Campaigning for Democracy And Socialism
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Dumping 'Roe' Is Only the Opener to Much Worse
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The cartoon to the right exposes how 'replacement theory' is sham history and fascist politics. The demographics of North America have always been in a zig-zag flux, with 'the frontier' representing the border contested zone of white dominance. One sector of our upper crust is now using change to incite a fear that their 'white united front' might crumble. The fear is irrational because when people of color rise, we all rise, and when they are held down, we are all held down, even if in varying degrees. Don't be a sucker for Tucker.
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WE ARE INVITING FEEDBACK!
Please send us your letters, comments, queries, complaints, new ideas. Just keep them short and civil. Longer commentaries and be submitted as articles.
DIFFICULTY READING US?
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Organizing Training
for Sunrise 201
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Yoin us for a training in partnership with Empower Project to level up those critical organizing skills you need to retain members of your hub.
This training will be online and will go for 2 hours with a 10 minute break in the middle! Please let us know if anything would make this training more accessible for you.
Time: Wed, May 25
4 – 6pm EDT
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Thirty one songs are presented in a beautiful hard cover bound double CD and digital download containing new performances in a traditional style by numerous contributing artists.
An accompanying 64 page liner notes booklet includes complete lyrics as well as reproductions of historic documents. The liner notes also include essays by the album’s producer Mat Callahan, scholar Robin D.G. Kelley and activist organizer Kali Akuno.
The album is also available via digital download and streaming services.
A companion full-length book, to be published by the University Press of Mississippi, documents the sources of these newly released songs, as well as providing historic context:
A documentary film documents the entire project and is available for screenings.
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'Making Sense of the War in Ukraine' ties together critical pieces of background on the current crisis and raises questions that call for our immediate attention. Guests Alex Gendler, Ramon Mejía, and Jerry Harris touch on the pattern of post-Soviet Russian imperialism; the real strength of the far right in Ukraine and Russia; the links between militarism and the fossil-fuel economy, and how we can build solidarity without militarism. Click picture to view
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Honor Women, Defend Women's healthcare,
Protect Women's Right
to Choose
Monday evening, May 23
9pm ET, 8pm CT, 6pm PT
Sponsored by
CCDS Socialist Education Project
Join us for this
important discussion.
As we see the far right with the rightist justices of the Supreme Court, as they attempt to overturn Roe V Wade.
Make no mistake this is an attack on everyone. By using arguments they directly threaten legal protections for homosexuality, contraception, interracial marriage, and much more.
Register in advance
for this meeting:
Speakers:
Mildred Williamson
Mildred Williamson, PhD, MSW, has spent her career in public service with human rights/social justice as her passion. She has more than 30 years of experience in developing and leading public health safety net programs for vulnerable populations. She recently retired as Executive Director of HIV Services for Cook County Health and continues to serve as Adjunct Assistant Professor the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health (UIC-SPH). She served as HIV/AIDS Section Chief for the Illinois Department of Public Health from 2008-2015 and began her public health career at Cook County (now John H. Stroger) Hospital in 1989 as the first administrator of the Women & Children HIV Program, which today, is part of the Ruth M. Rothstein CORE Center - the largest provider of comprehensive HIV services in the Midwest. Dr. Williamson obtained her Master’s and Doctoral degrees in Social Work at the School of Social Service Administration/University of Chicago.
Heather Booth
Booth is one of the country's leading strategists about progressive issue campaigns and driving issues in elections. She started organizing in the civil rights, anti-Vietnam war and women's movements of the 1960s. She started JANE, an underground abortion service in 1965, before Roe. There is a new HBO documentary about this called The JANES, and there is a new Hollywood film version of the story, Call JANE.
She was the founding Director and is now President of the Midwest Academy, training social change leaders and organizers. She has been involved in and managed political campaigns and was the Training Director of the Democratic National Committee. In 2000, she was the Director of the NAACP National Voter Fund, which helped to increase African American election turnout. She was the lead consultant, directing the founding of the Campaign for Comprehensive Immigration Reform in 2005.
In 2008, she was the director of the Health Care Campaign for the AFL-CIO. In 2009, she directed the campaign passing President Obama’s first budget. In 2010 she was the founding director of Americans for Financial Reform, fighting to regulate the financial industry. She was the national coordinator for the coalition around marriage equality and the 2013 Supreme Court decision. She was strategic advisor to the Alliance for Citizenship (the largest coalition of the immigration reform campaign). She was the field director for the 2017 campaign to stop the tax giveaways to millionaires and billionaires She directed Progressive and Seniors Outreach for the Biden/Harris campaign. She has been a consultant on many other issues and with many other organizations. She is a member of the consulting firm Democracy Partners.
Marilyn Katz
Marilyn Katz is a long-time women's rights advocate going back to the new left of the 1960s. She was part of SDS and the New American Movement. As a communications specialist, she play a major role in the campaigns of Mayor Harold Washington and Senator Carol Mosley Braum Carol Mosely Braun. She was a founder of Chicagoans Against War and Injustice.
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Photo: A march before the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017., Credit: Zach D Roberts/ New York Times
The Long Game of White-Power Activists
Isn’t Just About Violence
It is impossible to separate replacement theory from its violent implications. The mainstreaming of replacement theory, whether through Tucker Carlson’s show or in Elise Stefanik’s campaign ads, will continue to have disastrous consequences.
By Kathleen Belew
New York Times via Portside
May 19, 2022 - It’s not immediately obvious how the “great replacement” theory, often framed as anti-immigrant doctrine meant to preserve predominantly white societies, is connected to the shooting of Black customers and employees at a grocery store in Buffalo last weekend. Those at the store, who lived over 100 miles away from the man accused in the killings, were simply going about their lives (picking up groceries, buying a birthday cake, taking their children for ice cream).
But the explanation for both the choice of targets and the brutality of an attack that killed 10 people can be found in the history of the theory. In the American context, it has in its cross-hairs a host of future targets, among them democracy itself.
The great replacement is the latest incarnation of an old idea: the belief that elites are attempting to destroy the white race by overwhelming it with nonwhite groups and thinning them out with interbreeding until white people no longer exist. This idea is not, at its core, about any single threat, be it immigrants or people of color, but rather about the white race that it purports to protect. It’s important to be cautious and not too credulous when reading the writings of assailants in attacks motived by race, but we should note an important pattern: their obsession with protecting white birthrates.
For decades, white-power activists have worried about their status as a majority. They see a looming demographic crisis and talk about when their community, town or the United States will no longer be majority white. Even when demographic change slows, this fear has not abated.
