continuation of Dunbar- Ortiz’s other books such as An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States[4], Loaded[5], Roots of Resistance[6] and others. As I was reading the book I could feel the connectedness and how they are part of a people’s history challenging national myths and demanding action. With all of her books Dunbar-Ortiz does not want one to simply know the history but take action. This book is a tool for activists to recruit people to the movement.

In the book Dunbar-Ortiz makes many arguments from unveiling the real history of Alexander Hamilton contrary to the popularized white washed musical Hamilton to the role that American exceptionalism has played in indoctrinating new immigrants. The main argument that runs through the entire book is the story of erasure in American myths, the most glaring being the erasure of Indigenous people and settler colonialism in US society.

Erasure and violence are behind myths such as “Nation of Immigrants” or “Western Expansion”. Many activists and liberal pundits will point to Nixon, Reagan or Trump for advancing white nationalist ideas. But what Dunbar-Ortiz argues is that this is and has always been core to the US. At the beginning of the book she discusses how the US military was necessary and central to the US imperialist and capitalist project, not the idea of a nation of immigrants. She says,

The elephant in the room of immigration is the US military invasion and annexation of half of Mexican territory that spanned more than two decades, 1821 to 1848. During that same period, the eastern half of the United States was being ethnically cleansed with the forced removal of Native nations. White supremacy and settler- colonial violence are permanently embedded in US topography. The United States has a foundational problem of white nationalism that wasn’t new with Nixon or Reagan or Trump.[7]

Dunbar-Ortiz calls this the fiscal-military state, which she defines as a state that is built to make war. This is a hard argument to dispute as when the US became independent from Britain it desperately wanted to move further and further west demanding more land and resources.

After discussing Hamilton she focuses on the mechanics of settler colonialism and how by its very nature is genocidal. This is an important argument as this is the framework that she uses throughout the book. If you only look at the US as a nation of immigrants that is accepting of all people it erases the violence of settler colonialism. In today’s discussions about multiculturalism and diversity Indigenous people are often simply thrown in as another minority rather than something systematically different in its relationship to the settler state. Dunbar-Ortiz pointed to the shortcomings of multiculturalism saying it was, the response to civil rights demands, which required revision of the US history narrative. For this scheme to work—and affirm US historical progress—Indigenous nations and communities had to be left out of the picture or somehow woven into the story. As territorially and treaty-based peoples in North America, they do not fit the grid of multiculturalism but were included by transforming them into an inchoate, oppressed racial group, while oppressed Mexican Americans and colonized Puerto Ricans were dissolved into another such group, variously called “Hispanic” or “Latino,” and more recently “Latinx.” The multicultural approach emphasized the “contributions” of oppressed groups and immigrants to the United States’ presumed greatness. Indigenous peoples were thus credited with contributing corn, beans, buckskin, log cabins, parkas, maple syrup, canoes, hundreds of place names, ecology, Thanksgiving, and even contributing to the US Constitution the concepts of democracy and federalism.[8]

This argument is important as so many liberals and institutions see multiculturalism as a counter to the racism in our society. Multiculturalism without an examination of the roots of the US continues to perpetuate the erasure of Indigenous people and other colonized people.

The book also takes on that role that slavery and white supremacy played in the the development of the US. She uses the framework of racial capitalism which was popularized and theorized by historian and scholar Cedric Robinson. Robinson’s work such as his 1983 book Black Marxism has been republished as more and more people have started to see that in the US there can be no capitalism without racism. Robinson and Dunbar-Ortiz’s historical work challenge even the US left to deconstruct any leanings toward class reductionism in a society founded on a racial caste system and genocide.

In addition to the frameworks of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, she used the framework of continental imperialism to discuss the invasion of Mexico and the stealing of a third of their country with Anglo-Settlers being the foot soldiers for continental imperialist interest. She appropriately calls Lewis and Clark spies as they creeped into Indigenous land to provide intelligence of how the US could militarily expand. Dunbar-Ortiz demonstrates how the US was always imperial, countering many historians who mark US imperialism at 1898 when the US gained the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico and in-directly Cuba as colonies following the Spanish-American War. She takes issues with historians using passive language such as “manifest destiny” or “westward movement” or “expansion” in conceptualizing the invasion, conquest, and colonization of Indigenous nations across the continent, as well as the invasion and occupation of the Republic of México, as natural; not colonialism, not imperialism.[9]

This shows the power of language, different images come to our head when we say expansion versus invasion.

Outside of the brutality of war and invasion Dunbar-Ortiz focuses on some of the ideological struggles and how some groups at different times have self-indigenized. This started around the 1820s when writers and the settlers from Appalachia were set up as if they were the original inhabitants of the region. In fact some writers even called them Indigenous with no mention of the actual Indigenous people of that region. This same practice happens today when you see the Bundy family in 2016 occupy the “Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon, claiming it as their land, holding the refuge center and offices for forty days.”[10]

Self-indigenization also happened to Columbus who never stepped foot on what is known as the US today but has since become viewed as the “founder” of the US. We have even seen this in the southwest as those who are descendants of the Spanish colonizers cry indignity to the Anglo settlers. Dunbar-Ortiz of course goes into each of these cases in extreme detail but the point is that self-indigenization is a powerful ideological tool to convince people who should have no interest with the elite class to side with them on issues of nationalism.

The book also takes up Asian racism specifically geared towards the early Chinese immigrants that came to build the railroad. In fact the very first anti-immigrant legislation was the Chinese Exclusion act. Additionally she takes on the issues of refugees from all of the US war making abroad and the challenges faced by immigrants today and in the past, which is no surprise as we see what is unfolding after 20 years of occupation in Afghanistan and the debate over refugees. While other oppressed groups like the Irish and other European immigrants could eventually fit into a white supremacist society with redefining “white” over generations, immigrants of color did not have that benefit.

This is to say that even if one accepts the “Nation of Immigrants” ideology it says nothing about how anti-immigrant the US has always been. Even though the US is becoming less “white”, with a decrease in the white population for the first time in the 2020 census[11], that doesn’t wash away the white settler ideology and myths this country is founded on that are deeply ingrained in all of us.

Discussion of settler colonialism has mostly been absent in mainstream society but is now becoming a conversation on the left. Historically the acceptance of settler colonialism on the left has made socialist organizations and others on the left weak. The US left has often just pointed to capitalism as the problem with a blind spots to colonialism and imperialism especially at home. Dunbar-Ortiz says, “The Eurocentric model of a proletarian revolution challenging, much less overcoming, the US fiscal-military capitalist and imperialist state has not and will not work. A revolutionary working class must be able to acknowledge its enemy and eschew not only capitalism but also colonialism and imperialism.”[12] Unless the left does this there is no hope in a multi-racial working class revolution.

LIke all of Dunbar-Ortiz’s books this is easy to read and will force you to confront whatever American myths you still believe. If you want to make the anti-CRT people go wild, pick up this book, read it, share it with your friends, do a study group, and get organized. If you are an educator like me you can go one step further and take the Pledge to Teach the Truth, which is a campaign organized by the Zinn Education Project.[13]

Notes

[1] http://www.beacon.org/Not-A-Nation-of-Immigrants-P1641.aspx

[2] Page 281

[3] https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/pledge-to-teach-truth

[4] https://isreview.org/issue/97/settler-colonialism-and-its-vict ims/

[5] https://isreview.org/issue/109/roots-gun-violence-united-state s/

[6] https://www.oupress.com/books/9782425/roots-of-resistance

[7] Page XX

[8] Page 270-271

[9] Page 84

[10] Page 47

[11] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/population -changes-nations-diversity.html

[12] Page 281 [13] https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/pledge-to-teach-truth

Millions Lose Government Assistance and Protection; Biden Mandates Vaccination

This article was written for L’Anticapitaliste, the weekly newspaper of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) of France.

As I write, the American media is filled with remembrances of the September 11, 2001 attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, some of critical reflection, most in a patriotic vein, yearning for that moment of national unity. This is a fleeting interlude for a country consumed by internal conflicts.

This month millions of Americans lost government unemployment benefits and millions more are losing protection from eviction. The end of temporary federal programs is taking place in a slowly improving economy, still 7.5 million Americans will lose supplemental unemployment benefits of $300 per month (earlier they were $600 monthly). Most of those receiving these benefits have already exhausted the typical 26 weeks of state unemployment assistance, though others may be eligible for state benefits. Republicans argue that such benefits have been higher than wages, thus keeping workers from returning to their jobs. Democrats are concentrating on passing trillion-dollar programs that will rebuild the country’s infrastructure, tackle climate change, and provide social programs such as child care. So, there is little chance that Congress will pass a new supplemental unemployment benefit law.

At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court this month stopped President Joseph Biden’s administration from continuing its eviction moratorium. Congress has provided $46.5 billion in funds to assist landlords and tenants, but only about $5.1 billion has been distributed, largely because of bureaucratic obstacles such as complicated application forms and slow processing. Many tenants remain unaware of the program and how to apply and landlords also resist tenants’ attempts to use the system. Some five to ten million households are in arrears and many, having lost jobs during the pandemic, owe thousands of dollars in mortgages or rent. Hundreds demonstrated in Brooklyn against the end of the moratorium, one of them, Fabien Rogers said, “How can they let evictions start when so little money has gotten into people’s hands?”

Meanwhile the COVID crisis continues with about 1,500 dying each day, bringing the total deaths to more than 660,000 Americans. Recent deaths are from the COVID-Delta variant and occur among the unvaccinated, yet 13 percent say they will never get vaccinated. So far in the United States only 69 percent of those eligible have been fully vaccinated, and in some states, it is as low as 40 percent. The unvaccinated are concentrated in rural areas and Republican states in the South and West.

Hoping to end the pandemic and thus to continue to revive the economy, Biden has mandated vaccination for about 100 million workers in both the public and the private sector. Under his plan workers must either be vaccinated or tested weekly. He has the support of Democrats, including progressives, and most corporations—including businesses that supported Trump. Some labor unions support vaccination and masks; others demand the right to negotiate how the mandate is implemented. Unions represent 11 percent of U.S. workers, only 6 percent in the private sector and 35 percent in the public sector, but there is little struggle at the moment; so, their influence on the mandate is limited. Republican governors oppose mandates and have blocked local governments, school districts, and private businesses from imposing them in their states. Schools are reopening, but there is no common policy on vaccination or masks, which are decided by states and local school districts. The essential step now is approving vaccines for 5- to 12- year-olds. There have been some small, sporadic protests at workplaces around the country, generally led by Trump followers, Q-Anon cultists, and anti-vaxxers.

The U.S. Left with few exceptions has surprisingly taken no position on mandates requiring vaccination, testing, and masking. The far left is missing from the nation’s most important debate of the moment.

Mobbed-Up! The Untold Story of Sean O’Brien and Teamsters Local 25: A Rank-and-File Perspective James Hoffa. left, and Sean O’Brien, center.

Editors’ note: This is the first of two articles with background about the union’s recent history, intended to inform readers about the election of officers now taking place in the Teamsters union (International Brotherhood of Teamsters).

The 2021 International Brotherhood Teamsters (IBT) General Election is under way and times for rank-and-file members could not be any bleaker. This year’s election will be a battle between two slates headed by current General Executive Board Vice-Presidents who ran on the 2016 Hoffa-Hall slate. One is Sean O’Brien, who heads the Teamsters United Slate of the troubled Local 25 in Boston with its historic ties to corruption and organized crime.

The other slate, Teamster Power, is headed by Steve Vairma of Local 455 in Denver. Neither O’Brien nor Vairma are reformers, nor do they have a plan for the future of the union or for leading a successful mobilization drive to unionize Amazon as discussed by reformers at the first post-debate debrief. More importantly neither plans to slash the multiple salaries and other excessive perks officers have enjoyed since James P. Hoffa’s win in 1998 restored the old-guard to power.

Vairma’s Teamster Power slate is made up of old-guard officers loyal to the current Hoffa administration in an attempt to keep the status-quo intact. For his part, O’Brien had a falling-out with Hoffa during the 2018 UPS contract negotiations. Rebuffed by Hoffa, in 2017 O’Brien reached out to the leaders and rank and filers of the Teamsters United movement. Hoffa then countered by firing O’Brien as director of the package division.

Following the 2016 Teamsters election it became quite evident that O’Brien, who had been Hoffa’s most ardent old-guard warrior in New England, had aspirations to seek the union’s top position in 2021. The UPS contract that represents over 250,000 members has been at the center of the fight in the Teamsters since 2013 when eighteen supplements were rejected by a membership enraged over healthcare changes that O’Brien himself had helped craft. In 2018 UPS workers rejected an agreement that created another tier of drivers, but using the two-thirds rule in the Teamster constitution (the need for a two-thirds majority to reject a contract) Hoffa imposed the contract, because less than fifty percent of the members voted.

Unfortunately for reformers, Fred Zuckerman, now the secretary-treasurer candidate on the Teamsters United slate, did not pick-up the fight for the members where he left-off in 2016. During the problematic 2018 UPS negotiations, Zuckerman secretly formed an alliance with O’Brien who used his ousting as UPS Package Director to disguise himself as a “reformer” and disregarded the hundreds of reform activists that had organized to reject eighteen UPS supplements in 2013. In fact, those who organized against the contract had become constant targets of intimidation and harassment from management and old-guard officers that included O’Brien. Some of these active rank-and-file reformers lost their jobs in the process as they campaigned relentlessly in the 2016 Teamsters presidential election to bring Zuckerman within less than 3.23 % of Hoffa’s vote. Still, reformers won six executive board positions. Nevertheless, in the current election cycle, Zuckerman agreed to give-up the Teamsters United top spot to a product of the most reactionary and thugged-up elements the Teamsters old- guard has to offer: O’Brien. Not surprising, when O’Brien announced his candidacy for general president in May 2018 he had the arrogance and audacity to declare: “I told Fred we got to do it in Boston where great leaders like Dan Tobin and Bill McCarthy came from.” But what was the history and tradition of Boston Local 25?

The 1980s would become the most embarrassing and turbulent times for the Teamsters as President Ronald Reagan’s administration, after firing 11,345 striking air traffic controllers, waged open war against organized labor. At the same time Republican governors pushed anti-union right-to-work legislation in Republican ran states, while Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy pushed trucking deregulation through Congress, leading to the rise of non-union carriers in the freight industry. Within the union itself, Frank Fitzsimmons (1981), Roy Williams (1983) and Jackie Presser (1988) all finished their presidencies in legal trouble and as disgraced for their ties with both the Mafia and the FBI.

In 1988, the head of Boston Local 25 and New England’s Joint Council 10, William McCarthy succeeded to the general presidency in a nine-to-eight vote after a divisive political struggle within the mob-controlled Teamster General Executive Board (GEB). The civil Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization (RICO) Act suit had already been filed when he was sworn in. But more important to note is that McCarthy was not promoted to the highest office of the Teamsters based on his merits and working-class fighting credentials as O’Brien suggested. McCarthy was a loyal puppet of organized crime and he himself had allowed gangsters and thugs to infiltrate the ranks of his home local and Joint Council going back to the days he had gained control of their offices in 1955 and 1972.

In 1988 the U.S Department of Justice brought a 113-page RICO Act complaint, filed by the Southern District Court of New York (SDNY) that accused the Teamsters of being a subsidiary of organized crime. McCarthy was forced in March 1989 to agree to a consent decree that would rid the union of corruption and organized crime involvement. The consent decree also required several amendments to the IBT constitution that gave rank-and- file members the right-to-vote for the union’s GEB, ending the undemocratic and nepotistic structure of appointments. From 1988 when McCarthy was appointed General President, till the election of 1991, McCarthy looked incompetent, incapable and weak. The daily newspapers and television news stories about the Teamsters further tarnished the reputation of the Boston leader.

McCarthy had initially announced that he would seek reelection, but quickly was forced to abandon his candidacy when he failed to secure the support of the majority of the GEB. With the infiltration of the violent and criminal Winter Hill Gang into Local 25 and the constant headline stories about the troubled local on the front pages ofThe Boston Globe and The Boston Herald, in 1991, McCarthy lost his local election to George Cashman, an opportunist disguised as a reformer. This was followed by McCarthy’s resignation as Joint Council 10 president, a position he had held since 1972. So, he retired from the Teamsters in complete disgrace.

George Cashman (1992-2003): The Perfect Opportunist

Disguising himself as a reformer in 1991, George Cashman defeated McCarthy. At the time Cashman took over Local 25, it had become the constant subject of both local newspaper and television news stories due to its members notorious behavior and close association to the gangster James “Whitey” Bulger. Up and coming right-wing zealot Howie Carr, a columnist for The Boston Herald and host of a regional radio show has since the 1990s made a name for himself exposing the corrupt legacy of Local 25, Whitey Bulger and the Winter Hill Gang. The same thuggish characters that roamed Local 25 during McCarthy’s reign continued to so under Cashman.

In 1994 The Boston Herald reported that an ex-con turned movie crew chief of Local 25 – William “Billy” O’Brien, was named in an indictment for an armored car robbery in New Hampshire that ended in the execution of two guards. William O’Brien who is the father of Sean O’Brien was never charged for renting the getaway truck used in the heist.[1] Interestingly following the armored car heist, in an interview withAMA Highlights magazine, Carr shared that the FBI raided the home of the elder O’Brien and found $50,000.[2] According to sources, at least seven of the eight men cited by investigators in the 1994 robbery and executions of the two armored car guards in New Hampshire have worked for Local 25’s movie division.[3] Over the years there has been speculation in the media and by some Teamsters that O’Brien cooperated with federal investigators following the heist and so was not charged.

In April 2003, Cashman, pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges. He admitted falsifying timesheets to allow nine-teen truck drivers to illegally collect more than $72,000 in health benefits. One of the drivers was John “Mick” Murray, an admitted associate of by then fugitive gangster Whitey Bulger.[4] In a separate scheme, The Middletown Press added that Cashman admitted to extorting $100,000 from a health care company, and pocketing $20,000 of the money. Because of his conviction, Cashman lost his two positions at Local 25 and Joint Council 10 and was barred from being employed by the union for thirteen years. Cashman was sentenced to serve over thirty-four months in prison for his scheme as head of Local 25.[5],

Sean O’Brien (2006-): The Lust for Power

When Sean O’Brien took over as head of Local 25 in 2007, he did so with the opportunity to clean-up the local’s corrupt and notorious past. O’Brien could have purged the criminal elements that had infiltrated his local going back to the McCarthy days. But like Cashman before him, he allowed them to remain in his local and roam with the same free pass his predecessors had provided them. In fact, some of these thugs have since 2007 become O’Brien’s personal goons and are best referred today as “Seanies.” But O’Brien didn’t lift a finger when it came to addressing the ills that have afflicted Local 25.