This belief transforms social issues into direct threats: Immigration is a problem because immigrants will outbreed the white population. Abortion is a problem because white babies will be aborted. L.G.B.T.Q. rights and feminism will take women from the home and decrease the white birthrate. Integration, intermarriage and even the presence of Black people distant from a white community — an issue apparently of keen interest in the Buffalo attack — are seen as a threat to the white birthrate through the threat of miscegenation.
In the United States, it is clear that this is never only about immigration; when gunmen write about “replacers,” they might just as easily mean any person of color, whether they have American roots or not. Replacement theory is about the violent defense of whiteness.
The reason we often think of replacement theory as a specifically anti-immigrant ideology is because of two key writings — “The Great Replacement” by Renaud Camus and “The Camp of the Saints” by Jean Raspail. Both have gained currency in white-power and militant-right circles in the past decade. “The Camp of the Saints,” from 1973, is essentially a dystopian, fictional precursor to “The Great Replacement,” published in 2011 in French, which argues that white Europeans are being replaced in their countries by nonwhite immigrants. That “The Camp of the Saints” was recommended by Stephen Miller, who later became an architect of the Trump administration’s cruelest immigration policies, reveals that replacement theory is known, if not embraced, by some in the Republican Party. Both are built around the fear of nonwhite — including Islamic — immigration into Europe as a major threat of cultural collapse and extinction of whiteness.
White-power extremism reveals that the core of this ideology is not the victims it attacks, but rather the thing it attempts to preserve — and the mechanism that transfigures this ideology into racial violence. It imagines that a conspiracy of elites, usually imagined as Jewish “globalists,” are deliberately working to eradicate both white people and white culture. This is why white nationalism is so often virulently antisemitic, and also why it feeds on a deep distrust of the media, education, science, and other arbiters of expertise.
Replacement theory in America has domestic antecedents much older than Renaud Camus and Jean Raspail. Henry Ford, among other Americans, promoted “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which — through an entirely fictional depiction of a powerful Jewish conspiracy that controlled world events — has influenced racist theories and beliefs from its initial publication in the early 20th century.
Worries about the body politic and threats to the racial composition of the nation inspired eugenics campaigns, anti-immigration activists, and other progressives, including Theodore Roosevelt. These ideas have been braided with environmentalism not only by ecofascists in the recent past, but also by late-19th- and early-20th-century environmentalists who worried about population burdens and wondered how to preserve nature for white people.
When neo-Nazis, Klansmen, militiamen and skinheads came together in the 1980s and 1990s, they worried about the “Zionist Occupational Government” or the “New World Order.” They also clarified that their nation was not the United States, but a transnational body politic of white people that had to be defended from these conspiratorial enemies and from racial threats — defended through violence and race war. That current still runs through the writings of those associated with the Charleston, Christchurch, Oslo, El Paso, Pittsburgh and Buffalo attacks.
It is impossible to separate replacement theory from its violent implications, as decades of terrorism by its adherents show us. The mainstreaming of replacement theory, whether through Tucker Carlson’s show or in Elise Stefanik’s campaign ads, will continue to have disastrous consequences.
The long game of white-power activists isn’t just to terrorize and intimidate nonwhites: As “The Camp of the Saints” shows, these activists fear apocalyptic extinction if they don’t take up arms. The American equivalent, “The Turner Diaries,” imagines what it would be like to establish a white-dominated world through race war and genocide.
Why wouldn’t people immediately condemn such an idea? Thoughts and prayers are never enough after a mass shooting, but even these messages seem sparser than usual. Wendy Rogers, an Arizona state senator and member of the far-right extralegal Oath Keepers militia that was involved in the storming of the Capitol, suggested online that the shooting had been a false flag operation perpetrated by a federal agent.
Clearly this is not a fringe idea anymore. Decades of violence at the hands of extremists tell us that such ideas will lead to further violence. Mainstreaming of the idea means that the window for action is closing.
[Kathleen Belew is the author of “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America” and an incoming associate professor of history at Northwestern University.] ...Read More
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Photo: Law enforcement identified 18-year-old Payton Gendron of Conklin, NY, as the gunman. BigDawg via REUTERS
BLOOD AND SOIL: The Buffalo Shooter
and the Rise of Ecofascist Extremists
The shooter’s manifesto makes clear, that climate denial and ecofascism are two sides of the same right-wing coin.
By Kate Aronoff
The New Republic
May 17, 2022 - Before attending a conference for climate deniers a few years back, I received two pieces of advice from researchers who frequent that circuit: first, that most of what’s said at climate denial events is projection and second, that there’s no sense trying to find coherence in any of it.
What I heard that week will sound familiar to anyone who’s watched Fox News or a Republican attack ad in the last five years: Radical environmentalists treat rising temperatures as a Trojan horse for socialism. Maybe climate change does exist—maybe that’s even a good thing!—but we can’t know for certain either what’s causing it or what to do about it.
Following suit, keynote speaker and California Congressman Tom McClintock said that the left should not be allowed to stake an “uncontested” claim to climate science. “They carry the argument that the earth hangs in the balance,” he told the crowd, “and if the earth truly hangs in the balance, well then no measure is too extreme.”
“For too long,” Buffalo shooter Payton Gendron wrote, echoing McClintock, “we have allowed the left to co-opt the environmentalist movement to serve their own needs.”
On Friday, the 18-year-old white man now charged with having shot 13 people and killed 10 in a Buffalo supermarket posted a sprawling 180-page white supremacist manifesto shortly before opening fire, noting that he had deliberately chosen to terrorize a store in a predominately Black neighborhood with predominately Black clientele, having set out to “kill as many blacks as possible.” Like mass shooters in New Zealand and El Paso, Texas—who set out to murder Muslims and Latinos, respectively—he also referred to himself as an ecofascist, pointing to overpopulation of nonwhite people as a driver of environmental destruction in a rant that amounted to microwaved Blood and Soil nationalism.
“For too long,” Buffalo shooter Payton Gendron wrote, echoing McClintock, “we have allowed the left to co-opt the environmentalist movement to serve their own needs.” He blamed the left for “presiding over the continued destruction of the natural environment itself through mass immigration and uncontrolled urbanization, whilst offering no true solution to either issue.”
Gendron’s embrace of the “great replacement theory”—the idea that white people are being systematically overrun by nonwhite people, heartily espoused by the likes of Tucker Carlson and all manner of prominent Republicans—has grabbed headlines. But last Friday’s shooting and others in recent years have also made something else clear: that the right is breeding a new generation of environmental extremists.
The barb of “environmental extremism,” of course, is one that conservatives traditionally lob at the left. But the left’s “environmental extremists” are by and large engaging in lobbying and nonviolent direct action to urge the world’s governments to spend trillions of dollars a year decarbonizing the global economy to keep temperatures from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit)—a goal that remains perilously far off. The right’s environmental extremists, by contrast, have murdered scores of people in acts of vigilante ethnic cleansing.
How they got there isn’t hard to track. Climate topics still verboten for right-wing elites—many of whom are getting paid by polluting industries directly, and accordingly treat fossil fuels as another front in the culture war—are fair game for the rabble they’re stoking, particularly the young and Nazi-meme-addled.
Sixty percent of young people surveyed by the University of Bath last year reported being “extremely” or “very” worried about the climate crisis. More than half said it makes them feel “afraid, sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and/or guilty.” Fortunately, in the United States, concerns about climate change and the environment have tended to go hand in hand with liberal views on everything from abortion to immigration. But that’s not something to take for granted.
The paranoid racist fantasies of national decline being spun by the likes of Carlson, J.D. Vance, and other “populist” GOP luminaries offer a grab bag of ideological frameworks that viewers can map onto their own set of concerns. Statistically speaking, that will include the climate crisis, whether or not rising temperatures are a central focus. As that crisis becomes unavoidable for more and more people in the U.S.—already dealing with extreme heat and rising temperatures—it stands to reason that the ranks of right-wing environmental extremists will grow. Prominent Republicans have also made guns widely available to help such extremists act on their beliefs as the world warms.
Carlson has casually flirted with ecofascism in recent years; after all, it’s a short conceptual jump from both the great replacement theory and the garden-variety white supremacy that may as well be the GOP party line. “Isn’t crowding your country,” Carlson mused in 2019, in conversation with the Heartland Institute’s Justin Haskins, “the fastest way to despoil it, to pollute it, to make it a place you wouldn’t want to live?”
One of the defining fights of the twenty-first century will be over access to land that’s safe to live on. Half of all addresses in the contiguous U.S. already face some degree of wildfire risk, according to data released this week. By 2070, 19 percent of the world will be too hot for humans to live on. Residents of Southeast Asia have experienced such temperatures since March, as temperatures in Delhi reached 120 degrees Fahrenheit this week.
Prominent voices on the right are giving their base a road map to navigate that world in zero-sum terms. Meanwhile, their representatives in Congress are doing everything in their power—from blocking climate policy to boosting drilling—to ensure that the situation continues to get catastrophically worse. It should come as no surprise that this toxic cocktail is already showing up in shooter manifestos. After all, “if the earth truly hangs in the balance, well then no measure is too extreme.”
Kate Aronoff is a staff writer at The New Republic. ...Read More
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Digging Deeper into the Current Conjuncture:
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Photos: TOP LEFT: Aryan Nations demonstrators march through the streets of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, with a Nazi flag. TOP RIGHT: Portrait of an unidentified man at the Aryan Nations compound, Hayden Lake, Idaho, April 1992. The sign reads "Whites Only." BOTTOM LEFT: A masked guard armed with a semi-automatic rifle patrols outside a news conference as Aryan Nations convenes in Hayden Lake, Idaho, on July 12, 1986. BOTTOM RIGHT: The former Aryan Nations compound. GETTY/AP/REUTERS
Living With The Far-Right Insurgency In Idaho
A radical GOP faction, in open alliance with extremists, is seizing power and targeting its opponents with cruelty. Some wonder: Is it time to leave?
By Christopher Mathias
Huffington Post
May. 17, 2022 - IDAHO — White nationalist Vincent James Foxx had a new video for his nearly 70,000 subscribers on BitChute, one of the few tech platforms that hasn’t banned him. On Feb. 16, he appeared wearing a baseball hat emblazoned with the state’s outline tilted on its side so that it resembled a pistol.
“We are going to take over this state,” Foxx declared. “We have a great large group of people, and that group is growing. A true, actual right-wing takeover is happening right now in the state of Idaho. And there’s nothing that these people can do about it. So if you’re a legislator here, either get in line, or get out of the way.”
Foxx, 36, isn’t from Idaho. He only recently moved from California to Post Falls. But in the video, he showed off photos of himself posing with a string of prominent Republican politicians in the state as he explained who he’s supporting in the upcoming primaries, slated for May 17.
He was especially excited about a selfie he’d taken a week prior: It showed him and fellow white nationalist Dave Reilly, a recent Pennsylvania transplant also living in Post Falls, standing alongside Idaho’s lieutenant governor, Janice McGeachin. All three were smiling.
“We’re supporting her,” Foxx said, bragging of his movement’s “deep connections” to McGeachin, whom former President Donald Trump endorsed in the GOP primary race for governor. Foxx then explained how his particular brand of Christian white nationalism is poised to conquer Idaho, then the country.
“The solution is local politics: Amassing power in these pockets of the country until it’s time to unify,” he said. “I’ve only been here for a couple of months and I’m trapped in the way that I am. You can do it too.”
Fascists like Foxx are famous fabulists, experts at exaggerating their influence and success. But Foxx wasn’t just talking shit.
He is one of many far-right activists who have flocked to Idaho in recent years, where a large and growing radical MAGA faction in the state’s Republican Party has openly allied itself with extremists to a shocking extent, even for the Trump era. This faction is accruing more and more power in Boise, the state capital: Imagine a statehouse full of Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Steve Kings. At the local level, they have seized seats on school boards and county commissions at a fast clip.
They’ve accomplished this, in part, by targeting their opponents with frightening cruelty and harassment, embracing a strategy called “confrontational politics,” which has helped drive more moderate officials across the state to resign or retire.
A lot has been written about both the radicalization of the Republican Party and the decline of democracy in the U.S. — about the country being at a precipice. It’s maybe easy for those warnings to become background noise, or to dismiss them as doom-mongering pieces of clickbait. But in Idaho, the nightmare scenario is crossing into reality, as an authoritarian GOP sets about to create a whiter, Christian nation.
These MAGA radicals have gestured at the future they want: no rape and incest exceptions to Idaho’s abortion ban; no emergency contraception; no gender-affirming health care for minors; the banning of books; the jailing of librarians; and maybe no public education altogether.
I recently spent a week traveling across the state, from Sandpoint in the northern panhandle down through the green slopes and whitewater of Hells Canyon to the plains of Ada County, and then across lava rock and sagebrush to Blackfoot. In all these places, Democrats and more moderate Republicans viewed Tuesday’s primaries as an existential affair. Some are considering leaving the state if MAGA extremists consolidate more power. Others are digging in their heels.
The people I talked to were not all that accustomed to alarmism, which made it striking to hear some of their voices tremble when they talked about what’s happening to their home. Their message for the rest of the country? It’s gonna get bad. The GOP really will go that far.