O’Brien is a man who will stop at nothing to achieve his ends. In the past he has been referred to as the “the Boston Bully” for his behavior against reformers and those challenging his closest allies. His past attacks on reformers and his spectacles at multiple IBT Conventions demonstrate that he is a bully. In 2013 O’Brien was suspended for threatening members and in 2016 was caught lying to the Office of the Election Supervisor for the IBT. Lacking any principles or integrity other than self-advancement, O’Brien has zig-zagged and flip- flopped his way through Teamster politics since 2017—the year Hoffa fired him as UPS Package Director.

Despite O’Brien’s faults there is no denying he has a cult- like following among his supporters in New England. He was elected as the youngest GEB member on the Hoffa-Hall 2011 ticket and the highest vote getter as candidate for Eastern Region Vice-President. In the past, O’Brien has shown off his support with the entourage of goons that has accompanied his delegations to the IBT conventions in Las Vegas every five years and yearly “unity” conferences. O’Brien, who climbed the bureaucratic ladder of the IBT through nepotism, is a political chameleon that has managed to change his position and behavior to benefit his career and goal of becoming Teamster president. Together with Hoffa and Rome Aloise of Oakland, he is the most dangerous Teamster bureaucrat remaining in the union holding a position of power.

O’Brien missed his opportunity to shine as a great Teamster leader during the 2013 UPS Contract negotiations when he was appointed coordinator of supplemental contract negotiations. Instead, O’Brien worked in collusion with UPS management to harass Vote No activists and because of him, some were fired. At Local 804, the home of Ron Carey and leader of the 1997 UPS Strike—O’Brien attempted to strongarm Teamster members into accepting a concessionary supplement. Former leader of Local 804 Tim Sylvester best summed it up in 2017 following O’Brien’s removal as UPS Package Director:

Where was Sean O’Brien’s tough talk about Hoffa before he got fired? Sean O’Brien backed Hoffa without a word of criticism in the last election. In fact, he threatened any member who dared criticized Hoffa. During the last contract negotiations, O’Brien tried to strong-arm my local into accepting a lower pension increase and eliminating twenty-five and out. We refused and united the members instead. We won a $400/month pension increase including twenty-five years of service and out regardless of age. Now after his termination by Hoffa, Sean says he is for the members and this is not about politics.

Pension Fund Problems

In fact, in 2005 O’Brien’s New England Teamsters Pension Fund was forced to eliminate their twenty-five and out program do to pension inefficiency and was forced to raise retirement eligibility to age 57.[6] No other Teamsters pension fund requires any members to work to late an age. Since O’Brien took over as head of Local 25, the New England Pension Fund has continued to suffer from financial mismanagement and failure to make adjustments. In December 2008, the fund was certified by its actuaries to be in “critical status” as defined by the Pension Protection Act (PPA).[7]

Although O’Brien was not a union Co-Chairman of the fund in 2008, he served as one of three trustees when it entered “critical status.” Since taking over as co-chairman the fund has not stopped declining. The fund entered “critical and declining’ status in 2012 when it fell below the 65% funding level—triggering a decision by UPS to pull-out from contributing into the failing fund.[8] Under O’Brien’s watch the past five years have been the worst for the New England fund since it was founded in 1958. The collapsing fund began the 2020 year at 48.2% funded, the second worst after the Central States Pension Fund and it will require a government bail-out provided by funds from the Butch Lewis Act passed by Congress last April.

The rapid collapse has to do with the New England Pension Fund currently having more retirees collecting benefits than members contributing to it. The problem lies in the region’s failure to organize new members. As leader of New England’s Joint Council 10, O’Brien has been unsuccessful in leading any significant union organizing drives that would have brought new contributing members into the union and helped the struggling fund, this despite New England states having amongst the friendliest labor laws in the nation and not having any right-to-work states. There is no one else to blame for this failure but O’Brien himself who is the sole decision maker regarding organizing drives by Joint Council 10.

Also, under O’Brien Local 25 has continued to be the subject of not only local media stories, but national ones as well thanks to its continuing violent behavior. He himself was suspended for 10 days for threatening the members of Local 251 in a sister local in Rhode Island. O’Brien’s failure to change the local’s horrible reputation is an embarrassment to every hard-working rank-and-file member and a blemish that has not yet disappeared despite the federal government’s takeover of the union.

This analysis is not an endorsement of any slate. This article is intended to expose Sean O’Brien and to reveal Boston Teamsters Local 25 for the failure it has been. As the ballots make it to members’ homes this October, it is very important that each and every one of those members knows this history before they vote. O’Brien is nothing more than an impostor disguising himself as a reformer.

It should be the duty of all rank-and-file members to study the lessons of the past as a necessary precondition to better their union at a time when greedy corporations have waged open war against them. In the words of the great Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana: “He who does not learn from history will forever be doomed to repeat it.”

Edgar Esquivel has been a member of Local 952 UPS Teamsters in Orange County CA for over twenty years. He was formerly an activist with Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). He holds a Master’s Degree in History from California State University- Fullerton and has served as an adjunct professor of History at both Mt. San Antonio College and Santa Ana College in Southern California. He has in the past written for Socialist Worker.

[1] “Winter Hill Gang Nets True Crime Figures,”IGN Entertainment, June 17, 2012. https://www.ign.com/articles/2001/11/20/winter-hill-gang-nets- true-crime-figures

[2] “Howie Carr,”AMA Highlights. https://amahighlights.com/howie-carr/

[3] Jack Sullivan, “Teamsters movie crew includes some very bad actors,” The Boston Herald, July 27, 2000. CNN – Local News – Teamsters movie crew includes some bad actors – July 27, 2000

[4] Denise Lavoie, “Teamsters Leaders Plead Guilty to Fraud,” The Middletown Press, April 26, 2003.

Teamsters leaders plead guilty to fraud (middletownpress.com)

[5] Editorial, “Teamsters case shows: Goons are bad for business,” The Boston Globe, September 26, 2012.

Teamsters case shows: Goons are bad for business – The Boston Globe

[6] “Pension Cuts Hit New England,” Teamsters for a Democratic Union, July 27, 2005. Pension Cuts Hit New England (tdu.org)

[7] 2009RehabPlan.pdf (nettipf.com), 1.

[8] Barry B. Burr, “UPS to leave New England fund, strikes new funding deal,” Pensions & Investments, August 27, 2012. UPS to leave New England fund, strikes new funding deal | Pensions & Investments (pionline.com)

How Work Is Killing Us

A Review of Worked Over: How Round-The-Clock Work is Killing the American Dream by Jamie K. McCallum (Basic Books, 2021); Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone, by Sarah Jaffe (Bold Type Books, 2021) and Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and The Hidden Toll of Inequality in America by Eyal Press (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021)

In 2020-21, Covid-19 threw millions of people out of work, dispatched the more privileged among us to white collar “home offices,” and made life on the job a lot more dangerous and difficult for those suddenly deemed “essential” as health care workers, retail clerks, or meat packers. The resulting disruption of existing workplace arrangements—from commuting patterns to face-to-face meetings and on-site supervision—has been the subject of endless newspaper commentary and social media discussion, as pandemic conditions persist or abate. Thanks to the Delta variant, we’re now prisoners of a wide- ranging debate about workplace mandates related to Covid-19 testing, mask-wearing, or, better yet, vaccination.

In the midst of this national uproar about new job hazards and workplace rules, three authors—Jamie McCallum, Sarah Jaffe, and Eyal Press– have published important books that examine work and its discontents, in pre-pandemic form. The questions they raise and arguments they make about job satisfaction, inadequate compensation, long hours, and morally injurious employment are a good starting point for post-Covid campaigning for fundamental changes in how work is organized, directed, and externally regulated.

In Worked Over: How Round-The-Clock Work is Killing the American Dream, Middlebury College sociology professor Jamie McCallum takes aim at “over-work.” McCallum began writing about this problem as an attempt to reconcile an “intense personal work ethic” with his conviction that “we need a mass movement to win greater collective control over work time” and a return to labor’s historic fight for shorter hours. As he notes, there has been much ground lost since millions of workers finally won the 40-hour week and related over-time pay requirements, during the union upsurge of the 1930s. “From 1975 to 2016, the hours of all wage and salary workers increased by 13 percent, the equivalent to about five extra weeks of work per year.” Today, McCallum writes, “many Americans work close to forty-seven hours per week yet earn far less than they did decades ago. Among full-time workers, nearly 40 percent report working fifty hours per week or more, and about 18 percent say they work sixty hours or more.”

Among advanced capitalist nations, the U.S. is now an outlier. “Typically, the richer a country, the less time its citizens spend working.” But, by 2018, Americans were working an average of 1,786 hours per year, far more than in any peer nation. Adding insult to injury, we have no minimum federal statutory requirements for paid holidays and vacations, sick days, and paid maternity leave. “More than one hundred countries have a legally mandated maximum length of the workweek—but not the United States.”

The timing of McCallum’s critique—in a book published mid- pandemic—was potentially a bit awkward. How do you rally workers against longer hours and lack of paid time off, when millions of people suddenly have no jobs at all and much uncertainty about ever being called back? In the author’s view, employment insecurity created by the pandemic actually highlighted how little control most Americans have over their work lives, even under normal conditions. “According to the Economic Policy Institute, only 15 percent say they are ‘free to decide’ their work schedule.” The societal result is “mental and physical stress, uneven income, emotional turmoil, family conflicts, gender inequity, ecological damage, and personal unhappiness.”

In Work Won’t Love You Back, Sarah Jaffe challenges what she believes to be the mistaken but widespread notion that work is the key to happiness. According to the author, a leading labor journalist, millions of people end up exploited, exhausted, and alone when they embrace what she calls the “labor of love” myth. They’re told, in “a thousand inspirational social media posts” that, if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. In reality, she argues, “we work longer hours than ever, and we’re expected to be available even when we’re technically off the clock…We’re burned out, over-worked, under-paid, and have no work-life balance (or just no life).”

A Culture of Sacrifice

Like McCallum, who profiles frazzled gig workers and order pickers at Amazon, Jaffe finds many revealing examples of workers whose dedication to job or career comes with a high personal price. Work Won’t Love You Back explores the workplace world of non-profits, the art and tech industries, “intern nation,” and even professional sports. In the non- profit sector, Jaffe discovers that many idealists “enter the field hoping to do good while also making a living” only to encounter much pressure to “suffer for the cause,” whatever it is. This “culture of sacrifice” encourages “workers to stay long past closing time—in the room with a client, on the phone with a funder, or up late planning a program at home.” According to the author, non-profit groups often fight labor standards reform or any improvements in working conditions on the grounds that their cost “would put them out of business.” Pitting “their staff against the people they serve, non-profit managers argue that, if more money went to salaries, services would have to be cut.”

This dynamic becomes most apparent when some of the nation’s 12.3 million non-profit workers try to organize at outfits like Planned Parenthood, the Southern Poverty Law Center, or National Center for Transgender Equality. Out of fifty-six Planned Parenthood affiliates, only five were unionized by 2017, when a majority of its clinic workers in the Rocky Mountain states voted to join the Service Employees. As Jaffe recounts, Planned Parenthood management tried to get Donald Trump’s National Labor Relations Board to overturn these election results, delaying a first contract until 2019. In the meantime, charitable donations helped fund an anti-union campaign, whose familiar message was: “We are a family. We have an ‘open door’ policy. We listen to each other.”

This same mantra is popular in the more profit-oriented Silicon Valley. There, “the most skilled workers are wooed with high salaries, great benefits, stock options, and fun workplaces, where you can bring your dog, get a massage, play games, and, of course, enjoy the work itself.” In media hype about tech companies, no occupational group is more lionized than programmers, whose long and irregular hours “are held up as proof of their romantic commitment to work.” Yet Jaffe discovers one sub-set of the programmer workforce—young male video game developers—who’ve begun to question the grueling hours, heavy workloads, and high-turnover in a global industry which prefers staff who “can dedicate their entire lives to the job,” minus any personal distractions.

In the U.K, where labor law, although weakened, is still more worker friendly, Game Workers United (GWU) has gained some trans-national traction, according to Jaffe. One of GWU’s targets, a firm called Ustwo, had the chutzpah to bill itself as a “fampany” because it was so committed to being a diverse, inclusive, and welcoming corporate family. Nevertheless, it was quick to fire Austin Kelmore, the UK chair of GWU, when he dared to criticize management. Brexit, followed by Covid-19, generated even more issues for the new union to organize around: “Workers at some companies were furloughed but asked to keep working without being paid. Others were told they had to go to the office despite lock-downs.” EU immigrants who lost their game developer jobs were left uncertain about their visa status, post-Brexit. GWU became a key helper of workers with cases pending before the Home Office or local employment tribunals.

No Dream Jobs Here

In Dirty Work, investigative reporter Eyal Press takes readers into diverse U.S. workplaces, where “dream jobs” are in short supply because the labor process itself is so brutalizing or de-humanizing. Among the forms of employment he focuses on–and finds “most ethically troubling”–are slaughterhouse work, drone piloting, correctional psychology, and offshore oil drilling. Recent COVID-related coverage, in the daily press, about meat packing hazards showed how little has changed in this industry since Upton Sinclair’s expose, The Jungle, a century ago. As Press notes, where public opinion about packinghouse safety has shifted lately, it’s often among consumers “more concerned about “buying ‘meat’ that is organic than addressing the deplorable conditions to which workers in slaughterhouses are subjected.” Press documents, in compelling detail, how poultry plant workers in the rural South face endless speed-up, repetitive strain, sexual harassment, and supervisory bullying. People of color represent 80 percent of the workforce; nearly half comes from low-income households. In a pandemic stricken nation, still hungering for chicken nuggets and big burgers, food processing workers were suddenly deemed “essential.” But, under the Trump Administration, even the valiant efforts of local Food and Commercial Workers locals, in some unionized plants, could not secure sufficient COVID-19 protections industrywide. Once ill or injured, hourly employees were as disposable as ever. Among the kill floor workers interviewed by Press, most dared not complain, lest they be fired and quickly replaced by other un-documented immigrants plucked from a large pool of cheap, unskilled labor.

As the author shows in a chapter entitled, “Joystick Warriors,” drone pilots for the military end up with blood on their hands figuratively, rather than literally. Some view their shadowy role in targeted assassinations, via Hellfire missile strikes, as critical for our “homeland security.” Others profiled in Dirty Work discovered that remote killing, no less than direct combat, can be a later source of stigma, shame, PTSD, and moral injury. Heather Linebaugh, an Air Force veteran involved in drone operations for three years, took to the pages of The Guardian to reveal the “depression, sleep disorders, and anxiety” that she and other drone surveillance analysts experienced. Two of her former colleagues committed suicide, she reported. As Press shows, former members of the military, with service-related mental health conditions, at least have access to specialized and often innovative treatment at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

Yet most poor and working-class Americans with mental or emotional problems receive little care, of any quality. Those afflicted are often convicted of crimes and then end up warehoused in prisons, where their treatment, according to Press, ranges from “routine neglect to flagrant abuse.” During Press’s tour of the prison-industrial complex in Florida, we meet correctional psychologists who, at great personal risk, tried to blow the whistle on guards guilty of mistreating mentally ill prisoners. In “total institutions which enabled abusive staff to exercise unchecked power,” this was no easy task. Correctional officers, already suspicious of their “hug- a-thug” colleagues, were well positioned to leave mental health counselors in exposed situations, to intimidate and silence them. For Black prison guards, “an added moral tension existed—the discomfort of working in a system that disproportionately harmed their own communities.”

Individual or Collective Solutions?

What can workers do about any of the workplace issues illuminated by McCallum, Jaffe, and Press? For one concerned tech worker profiled by in Dirty Work, just quitting was the most he could do to protest objectionable employer behavior. (Of course, his PhD, highly marketable skills, and savings from a Google salary and stock options guaranteed a softer landing than ex-prison employees might expect.) McCallum and Jaffee are both understandably skeptical of such individual, rather than collective, solutions. As McCallum points out, a problem like “overwork is not a personal failing that can be resolved by life-style changes” involving “smarter time management, different professional choices, or better balancing of family and work matters.” However, as he also notes, ‘collective action takes time and when workers have less of it, they are less prepared to fight back.”

Any larger-scale movement for universal healthcare, shorter hours, more paid time off, or predictable schedules will need far more workplace activists like Rebecca Wood, an Uber Eats driver in Charlottesville, VA who is a single mother of a child with cerebral palsy. Or Terrence Wiggins, a Target employee in Pennsylvania, struggling to make ends meet, while working retails store hours too unpredictable to provide a stable living. Wood and Wiggins, like the activists profiled by Jaffe, discovered what she calls “the pleasures to be found in rebellion, in collective action, in solidarity, in standing shoulder to shoulder on the picket line, in carving out spaces and times to be with other working people and to change the conditions of their labor.”

As McCallum recounts, Wood became a health care reform activist, first as a defender of the Affordable Care Act, next as a Bernie Sanders supporting advocate of Medicare for All, and then as a volunteer at free medical clinic for low-income Virginians. Wiggins got involved in a group called One Pennsylvania, which sought local legislation requiring that employers give workers more advance notice of schedule changes. In December, 2018, his active participation in organizing meetings and public hearings helped persuade the Philadelphia City Council to pass a Fair Workweek Employment Standards Ordinance. As a result, the employers of 130,000 local retail, hospitality, and food service workers must give them “more regular schedules, including two weeks advance notice; ‘predictability pay’ to make up for departures from posted schedules; and a guaranteed nine-hour minimum rest break between shifts.” In response to a national “fair scheduling” campaign, nearly ten other cities, including Seattle and San Francisco have enacted similar ordinances.

McCallum acknowledges that winning—and then enforcing–such legislation without a heavily unionized workforce is not easy. One of Jaffe’s case studies shows what can be accomplished by a group like United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), which has had collective bargaining rights for decades but only more recently began to employ membership mobilization and community-labor alliances to enhance working conditions and political clout. Readers of Jaffe’s book meet Rosa Jimenez, also a single mother, high school teacher, and picket-line veteran of UTLA’s week-long strike two years ago. Long before that walk-out, Jimenez joined Progressive Educators for Action, which pushed the union to become more active on issues of racial justice, policing and immigration, and curriculum change. In 2014, after reformers won leadership of UTLA, rank- and-file teachers, like Jimenez were officially encouraged to take on new roles. They became part of a Parent Community Organizing Committee and a coalition called Reclaim Our Schools LA, with local allies like the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment.