A Very Extreme Republican County Committee
Right-wing extremists have long been attracted to Idaho, drawn to its abundant land, lack of racial diversity (the state is now 93% white) and libertarian brand of conservative politics. But according to longtime residents like Shawn Keenan, a local Democratic activist, the degree to which extremists are not only flocking here today but finding a home in the GOP feels different.
I talked to Keenan in Coeur d’Alene — a fast-growing city of 50,000 nestled in the Rockies — at a lakeside park downtown, the same place he remembers neo-Nazis in the 1990s marching around trying “to recruit blue-eyed blond-haired boys like me to join their Aryan cult.” ...Read More
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Photo: Doug Mastriano speaks on a stage as Republican gubernatorial candidate
Pennsylvania’s GOP Nominee for Governor Is Arguably the Scariest Man in Politics
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout
May 18, 2022 - Tuesday’s big GOP primary day has come and gone, and one terrifying threat to the republic has been replaced by another.
Madison Cawthorn, the GQ model and pocket Nazi for North Carolina’s 11th district, was narrowly defeated in the primary by Chuck Edwards, a three-term GOP state senator, largely thanks to the efforts of conservative Sen. Thom Tillis, who had endured more than enough of Cawthorn’s disturbing antics. To this, we owe Tillis a nod of thanks; Cawthorn was going places, and none of them were good.
Exit Cawthorn, enter Doug Mastriano — the far-right election denier who just won the Republican nomination in Pennsylvania’s gubernatorial race — and God help us all.
If you had shaken me awake on Tuesday morning and asked me who the most terrifying U.S. politician is, I may have surprised you by not replying, “Donald Trump.” The once and future orange pain in my ass is high on the list, to be sure, but there has always been something about Cawthorn’s slick delivery that has chilled me to the bone in a way Trump’s buffoonery never did. One always has the sense Trump knows he’s deploying a shtick, but with Cawthorn, you realize that he means every word he says, and he hasn’t told you half of what he really thinks.
For a time there, Cawthorn gave every sense of being the GOP’s Chosen One. Elected in 2020 at age 25, he immediately became one of Trump’s favorites (“a terrific young man.… He’s going to be one of the greats”). He got a prime speaker’s slot at the 2020 Republican convention and spoke at the January 6 rally that preceded the sacking of the Capitol. Cawthorn’s gun-wielding racism lined up perfectly with a GOP base that has grown more fractious and violent by the day, and his embrace of Trump’s election lies made him bulletproof for a time in a caucus already burdened by the nonsense of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar.
There will always be a place in U.S. politics for handsome young men with no shame. Cawthorn and his highly toxic masculinity were rapidly gaining momentum. “It’s hard not to arrive at the conclusion that this is the future of the Republican Party,” New York Magazine writer Talia Lavin said following the 2020 election, “and the man of what it has to offer.”
Well, the man may be gone now to Fox or Newsmax or shooting reverse mortgage commercials with Tom Selleck in between ads for Aspercreme, but everything about him the bulk of Republican voters once liked still remain the top-tier values of that bloc… and into the void steps Doug Mastriano, who won the GOP nomination for Pennsylvania governor last night by almost 25 points.
Cawthorn cracked under the pressure of being the future of the party, but Mastriano is perfectly happy to be the present… and his present is raw Christian nationalism where elections don’t matter if his party has the muscle to overthrow the outcome.
As much as any other Trump sycophant, Mastriano has labored to be seen as if he has moved mountains trying to change the results of the 2020 presidential election… yet all he has really done is showboat for the press. His own Pennsylvania Republican Party ejected him from an audit of the 2020 vote because, according to State Senate President Jake Corman, Mastriano was “only ever interested in politics and showmanship and not actually getting things done.”
Some other lowlights of the Mastriano phenomenon, courtesy of Popular Information:
In April 2022, Mastriano spoke at a far-right Christian conference, “Patriots Arise for God and Country,” which was organized by “Francine and Allen Fodsick, self-described prophets who have long promoted QAnon.” At the outset of the event, organizers played a video “claiming the world is experiencing a ‘great awakening’ that will expose ‘ritual child sacrifice’ and a ‘global satanic blood cult.’”
Mastriano’s position on abortion reflects his Christian nationalist worldview. Christian nationalism, the New Yorker reports, is rooted in “the idea that God intended America to be a Christian nation.” During his time as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and Afghanistan he “developed a dim view of Islam.” He has frequently “spread Islamophobic memes online,” including “a conspiracy theory that Ilhan Omar, the Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota, directed fellow-Muslims to throw a five-year-old over a balcony.”
After retiring from the military and successfully running for office in 2019, Mastriano “began attending events held by a movement called the New Apostolic Reformation.” Members of the New Apostolic Reformation believe “that God speaks to them directly, and that they have been tasked with battling real-world demons who control global leaders.”
Cawthorn and Mastriano arrived on the political scene at roughly the same time. What separates them appears to be Cawthorn’s aversion to work; Mastriano, by comparison, has hardly rested over the last two years, and is now an election away from assuming control over one of the most politically influential states in the union. Tuesday’s results represent further proof that the Republican Party has transformed into a metaphoric King Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster: Cut off one head, and another pops snarling into its place. ...Read More
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Photo: In the foreground, a big red banner with white lettering that reads “Democratic Socialists of America.” People in heavy coats, scarves and hats stand behind it. Most are white. The thick crowd extends back down the city street. Lots of people are holding other signs, white with red letters, saying “Working women of the world unite.”
Democracy, Strategy, Modes of Struggle: High-Stakes Strife in DSA
Core questions of political strategy animate the debate roiling DSA. The whole Left has a stake in the outcome.
Many Left organizations are facing serious internal struggles as they work to balance a growing membership on the one hand and a myriad of political challenges on the other. Internal debate and conflict can be healthy, leading to sharper analysis and tighter unity. But conflict is often destructive and leaves us weaker. Indeed, many Left organizations have split or died because members were not able to navigate working across differences.
How can we engage in debate inside our organizations and movements in a way that helps us grow stronger? As the authoritarian right grows and the climate crisis worsens, our political movements will shift, and what constitutes “the Left” itself will change. We need to know how to function effectively and strategically in alliances, and practice the democracy we are trying to defend and deepen. Convergence is committed to exploring such questions. We hope the following article, though focused on DSA, will yield broader insights for Left organizing. – --Convergence editors
By Max Elbaum
Convergence
May 17, 2022 - The campaign in Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to expel U.S. Congressmember Jamaal Bowman is not at the root of the sharp conflict taking place within the organization. But it was the trigger for its escalation into a problem that threatens the future of the organization and has major implications for the entire Left. So before getting to the political differences underlying the bitter disputes underway, let’s start there.
Bowman, a member of the Squad, was first elected in 2020 in a contest where he received DSA’s endorsement. In November 2021, he went on a J-Street-sponsored trip to Palestine and met with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet. Then he voted in favor of U.S. funding for Israel’s “Iron Dome” military program.
DSA as an organization is committed to Palestine solidarity in general and to BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) in particular. Bowman did not claim to be representing DSA when taking these actions, and DSA’s membership policies do not forbid members from publicly disagreeing with, or acting in ways inconsistent with, organizational positions. But he is a high-profile figure, and it was both warranted and inevitable that his actions would attract substantial criticism from other members.
A significant number of members raised the demand that DSA should go beyond airing criticism of Bowman’s actions and expel him from the organization. Others disagreed that this was the appropriate response. A major debate within the organization ensued.
From the perspective of building power toward ending U.S. support for Israeli apartheid —the main task of the Palestine solidarity movement in this country—actions other than expelling Bowman would have seemed more in order. For instance, what about DSA committing to a grassroots campaign in Bowman’s district to educate his constituents about Israeli apartheid and U.S. backing for it? Allotting organizational resources, deploying organizers who live in the district and members from other areas, identifying allies, and aiming to build a robust, mass-based voting bloc in that district for Palestinian rights? For that matter, why not launch such campaigns in other districts where there are progressive congressmembers (and local and state electeds) who are on the progressive end of the political spectrum but, because of both their own shortcomings and the weakness of support for Palestine in their districts, do not stand firm on this crucial component of an anti-racist and internationalist agenda?
This kind of effort could help build the clout of the Palestine solidarity movement. By showing that DSA was serious about putting its political muscle where its principles are, it could attract potential allies, including electeds and people considering running for office. It would show that DSA, a disproportionately white organization, is committed to building a strong relationship with progressive Black leaders, Bowman being the most radical Black male in the U.S. Congress. DSA members who participated in such an outward-looking campaign would gain rich experience and be better organizers coming out. And it could educate the entire organization on some home truths about doing politics: you cannot win “at the top” what you haven’t won at the base; elected officials are not the source of radical power; they reflect how much power we do (or don’t) have.
The expel-Bowman effort, in contrast, is inward-looking, focusing more on purifying DSA’s ranks than affecting U.S. policy. And by enlisting non-DSA members’ participation in the campaign to expel Bowman it has added new obstacles to winning broad mass organizations—unions, religious groups, etc.—to adopt BDS; those groups now have to add to their considerations the possibility that their own internal organizational policies will be challenged if, say, a prominent member who does not support BDS indicates that in public. Rather than show that DSA is into building the kind of base that will make it possible for electeds to take positions that are not easy to take in U.S. politics today, it is—consciously or not—a sign that DSA wants electeds to provide a short-cut route to gaining political power.
Elected officials are not the source of radical power; they reflect how much power we do (or don’t) have.
After a sharp debate in the various bodies and media platforms that DSA members utilize to consider political issues, the matter went to the National Political Committee (NPC) for a decision. The body voted to reject the demand to expel Bowman.
Things didn’t stop there
In a healthy big-tent organization, this vote would have resolved the disagreement. Democracy means, among other things, respect for majority rule. The national convention is the highest decision-making body of DSA, and that convention elects (or appoints via its elected leaders) bodies that are authorized to make various decisions in between conventions. When a decision is made that some substantial number of members disagree with, they of course can retain their opinions and try to change policy or personnel at the next convention. But until then, decisions of authorized bodies have to stand. Otherwise, an organization descends into a debating society.
That didn’t happen. The campaign to expel Bowman simply continued, with a pressure effort on the NPC to change its vote. Members who disagreed did not simply register that fact, which would be perfectly appropriate. Rather, they utilized official bodies of the organization that are accountable to the leadership (including the organization’s BDS Working Group) to wage an effort to reverse the decision.
The way many of this campaign’s most aggressive advocates conducted it indicated, as noted above, that the issue of Bowman’s mistaken actions in relation to Palestine was not its main driving force. Had that been the case, the central arguments raised would have concerned how elected officials (and socialists’ relationship to them) fit into an effective strategy to build power to change U.S. policy on Israel/Palestine. There is both a rich history and extensive current practice to look at in this regard.
The gains made by the anti-Zionist Palestine Solidarity Committee in the 1980s via work in the Rainbow Coalition, Jesse Jackson’s campaigns, and Harold Washington’s campaigns and administration in Chicago hold important lessons. So do the current efforts to build support for Rep. Betty McCollum’s bill to protect the rights of Palestinian children, which falls well short of BDS but is the key legislative project of groups that are willing to throw down for Palestinian rights, ranging from the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights to M4BL. (A measure of the balance of forces around Palestine in Congress, the bill now has 32 co-sponsors, all Democrats, including Jamaal Bowman.) But no discussion of strategy looking at these experiences was present, much less at the center, of the continuing expel-Bowman effort.
Rather, the political focus of debate shifted to DSA’s relationship to the Democratic Party. The most aggressive proponents of expelling Bowman have expanded their argument and now anchor it in a critique of the Squad, Bernie and other progressives and socialists who believe fighting for multi-racial, gender-inclusive political power at this stage of history requires engaging the fight within the Democratic Party over its direction. The argument is now that those who oppose expelling Bowman don’t take that position because they think it’s better for building Palestine solidarity; rather, they are accused of siding with Democrats against Palestinians and the Palestine solidarity movement.
And, besides the shift in political emphasis, the expel-Bowman forces have shifted their immediate demands and arguments to focus on various organizational decisions made by the NPC.
Let’s sort out both these levels.
The political agenda: break with the Democrats
The combination of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s exciting 2016 Presidential campaign and the victory of Donald Trump triggered a period of explosive growth and political transformation for DSA. Even though Bernie was not a member of DSA, his popularization of “democratic socialism” was a huge boost for the organization sharing that self-definition. The successful campaigns of the four women of color who formed the Squad in 2018, and then in 2020 Bernie’s second effort and the Squad’s expansion to six, carried that momentum forward. DSA works on many battlefronts besides elections, and its members’ involvement in today’s upsurge of militancy and unionization at workplaces is of great importance. But it is mainly DSA’s identification with Bernie and the new wave of progressive congressmembers, and to a lesser extent some important state and local officials, that has driven its growth. And the organization’s capacity to deploy volunteer canvassers has been the main source of its clout.