In 2019, thirty thousand UTLA members walked out to make contract gains that included higher pay, the hiring of more school nurses and counselors, smaller class sizes, reduced standardized testing, a cap on charter schools, the creation of more campus “green spaces,” and fewer random searches of students by security personnel. As Jimenez told Jaffe, the settlement was “way more than I could have imagined.” In the nation’s second largest school district, UTLA members were able to expand the scope of union bargaining, beyond the usual “bread and butter” issues, because “we were not just going out for ourselves, we were going out for our students,” Jimenez explained. “We now have a sturdy ground to stand on with what we’ve learned about organizing, to build coalitions, to work with students and parents in a meaningful way.”

In contrast, Eyal Press offers few such glimmers of hope in the grim occupations that he reports on. Prison guard unions, like labor organizations representing police officers, are not well known for building strong ties with the communities their members “serve.” They are more apt to be devoted lobbyists for building more correctional facilities and putting more people in them. Meanwhile, as Press observes, “more privileged Americans are spared any involvement in such dirty work” because “it can be outsourced and allotted to people with fewer choices and opportunities.” Although the author himself has clearly helped “tear down the walls and barriers that keep what happens inside prisons and industrial slaughterhouses hidden” and, through his reporting, also penetrated “the secrecy that envelops the drone program,” he believes that “the problem is not a dearth of information but the fact that many choose to avert their eyes, not only from dirty work, but also from those who get stuck doing it.”

Viewed as a whole, however, the workplace arrangements critiqued by these authors have many problematic features in common. Not everyone who experiences them has the option or the inclination to look the other way, as demonstrated by all the creative forms of shop-floor resistance their books so helpfully describe.

We Anti-Zionists Speak for a Quarter of U.S. Jews

Portrait of Shatzi Weisberger by Micah Bazant, Jewish Voice for Peace They may not call themselves anti-Zionists, but the newest poll numbers show that a quarter of U.S. Jews fundamentally oppose the Zionist project. They reject the Zionist movement’s goals for Jews to take over the land of Palestine and to make the resulting country a Jewish-supremacist state. American Jews are becoming less inward looking, less white, less religious, and thus increasingly different politically than Israeli Jews. That’s all to the good.

In July the results of a poll were released that had been commissioned by the by the Jewish Electorate Institute, which Haaretz says is a group led by prominent Jewish Democrats. The results were shocking to anyone who has been looking at these kinds of polls over the years. A quarter of U.S. Jews agreed with the statement that Israel was an “apartheid state”. 22 percent agreed that “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians”. On another question, “34 percent agreed that “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the United States”. According to Haaretz, “20 percent said they preferred establishing one state that is neither Jewish nor Palestinian” encompassing Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. In the Jerusalem Post a furious Rabbi Pruzansky wrote, “A whopping 38% of American Jews felt no ‘emotional attachment’ to Israel”.

Anti-Zionism is doing even better among younger people. Ron Kampeas in Haaretz wrote, “A third of younger voters agreed that Israel is committing genocide, … more than a third agreed that Israel is an apartheid state.” Realize young American Jews are turning more democratic and critical of Zionist practices while the trend in Israel is the reverse, with young people moving to the fascist right, and fast.

The Haaretz podcast discussed the matter on July 19. Interviewer Simon Spungin, spoke to Alon Pinkas , a former Israeli consul general and semi-retired Haaretz columnist Bradley Burston. They agreed the results of the poll were “startling”. Yet they weren’t totally surprised. Pinkas said that there was a “growing disconnect” between a “majority” of US Jews and Israel. Asked about whether Jewish organizations had failed, Pinkas said all the big establishment Jewish organization were “no longer relevant to American Jews.” Spungin noted a recent Pew survey in which the top concern for American Jews was “climate change”. Pinkas said that in election exit polls with self-defined Jews when asked what issues influenced their vote “Israel never figures in the top 5 and seldom in the top 10.” Burston said, Israel is seen as a “burden to many American Jews” and “not as a source of pride anymore.”

Why is this happening? One reason is that the Israeli government has pretty much given up on American Jews. That may sound crazy considering all that US Jews have done for Israel, but it’s true. Sure, Israeli officials come to the AIPAC conventions and orate on their undying love for American Jews, but that’s just window dressing. Years ago Netanyahu abandoned the usual big tent approach and hitched Israel’s fortunes to the U.S. Republican Party even though US Jews vote Democratic overwhelmingly. It’s unclear if the new Israeli government which is a mixture of Old Right, Settler Right, Liberal Sell-Out Right and Opportunistic Arab Right will try to reverse that strategy.

Consider the words of Ron Dermer, an American-born Israeli whose father and brother were at times Mayor of Miami Beach. Dermer was Netanyahu’s ambassador to the United States from 2013 to 2020, a very influential post. This May there was a piece about an interview he had given in theTimes of Israel (TOI). According to the TOI he said, “About 25% [of Americans] — some people think more — are evangelical Christians. Less than two percent of Americans are Jews,” he said. “So if you look just at numbers, you should be spending a lot more time doing outreach to Evangelical Christians than you would do to Jews.” Dermer also mentioned how enthusiastic the Evangelicals were for Israel while noting American Jews are “disproportionately among our critics.”

But why abandon U.S. Jews who have poured so much money and effort to support Israel? For one thing there’s demographics. Jews are a very small part of the U.S. population, and they no longer stick among themselves. Jews are intermarrying with non-Jews. For a millennium a Jew who married out of the faith was shunned, but in recent decades in the U.S. most Jews marry non-Jews. In 1990a survey commissioned by the what is now called the Jewish Federation of North America found that 52% of Jews were married to non-Jews, way up from only 9% in 1965. The prestigious Pew Research Center (Pew) found that by 2005 the percent had gone up further to 58%. Now, that doesn’t mean the percent of Jews in the US has gone down because people in mixed marriage can raise their kids to be Jews (religiously or culturally). Pew says the percent of Jews is steady at 2.4%. Nevertheless some important Israelis are hysterical about intermarriage calling it a “plague” or even a “2nd Holocaust”. In 2017 an Israeli right-wing paper reported that Netanyahu told aides that in two generations non-Orthodox U.S. Jews will “disappear”. If you think that way, it is logical to make your main ally to be Christian Zionists rather than U.S. Jews.

It has worked the other way round, too. Religious American Jews are mostly of the “Reform” or “Conservative” denominations. Yet in Israel rabbis of these denominations may not officiate at weddings. Only Orthodox rabbis can do that. These rabbis won’t marry Jews with non- Jews and they’re very picky to make sure a person who claims to be a Jews is Jewish according to ancient Jewish law. For instance Artem Dolgopyat, who won a gold medal for Israel this year in the Olympics, cannot get married in Israel. His mother’s side of the family is not Jewish. There is also the question of the Western Wall in Jerusalem. After years and years of bargaining a compromise was worked out allowing a space where men and women could pray together at the wall using non-Orthodox rituals. In 2017 theIsraeli government refused to pass the compromise. Mixed prayer remains forbidden. There’s also the fact that erasures of pictures of women on billboards and signs by ultra-orthodox Jews are “constantly happening” and rarely punished. This is all rather repulsive to most American Jews.

Pew said this about its 2020 survey, “Overall, about a quarter of U.S. Jewish adults (27%) do not identify with the Jewish religion: They consider themselves to be Jewish ethnically, culturally or by family background and have a Jewish parent or were raised Jewish, but they answer a question about their current religion by describing themselves as atheist, agnostic or ‘nothing in particular’ rather than as Jewish. Among Jewish adults under 30, four-in-ten describe themselves this way. So the second biggest section of U.S. Jews after “Reform” are those Jews who don’t follow the Jewish religion! In terms of an Israel that increasingly sees it legitimacy in religious terms this is quite a development. Of a lesser degree of importance is the increasingly diversity among US Jews. Pew found that while Jewish adults as a whole are 8% non-white, young Jewish adults are 15% non-white.

Then there is Israel and Donald Trump. Netanyahu embraced Trump and Israeli Jews overwhelmingly approved of him This didn’t play well with U.S. Jews, not with Trump surrounding himself with Alt-Right advisors, saying the Nazis at Charlottesville were “fine people” and with him ramping up hate generally just before the largest massacre of Jews in US history (Tree of Life Synagogue, Pittsburgh). Jews voted overwhelmingly against Trump in 2020. Only 30.5% voted for him according to the Republican Jewish Coalition. The estimate from the soft-Zionist group J-street was even less, just 21%.

It’s not just polls that show the growth of anti-Zionist thinking. The evidence is shown in the rapid growth of two American Jewish groups, Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now. Jewish Voice for Peace, which formally voted to reject Zionism, has 16,000 members. Its social media numbers are far higher than AIPAC’s, the quintessential “pro-Israel” group. Jewish Voice for Peace has 653,000 Facebook followers and 152,000 followers on Twitter. AIPAC has 174,000 FB followers and 116,000 followers on Twitter. IfNotNow is a newer group. It’s younger and it doesn’t take formal political positions, but it’s in the streets more than JVP. Still, it has more than 47K followers on FB and 75K Twitter followers.

Are U.S. Jews anti-Zionist as a whole? Of course not. The majority still toe the Zionist line, some with blind fury. But it’s time to recognize that a substantial number of U.S. Jews have split from the long American Jewish consensus that Israel-can-do-no-wrong. A quarter of U.S. Jews in fact find Israel generally to be in the wrong. It’s time for the media that runs only to AIPAC, the ADL, the Jewish Federation and the soft Zionists to start talking also to leaders of JVP, and IfNotNow and the many unaffiliated Jewish activists who are fed up to the kishkas with Israeli apartheid and Israeli warfare.

Say it out loud, “We’re Anti-Zionist and we’re proud.”

NP on Cuba: Consistent Opposition to US Imperialism and Support of Democratic Rights

We welcome the opportunity to clarify misrepresentations of New Politics’ editorial stance about Cuba and US imperialism. We write on behalf of the New Politics editorial board.

Since its founding 60 years ago, New Politics has consistently opposed US. intervention in Cuba, defending the right of the Cuban people to determine their government. We have defended freedom of political expression everywhere, the right to organize politically, including the right to form unions, rights denied in this country and many countries that self- identify as opponents of US imperialism. Just as we call on the U.S. government to release political prisoners and allow freedom of expression, we call on the Cuban government and all other governments to do the same. We oppose the U.S. embargo, which harms ordinary Cubans, especially when imposed during the devastating COVID-19 pandemic.

Most recently we have responded to popular demonstrations in Cuba with re-publication of material by activists in Cuba as well as analyses unique to our journal, includingAn “ assessment of the July 11 Protests in Cuba,” (August 11, 2021) and “Social Explosion in Cuba: The Ignored Signals” (July 21, 2021), by Alina Barbara López Hernández; “Cuban Protests and the American Reaction,” by Dan La Botz (July 21, 2021); and “From Cuba: A Description of the Protests,” by Comunistas Editorial Board (July 19, 2021).

Here we present only a partial list of the many articles we have published, online and in print, expressing our simultaneous opposition to US interference in Cuba and support for Cubans’ democratic rights.*

In Fall 1961, New Politics carried a symposium “The Cuban Revolution: Four Views,” which rejected US intervention and offered differing analyses of the Cuban revolution. Sam Bottone’s contribution expressed the Third Camp socialist tradition of NP’s editors and its founders, Julius and Phyllis Jacobson, which posited a symbiosis between two rival social systems and imperialist blocs, one headed by the US, and the other led by the USSR. Bottone noted the tragedy of the left’s failure to oppose both:

“For the New Left evolved as a response to the revelations of the Twentieth Party Congress, to the horrors of the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution, to the conservatism of the official labor movement and, most broadly, to the insanity of a world threatened by two imperialist power blocs. The New Left spoke in the name of democracy, humanism, socialism—and still does. But Cuba is a test of how deeply rooted these convictions are. And thus far the most authoritative spokesmen for the New Left have not measured up to their promise.” (p. 32)

In the “Cuba-Blockade-Crisis: A Symposium” in Fall 1962, New Politics hosted a debate about the Cuban missile crisis among writers who differed on how to understand the Castro regime. Hal Draper, condemned “Kennedy’s Disastrous Cuban Policy,” (pp. 27-40) warning that the triumphalist rhetoric of the Kennedy administration “is the most dangerous thing that has happened in American public opinion since the beginning of the Cold War. Not only is it basically false … but it means that, the next time, there will be so much the less resistance in the United States to an aggressive, adventuristic military- based foreign policy in reaction to Cold-War crises.” (p. 27).

Zane Boyd, in “The Debate Over the Recent Arrests and Sentences in Cuba,” New Politics, Summer 2003, examined debate in the international left around the arrests and harsh sentences meted out to more than 70 opponents of the Cuban government and its execution of three hijackers. In defending a statement critical of the Cuban government’s actions, Boyd noted the anti-imperialist credentials of its signatories, including Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Susan Sontag, and the statement’s clear focus “on the past and the present crimes of the U.S. government. It is a demagogic smear to claim that these intellectuals make a moral equation between the recent actions of the Cuban government with the manifold crimes of U.S. imperialism.”

In “Cuba Today: An Interview with Samuel Farber,” conducted by Joanne Landy, Thomas Harrison and Stephen R. Shalom, in the same issue of NP, Sam Farber concludes “The best thing that the people in the U.S. can do is to see that the blockade and all other forms of hostility against the Republic of Cuba cease and desist, and that normal diplomatic and economic relations are reestablished, thereby allowing maximum room for the Cuban people to make their own choices.” We have proudly published Farber’s erudite, incisive analyses of Cuban politics, all of which defend democracy in Cuba and oppose US intervention, including these three articles in 2020: U.S.“ Politics and the Financing of Political Groups in Cuba,” “Cuba’s New Economic Turn,” and “Cuban Doctors Abroad – Appearances and Realities.”

In the past decade NP has encouraged analysis of Cuba from a critical, anti-imperialist perspective. InIs “ Cuba Different?” (New Politics, Summer 2012), Charles Post reviewed Farber’s book, Cuba Since the Revolution of 1959: A Critical Assessment, (Haymarket Books, 2011), while Armando Chaquaceda and Lennier Lopez examined spaces for dissent in their piece on “Cuban Civil Society,” (New Politics, Winter 2018). Ariel Dacal Diaz provided an overview of Cuba’s internal politics in “Cuba: Note for a Balance Sheet of Ten Years of Reforms,” (July 21, 2018).

We challenge any and all who aver that the editorial position of New Politics has been to support US intervention in Cuba in any fashion, economic, political, or military, to examine what we have published for evidence, currently or historically. We are confident they will find nothing to support their claim.

*Currently the archives of New Politics are found in three locations online, and not all of the print issues have been digitalized. The editorial board is shortly launching a special fund appeal to raise at least $10,000 to gather the entire archive on a new website, allowing readers easy access to this rich trove of material as well as new articles that continue the proud tradition of this journal. You can donate here to support this exciting project.

Texas Anti-Abortion Law Upheld by Supreme Court—And Met with Resistance This article was written for L’Anticapitaliste, the weekly newspaper of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) of France.

Women in Texas and around the country were horrified and outraged to learn that the U.S. Supreme Court, meeting in the dead of night on September 1, voted 5 to 4 to uphold a new Texas law that would outlaw abortion for nearly all women. The law bans abortions after a heart beat can be heard, usually at about six weeks, before most women typically realize that they are pregnant. In Texas, before the passage of this law, 85 percent of women who got abortions had them after six weeks. While there are other “heartbeat laws” in other states–Georgia, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Ohio–this law goes further. It makes no exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest, and very narrowly defines health conditions that might allow an abortion.

The law does not call upon state officials to enforce it, but rather deputizes private citizens to sue anyone who performs an abortion or “aids and abets” a procedure, making it more difficult to declare the law unconstitutional. People with no connection to the patient or the clinic may sue and recover legal fees, as well as a bounty of $10,000 if they win. Women in Texas will now have to go to other states to seek abortions, an option that is much easier for the well off than for workers and the poor. The law will disproportionately affect Black and Latina women who have fewer economic resources. The law immediately threatens Planned Parenthood, the nation’s and Texas’ largest abortion provider, though there was a court ruling temporarily stopping suits against it until September 17.

The Texas law, which was passed by its Republican dominated legislature and signed by Republican Governor Greg Abbott, will not only affect the seven million women of childbearing age in Texas, but could also become a model for other states, about half of which could conceivably pass similar laws. And it is part of a broader attempt to get the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that upheld women’s abortion rights, later defined as pregnancies up to 24 weeks.

The Texas law and the Supreme Court decision are tremendous blows to women’s right to make decisions about their own bodies and their own lives. Abortion rights, culminating in Roe v. Wade in 1973 was won by the women’s movement of the 1960s and 70s through educational campaigns, mass protests, and political pressure, and still today a majority of Americans support women’s abortion rights. According to a national media poll in 2019, “A total of 77% say the Supreme Court should uphold Roe, [though] 26% say they would like to see it remain in place, but with more restrictions added; 21% want to see Roe expanded to establish the right to abortion under any circumstance; 16% want to keep it the way it is; and 14% want to see some of the restrictions allowed underRoe reduced. Just 13% overall say it should be overturned.”

In response, President Joe Biden denounced the law as “unleashing unconstitutional chaos” against women and promised that his administration would “launch a whole-of-government effort” to try to check the law. Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and women’s groups will be pushing the Democrats to pass new, comprehensive abortion rights legislation, though it would have little chance of passage at the moment given the divided Congress.

Resistance to the new law began at once, led by ordinary women and by women’s organizations. When Texas Right to Life established a website, Prolifewhistleblower.com, to act as a tip line to turn in abortion providers or those helping women seeking abortions in Texas—both of which are now crimes—women and men began using Tik Tok to flood the site with accusations that Governor Abbott was seeking an abortion, that Marvel Avengers wanted abortions, and bots regularly filed fade reports. The Texas law could spark a new women’s movement, letting people know that Women’s Lives Matter.

Going into Labor

An Economic Policy Institute graph showing the relationship between union density and the concentration of wealth sends us an important message this Labor Day; however it does not, as one well-known writer argues, say it all for socialists, or those who want a revitalized labor movement, or activists who are fighting social oppression. In fact, it recapitulates the problem with the graphic for this article, a historically inaccurate nostalgia for a white, male cisgender working class.