Despite this trajectory, from 2016 on a portion of the new members who flooded into the organization did not agree with the political strategy of the candidates themselves. Bernie and the Squad operate from the view that defeating a Republican Party now controlled by racist and misogynist authoritarians at every level is a prime task; that this requires building a broad electoral front of all those opposed to the Trumpists and voting for non-progressive Democrats to beat MAGA supporters; and that these tasks need to be done alongside building independent progressive clout. In short, they share an “inside-outside” strategy that involves both unity and struggle with the mainstream forces in the Democratic Party.
A portion of the DSA membership disagrees strongly with this strategy. And within this cohort are several groupings or caucuses with a well-developed alternative. In their view, treating the Democratic Party as a terrain of battle is a fundamental error that inevitably leads to abandoning the socialist project. For them, the key task of this period is to establish an untainted revolutionary pole in the mainstream of U.S. political life. To do that it is necessary not only to differentiate this pole’s politics from liberalism and all other left-of-center currents, but also to be completely separate organizationally. Forming a purely working-class revolutionary party is therefore the overriding task, to which all other tasks must be subordinated.
Even with the MAGA bloc aiming to take the country back to some hybrid system combining Jim Crow, Christian supremacy, and McCarthyism, the amount of attention paid to defeating that bloc at the ballot box or anywhere else is seen as a purely tactical matter. So is what kind of relationship should be built with non-socialist progressives or socialists who advocate work that entangles anyone with the Democrats or in any other cross-class alignment. These are to be considered only by the criteria of how they might or might not advance the task of building a revolutionary party, allegedly ensuring the “class independence” necessary for any forward motion in the direction of socialism.
Bernie changes the game
Before Bernie’s campaign, those who held this view opposed voting for anyone on the Democratic Party ballot line without exception. But Bernie’s 2016 campaign, where running as a Democrat he made socialism more popular in the U.S. than it had been in decades, punched a huge hole in that position. It was a factor (though not the only or even the main factor) in the largest group holding that view—ISO—disbanding; in splits within Socialist Alternative; and in many members of Solidarity and partisans of this view with no other organizational affiliation backing Bernie and/or joining DSA.
These activists now acknowledged, as did people with different histories and many newly radicalized individuals, that it was acceptable for socialists to run on the Democratic ballot line. But for many (not all) of these, no engagement beyond that was to be permitted. And DSA should only endorse socialists who promised to prioritize accountability to DSA itself over accountability to the broader progressive coalition that had to be forged for any campaign to be successful. The goal was still to build a self-contained revolutionary party, but the road to a complete break with the Democrats—including a separate ballot line, which was supposed to happen as soon as possible—now lay through the temporary tactical necessity of capturing the Democratic ballot line where possible.
Post-2016 DSA electoral work, often appearing to reflect a unified organizational effort, was in reality a complicated mix. Some members conducted that work as a steppingstone toward a break with the Democratic Party. Others pursued the kind of “inside-outside” strategy practiced by Bernie and the candidates who became the Squad. Tensions existed beneath the surface. But in practice, in campaigns to win a Democratic primary and to win the general election after a nomination was won, alliances with a wide range of other progressive groups were both necessary and possible. And many non-socialist progressives ran for office on programs that were all but indistinguishable from those advanced by socialist DSA members.
So, despite attempts by some in DSA to build a high wall between hoped-for members of a soon-to-be-established pure revolutionary party, serious political alliances and relationships developed between most DSA electoral activists and much wider circles. And in these wider circles, the strategy of Bernie and the Squad, including the high priority placed on electoral defeat of the Trumpified GOP, was—and is—overwhelmingly dominant.
In 2019, when the Left had high hopes for Bernie’s success in 2020 and the mainstream Democrats failed to offer a compelling agenda, the “stay away from the Dems” view in DSA had wide appeal. The result was passage of the “Bernie or Bust” resolution at that year’s DSA convention. But in Spring 2020 Bernie conceded the nomination to Biden, endorsed him and campaigned hard for his one-time opponent.
The vast bulk of progressives and radicals outside DSA, especially those rooted in labor and communities of color, worked hard for Trump’s defeat. And following the election, the extreme danger posed by the Trumpist camp was underscored by the GOP closing ranks after January 6. Simultaneously the Democratic Party mainstream shifted away from their previous neoliberalism. DSA members moved toward a more realistic assessment of the actual balance of forces in U.S. politics than had been the case in 2019. A resolution reasserting the “Bernie or Bust” perspective in different form (demanding that all DSA-endorsed candidates incorporate public advocacy of a break with the Democratic Party into their campaigns) failed at the 2021 DSA Convention.
But a section of those who disagreed with the Convention vote did not reconcile themselves to waiting until the next Convention to re-raise their view. Then came Bowman’s serious misstep regarding Israel-Palestine. Here was an issue that—if Bowman were expelled—could lead to a break not just with him but with the entire Squad, Bernie, and others who identify as radical or socialist but see the Democratic Party as a terrain of struggle.
No doubt those whose main priority is building a pure revolutionary formation believe expelling an elected who is not firm on Palestine is the right thing to do in itself. But their underlying strategy is more rooted in the demand to break with the Democrats. In that context, the Bowman controversy is a convenient “wedge issue” to accomplish that break without a frontal assault on the position adopted at DSA’s 2021 convention.
Internal democracy?
Those are the politics that account for the campaign to expel Bowman continuing and even intensifying after the NPC vote. The effort, at least for a time, crowded other matters off chapter agendas and became a preoccupation in internal DSA media. Rhetoric and accusations escalated, reportedly up to and including death threats. Tensions mounted among people on different sides and within leadership bodies. People with various views on the issues at hand tried to simultaneously lower the conflict temperature and raise the political level of debate. But overall, an all-too familiar pattern characterizing internal battles in socialist groups took hold: issues of internal democracy and alleged “top-down” leadership became prominent, obscuring the political issues underlying the internal conflict.
Issues of internal democracy and alleged ‘top-down’ leadership obscure the political issues underlying the internal conflict.
With respect for majority rule having broken down (it was thin in DSA in the first place) all kinds of uncomradely behavior became common. The leadership—and others—tried to enforce organizational rules. But sorting through the rights and wrongs of each specific situation was time-consuming, wearying, and thankless. With vital external work tasks not getting the attention they required, the NPC succumbed to the temptation to try to move forward by using organizational means. In this case, that took the form of moving to de-charter the BDS Working Group.
Proponents of the de-charter argued that the Work Group was not staying within its mandate as a body subordinate to the NPC, was using organizational channels to oppose majority rule and violating democratic norms; and that several members were making abusive allegations against some NPC members. They made a strong case. But a membership overwhelmingly committed to Palestine solidarity would clearly react differently to the suspension of a BDS-focused committee than to the decision not to expel Jamaal Bowman.