Seeing gender (and its intersectionality with race) in labor reveals much we need to recall this Labor Day. Black women have historically worked for pay outside the home (in addition to caring for their own families) when they could. Women worked at the start of the industrial revolution in textile mills. When urban school systems were created, women were hired as teachers, in Chicago forming Local 1 of what became the American Federation of Teachers, under the leadership of Margaret Haley. More recently teachers and nurses have often displayed a resilience and militancy defending their own working conditions and protecting those who are most vulnerable in our society that’s a model for the rest of the labor movement.

The pandemic has confronted unions with a historic challenge. COVID-19 and the response to it have simultaneously illuminated and intensified the ways “women’s work,” labor traditionally done by women in and for social reproduction, is both essential and devalued. The pandemic has exposed our dependence on people who are paid to provide physical and emotional care, along with our society’s inability and unwillingness to support and protect these workers as they risk their lives for us. From nurses, therapists, teachers, and flight attendants, to workers in jobs viewed (incorrectly) as unskilled with lower status and pay, like aides in hospitals and nursing homes, restaurant workers, and workers in hotels, it’s clear the less respect (and money) workers receive, the more disproportionately the job is done by Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people, often women. The poor pay and working conditions of much caregiving work reflect not only who is doing the care but for whom it is being done. Low- income people of color get the short end of both sides of the stick.

Social movements for equality and social justice have exposed disparities at the workplace, giving unions an opening to support workers who most need the protection collective representation brings. We see employers, from nonprofits to transnational corporations, giving verbal homage to correcting inequalities while failing to disrupt underlying inequalities in how work is organized, classified and paid. Outrage at the hyper-exploitation of food delivery services forced some of the most exploitative businesses to modify practices, stating clearly that delivery fees weren’t going to workers and providing ways for customers to tip. We should be fighting for the “gig economy” workers in food services, many of them immigrants, to earn a living wage and have stable hours. Still even among these hyper-exploited workers there’s a gender divide. The apps and websites allow customers to tip the workers who do deliveries (mostly young males of color) while the workers who prepare, pick and package food (traditionally women’s work) remain invisible and subject to whims of employers about wages.

Labor Day invites us to commemorate significant contributions unions have made for working people, recognizing courageous sacrifices of workers who lost their jobs and sometimes their lives fighting for the right for us to have collective voice at the workplace and to force both political parties to pass legislation limiting employers’ exploitation. At the same time, we confront sobering realities of how many advances have been undercut, as labor’s economic and political power and its numbers waned, due in part to widespreadacceptance of “business unionism,” which makes workers clients served by a union apparatus, rather than “owners” of their unions. The pandemic has created a global opportunity for disaster capitalism to mask policies that increase exploitation – and profits — in rhetoric about addressing longstanding social inequality. One ominous change is the chilling intensification, development and application of information technology to control workplace conditions; provide social, health and educational services; increase surveillance and data mining; and replace workers with AI.

Employers applaud themselves for boosting the prominence and authority of individuals from historically marginalized groups, substituting this shared power at the top in dominating workers, instead of supporting workers’ voice and empowerment through unionization. In contrast, when workers organize collectively, independent of the employer, they challenge the employer’s unilateral control over life at work, from pay and hours to the air they breathe, which in the pandemic is literally a matter of life and death. Collective organization brings potential power, which depends on the extent to which workers control what unions do in their name. Unions are only as strong as workers’ understanding that they, not union staff or officials, “own” their organizations.

It’s important not to romanticize workers and diminish the enormity of what we ask. Given the harsh conditions for work, expecting working people to do the jobs for which they are paid and also help organize their workplaces is a huge ask. One invaluable asset we have is seeing the inseparability of struggles for social justice and workplace democracy. We don’t dilute our power to improve economic conditions when we fight for demands to make our society and workplace more equitable, just and humane. On the contrary, we benefit from the synergy of increased resources and networks, often missed even when unions organize and defend workers who do “women’s work,” missing the gendered nature of work. UNITE HERE’s campaign opposing Hilton Hotel’s elimination of the daily requirement for cleaning rooms, putting housekeepers’ jobs in jeopardy, rightly highlights how this harms communities of color and low-wage women workers. Still it misses how housekeeping can be eliminated so easily: “women’s work,” cleaning the home, is taken for granted. What’s assumed is that no one will miss the work that’s done or the people doing it.

When Liz Shuler, the newly elected president of the AFL-CIO, who proudly claims the mantle as first woman to hold this position, tweets “I am humbled, honored and ready to guide this federation forward. I believe in my bones the labor movement is the single greatest organized force for progress,” she expresses what should be our hope and vision. Yet labor officialdom’s actions often undercut our chances of success in making that vision a reality. For example, the AFL-CIO has focused almost all of its energy on passing the PRO Act, and while the legislation is important, we can’t assume its passage will solve labor’s problems. Labor can’t rely on Biden and the Democrats’ promises of legislation to substitute for workers fighting for what they want and need, for themselves and the society.

What is it we should expect and demand of unions?When a hospital starts to hire “replacements” for striking nurses in Worcester, Massachusetts, who have been on the line for months, insisting on conditions that protect patients, the state and national AFL-CIO need to speak up for a state-wide one-day walkout – and provide resources to organize it. When teachers and staff demand school districts change policies to help keep schools safe, reflecting new dangers brought on by the Delta variant, they deserve to have the state and national teachers unions show up with resources for organizing one-day statewide walkouts and protests. One teacher union activist, who like others is organizing to make his district and state spend their federal pandemic funding on what students really need, observed the national teacher unions have the most influence over the White House than we’ve had in a generation, and yet both national unions, AFT and NEA are “working as mouthpieces for the administration instead of pushing the envelope.”

Movements fighting for social justice, from “#MeToo” to BLM to “AbolishIce” need a massively reinvigorated labor movement, just as much as labor unions need them. We need new understandings and enactments of solidarity that recognize how social oppression affects us all. Unions are stronger when they acknowledge the political tensions that exist among union members and provide democratic spaces to hammer out differences, in the process of deciding on specifics for fighting back. When we use our power on the job to force those who exploit us to hear, value, respect our humanity, we are demanding a new world. The challenge workers and their organizations face is not so different from what women must accomplish when they go into labor: arduous work that requires courage, confidence and hope, the work essential for birthing a new society, which we need and deserve.

A version of this article appeared in Truthout.

Editor’s note: Labor Day 2021 marks the start of the New Politics special fund appeal. This year we have an especially ambitious goal, raising $10,000 for updating our website, making the entire archive of back issues available on our site, purchasing software to manage the growing number of subscriptions and donations, and improve communication among the editorial board, NP’s supporters, and our generous writers. We are counting on our readers to help us. You can donate here.

Recovering the Dialectic of Race and Class Struggle in the USA

[Editors’ note: This article is a further contribution to the Symposium on Black Lives Matter and the US Left begun in the Winter 2019 issue of New Politics with an initial essay by Cedric Johnson, “Who’s Afraid of Left Populism.” All the articles in this discussion can be accessed here.] Cedric Johnson’s contributions to this New Politics Symposium challenge us to confront the complexity of actually existing Black political life without falling back on the homogenizing assumptions of a “Black exceptionalism” that denies African Americans the same level of class, cultural, regional, and ideological diversity routinely extended to other similarly- sized groups (such as, for instance, the entire population of Canada). Johnson further urges us to recognize, in light of “Black Lives Matter,” that slogans which may “galvanize” street mobilization can also “enshroud” crucial underlying issues. Just because a banner or slogan is suddenly popular is not a reason to refrain from critical thinking about it—which is not necessarily to say that such a slogan should be dropped entirely, either. The question then, is how to approach such “race-first” tendencies in light of our broader historical and materialist analyses and socialist politics.

Johnson rejects the hardening of ‘standpoint theory’ into a racially essentialized outlook that fetishizes ascribed identity and enforces ethno-territoriality on critical discourse, policing who is allowed to speak about what, irrespective of the content of what they may have to say. He warns us against demonizing the white working-class and calls out ruling elite attempts to baptize corporations as “progressive” by way of multicultural “blackwashing.” Consistently, he attends to the deeper forces that are driving the contemporary policing crisis in the United States, which are considerably more complex than prevailing meta-stories of transhistorical racism allow. If we want to grasp where exactly the Trumpist “Blue Lives Matter” current is coming from, Johnson reminds us, then we need to grapple with the actual historical and material conditions giving rise to that tendency, even as doing so may trouble cherished movement shibboleths. Overall, Johnson makes a compelling case for orienting socialist politics towards the majoritarian goal of connecting working-class people across ethno-racial lines, uniting all those who are affected negatively by systemic injustices—from mass incarceration and militarized policing, to unemployment and poverty wages—in order to build a popular force capable of making the actual transformations we seek, while outflanking the enemies we face. His work helps us move beyond a simplistic ‘Black and white’ view of the history and problems before us.

The core of the Symposium critics’ response to Johnson seems to be that there is still nonetheless something productive, illuminating, and necessary in foregrounding the injustices of race and racism ‘as such’ (even while noting the importance of class, too). Kim Moody, for instance, suggests the need for both universal and class-based programs and race-based interventions, warning of the danger of equating the established national unions of the Democratic Party with “labor” or “the working-class.” Lester Spence unites with Johnson on the need for broad left and class-based universal programs (like Medicare for All), but also insists on the need to focus on hyper-incarcerated populations, who may be so isolated and disconnected from broader social institutions that they can’t be reached without more targeted action. (Note that Spence appears to assume that those affected by such hyper-incarceration are non-white.) Brian Jones, for his part, referring to the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the #BlackLivesMatter upsurge, asks “Can these two developments be fused?” Jones concedes that what “galvanizes” may often mystify with regards to race, but nonetheless reminds us of the value—from an anti-capitalist perspective—of a good deal of the popular #BlackLivesMatter- aligned writing that has broken through in mainstream media outlets like the New York Times, including regular appearances from the likes of Michelle Alexander, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and Ibram X. Kendi. Even if the focus in such venues is generally on the history of racism and contemporary racial inequality rather than capitalism per se, Jones suggests, that frame allows anti-capitalist voices and ideas to gain ground. A stronger version of Jones’ claim might go on to argue that so entwined are the histories of racism and capitalist exploitation in the USA that one cannot excavate the former without calling the latter into question as well. “You can’t have capitalism without racism,” Malcolm X famously said. Perhaps we could invert and update the saying: “You can’t popularize anti-racism without stirring up anti-capitalism.” It is an appealing notion, suggesting that any expression of anti-racism, even if not consciously committed to socialism or working-class power, is nonetheless creating space for such politics, laying bare the fundamental injustices, inequalities, and violence that structure American capitalism and empire. But is this notion, however appealing, true? Does anti-racism automatically create space for anti-capitalism? Might even the “anti-racist” corporate trainings of Robin DiAngelo and Co. be paving the way for more radical possibilities?

Parallel with this NP Symposium, another contemporary critical framework has been growing popular, in part on its promise to address both race and class simultaneously: the discourse centered around the notion of “racial capitalism.” Associated with Cedric Robinson’s 1983 work Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, this tendency has been especially influential since this book’s reintroduction by Robin D.G. Kelley in 2000, with a third edition released in late 2020, in the wake of the massive George Floyd upsurge. One might assume that, among various avowedly anti-racist trends today, the critique via “racial capitalism” would represent the proof of the strong proposition above, with attention to racial inequities developing organically to challenge capitalist social relations. Yet the situation is not so simple; Black Marxism’s treatment of anti-capitalist Black radicalism in fact closes down as many avenues as it opens. I’ve recently offered a detailed critique of this book—and Robinson’s deployment of the notion of “racial capitalism”—in my January 2021 Socialism & Democracy article “Sifting the Stony Soil of Black Marxism: Cedric Robinson, Richard Wright, and Ellipses of the Black Radical Tradition.”

I should mention that my own engagement with Robinson grew out of a three-pronged paradox. First, Black Marxism has been enjoying tremendous influence, with its key concepts of “racial capitalism” and “the Black Radical tradition” taken up by significant sectors of the academic-activist left. Second, amidst the Black Radical embrace of recent years—which has helped elevate voices like Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin—Richard Wright, long thought of as central to the Black left, has seemed to be somewhat excluded from the renaissance. Third, upon returning toBlack Marxism, I realized that, contrary to my expectations, Richard Wright was himself a key—indeed foundational—figure in Robinson’s own text.

How, I wondered, could this be? How could Black Marxism be experiencing such a revival even as Wright, one of its central figures, was being muted or marginalized? Furthermore, I wondered, what was it about Cedric Robinson and Black Marxism that so many academics and activists were finding so appealing? And what was it about Richard Wright that made him increasingly anathema, even amidst a virtual Black Radical revival? These linked concerns led me to set out on a close critical interpretation of Cedric Robinson’s ubiquitous magnum opus, through the lens of his treatment of Wright’s work—which I’ve been studying for years.

The title of my Socialism & Democracy piece, “Sifting the ‘Stony Soil’ of Black Marxism,” speaks to my approach, which aims not to deny the value of Robinson’s work, but to ‘sift’ through it, critically distinguishing what is fertile from what is an obstacle to left theory and practice. The appeal of racial capitalism is easy enough to discern. Likewise, the Black radical tradition. But the problems—or potential problems—embedded in such terms may not be so easy to spot. So I set out to explicate some of the ways these terms, whatever their value or mobilizing power, could also be prone to blind-spots, narrowing our sense of what we might call ‘actually existing Black Marxism.’

The term “stony soil” alludes to Richard Wright’s crucial 1937 essay, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” where Wright, from a Marxian and pro-socialist perspective, addresses what he saw as the contradictory appeal of Black nationalism (associated then with Marcus Garvey’s massively popular, but by the ‘30s declining, United Negro Improvement Association). As I discovered, this essay is also a symptomatic point that reveals the serious limitations of Robinson’s opus as an approach to actually existing Black Marxism.

The short of Wright’s take—which warrants re-reading–is that, so long as the American scene continues to be characterized by “white chauvinism” and racist inequality, its “stony” terrain will continue to give rise to Black nationalism, including distorted and unhealthy variants (such as those at the time cheerleading for Japanese imperialism). And yet, the paradox for Wright was that while the growth of such nationalist currents in Black life was understandable—maybe even inevitable—their growth was still not on its own adequate to emancipating people from this terrain and could in fact create new problems, deepening rather than escaping the various ruts in which working and oppressed people were stuck.

In “Blueprint,” Wright conducts a two-fold struggle: on the one hand opposing the ‘class reductionists’ of his own day with an argument as to the historical necessity and unavoidability of race and nationalistic consciousness for Black writers and the socialist movement alike; and, on the other, problematizing that nationalistic consciousness itself as inadequate to challenges before us, despite its understandable roots. Against the two poles, Wright calls for a critical dialectical engagement with the nationalist currents in Negro life, and also for creating culture and organization to promote unity and trust among Black and white writers and workers, as a means of reducing the suspicion and alienation that, in his view, gave rise to Black nationalism in the first place. (Only once this second goal was achieved could nationalist reaction be truly overcome.) At the same time, Wright does not discourage Black writers from engaging the undeniable racial condition of their lives—how could they not?—but he urges them to do so in ways that reveal the need for that nationalistic consciousness to transcend itself.

What does it mean to “transcend” Black nationalism in this context? Was Wright asking Black writers to ‘put race aside’ or to embrace a kind of ‘race-blind’ working-class unity that rendered racism a secondary ‘epiphenomenon’? Clearly not—as the centrality of racialized struggles to Wright’s own major works demonstrates, from his earliest poetry, to his collection Uncle Tom’s Children (1938/40), to his blockbusters Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (American Hunger) (1945/77). By ‘transcendence,’ Wright meant not a minimizing, side- stepping, or leaping over race, but rather a particular approach to it. As he wrote: “It means a nationalism that knows its origins, its limitations; that is aware of the dangers of its position; that knows its ultimate aims are unrealizable within the framework of capitalist America” and that recognizes “the interdependence of people in modern society” (emphasis added).

Wright was in effect calling for cultivating a racially integrated, global anti-capitalist movement in part through critical reflection on the historical injustices, experiences, and social distortions of race. But, paradoxically, in Wright’s (pro-Communist, socialist) view, a would-be Black nationalist movement could not realize itself without overcoming itself, on at least two levels:

1. At the level of historical analysis: it needed to grasp where and how “race” and racial divisions came into being in the first place (invocations of race never being enough to grasp racism’s own origins—except through racists’ eyes); 2. At the level of political strategy: facing the limits of being a national minority within the USA, it needed to seek out comrades and allies beyond its ‘own’ ranks. It further needed to challenge capitalism—as well as imperialism— since a majority of Black people in the US were exploited workers, and since oppressed peoples elsewhere shared many similar struggles.

If a project of Black liberation was to succeed, then, it needed to work for the liberation and unity of all working- class and oppressed people, across race lines and across the world; as well as to prioritize the struggles of the Black working-class—the great majority of Black folks, to be sure—against more petty bourgeois and bourgeois elements who were already struggling for control over the nationalist banner, even before the overcoming of Jim Crow. (At the same time, the more that the broader working-class movement took up these causes too, the less Black responses would need to assume a nationalist form.)

We could do a lot worse than to use Wright’s breakdown of “transcendent” Black nationalism as a tool for evaluating and engaging different manifestations of #BlackLivesMatter and anti-racist discourse and movement today. Yet “Blueprint” remains a largely neglected treatment of the race/class problematic. And those who do mention the text often misread it, blunting its critical edge. Sadly—and symptomatically—Black Marxism here is helping to mislead the pack. Cedric Robinson foreground’s Wright’s “Blueprint,” but he misleadingly strips it of its crucial dialectical hinge, literally excising (via use of ellipses when quoting from the piece: “…”) Wright’s insistence on the need for ‘transcendence’ and instead leaving us with a far more uncritically and affirmatively nationalist account that ignores Wright’s concern about the dangers of nationalisms that fail to grow beyond immediate racial reaction. Robinson, to be sure, has lots of interesting and insightful things to say about Wright, and defends him against several influential detractors—from Robert Bone, to Harold Cruse, to James Baldwin. But his essentializing ideological commitment to a notion of “racialism” as a virtually transhistorical architectonic (one that, he claims, predates capitalism by as much as a millennium), and the corollary notion that Black militancy is therefore inherently “radical,” leads him to elide Wright’s crucial contributions to fit his own more nationalist frame. In effect, the “Black Marxism” (and the Black Radical Tradition) that Robinson puts forth narrows the breadth and thins the depth ofactually existing Black Marxism.