A broader and deeper discussion in the organization about the Working Group’s violation of democratic norms, with more specifics about how it would move forward with Palestine solidarity efforts, would be needed to avoid another round of bitter conflict. Instead, the de-charter, and the rush by some DSAers to galvanize support for the NPC decision before the organization as a whole could obtain and absorb all the necessary facts, caused more problems than it solved. And the decision was later rescinded.
Utilizing organizational means is a perilous course, especially when important political issues underlie internal conflict. Identifying and debating those issues in full view of the membership—putting politics front and center—is a far better course. Failure to do this, and failure to use all available channels to give the membership information and an opportunity to air their views, almost always backfires. It allows those violating democratic norms to assume the posture of victims being persecuted by an allegedly dictatorial leadership.
Especially in a young organization where leadership bodies have not yet earned significant political authority—and given the lack of leadership accountability in so many past socialist groups—this stance generally garners sympathy. By their nature, crackdowns on abusive behavior or rule violations have a large proportion of messy, “they said, they said” charges and sometimes facts and allegations are at least partly confidential. These problems are exacerbated in DSA because the NPC, rather than some independent, non-leadership body, is designated as the arbiter of grievances and other kinds of disputes.
All that played out in DSA in arguments about the de-chartering and applying discipline to certain individuals. Mistakes were made on all sides. These need to be identified and the lessons used to improve organizational practice, and perhaps do some restructuring, going forward. But whatever mistakes were made on this front, they are not the reason tensions in DSA have reached the point they have.
The fundamental reason the political differences shaping this struggle have led to tension and crisis rather than greater political understanding is this: A minority in the organization refused, and still refuses, to accept the will of the majority, as expressed in the last Convention and in the NPC vote rejecting the demand to expel Jamaal Bowman.
Tear members down or lift members up?
An additional factor makes the current fight in DSA so toxic. “Call-out culture”—harsh criticism of individuals that attributes political views a person disagrees with to character flaws or lack of commitment on the part of the target—is widespread in DSA, as it is in all too much of the broad Left. The result is that political debates, especially on the internet, deteriorate rapidly into personal attacks.
My generation is no stranger to nasty and destructive internal Left debate. The sectarian wars we conducted during the 1970s and ’80s were counter-productive to say the least. But it was political sectarianism: we lost any sense of proportion, exaggerated small differences, and gave our opponents’ views every negative label in the book. But for the most part, we considered our opponents carriers of bad—even counter-revolutionary—lines, not bad people. We aimed to “win them over” to our supposedly enlightened perspective—”cure the disease to save the patient.”
There are lessons to be drawn on this from my generation’s mistakes. Yes, each of us carries baggage from growing up in an individualistic society founded on racism, sexism and other forms of dehumanization. But people enter the radical movement and join an organization like DSA to contribute to changing that society. They are to be valued and given the tools to grow as they engage in political activity. Except for police agents (when we can identify them with certainty) and the occasional person too damaged to work in any collective setting, our default assumption must be that everyone acts in good faith. Attacking people’s character or treating others in ways you would not want to be treated—not to mention threatening someone’s personal safety—should be out of bounds.
Our default assumption must be that everyone acts in good faith.
That does not mean that there aren’t political views and practices that are destructive. There are. But they need to be taken on as political views one thinks are badly misguided, not as indications that their proponents are bad people or less committed to social justice than “our side.”
Some kinds of politics are destructive
Keeping that polemical standard in mind, it is still true that there is a political perspective held by some currents in DSA that is not just erroneous but destructive. Whatever the good intentions of its advocates, it translates into the kind of “rule or ruin” practice that has weakened or destroyed numerous broad Left organizations in the U.S. and around the world. This perspective holds that building a purified revolutionary party is such an important priority that it justifies doing whatever it takes within DSA to gain influence and recruits for that perspective. If DSA is badly weakened or even destroyed in the process, that is not just acceptable. It is a good thing.
This general perspective has a long history in the socialist movement. Its clearest expression is not in the words of its critics, but in those of its own proponents. For example, dedicated revolutionary and main founder of U.S. Trotskyism James Cannon voiced it as he offered his summation of the results of his group entering the Socialist Party USA in the 1930s, and then exiting to form the Socialist Workers Party:
- “The [SWP Founding] convention adopted the entire program of the Fourth International without any opposition. This showed that our educational work had been thoroughgoing. All these accomplishments can be chalked up as evidence of the political wisdom of our entry into the Socialist Party. And another of them-and not the least of them-was that when the Socialist Party expelled us and when we retaliated by forming an independent party of our own, the Socialist Party had dealt itself a death blow. Since then the SP has progressively disintegrated until it has virtually lost any semblance of in-fluence in any party of the labor movement. Our work in the Socialist Party contributed to that. Comrade Trotsky remarked about that later, when we were talking with him about the total result of our entry into the Socialist Party and the pitiful state of its organization afterward. He said that alone would have justified the entry into the organization even if we hadn’t gained a single new member. Partly as a result of our experience in the Socialist Party and our fight in there, the Socialist Party was put on the side lines. This was a great achievement, because it was an obstacle in the path of building a revolutionary party. The problem is not merely one of building a revolutionary Party, but of clearing obstacles from its path. Every other party is a rival. Every other party is an obstacle.” --James P. Cannon, “The History of American Trotskyism,” Pathfinder Press, New York, 1972, pp 252-253
Let me be crystal clear about this. I think the labels from the pre-1989 Left—Maoist, Trotskyist, Marxist-Leninist, Stalinist, Social Democrat, etc—are mostly useless in understanding today’s Left. Not all those who identify with Trotskyism share Cannon’s views or engage in anything like the kind of practice he praises. And all too many who identify with other ideological currents in the pre-1989 Left do engage in “rule or ruin” adventures. So broad-brush generalizations about any ideological tendency must be resisted. (To reinforce this point: what use are pre-1989 categories when leading voices in the allegedly “Stalinist/Tankie” Communist Party USA vehemently condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, while three groups from the Trotskyist movement (Socialist Action, Workers World Party, and the Party for Socialism and Liberation) refuse to criticize the Putin regime’s aggression and blame the entire situation on US/NATO imperialism?)
That said, it would be the height of naiveté not to see that there are groupings within DSA that are operating in a manner that subordinates the integrity of DSA to their conception of a higher good. Some entered DSA as a group with their own discipline; others evolved within DSA since its 2016 explosive growth and transformation.