So much for Robinson’s treatment of Wright. How about the broader Black Radical trajectory that Robinson has helped to inspire and coalesce? Why has Richard Wright become so marginal within so much of this discourse, even though Robinson saw him as crucial? Increasingly it seems to me that the sidelining of Wright (Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates are notable examples) is not only unfortunate, but symptomatic of the limits of current academic, left and/or #BLM thought, specifically a widespread reluctance to embrace and engage a core insight of Wright’s work: oppression—though it certainly inspires resistance—also oppresses people. As Wright theorized in “Blueprint,” and most infamously expressed through the character of Bigger Thomas in his novelNative Son, the forms of spontaneous resistance that oppressed people are driven to in a racist capitalist society are often themselves marked negatively by that oppression. (Bigger certainly engages in heroic and innovative resistance; he also kills two different young women out of his desperate fear.) Contra Robinson, struggling Black people are not immune to the corruptive and alienating forces of the society in which they are forced to live. No one is. Yet, the current preference for more affirmative race talk, favoring a more ‘uplifting’ portrait of the racially oppressed, tends to steer clear of the problems Wright was at pains to foreground.

Such reluctance is understandable, stemming perhaps from a fear of playing into racist stereotypes circulated by the “law and order” right-wing and racist “underclass” ideology, which has dogged policy towards African Americans for nearly a century since the Great Migration. (It may also reflect a middle-class academic aversion to looking the rough realities of proletarian life in the eye.) But whatever its rationale, a fixed stance of racial affirmation risks romanticizing the oppressed as well as suppressing crucial aspects of the strategic situation before us, while ignoring the urgent dialectic of racial oppression and social liberation which “Blueprint” outlines, in particular the ways in which racial nationalism that doesn’t “transcend” itself can in fact compound rather than alleviate the trap we’re in. At times, strains of Black Radical Thought today operate as if recognizing the complex entanglement of people’s lives in poverty, desperation, vulnerability, violence, and social alienation, is somehow to co-sign a racist thesis about Black people’s ‘imbrutization’ (Kendi). But while we must certainly distinguish a left critique from racist right-wing underclass demonization, we do our cause no favor by smoothing over the rough edges of the world we inhabit and the challenges we face.

Recently assembled violent crime statistics and the 2021 mayoral race in New York City both underscore the urgency of the issue, with a majority of even Black Brooklyn helping to elect a former police officer, notwithstanding militant movement calls to “Defund” or “Abolish” the police. The city of Chicago—Bigger Thomas’s home—saw 774 homicides in 2020 alone, more than two killings per day, a 50% increase over 2019 totals. Such high levels of violence within contemporary US society cannot be laid narrowly at the foot of the favored movement target—racist police—alone, though the system they are trained to defend does bear ultimate responsibility. What are the concrete mechanisms that produce such violence? What must be transformed socially if we are to reduce such bloodshed, and thus abolish the alibi of the increasingly militarized ‘thin blue line’ that finds its self-justification in such social mayhem? What are the social pressures that stifle and distort the human potential simmering in our most oppressed communities? How is the growth of structural unemployment, and of a precarious surplus population ‘useless’ in the eyes of capital, compelling people to hustle and hunker down to survive? What are the material reasons that even many working-class people are compelled to seek out the limited (and often trigger-happy) assistance of the police (or the lure of Trumpian authoritarianism) in response to the more immediate social violence and insecurity that surrounds them? Can we speak openly about such material dynamics without being accused of demoralizing our side or of consorting with the enemy?

Wright himself was often criticized in his own time for his alleged pessimism, for dwelling on the negative, and foregrounding the way that systems of racism and capitalism intertwined and distorted the responses of oppressed people, Black and white alike. As Wright made explicit in his essay “How Bigger Was Born,” he saw that the dangerous tendencies of ‘Bigger Thomas’ could appear—and increasingly were appearing—across all racial complexions in an increasingly alienated US society. And he further saw that in the hyper- alienated context of the USA, urbanized and proletarianized people could break either towards progressive socialism (and international communism) or towards nationalistic and reactionary fascism. In general, Wright refused to give his readers—leftists among them—the uplifting endings or heroic radical proletarians that some clamored for. And with good reason.

For a truly majoritarian socialist movement needs to be rooted in a deep honest grasp of the disparate forces that produce social alienation, desperation, and dysfunction. Such analysis can provide us with a map to trace these forces through to all who are linked by them across racial lines—whether the affected see those links themselves yet or not. This shared contact with social oppression may feel surprising or shameful at first, but in fact lays the basis for increasingly wide networks of solidarity, connecting and dividing communities that otherwise may be seen as separate from—or even pitted against—one another. The very messiness and ‘pessimism’ of Richard Wright’s work then, as well as its class-attentive, race-transcendent radicalism, arguably lends itself to exploring and ‘sifting’ our social terrain better than many other writers (creative and critical alike) who in one way or another give us more comforting Black and white assurances that, however bad things are, we know the nature of the people and problems and possibilities before us, without the need for any more burdensome investigation.

One might say something similar of Cedric Johnson’s work—and contemporary reactions to it—though his thoroughgoing empirical critique of 20th-century Black nationalism goes even further than Wright’s. (Indeed, Wright’s dialectical “Blueprint” may look positively rosy and optimistic compared to the accounts of class conflict and ideological sectarianism that Johnson recovers in his bookRevolutionaries to Race Rebels: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics.) Nonetheless, in compelling us to address the messiness of historical inheritance, class contradictions that cross racial lines, and political struggle within and beyond the oppressed groups themselves, Johnson, like Wright, helps shake loose our thinking from comforting (and often anachronistic) beliefs about what the struggle for liberation must look like in the contemporary USA, insisting that our theory of the world be as nuanced and open to complexity and change as the world itself.

It seems clear that neither the Black Marxism of Richard Wright, nor that of Cedric Johnson, fits the now popular forge of “Black Marxism” laid out by Cedric Robinson and his followers. But their thought remains vital and necessary today regardless, even more so because of the way it challenges a “racial capitalism” discourse wherein the latter term may be eclipsed by the former. We can ill afford the dominance of “Black radical” frames that marginalize or suppress such brilliant and actually existing Black Marxists from view, narrowing historical materialism to nationalist militancy. Tacking on the word “capitalism” is not enough. We need all the tools that history has handed us for the difficult work ahead.

The Failure of American Empire Lite

The September 11th attacks were the first major event I can remember. I was in Grade Eight at the time. We were all sent home where the news played scenes of the carnage over and over again like some kind of Sadean merry-go-round. Even in Canada there was panic that we might be next, with the center of Ottawa locked down and our leaders struggling to one up each other in expressions of remorse and stern concern.

Mere weeks later the Bush administration, backed by a tremendous groundswell in global and domestic good will, launched an invasion of Afghanistan to oust the Taliban and capture Osama Bin Laden. The former was seemingly accomplished in record time, the latter would take many more years. It seemed like victory had been won at minimal cost and maximal moral integrity. Little did we know the writing had already plastered the wall as early as September 20th, when Bush emphatically dualized the world into those who were with “us” and those who were “with the terrorists.” The implications would soon become clear: this would be a very different kind of conflict, one which transcended global borders and was directed against a spectral and indeterminate series of enemies, whose number would increase as resentment at American interventionism cascaded into violence. Less than two years later, the administration lied its way into an illegal war against Iraq that massaged the egos of those who’d wanted Saddam Hussein dead since 1991. But a series of arrogant blunders — most notably effectively dissolving previous power structures wholesale and beginning wholesale — led to a long insurgency and the collapse of the entire region in the face of the Syrian Civil War and ISIS aggression after 2011. Now, a decade on, the final domino has toppled and the Taliban have regained control of Afghanistan.

The Conceits of Empire Lite

One of the most remarkable features of the war was how decisively it broke with many of the hallowed pieties of American self-reverence. Conservative Republicans, who some might have expected to have at least some respect for traditional practices, became entranced by an unholy neoconservative Jacobinism, one which adopted an almost Year One type approach to the countries they sought to govern. What was fascinating about this was how reflective this Millenarian approach to reality was. In a 2004 interview in the New York Times a senior Bush official, widely alleged to be Karl Rove, infamously disdained the “reality based community,” claiming that as an empire “we create our own reality.” What this reflected was all the old Thucydidean warning about hubris in politics coupled with the natal post-modernism of the American conservative movement. The belief that the world was a plastic medium defined by the brightly colored ideological fantasies of its participants, who jostled with one another for the power to will theirs into solidity over and against the materiality of living people and their centuries-old social and material relations. But underneath this bluster was a deep anxiety that the failure to achieve this almost Miltonian power of imperial creation would lead to the decadence and fall of the shining city on the hill. Organizations like the Project for a New American Century expressed anxiety that the end of the Cold War would lead Americans to lose their martial edge, and sink into a mire of “complacency,” consumerism, and lethargy rather than the spectacular projection of power as an instrument of hegemonic global rule. As William Kristol and Robert Kagan, two of the leading intellectuals of the movement put it:

“American civilians at home, preoccupied with the distribution of tax breaks and government benefits, will not come to [the military’s] support when the going gets tough. Weak political leadership and a poor job educating the citizenry to the responsibilities of global hegemony have created an increasingly distinct and alien military culture. Ask any mechanic or mess boy on an aircraft carrier why he is patrolling the seas, and he can give a more sophisticated explanation of power projection than 99 per cent of college graduates.”

What was of course required was reinvigorated military spending, and a more ambitious foreign policy agenda to export the universality of the American way to countries where it eminently belonged. They simply didn’t know it yet. But more than that was the importance of the image of power as a precondition for its reality; the projection of macho force and military might were the key to maintaining the awe required for hegemony as much as its actual use. More hardened social conservatives like Dinesh D’Souza ruminated that in fact it was the American left that had helped bring about 9/11, by attracting the ire of Islamic fundamentalists with their permissive sinfulness. The common thread unifying this dialectical dance between imperial hubris and fear of decay was the fatal conceit that power and discipline make the world, and a country where the disorder of faithlessness and individual dissent were overcome would be the most powerful and disciplined of all. If it failed at this the country would inevitably be swallowed by enemies, who held fast where their rivals faltered.

None of these tendencies were unique in American history of course. Everything from the euphoric imperial universalism to the paranoid style of politics had its precedents. One of the most ironic examples of this was the intensely politically correct language that surrounded the neoconservative War on Terror. This was sometimes misdescribed as Orwellian, in its seeming relish in putting opposites together. The infamous Patriot Act intended to defend American freedoms invited the government to spy on its citizens. Bringing “independence” to the people of Afghanistan and Iraq meant liberating their industries from national control and allowing the entry of American capital. But Orwellian language requires a willful weaponization of untruth against truth, mobilized by the heads an authoritarian party that is self-reflective about its own hypocrisy. The lower downs may have to engage in double think, but not the party heads. What was distinctive about the lingo of the War on Terror was how desperately its proponents tried to hold the self-imploding ideological contradictions together, even in the face of mounting criticism and catastrophe, through sheer willpower. What was distinctive was the way their imperial, authoritarian, and militaristic sensibilities were almost automatically disowned by their proponents, almost like ritualistic Catholic confessionals through which these sinful inclinations were disavowed and the national conscience cleansed. Which of course allows us to sin again with a pure heart. Nowhere were these tendencies better reflected than inthe kitschy neologism “Empire Lite.” Coined by Michael Ignatieff in the mid-2000s, empire lite referred to the increasingly informal ways American hegemony manifested across the globe. Everything from its global alliance system with other developed states — from Canada to the United Kingdom — to its network of laws and soft-power projection, enabled the United States to maintain a relatively benign order without the requirement of military occupation which defined what I suppose were the “heavy” empires of yore. Of course sometimes the United States did intervene militarily, with the most remarkable examples being the twin invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. And Ignatieff even argued that in defense of “empire lite” lesser evils like modest forms of torture –also whitewashed under the politically-correct guise of “enhanced interrogation” — would be justifiable. But what was significant was that in these instances violence was of a more pure and holy form, since it was motivated less by avarice, than by a humanitarian desire to spread human rights and liberal democracy to authoritarian countries. Freedom from cruel and unusual punishment for all, brought to you courtesy of waterboarding in Guantanamo Bay.

Fat Free, Sugar Free Empire

The Obama administration’s efforts to rebrand the war in a more humanitarian fashion, if anything, doubled down on this attempt to have what Slavoj Zizek might call a fat free, sugar free empire, one where acceptable human casualties — read, American military casualties –would be kept be a minimum, but imperial power and prestige would be maintained. For a brief period there was an effort to emulate the Iraq “surge” through deploying tens of thousands of additional troops, leading to a peak in the early 2010s where there were 100,000 soldiers in the country. Obama’s administration even succeeded where its predecessor had failed, and Osama Bin Laden was assassinated and 9/11 avenged in 2011. But as it became clear that the Iraq war was ending and the public’s appetite for conflict continued to wane, troop numbers fell dramatically. This of course meant that the war would increasingly be subcontracted out to a combination of drones, militias, and dubious allies. Many of these would cause irreparable damage to the region; but still better than the irreparable damage to public opinion of the war that would result from more American military deaths. Obama’s lethal record of drone strikes even solicited criticism from typically friendly media outlets likeThe Atlantic (though of course that didn’t stop Trump from later carrying on the same policy with even less transparency and even more callousness). Throughout Obama tried to sell the conflict as an unwanted burden, brought about by the 9/11 attacks and in need of a swift end. And undoubtedly there is more validity to this claim then the argument the United States had any business in Iraq. But the reality was that the United States did invade a foreign country, topple its government, and install a weak puppet regime in its place. In doing so it assumed responsibility for the care of the Afghan people and their security; a responsibility that was often treated as an even more unwelcome burden than the war itself.

The Trump administration transformed this policy of wounded aloofness into a veritable political style. Trump himself lied about his initial support for the War on Terror, trying to paint himself as a visionary Cassandra who saw the disaster to come rather than a huckster fellow traveler who abandoned ship when convenient. Superficially, Trumpist post-modern conservatisms’ “America First” policy seemed to constitute a retreat from neoconservative imperialism abroad. And to the extent it perpetuated the Obama era yearning to purge itself of responsibility for the country’s chosen wars, there is some truth to that. Trump followed Obama’s policy of briefly increasing US troop numbers, before bringing them dramatically down while ramping up ineffective but violent drone attacks. He even intended a June 2021withdrawal from Afghanistan, signing Faustian deals with the Taliban that turned out not to be worth the paper they were printed on. Historians will no doubt debate whether Trump would have made an even bigger muck of the retreat than Biden; and like all hypotheticals we will never know for sure. His ego may have demanded a show of splendor and force to preserve American pride, but on the other hand the Trumpists were never known for their ability to organize more or less anything effectively.

The real legacy of Trumpist foreign policy, including in Afghanistan, will be the impact on conservative discourse going forward. Trumpism assimilated many of the post-modern features of neoconservative empire lite, but instead directed them internally against enemies at home. Instead of a titanic clash of civilizations which would provide the necessary tonic against American decadence, its energies were largely spent in culture wars and solidifying the most anti-democratic and revanchist features of the constitutional order. In its indifference to reality at home, and its veneration of power as the medium through which the facts of the world could be overcome, we see in Trumpism the worrying extension of an imperial logic developed abroad applied erratically on the home front. A logic defined by the continuous embrace and then disavowal of its own contradictions. Embrace where that allowed Trump to posture as a man of power and strength, who wouldn’t allow something as inconvenient as truth or facticity get in the way of “winning.” Disavowal where a majority of the American people rejected their tin-pot leader in November 2020, leading to the unreal spectacle of the Republican party racing to erode democracy while claiming to defend it. In all of this the Afghan people were, predictably, forgotten.

The only thing “lite” about American empire turned out to be a dogged unwillingness to accept any culpability in using power to try and remake the world, instead insisting that the exercise of violence could be innocent as long as the right people were doing it. As it became increasingly clear what would really be required to remodel the globe into a true McWorld, the razor of integrity cut deep into the contradictions of American imperialism. Moreover it also became clear that despite the Crusader-like faith in imperial power to “create our own reality” it turned out reality is quite real. The mounting cost of empire lite, almost always framed in terms of consequences for America and its allies rather than those subjected to their benevolent interventions, left us with a serious choice. Accept that if you break it, you bought it. This would mean acknowledging that the invasions were wrong and strategically misguided, recognizing that it would now take decades and a lot more pain to actually bring about the effective, rights respecting democratic government that was supposed to simply blossom in bombed out soil. Or blame the country and its puppet leaders for not respecting the gift delivered unto them and leave them to their fate. In 2011 that’s what happened in Iraq. Now in 2021 it’s the turn of the Afghan people.

This turn of the screw will undoubtedly shape geopolitics for many years. America’s international reputation, already seriously compromised by the outrage over the war in Iraq, will take another serious hit. In the 2010s this enabled Russia and China to regionally flex into the Ukraine and many parts of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa respectively. They will no doubt feel further emboldened. The prestige of the Taliban will likely be immeasurably increased, leading many fundamentalists and militants to regard them as an inspiration. While making some half-hearted efforts at rebranding themselves as cuddlier, gentler authoritarian fundamentalists the tragic reality is that many people will suffer from their revenge and reprisals. We should brush aside the inevitable, Islamophobic anxieties about immigration and accept as many refugees as possible, though the window will likely get narrower by the day. And most importantly we should recommit ourselves to empowering an international legal system to put normative pressure on states that wish to launch ill- conceived and self-serving wars, even when backed up by flowery rhetoric. This might not have stopped the war in Afghanistan, which received widespread support, but it could have prevented the parallel disaster in Iraq. This should be coupled with more stringent deterrent measures which threaten the officials of powerful states with criminal sanctions in the event that they advocate for unjust wars, or choose to use unjust and cruel means to fight them. The War on Terror brought a lot of evil and suffering into the world. Nothing can make that right, but we can try for once to learn from the past and realize that the answer to terror can’t be the banal horrors of empire.

The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report: A Green-Syndicalist Analysis

Earlier this month, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the first part of its Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of ongoing global warming. This study of the “Physical Science Basis” of climate change concludes that the situation is very alarming. As such, the AR6 may be taken as “code red for humanity.” In less than 300 years, the carbon emitted to power industrial capitalism has intensified the greenhouse effect, causing Earth’s global temperature to rise on average by 1°C, or 1.8°F (A.1.3). Overall, the AR6’s authors project the impacts of five trajectories of climate change in what remains of the twenty-first century, from courses that limit warming to a 1.5-2°C (2.7-3.6°F) average increase, to paths promising a rise of 3-5°C (5.4-9°F)—or worse. While these latter scenarios would hasten the Sixth Mass Extinction and threaten humankind’s self-destruction through precipitous global ecological collapse, even in the less destructive cases of increases of 1.5-2°C, “[m]any changes due to past and future greenhouse gas emissions are irreversible for centuries to millennia, especially changes in the ocean, ice sheets and global sea level” (B.5). Indeed, global temperatures will rise this century in all scenarios under consideration, and limiting this increase to 1.5-2°C is only possible with “deep reductions in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions” now, and in the coming years (B.1)

Since publication of its first assessment report in 1990, the IPCC has borne witness to the ever-worsening problem of anthropogenic climate disruption, together with what amounts to humanity’s suicidal failure to address the factors threatening collective destruction. The AR6 reflects the latest and starkest findings from the field of climatology. Given that each successive report takes 6-8 years to produce, as Guardian environment correspondent Fiona Harveyadds soberly, the AR6 also constitutes “the last IPCC report to be published while we still have a chance of averting the worst ravages of climate breakdown.”

In this article, we will review the IPCC’s AR6 Summary for Policymakers (SPM). The SPM is a much-condensed version of the full report on the “Physical Science Basis” of global warming, which runs to nearly 4,000 pages. We encourage readers to read either or both reports for themselves. After considering the latest findings from climatology, we will conclude by considering possible remedies to the grave problems highlighted by the AR6 SPM. As summarized in the concept of green syndicalism, we will avow egalitarian and socially transformative approaches to radically reducing emissions, in the hopes of minimizing the grave risks posed by the climate crisis. All figures are taken from the SPM.

Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis

The IPCC’s AR6 expands upon and updates the AR5, published in 2013. In turn, the 2007 AR4 served as the basis for the eco-journalist Mark Lynas’ terrifying exposé, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Climate (2007; reviewed here). Although it is the first IPCC report “to assess the risk of tipping points thoroughly,” the AR6 follows a similar format to its predecessors, in considering the past and current states of the climate, contemplating possible climate futures, and stressing the importance of limiting future warming. As scientists, the AR6’s authors use confidence estimates to convey the certainty of their claims.

For instance, with 80-90% confidence, the IPCC finds that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in 2019 were the highest they’ve been in 2 million years, and that human activities are the “main driver” of worldwide glacial retreat since the 1990s, as of the decrease in Arctic sea ice seen in the past 40 years (A.1.5, A.2.1). Grimly, with 80% confidence, the IPCC can say that the average Arctic sea ice extent has been at its lowest over the past decade since 1850. With 50% confidence, it finds that both the existing level of late-summer Arctic sea ice and the global rate of glacial recession are unprecedented for one to two-thousand years (A.2.3). Since the onset of industrial capitalism, the oceans have borne the brunt of global warming: specifically, the AR6’s authors estimate with 80% confidence that the oceans have absorbed “91% of the heating in the climate system, with land warming, ice loss and atmospheric warming accounting for about 5%, 3% and 1%, respectively” (A.4.2). By the same token, in the early twenty-first century, “ice sheet and glacier mass loss were the dominant contributors” to sea-level rise (A.4.3). Thus far over the past century, the oceans have risen an estimated 0.2 meters, or 0.7 feet (A.1.7)

In terms of both the fate of Earth’s cryosphere (icy regions) and sea levels, the IPCC’s authors have no doubt either that ice loss will continue in Greenland, or that sea levels will rise, as this century progresses. Moreover, they calculate a two-thirds probability that Antarctica’s ice will recede during this time, together with a lower risk that the Antarctic ice sheet will start to break up altogether, in the case of especially high emissions (B.5.2). In a similar vein, the AR6 authors warns that sea levels will continue to rise another 0.3-1 meter(s) this century, with more intensive carbon-emission trajectories translating to greater sea-level rise (B.5.3).

Regarding heat and drought, the IPCC’s authors are “virtually certain that hot extremes (including heatwaves) have become more frequent and more intense across most land regions since the 1950s, while cold extremes (including cold waves) have become less frequent and less severe, withhigh confidence that human-induced climate change is the main driver of these changes” (A.3.1, A.3.5; original emphasis). This shift toward a “Hothouse Earth” pathway is bleakly illustrated in the figure below, which shows nearly all of the world’s regions heating up. Whereas warming effects are expected to be most concentrated at Earth’s poles, some temperate and semi-arid regions can be expected to “see the highest increase in the temperature of the hottest days, at about 1.5 to 2 times the rate of global warming (high confidence)” (B.2.1, B.2.3; orig. emphasis). Overall, as Guardian editor Damian Carrington observes in his review of the AR6, “[d]rought is increasing in more than 90% of the regions for which there is good data.” Paradoxically, though, a hotter Earth can also be a wetter Earth: “The frequency and intensity of heavy precipitation events have increased since the 1950s over most land area for which observational data are sufficient for trend analysis (high confidence), and human-induced climate change is likely the main driver” (A.3.2; orig. emphasis). As we have seen confirmed this summer from China to Germany and the U.S., global warming intensifies the risk and frequency of “heavy precipitation events” (B.2.4).

Transitioning to a focus on different climate futures, the AR6 authors ominously conclude that there is effectively no space for any future expansion of greenhouse-gas emissions, considering that we have “blown 86% of our carbon budget already.” Therefore, as with exposure to ionizing radiation, we can conclude that there is no safe dose for the burning of carbon at this point, as “[c]hanges in several climatic impact-drivers would be more widespread at 2°C compared to 1.5°C global warming and even more widespread and/or pronounced for higher warming levels” (C.2). In other words, the degree of damage wrought by anthropogenic climate disruption depends on whether or not we can defy capital’s growth imperative and radically reorganize production, society, and polity in the coming years. As is clear from the bar graphs below, only the most radical of reduction trajectories considered in the AR6, the so-called SSP1-1.9, provides a good chance of limiting overall global warming to a 1.5°C average increase. Achieving this goal presupposes sustained global net negative carbon emissions—meaning the abolition of fossil fuels and deforestation, plus carbon sequestration (D.1.6). Even then, in the best case, temperatures could soar beyond 1.5°C later this century, before declining below the target again (B.1.3).

In reality, only the lowest and second-lowest greenhouse-gas emission trajectories modeled by the IPCC in the AR6 are likely to avoid the “threshold” of a 2°C rise, beyond which catastrophe ensues (B.1.1, B.1.2). All other courses, which are expected by the capitalist compulsions that govern the world, ensure our collective self-destruction.

Radical Climate Politics and Green Syndicalism

As we have seen in this article, the first third of the AR6 is not dedicated to solutions, but rather, to examining the scope of the problem of global warming. However, whereas the AR6 section on strategies for mitigating global warming is not expected until next year, remedial action to shift us toward very low emissions trajectories is desperately needednow. Rather than perpetuate hierarchical convention or Trumpist barbarism, we need a regenerative“Great Transition” integrating a “managed decline” of fossil-fuel production, expansion, and exploration, together with a halt to deforestation, across the globe. As the AR6 demonstrates, such a program would need to achievenegative net carbon emissions—as through reforestation, rewilding, restoration, and other forms of sequestration—to limit global warming to a 1.5-2°C rise. In short, the longer we procrastinate, the higher our risk of self-destruction (D.2.3).

At the same time, while the gloominess of the AR6 might shock its readers, we should recall that its conclusions are necessarily conservative. Climate journalist Emily Atkin points out that every word published in the IPCC’s name must be agreed to by each UN member-country—including mass-carbon burners like the U.S., Canada, Russia, China, India, Brazil, Australia, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia. Due to this same power dynamic, the term “fossil fuels” does not appear once in the Summary for Policymakers. We hear about “activities,” “emissions,” and “influence,” but not exploitation or domination, whether of humanity or nature. Reading the AR6, Atkin notes soberly, “You’ll learn the world is ending, [but] you [might] not know who to blame.”

In closing, then, and keeping in mind our interest in egalitarian and socially transformative frameworks for radically reducing emissions to minimize our climate risk, let us consider some contemporary approaches to climate politics, both institutional and radical.

Known as the official architecture for discussing and debating global warming, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the body that has negotiated such non-binding international agreements as the Kyoto Protocol (1997) and the Paris Accord (2015) through annual meetings of the Conference of Parties (COPs). In November 2021, after a one-year hiatus over the COVID-19 pandemic, the twenty-sixth COP will be held. Based on its track record so far, nothing meaningful can be expected to come of it. Of course, the failure of the COP to restrain the factors driving global warming is largely on the United States, the largest historical emitter by far, which refused to join Kyoto under the Clinton and Bush administrations, torpedoed the Copenhagen talks in 2009 but then championed the Paris Agreement under Obama, and withdrew from it under Trump.

Although Biden has ordered the U.S. to get back on track to meet the goals outlined in the Paris Accord, the stark reality is that very few countries have met their pledges to date. Even if they did, studies show that the outcome would mean an unacceptable 3°C rise in average global temperatures. In parallel, Biden’s brainchild, the much-touted, $1 trillion- dollar infrastructure bill, had many of its climate provisions gutted to get it past Republican senators. In short, we are still on a high-emissions trajectory that promises hell on Earth later this century, even under centrist-reformist State management, and the necrophilic irrationalism of Trump and the GOP will only get us there sooner. In this sense, Republicans will likely capitalize on Biden’s chaotic withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan—which ironically followed Trump’s lead—thus amounting to an elegy for the Green New Deal.

With time running out, and with all this negativity in mind, seeing the powers that be so radically failing us, what alternative remedies can we possibly consider?

Certainly, with a combination of political, social, and economic changes, humanity’s energetic needs could be met by a transition to wind, water, and solar (WWS) sources, as outlined by Mark Jacobson and company’s WWS-based roadmaps for 139 countries, and David Schwartz’s concept ofsolar communism. The problem of replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy is far more political and economic than technical. Humanistic and ecological proposals for degrowth, targeting both private and State capitalism, echo Richard Smith’s deindustrialization imperative and a “neither Washington-nor Beijing” position that would critique both U.S.-American and Chinese Communist authoritarianism on principle. A decade ago, in Imperiled Life: Revolution against Climate Catastrophe, I recommended internationalism and ecological anarcho-communism as reconstructive strategies, and still do.

In The Ministry for the Future, the visionary writer Kim Stanley Robinson foresees the climate crisis unleashing global uprisings that force policymakers into overhauling the economy to deincentivize the burning of carbon altogether. Taking inspiration from La Via Campesina’s motto that “agroecology cools the planet,” Troy Vettese proposes that we induce a “second Little Ice Age” through a simultaneous transition to plant-based diets and the restoration and reforestation of the billions of hectares of land currently dedicated to pasture and agriculture. Hopefully, this would be a “bloodless” Little Ice Age, unlike the first, which took place between the 16th and 19th centuries, as European genocide and epidemiological desolation of Indigenous peoples in the Americas resulted in rapid regrowth of ecosystems, the sequestration of carbon, and a decline in atmospheric CO2.

We believe green syndicalism to be among the most reasonable of strategies for implementing the deepest cuts to carbon emissions foreseen in the AR6’s—that is, the SSP1-1.9 curve, which provides the best chance to limiting global warming to 1.5°C. In light of the historical failures of bureaucratic socialism to achieve its stated goal of classlessness, much less to provide inspiring models for eco-socialism (see the Chernobyl nuclear disaster or the Aral Sea), anarcho- syndicalism provides greater hope for workers’ self-abolition as workers, for it aims directly to overthrow class society. To add ecology to the mix, especially in the face of looming climate catastrophe, is only logical, considering Jeff Shantz’s point that the protection of nature “requires the social power, the power to stop capitalist production, distribution, and exchange, that is represented by the collective power of working people.” Rather than view workers as necessarily allied with bosses in the destruction of ecosystems, as the “jobs versus environment” double-bind would have us think, green syndicalists highlight class struggle and powerlessness at work and in society at large as factors that can contest and reproduce environmental destruction, respectively. In this sense, workers must come to recognize the uselessness of their jobs, while ecologists must come to recognize that class divisions and the bureaucratic organization of work perpetuate ecocide. The ideal organizing strategy might be to revisit Judi Bari’ssynthesis of the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World with the deep- green ecology of Earth First!—seen in the founding of the unique IWW/EF! Local 1 in northern California in 1989—learn from its shortcomings, and reapply similar models of “blue- green alliance[s],” community syndicalism, and autonomous unionization today, and in the future.[1]

By inverting the established decision-making hierarchies between capital and labor, green anarcho-syndicalism has the potential to meet the unprecedented challenge, posed by the authors of the IPCC’s AR6, of reducing carbon emissions radically and rescuing humanity from self-destruction. Ideally, workers and environmentalists would unite to “dismantle the factory system, its work discipline, hierarchies, and regimentation,” as well as ban fossil fuels, implement a transition to a WWS-based energy system, and reorganize global society by promoting participatory democracy at work, in the community, and in social life.[2] Although the success of such a program may be hard to imagine in oligarchical U.S. society (not to mention other oligarchical contexts), in light of the exceedingly low rate of unionization in the workforce and the lack of effective recourse against bosses who crush union drives, a green- syndicalist revival is nevertheless imperative.[3]

[1] Jeff Shantz, Green Syndicalism: An Alternative Red/Green Vision (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012), xxv, xxxii, xxli, 46, 109-112.

[2] Ibid, 54.

[3] Alice Martin and Annie Quick, Unions Renewed: Building Power in an Age of Finance (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2020). Solidarity, Inc. Part III: The absence of protest

See Parts I and II.

Perhaps the most fatal of the teenage anti-imperialist’s distractions was their argument Western governments were actually supporting the dangerous Islamists in Syria they ‘pretended’ to be bombing. This was a denial which meant, amongst other things, that the thousands of civilians killed in that illusory war didn’t actually exist, and that the destruction leveled on towns and cities controlled by ISIS did not take place. If the propagated notion was that the West wasn’t really fighting ISIS – but was more concerned, say, with ‘undermining Iran’ – how could there be protests against such an imaginary (or at least suspect) war?

And indeed, this is precisely why there were almost no such protests against some of the major events of the US-led intervention in Syria. To take the example of the Stop the War Coalition, following the 2015 vote on UK airstrikes, the group only came out of the street on a Syria matter on four occasions: twice to protest against symbolic (and often pre- coordinated) strikes on empty Syrian regime facilities following one of hundreds out of hundreds of chemical attacks, and twice to oppose Turkish and rebel military offensives against the Western-backed Kurdish-led SDF. To take the first of such protests, almost 50 Muslim worshippers killed in a US airstrike on a mosque in a rebel-held village weeks before the strike on an evacuated regime airfield, and 33 civilians that were killed in a US strike on a school in Raqqa, did not warrant the same headlines – or protests – that the damaged airfield tarmac provoked shortly after Trump’s “first strike on Syria” – i.e. in the aftermath of the Khan Shaikhoun chemical attack. Far more extensive bombings of Raqqa, Mosul, and Manbij failed to elicit a single protest by the teenage anti-imperialist leadership of Stop the War Coalition. Much to the contrary, the group in fact continued to host supporters of the SDF on its platforms, even while it denied reports of civilians killed by the Coalition as ‘exaggerated’ and ‘ISIS propaganda’, and refused opposition requests to suspend cooperation with the US-led Coalition. Whencriticised precisely on these points, its leaders accused its opponents (somehow) of “supporting war”.

In total, the teenage anti-imperialist and their organisations protested against less than 0.1% of Western airstrikes in Syria. They have meanwhile ensured that Western audiences heard far more about the US crime of striking empty airfields and ‘supporting the opposition’ than of the thousands of civilians directly killed by US airstrikes – or even for that matter, of the fact that the US has bases in a third of Syria happened to be in the areas under the control of the teenage anti-imperialist’s “only progressive friends” – and has its own oil companies in the region (the traditional obsession of anti-imperialists) – in those areas under the control of the left-wing SDF.

Indeed, as will be seen in the following section – the Syrian opposition became more hated for the teenage anti-imperialist even when it clashed with the US, and even when the opposition explicitly claimed that the US was supporting Assad. Perhaps unwilling to be seen as sympathetic to ISIS by organising protests against Western airstrikes, the teenage anti- imperialist settled for the compromise of continuing to bully the Syrian opposition. Such a focus continued even after the (much-misunderstood and net-restricting) CIA program of coordinating the supply of regional arms to the rebels was ended by Donald Trump in early 2017, and there was a severe underreporting in the teenage anti-imperialist’s media of the humanitarian realities in areas under the bombardment of of the US-led Coalition, most reports of which came from pro- opposition networks in addition to human rights groups and conflict monitors.

Hold on, did they just support… their imperialist parents?

Beyond failing to adequately cover the realities of areas under US-led bombardment or protest against such bombardment, the manifestation of the teenage anti-imperialist’s often- surreal contradictions meant that on occasion, they actually ended up mobilising against rebel operations which aimed to expel US forces from the region. This took place for instance in protests organised in defence of the SDF when it came under attack by the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA). US Special Forces were in fact embedded with the SDF, and came under attack by the FSA prior to the major offensive. One stated target of the Turkish-backed FSA offensive was for the evacuation of the city of Manbij from both the SDFand US Special Forces. Indeed, from a narrow so-called “anti- imperialist” view, it ironically remains the case that to this day, the only withdrawal of US Special Forces in Syria has been as a result of a Turkish and rebel military operation – namely the 2019 ‘Operation Peace Spring’, which was in fact opposed by Western anti-war groups. Meanwhile, US Special Forces continue to cohabit the Syrian regime in the province of Hasakeh, with few if any attacks launched on US forces.

It should be again reemphasised at this juncture that the point of this is not to claim that one side is ‘good’ or otherwise – this author hascondemned the Turkish/FSA offensive and the extensive human rights abusesthat have followed in Afrin, for instance. Nor is it to deny that the Syrian opposition made crucial mistakes in handling the Kurdish cause, which was poignant in such decisions as refusing to change the name of the new state from Syrian Arab Republic to Syrian Republic. Rather, it is to state that using purely the supposed metric of “opposing Western intervention”, groups such as the Stop the War Coalition have ended up in fact de facto siding with US Special Forces remaining in the region to protect them against a Turkish and rebel offensive. The reasons here, of course, have much to do with the general identity politics of the teenage anti-imperialist: as leftists, the Kurdish-led SDF enjoyed exceptions to the teenage anti-imperialist’s supposed “non-intervention” rules (indeed, this author has attended events where Syrian opposition speakers who have expressed opposition to Western intervention, had their invitation to speak at a anti-war party branch later rescinded on instruction from the organisation’s central leadership. At the same event, a Kurdish supporter of the SDF was allowed to speak).

Indeed, there are even those who are wary of these contradictions and yet who prioritise the War on Terror over opposition to ‘Western imperialism’. Readers may be surprised to hear that one such example was none other than the former stalwart of the anti-War on Terror movement during the Bush era, the former ally of the Muslim community in Britain against its narratives, the former resolute defender and supporter of the Iraqi resistance to the US occupation, and the former condemner of the narratives of the Hitchens’ and the Dershowitzs’ of that resistance being purely “extremist” as racist and Islamophobic – none other than former UK MP George Galloway. In 2015, Galloway declared his support of Western airstrikes in Iraq, and advocated for the UK to launch airstrikes in support of the Assad regime. In other words, Galloway advocated for ‘Western imperialism’ to offer support to the Assad regime, which Galloway supports due to its resistance to Western imperialism. As could perhaps be expected with the underlying racialist Islamophobia that categorised much of the far-right—far-left convergence on Syria, Galloway has since increasingly and overtly embraced right-wing figures and rhetoric – including sharing platforms with (and allegedly hugging) Steve Bannon,hosting Nigel Farage on his television show and declaring support for his “Brexit Party”, and most recently,describing a Muslim Scottish MP as “not a Celt like me”.

Ultimately, as with the establishment parent, the teenage anti-imperialist is orientalist – just in an upside down sense. This is precisely why the teenage anti-imperialist is terrified of debating a native voice. Because it is that native voice behind which his own interests masquerade and take justification. What if it contradicts their own? What if the native voice says “well, your parent is not the main issue I am facing in this particular case”? Or what if the native voice says “you have no idea what your government’s policy actually is”? Or what if it says both? And this is precisely the point that has not been made enough by those in solidarity with the Arab Spring and genuine anti-imperialists: the teenage anti-imperialist is not an anti-imperialist – not in opposing or even understanding what imperialism constitutes, nor even in genuinely opposing its Western variant.

Anecdotes: When the angry Arab meets the Western teenage anti- imperialist

When the teenage anti-imperialist reaches a position of relative visibility and influence, they often come under criticism. The teenage anti-imperialist does not, however, always adopt one form in response. Some are unabashed of their affiliation with the West’s perceived adversaries, others are not. In the latter, take the aforementioned UK Stop the War Coalition, perhaps a more “mature” form of the teenage anti- imperialist. The group has always said that it does not support the Assad regime, Iran, or Russia. And indeed, from long experience attending the group’s events, it is clear that there are differences amongst the organisation’s leadership (and of course, the general membership) on the nature of their affiliations and held narratives on the conflict. But there is absolutely no doubt that such a group has promoted narratives that lean heavily towards the Syrian regime and Iran. Its website was (and is) full of them. Its talks were full of them. The conflict was an attempt by Western-backed Sunni jihadists to enforce “regime change” in Syria to undermine Iran. (Incidentally, what exactly does opposition to “regime change” in a proclaimed revolutionary war entail? Is it not by definition “regime survival”?). The talks, of which this writer attended many, were a consistent, one-sided attack on the Syrian opposition – even during periods when the Syrian opposition actually claimed that the US position was one of regime-preservation (in other words, ironically the same position advocated by groups such as Stop the War).

Take the example of a Syrian from the northern city of Manbij, who stood up to speak at a at a Q&A at a Stop the War conference. The activist in question led a pro-opposition organisation in London, which was opposed to both Western and Russian intervention – even emailing his Member of Parliament, a certain Jeremy Corbyn, to ask him to relay his opposition to Western airstrikes in parliament. Corbyn would indeed do so, directly referencing the activist’s concerns in parliament and in the very same statement declare that the activists’s relatives and friends in the FSA were not moderate. At the conference, the activist asked the panel – which would include Corbyn’s future Director of Communications Seamus Milne, as well as the convenor of Stop the War Coalition, Lindsey German – why the group failed to cover incidents of the US and Syrian airforces bombing the same cities and towns of northern Syria in tandem – a mockery of those US policymakers who claimed that there was no coordination between the two sides, in contrast to the regime’s own admissions and brags. “You know what’s going on now in Manbij city?” he asked. “Assad’s bombing us in the daytime, and the Coalition – the Americans – are bombing us in the night-time. There is cooperation between Assad and the West”. Such claims were not singular – they were at the time repeatedly reported by Syrians on the ground areas outside the control of the Syrian government.

This writer was also present at the event, and had his own intervention: the Stop the War leadership were not actually covering any US airstrikes on anti-ISIS mainstream rebels (that is, even excluding groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra) that were taking place, because such events were a contradiction “inconvenient to their narrative” (i.e. of what the leadership had always said was a US-obsessed “regime change” plot). I added that the correct and nuanced analysis, that the US was not interested in regime change and in fact, wanted the regime to survive – “whether with Assad personally at the top or not” (at this point German scoffed: “because it doesn’t”) – was not bombastic enough for their liking despite being the correct analysis.

Responding to the Syrian activist, German declared: “I simply do not agree that the US is supporting Assad in any way. I just don’t see it, there is nothing in their [US] actions that shows that they are in any way supporting the Assad regime… whether you like it or not that is the truth”. “Nothing” in their actions. Not even, it appeared, the quite straightforward observation of two airforces simultaneously bombing different enemies of the regime. What was the pertinent evidence by which German so easily swatted the testimony of this Syrian – whose city was being bombed and whose neighbours were reporting the same thing? It of course, started and ended, with the Western parent: a ‘recent interview’ she had watched in which a “US official was blaming Assad for everything”.

Such anecdotes of clashes between Arab Spring activists and Western teenage anti-imperialists also extended to other Arab Spring arenas. At an event hosted by the UK ‘Stop the War Coalition’ circa 2015, a Houthi supporter who was given a platform by the Stop the War organisers would proclaim that the Houthi takeover that had taken place in coordination with Saleh loyalists within the Yemeni military was a ‘revolution’ – prompting this author, no supporter of the Saudi bombing (not because it opposed the coup, but because of its destructive and indiscriminate nature) – to respond “what kind of revolutionaries ally with the man the revolution overthrew”. After the event, and after confronting the speaker in question, he responded with the following words that I remember to this day: “Ali Abdullah Saleh is a man and a hundred men”. In other words, the Stop the War Coalition had hosted an avid admirer of a US “puppet”, in every sense of the word. Interestingly, another Stop the War-organised event was crashed and shut down by pro-Arab Spring Yemeni supporters, who called the organisers supporters of the Houthi-Saleh coup.

The notion that the group has only“ opposed Western intervention” is, of course, nonsense – it was possible to oppose Western intervention without recycling narratives heavily laden with dangerous Islamophobic implications regarding millions of Syrians who opposed the Assad regime (a congruence between the far-right and far-left that has been covered extensively elsewhere). It was possible to stay truly neutral on the civil war, if that was the wish of the organisation, and oppose Western intervention in the conflict. But what would they fill their websites and talks with and create outrage amongst the crowd of foreign policy hobbyists?

Don’t take to heart the comforting denials by such groups that “we do not support any side in these conflicts”. I was personally witness to the platform given to the Houthi-Saleh supporters, applauded by the entire audience of teenage anti- imperialists. This author personally had police with machine guns summoned to talk to him (very cordially though, to be fair) for being a bit rowdy at a Stop the War event, after only one Syrian speaker out of a dozen was allowed to speak despite promises that others would be heard (Western members in the audience were afforded the rest of the promised time). Unbeknownst to the author, a BBC journalist in the crowd caught the whole exchange – including my response to a steward who said that they would call the police. Subsequently, the Stop the War Coalition released a statement describing the claim of police being called (my claim, not the BBC’s – an organisation that has also produced some awful pieces on Syria as on Iraq before it) as a BBC invention.

But this is where it got very interesting: perhaps wary that there was an entire audience that was witness to the arrival of police at the event, the teenage anti-imperialist who wrote the response carefully specified that “the constabulary” was never called. Indeed. It wasn’t the constabulary, it was parliamentary security – who, unlike the constabulary as it happens, happen to be armed with machine guns. It was that day that I realised that the problem with the teenage anti- imperialist was not limited solely to analytical superficiality, exhibitionism, and self-centeredness – it included outright dishonesty to protect what had become a brand.

To make this even more of a scandal (one undoubtedly long- since covered up by the group’s leadership), one of the speakers on that event’s platform, Conservative MP Crispin Blunt, invited by the “anti-war organisers” – would vote for UK airstrikes in Syria a month later. Indeed, even at the ‘anti-war’ event in question, Blunt made the case that there should be UK airstrikes in Syria; his original reservation was not in fact, an anti-war one at all: rather, he believed that the West should include Assad in the plan against ISIS, and he was not convinced that there was enough of a ‘moderate’ opposition that should be relied on for the effort. In other words, to put it in the sort of bombastic terms perhaps more familiar to the teenage anti-imperialist: the Stop the War Coalition invited a UK parliamentarian who would vote to bomb the country of the same people they refused to allow to speak at that very event. Again, this was another example where the Stop the War actually accepted a ‘pro-war’ speaker as long as he condemned not the principle of Western intervention, but simply the Syrian opposition. And while the Syrian regime actually repeatedly welcomed the airstrikes itself, the Stop the War Coalition warned that it was a backdoor attempt at ‘regime change’ – in other words, being more defensive, not to mention proven wildly incorrect, of the regime than the regime itself. The regime of course understood well that the West had adopted a War on Terror that would leave him in place (it had actually solicited such an intervention before it took place), and boasted of intelligence coordination with Western governments that criticised him in public.

One man’s terrorist (circa 2011) is another man’s freedom fighter (circa 2010) – discarding former friends

The Stop the War Coalition’s position on the Syrian conflict is estimated to have cost it the support of large numbers of British Muslim activists who had previously been active alongside the Coalition during the Iraq war. Former Guantanamo prisoner and Stop the War ally, Moazzam Begg*, is perhaps the most prominent example. “In my case, I think that I’ve seen evidently that not only have they [Stop the War Coalition] stopped asking me to speak at more and more events, I have found myself naturally not wanting to go to such events and speak more and more”, Begg said in an interview conducted in 2019. He proceeded to cite examples of prominent figures from within the Muslim community who in the past had “fought alongside the left on their platforms” but had come to feel squeezed by a new right-left convergence: “Of course, people have felt that you naturally can’t turn towards the right because they hate us anyway, and the left who are historically our allies on this use the same language to define us” he declared.

Begg was ultimately unimpressed by the Stop the War Coalition’s record on Syria. “When I’ve seen the [Stop the War Coalition] signs of ‘don’t bomb Syria’, it’s always been about don’t bomb the Syrian government. But let’s talk about the places that are being bombed – not even by the Russians, because they [Stop the War Coalition] say that they could only talk about what our government is doing. America has not only bombed ISIS but in the early days they bombed Nusra, Ahrar al- Sham, they even hit the Free Syrian Army. There were no protests against that either, and clearly that shows that there is a great double-speak. When Syria has been bombed in non-regime areas there have been no protests – not when it’s done by the British or the Americans or the Russians.”

Indeed, one traditional feature offered by anti-war and leftist movements in the aftermath of extremist attacks in the West has been to cite Western foreign policy towards Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine as a motivating factor. This however was notably absent in the case of Syria; here, various examples of radicalised Muslims who carried out atrocities cited motivations that the West had in fact ignored Assad, before deciding to selectively intervene to turn an Arab Spring conflict into a renewed War on Terror. Such examples included testimonies by Amedy Coulibali, one of the perpetrators of the 2015 France Kosher Supermarket killings (“I think of those who had to put up with Bashar al-Assad in Syria. He tortured people. Nobody did anything for years. Then bombers, coalition of 50,000 countries and all that”); Basam Ayachi, a mosque Imam and the father of one of the 2016 Paris attackers (who attributed the travelling of Belgian Muslims to Syria to a “lack of action against the Assad regime on the one hand, and domestic factors on the other”), and Amer Deghayes, one of the remaining British fighters fighting for al-Nusra in Syria. Indeed, it is interesting to note that far fewer British Muslims joined the fight against the US-led occupation in Iraq than was the case in the conflict in Syria. This poses an interesting question as to what extent this could be attributed to the lack of the same active anti-war mobilisation that served as outlet which absorbed the energies of British Muslim youths during the Iraq war, being available in the Syrian context. Indeed, the degree to which Muslims who closely followed the events of Syria were mobilised by the daily televised nature of the Syrian regime’s war is one that has been largely marginalised in anti-war and leftist analyses on the phenomenon. Instead, and in a complete reversal of the ‘contextual’ and grievance-based explanations offered for extremist attacks that previously predominated, groups such as Stop the War Coalition in fact attributed atrocities such as the 2015 Paris attacks to the West supporting ‘jihadists’ in Syria.

The anti-war movement failed to oppose the collective Wars on Terror that were fought out on Syrian territory. The failure to recognise the overlaps between those Wars on Terror meant that such watersheds as the Russian destruction of Aleppo and the US-led destruction of Raqqa alike failed to provoke much protest or anti-war mobilisations – with a perception that there had overall been a ‘mission accomplished’ so long as the Syrian regime was not targeted for overthrow.

Shrodinger’s “Jihadists”

For the teenage anti-imperialist, the “rebel jihadists” are a mythical creature. Descendent from the sky, moved through time from “when we backed the mujahedin against the Soviets” some thirty years ago. They have nothing to do with the protests that broke out in 2011 – even though they happen to be concentrated in the same areas (putting aside the years of reports by conflict monitors that find that most of these fighters were former civilians and protesters – ‘experts’ carry little currency in this field). They are Shrodinger’s “moderate rebel jihadists”: so heavily backed by the West, yet somehow simultaneously a fiction losing out to better-funded extremists. So weak and negligible in scale – yet somehow still able to control some third of an entire country’s territory (those green areas you used to see on the Syria war maps) – even after ISIS chipped away at the other half, killing thousands of the “so-called moderates” in the process. So divided, localised, and fragmented in nature, yet with such an indisputable and obvious extremist uniformity. After all, who’s going to take the time to examine which rebel coalition controls such and such town, village, or city? Leave that to the experts (who we’ll then ignore). No, the teenage anti- imperialist can hardly name a handful of the factions – from the ‘hundreds of extremist ones’ – that exist in Syria.

No, the teenage anti-imperialist cares little for the many years of reporting of conflict monitors that find that most villages, towns, and cities in those ‘green’ areas are indeed controlled by factions that put themselves under the ‘FSA’ umbrella (such claims were even on occasion unwittingly confirmed by the likes of Russia). FSA? “Don’t make us laugh. They didn’t exist. Those green areas were controlled by no- one. Or they were controlled by Nusra – those so-called “conflict monitors” never talk about Nusra.” The teenage anti- imperialist then proceeds to cite the latest report from a conflict monitor on how Nusra is controlling Idlib. Besides, even if the ‘FSA’ did exist in the other provinces, that was only to get the Western funding they needed to not have the resources to launch a jihad against the Western governments who are actually supporting them. To the teenage anti- imperialist, this is somehow logically coherent. In conclusion, the ‘FSA’ does not exist. Or alternatively, the ‘FSA’ is entirely made up of extremists. Ironically, the latter analysis happened to be shared both by Tony Blair’s think tank and none other than Jeremy Corbyn.

The agency of ‘jihadists’ and insurgents changes depending on the teenage anti-imperialist’s goals. When fighting the tyrannical establishment parent, the US occupation forces in Iraq for instance, the ‘jihadists’ and insurgents were valiantly resisting foreign domination. “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”, they reminded you. The teenage anti-imperialist raged when a Bush administration official claimed that the insurgents were invariably ‘Al- Qaeda’ – of course a false claim then in Iraq as later in Syria. Yet it was similarly undoubtedly the case that the predecessor of ISIS – founded by Abu Mus’ab Al-Zarqawi, and known then as Al-Qaeda in Iraq and later Islamic State of Iraq – did play a considerable role in the insurgency against the US. When fighting in Syria however, the ‘jihadists’ and insurgents suddenly morphed into agency-less, context-less monsters. Yet was there actually a substantive change in how the imperialist parent approached the likes of Al-Qaeda and ISIS during this transition to justify this?

The reality of the next few years reveal rather the opposite: the anti-ISIS and anti-Al Qaeda campaign of the post-Arab Spring period was, from the Western point of view, far more efficiently conducted when considering the sheer asymmetry between ISIS fighters killed and Western soldiers killed. It also resulted in more than 13,000 civilians killed in Iraq and Syria, overwhelmingly in areas which witnessed Arab Spring protests – not heartlands of Syrian government support, as the teenage anti-imperialist would deceptively have you believe. How many Arab Spring protesters were killed in US airstrikes in these regions? Indeed, this is a question that is never asked.

*The wider views held by interviewees quoted in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the writer or New Politics.

Who’s Buried in the Graveyard of Empires? U.S. President Joe Biden invoked Afghanistan’s historical nickname as “graveyard of empires” in order to justify his decision to speed up the withdrawal of American troops from this poor country. He was thus asserting that attempts at securing control over Afghanistan are doomed to fail, while laying the blame on the Afghan government that had been established by the U.S. occupation itself. The tragic pictures of the Afghan government’s collapse along with its state and the panic that got hold of a big fraction of Afghan society, especially in urban areas and above all in the capital Kabul, led to reactions split between two opposite poles: while one pole blamed Biden for having misjudged the situation and having failed to do what should have been done to make sure that the Afghan pro-Western government carries on, the other pole rejoiced and celebrated the magnitude of the defeat suffered by U.S. designs, comparing what took place in Kabul these last days to what happened in Saigon, South Vietnam’s capital, when it was taken over by Communist forces in 1975, two years after the U.S. troops’ withdrawal. It is difficult to decide which of these two reactions is more short-sighted; they both ignore basic facts.

Let us first consider the reproaches made to Biden for his misjudgment (in other words, his intelligence services’ misjudgment) of the Afghan government’s capacity to withstand the Taliban’s offensive. It is truly extraordinary that anyone could believe that the failure of twenty years of occupation in building the foundations of a state with enough credibility and popular support to stand up without being protected by foreign troops, that that failure could have been made up for by prolonging the presence of NATO troops by a few months! The claim is all the more extraordinary in that none of the critics is capable of explaining what the U.S. occupation could have done during a few more months that it hadn’t done for two decades. In reality, the Afghan government’s fate is but the most recent in a long list of cases of puppet entities created by a foreign occupation that collapse when that occupation ends. Ashraf Ghani was preceded on this same path by Mohammad Najibullah, who had been appointed as president of Afghanistan by the USSR’s rulers in replacement of Babrak Karmal whom they had installed in power when their troops invaded the country, in the same way as Ghani was appointed by Washington in replacement of Hamid Karzai, whom U.S. forces installed in power when they invaded the country. This refers us to the obvious fact that the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks was not a “liberation” of that country, no more than the American occupation of Iraq was less than two years later. It was a seizure of the country for reasons pertaining to U.S. imperial strategy in Central Asia and toward Russia and China, coated in the pretext of liberating the Afghans, the women in particular, from the Taliban’s obscurantist yoke, that same yoke that Washington and its regional allies had played a key role in helping to get hold of the country.

Those who hail the Taliban from a standpoint claiming to be on the left or “anti-imperialist” should be reminded that only four governments recognized diplomatically the Taliban’s regime after it took control of Afghanistan in 1996, and those were not Cuba or Vietnam or China or even Iran, but Pakistan, Turkmenistan, the Saudi kingdom and the United Arab Emirates! Add to this that it is well known that behind the Taliban stood, and continue to stand, Pakistan’s military intelligence, which adds to the anxiety of neighboring countries, starting with Iran.

The truth is that Washington didn’t entertain many illusions about Afghanistan’s fate, but knew from the USSR’s defeat in that country and from its own Vietnamese experience that controlling Afghanistan is impossible for several reasons, including the country’s geography and the strength of age-old tribal and ethnic bonds that still prevail there. That’s why Washington’s strategy in Afghanistan was from the beginning qualitatively different from its strategy in Iraq: whereas it aimed at exerting full control over Iraq and deployed there forces adequate for that purpose (in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s belief, despite warnings from the U.S. high brass that his estimate of the adequate number of troops was highly optimistic), Washington only deployed a limited number of troops in Afghanistan, while relying upon the Afghan anti- Taliban Northern Alliance to take control of the country and putting pressure on its NATO allies to send in troops so that the U.S. didn’t need to deploy more.

The strategic goals of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, or more accurately of parts of Afghan territory, consisted first of all in building American air bases in this country of highly-prized strategic location and in the extension of U.S. influence to Central Asian republics that were previously part of the USSR. With time, Washington came to the conclusion that the cost of its continued presence in Afghanistan was no longer commensurate with these strategic benefits that had lessened over time, especially that the Taliban’s offensive and their ability to control increasingly vast areas of the country indicated that Afghanistan was on its way to confront Washington with a Vietnam-like dilemma between endless escalation and withdrawal.

This said, the closest situation to what is occurring in Afghanistan isn’t Vietnam in fact: the South Vietnamese forces were much stronger than the Afghan government’s forces, and they managed to stand up for two years against Communist forces that the U.S. itself had been incapable to defeat and which enjoyed much larger international and regional support than the Taliban ever had. The closest situation to what has occurred in Afghanistan is what happened to the troops of the Iraqi army that Washington had built up and that collapsed disgracefully in front of the offensive launched by the so- called Islamic State (IS) in the summer of 2014 in the same way that the forces of the Kabul government collapsed in front of the Taliban’s offensive. Needless to say, the resemblance between IS and the Taliban is only matched by the huge difference between the two jihadist groups, on the one hand, and the Vietnamese Communist forces on the other.

This article is translated from the original Arabic published in the issue of Al-Quds al-Arabi dated August 18, 2021.

RAWA Responds to the Taliban Takeover

Afghan Women’s Mission has been in touch with RAWA to address their needs at this urgent time. In this brief Q&A with AWM Co-Director Sonali Kolhatkar, RAWA explains the unfolding situation on the ground as they see it. Click HERE to donate to RAWA now.

Sonali Kolhatkar: For years RAWA spoke out against the U.S. occupation and now that it has ended, the Taliban are back. Could President Biden have withdrawn U.S. forces in a manner that would have left Afghanistan in a safer situation than currently? Could he have done more to ensure the Taliban were not so quickly able to take over? RAWA: In the past 20 years, one of our demands was an end to the US/NATO occupation and even better if they take their Islamic fundamentalists and technocrats with them and let our people decide their own fate. This occupation only resulted in bloodshed, destruction and chaos. They turned our country into the most corrupt, insecure, drug-mafia and dangerous place especially for women.

From the very beginning we could predict such an outcome. On the first days of the US occupation of Afghanistan, RAWA declared on October 11, 2001:

“The continuation of US attacks and the increase in the number of innocent civilian victims not only gives an excuse to the Taliban, but also will cause the empowerment of the fundamentalist forces in the region and even in the world.”

The main reason we were against this occupation was their backing of terrorism under the nice banner of “war on terror”. From the very first days when the Northern Alliance looters and killers were installed back into power in 2002 to the last so-called peace talks, deals and agreements in Doha and release of 5000 terrorists from prisons in 2020/21, it was very obvious that even the withdrawal won’t have a good end.

The Pentagon proves that none of the theory invasion or meddling ended up in safe condition. All imperialist powers invade countries for their own strategic, political and financial interests but through lies and the powerful corporate media try to hide their real motive and agenda.

It is a joke to say values like “women’s rights”, “democracy”, “nation-building” etc. were part of the US/NATO aims in Afghanistan! US was in Afghanistan to turn region into instability and terrorism to encircling the rival powers especially China and Russia and undermining their economies via regional wars. But of course the US government did not want such a disastrous, disgraceful and embarrassing exit that left behind such a commotion that they were forced to send troops again in 48 hours to control the airport and safely evacuate its diplomats and staff.

We believe the US left Afghanistan out of its own weaknesses not defeated by its creatures (Taliban). There are two significant reasons for this withdrawal.

The main reason is the multifold internal crisis in the US. The signs of the US system decline was seen in the weak response to Covid-19 pandemic, attack on Capitol Hill and the great protests of the US public in the past few years. The policy-makers were forced to withdraw troops to focus on internal burning issues.

The second reason is that the Afghan war was an exceptionally expensive war whose cost has gone into trillions, all taken from taxpayer money. This put such a heavy dent on the US financially that it had to leave Afghanistan.

The war-mongering policies prove that their aim was never to make Afghanistan safer, let alone now when they are leaving. Furthermore, they also knew that the withdrawal would be chaotic yet they still went ahead and did it. Now Afghanistan is in the limelight again due to the Taliban being in power but this has been the situation for the past 20 years and everyday hundreds of our people were killed and our country destroyed, it just was rarely reported in the media.

Sonali Kolhatkar: The Taliban leadership are saying they will respect women’s rights as long as it complies with Islamic law. Some Western media are painting this in a positive light. Didn’t the Taliban say the same thing 20 years ago? Do you think there is any change in their attitude toward human rights and women’s rights?

RAWA: The corporate media is only trying to put salt on our devastated people’s wounds; they should be ashamed of themselves the way they try to sugarcoat brutal Taliban. The Taliban spokesperson declared that there is no difference between their ideology of 1996 and today. And what they say about women’s rights is the exact phrases used during their previous dark rule: implementing Sharia law.

These days the Taliban have declared an amnesty in all parts of Afghanistan and their slogan is ‘what the joy of amnesty can bring, revenge cannot’. But in reality they are killing people every day. Just yesterday a boy was shot dead in Nangarhar only for carrying the tricolored Afghan national flag instead of the white flag of Taliban. They executed four former army officials in Kandahar, arrested a young Afghan poet Mehran Popal in Herat province for writing anti-Taliban posts on Facebook and his whereabouts is unknown to his family. These are just a few examples of their violent actions despite the “nice” and polished words of their spokespersons.

But we believe their claims may be one of the dramas being played by the Taliban and they are just trying to buy more time till they can organize themselves. Things happened so fast and they are trying to build-up their government structure, create their intelligence and make the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, which is responsible for controlling the little details of people’s daily lives like the length of the beard, the dress code and having a Mahram (male companion, only father, brother or husband) for a woman. Taliban claim that we are not against women’s rights but then it should be within the framework Islamic/Sharia laws.

Islamic/Sharia law is vague and construed in different ways by Islamic regimes to benefit their own political agendas and rules. Furthermore, the Taliban would also like the West to acknowledge them and take them seriously, and all these claims are part of painting a whitewashed image for themselves. Maybe after a few months they would say that we will hold elections since we believe in justice and democracy! These pretences will never change their true nature, and will still be Islamic fundamentalists: misogynist, inhuman, barbaric, reactionary, anti-democracy and anti-progressive. In a word, the Taliban mentality has not changed and will never change!

Sonali Kolhatkar: Why did the Afghan National Army and the U.S. backed Afghan government fall apart so quickly?

RAWA: Some major reasons out of many are:

1) Everything was done according to a deal to handover Afghanistan to Taliban. The US govt. negotiating with Pakistan and other regional players had agreement to form a govt. mainly composed of Taliban. So the soldiers were not ready to be killed in a war that they knew there was no benefit of the Afghan people in it because finally it is set behind closed doors to bring Taliban to power. Zalmay Khalilzad is highly hated among Afghan people due to his treacherous role in bringing the Taliban back to power.

2) Most Afghans understand well that the war going on in Afghanistan is not the war of Afghans and for the benefit of the country, but waged by foreign powers for their own strategic interests and Afghans are just fuels of the war. Majority of the young people are joining the forces because of severe poverty and unemployment so they have no commitment and morals to fight. It is worth mentioning that the United States and the West have tried for 20 years to keep Afghanistan a consumer country and have hindered the growth of industry. This situation created a wave of unemployment and poverty, paving the way for the recruitments of the puppet government, the Taliban and growth of opium production.

3) Afghan forces were not so weak to defeat in the course of a week, but they were receiving orders from the presidential palace not to fight back Taliban and should surrender. Most provinces were peacefully handed over to the Taliban.

4) The puppet regime of Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani were calling Taliban “dissatisfied brothers” for years, and released many of their most ruthless commanders and leaders from prisons. Asking Afghan soldiers to fight a force that is not called “enemy” but “brother”, emboldened the Taliban and hit the morale of the Afghan armed forces.

5) The armed forces were unprecedentedly plagued by corruption. The large number of generals (mostly former brutal warlords of the Northern Alliance) sitting in Kabul grabbed millions of $, they cut even from food and salary of soldiers fighting in the frontlines. “Ghost soldiers” was a phenomenon exposed by SIGAR. High-ranking officials were busy filling their own pockets; they channelled salary and ration of tens of thousands of none-existing soldiers into their own bank accounts.

6) Whenever forces were besieged by Taliban in the hard fight, their call for help was ignored by Kabul. In numerous cases tens of soldiers were massacred by Taliban when they were deserted without ammunition and food for weeks. Therefore the rate of casualties among armed forces was very high. In the World Economic Forum (Davos 2019), Ashraf Ghani confessed that since 2014 over 45,000 Afghan security personnel have been killed, while in the same period only 72 personnel of US/NATO were killed.

7) Overall in society growing corruption, injustice, unemployment, insecurity, uncertainty, fraud, vast poverty, drug and smuggling, etc. provided a ground for reemergence of Taliban.

Sonali Kolhatkar: What is the best way for Americans to help RAWA and Afghan people and women right now?

RAWA: We feel very lucky and happy to have the freedom-loving people of the US with us during all these years. We need the Americans to raise their voice and protest against their government’s war-mongering policies and support the strengthening of the people’s struggle in Afghanistan against these barbarians.

It is human nature to resist and the history bears witness. We have the glorious examples of US struggle “Occupy Wall Street” and “Black Lives Matter” movements. We have seen that no amount of oppression, tyranny and violence can stop resistance. Women will not be shackled anymore! Just the next morning after the Taliban entered the capital, a group of our young brave women painted graffiti on the walls of Kabul with the slogan: Down with Taliban! Our women are now politically conscious and no longer want to live under the Burqa, something they easily did 20 years ago. We will continue our struggles while finding smart ways to stay safe.

We think the inhuman US military empire is not only the enemy of the Afghan people but the biggest threat to world peace and instability. Now that the system is on the verge of decline, it is the duty of all peace-loving, progressive, leftist and justice-loving individuals and groups to intensify their fight against the brutal war-mongers in the White House, the Pentagon and the Capitol Hill. Replacing the rotten system with a just and humane one will not only liberate millions of poor and oppressed American people but will have a lasting effect on every corner of the world.

Now our fear is that the world may forget Afghanistan and Afghan women like under the Taliban bloody rule in late 90s. Therefore, the US progressive people and institutions should not forget Afghan women.

We will raise our voice louder and continue our resistance and fight for secular democracy and women’s rights!

Reposted from RAWA. On Remembering Stanley Aronowitz

[Stanley Aronowitz, who died at age 88 in mid August, was to the many on the left who knew and deeply respected him Gramsci’s quintessential organic intellectual. Articulate in prose and breathtaking as a speaker, he was an experienced trade union organizer, prolific author on working-class life, and an academic of the first rank who was himself, as a tenured sociologist at the City University of New York Graduate School, well aware of the limitations incurred by the odious and arbitrary divisions of the social sciences as well as the limitations of contract unionism and its eliding of the capacity for workers to control their own unions, let alone their workplaces.

Unlike many radicals who trace their thinking back from traditional left organizations, Stanley was a bit of an outlier, identifying most closely with the Council Communist tradition, a variant blend of syndicalism and political organization that put its emphasis on socialism from below and the capacity of working people to emancipate themselves and make their own history.

A founding editor of the 1960s decade’s seminal journal Studies on the Left, a key organizer of union participation in the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington, and an erstwhile editor of this journal as well as a decades’ long sponsor of our work, Stanley was always available to emerging radicals as a mentor, speaker at teach-ins, and warm friend and mentor. Laudatory obituaries have already appeared inJacobin and Truthout. More will doubtlessly appear. He will be much missed.

Below is a remembrance of Aronowitz by Steve Early, himself a leading contemporary labor writer and one deeply appreciative of the things Aronowitz brought not only to the text but to the class struggle and to emerging militant social and culture insurgencies.

— Michael Hirsch, New Politics editorial board member]

Brother Stanley Aronowitz was always ahead of the curve, with his criticism of the shortcomings of old labor and his envisioning of “a new workers movement” that might replace it. During the 1960s, campus radicals turned to him, as a former factory worker and staff member of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers, for advice about the student left’s much debated and then still pending “turn toward the working class.” Late in life, while well embedded in academia, he remained a teacher union activist and successful reform caucus member.

In a series of incisive books like False Promises, Working- Class Hero, and From the Ashes of the Old, Stanley always took “slumbering mainstream unions” to task for their lack of militancy, diversity, internal democracy, and progressive politics. Less than a decade ago, in The Death and Life of American Labor: Toward a New Workers’ Movement (New York: Verso 2014), he was still on target about what was wrong and needed to be changed. “Despite brave words from AFL-CIO headquarters,” he wrote, “unions rely on the mainstream political power structure rather than their own resources for gains. They have poured hundreds of millions into electing Democrats to national and state offices and relegated the grassroots organization of workers to the margins.”

Aronowitz was particularly astute about the unhealthy synergy between membership expectations and public-sector-union functioning, as the latter have evolved since the rank-and- file upsurge that won collective-bargaining rights for teachers and other civil servants in the 1960s and ’70s. Over time, Aronowitz observed, too many public employees came to “view their unions as service providers, rather than as instruments of mobilization.” As Aronowitz noted, “The unions may fight individual grievances and negotiate decent contracts, but to call upon their members to conduct collective political fights — including direct actions that might disturb the comfortable relationship that the leadership enjoys with the employer — is well beyond the perspective, and therefore, the capacity, of the union. In short, the member is now generally a client of the union rather than its owner.”

As an alternative approach, in Death and Life of American Labor, Aronowitz offered his own blueprint for how a “militant minority within unions and the larger workers movement” could make American labor “more combative in challenging capital and the repressive state” over issues like “the super-exploitation of the working poor.” He applauded the recent emergence of worker formations in the retail and fast-food industries that functioned with voluntary membership, no legal certification, and a greater reliance on what he called “innovative direct action,” including short duration protest strikes.

This type of organizing and strike activity reflects, in part, the continuing erosion of an 86-year-old industrial relations system based on “exclusive representation,” “contract unionism,” and accompanying no strike clauses. In the last decade, Stanley wrote, “the era of labor-management cooperation that was initiated by the New Deal and supported by succeeding legislation… has come to an end.” He argued that continued union reliance on a last-century institutional framework, now under attack by private corporations and right- wing politicians alike, is not helping “workers meet the challenges created by globalization and its significantly aggravated anti-union political and social environment.” Stanley was one of the few left labor intellectuals who also took note of the fact that the Wagner Act regime (and related AFL-CIO rules) create nearly insurmountable legal obstacles to workers switching unions or building independent ones. As a result, many union members have had more trouble holding their national and local organizations accountable to the rank-and- file than trade unionists in other countries, where switching unions (or labor federations) is much easier and there is more competition among them. Because of their far greater insulation from the threat of membership defection to rival organizations—and reform from within–incumbent union officials in the U.S. have been much freer to embrace labor-management partnering, with results that have never been good, from the auto industry to healthcare.

In the U.S., Aronowitz noted, “any association that chooses to independently organize workers within an established union’s jurisdiction, even workers from a group that the union has effectively abandoned, is going to be seen as a threat. This is not necessarily a bad thing: competition may goad the conventional unions to undertake their own organizing. As we have seen, competitive unionism is often a stimulus to mobilization and ultimate success.”

The greater union pluralism that Stanley hoped would emerge, amid American labor’s continuing shrinkage, has yet to materialize, on a large scale. But there are many new working class heroes, not blinded by 21st century false promises, who still hope to build better organizations from the ashes of the old—who should check out the past writings of a now deceased 88-year old New Yorker who knew what he was talking about, then and now.

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Richmond, California-based Steve Early is most recently the author of Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City (Beacon Press, 2017). For book ordering or speaking event information, visit: http://steveearly.org/.