Political strategy is the bottom line
This is not an issue DSA can resolve by organizational means. It is a matter of identifying the core political issues and the different views advocated by the contending currents in the organization. Peel away all the back-and-forth about who mistreated whom, all the noise and call-out attacks on social media, and all the “gotcha” questioning of people’s character and commitment. Then you get to the bottom-line political choice DSA must make.
DSA can focus outward and continue on the path most connected to its recent growth: establishing itself as a socialist force within the progressive trend in U.S. politics whose most prominent figures are Bernie and the Squad. Taking that course would mean focusing, like the vast bulk of that trend, on both defeating the authoritarian right and building the independent strength of social justice and socialist forces in the process. It would point to synergizing electoral work with efforts to revitalize the labor movement; strengthen the urgent movements for racial justice, gender justice, and environmental protection; and root the organization the multiracial, gender-inclusive working class. And it would involve work to rebuild the tattered and beleaguered peace and solidarity movements, including serious efforts to build a voting bloc committed to Palestinian rights in as many congressional districts as possible.
Alternatively, DSA can prioritize a purification effort and set a course toward building a new revolutionary socialist party outside of and in opposition to that trend. Expel Jamaal Bowman and move to break ties with others in the Squad and Bernie because, according to one of the prominent expel-Bowman advocates:
“DSA’s “electeds” and allies, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and of course Bernie Sanders, all ceased any semblance of being an opposition and instead branded themselves as the staunchest liberal Democrats who would try to work harder in service of the Democratic Party.”
This choice is at the core of DSA’s current internal conflicts. The debate about it can be conducted in a way that brings more light than heat. It is a multi-faceted debate that in this case pivots on electoral strategy but reflects different assessments of the current balance of forces in U.S, politics, different views on the relationship of the fight for democracy and the fight for socialism, and—of special importance—the inter-relationship of white supremacy with U.S. capitalism and what that means about the nature and danger of today’s Trumpist bloc. (Besides what is in this essay, my opinions on these issues are presented in the 20-plus columns I have written for Convergence—formerly Organizing Upgrade—over the last two years, available here. And for a specific critique of overly narrow views of the alliances needed to effectively challenge U.S. racial capitalism, see the Convergence symposium “The White Republic and the Struggle for Racial Justice,” especially the concluding essay here.)
Once DSA makes this choice, it can and should be tested out for a period of time. Those who disagree certainly have the right to remain in the organization and re-raise their alternative perspective at the appropriate time, likely a national convention. But no socialist organization can function effectively if it is embroiled in constant internal strife over a fundamental question such as where it positions itself within the politics of the country in which it functions.
DSA is the largest socialist organization the U.S. has seen in at least 70 years. Its explosive growth since 2016 has heartened everyone on the progressive side of the spectrum at a time of humanity-threatening crises and a dire threat from right-wing authoritarianism. The entire Left has a stake in the direction DSA chooses to take. ...Read More
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Photo: The Myscogee (Creek) Nation has expanded agriculture enterprises from a small farm to nearly 6,000 acres after the purchases of ranch lands in 2021 near Okmulgee, Oklahoma. It is the largest known land acquisition in the tribe's history.PHOTO BY TORGAN TAYLOR/MVSKOKE MEDIA
Muscogee Nation Turns to Cows to Build for the Future
Tribal nations are finding sustainable ways to generate jobs and food security.
BY LIZ GRAY & MORGAN TAYLOR
Yes! Magazine
MAY 6, 2022 - On a stretch of highway between Tulsa and Okmulgee that cuts through the Mvskoke Reservation, commuters have grown accustomed to passing Duck Creek Casino, owned and operated by the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.
Now, the view includes a neighboring business, Looped Square Meat Co., the tribe’s latest economic venture that draws its name from a symbol representing the balance of nature. The $15 million meat-processing facility includes a retail space that sells what has been branded as “reservation-worthy” meats and other foods.
It’s part of a growing agricultural enterprise for the tribe that started with a small farm more than 75 years ago and has expanded to nearly 6,000 acres with the recent purchase of ranchlands near Okmulgee—the largest known land acquisition in the tribe’s history.
And although the tribe’s nine casinos are still the main source of funding, officials believe the expansion of agriculture can provide regular income, jobs, and food security for tribal citizens.
“Lots of Indian Country have taken more of an active role in the management of natural resources and the use of their land,” said Trent Kissee, a tribal citizen and manager of the tribe’s Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources.
“I think there’s a variety of factors in that,” Kissee said. “Some of it is that tribes are just now becoming able to do so financially.”
The financial boost for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation came in the form of CARES Act money in 2020, which funded the construction of the 25,000-square-foot meat-processing plant. The facility opened in December with eight employees, but is expected to eventually be fully staffed with 25 workers.
And the Muscogee (Creek) Nation is not the only tribe investing in agriculture. Indigenous and Alaska Native producers generated an estimated $3.5 billion in agriculture sales in 2017, with three-fourths specializing in livestock production, according to the Native American Agriculture Fund.
The Osage Nation Ranch in northern Oklahoma operates a cow–calf operation and a conservation herd of bison, in part on land purchased from media mogul Ted Turner. In other parts of the country, tribal nations operate fisheries, ranches, poultry farms, food-processing plants, farms, nurseries, and other agricultural enterprises.
For many, it’s a way to generate income in traditional ways without depleting natural resources.
“What I’ve heard from many tribes is that they’re trying to do agriculture in a way that honors the Earth, sort of looks at a whole system, and the interrelations of land and people and community,” said Patrice Kunesh, of Standing Rock Lakota descent, development officer for the Native American Rights Fund and former director of the Center for Indian Country Development at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
“Whereas (with) agribusiness,” she said, “you tend to have blinders on and be totally focused on profit and the highest production.”
History of Tribal Ranching
Kissee pulls up a photo of various cuts of beef on his phone and explains the marbling of a steak as if reading a map.
The white lines running through the meat like rivers and creeks are attributed to the high quality of beef the tribe is producing these days with its herds of Brangus and other cattle.
“See those little flecks on the inside?” he asked. “That would be a high choice grade of steer.”
Farming and ranching have been present in the territory since the southeastern tribes reached the end of their journey from the long walk caused by forced removal from their ancestral homelands in Georgia, Alabama, and other areas.
“Native people have significant livestock interests all over the country,” said Janie Hipp, a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and the first Indigenous person to serve as general counsel for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, during a ribbon-cutting event held by the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.
“When COVID happened in those early months … I was getting phone calls every single day from tribal leadership all over the country, because the supply chain started feeling rigid and having breaks here and there.”
The Muscogee (Creek) Nation has had land for almost a century in rural Oklahoma, including a 359-acre farm in Dustin that was purchased for the tribe by the federal government on Nov. 19, 1941, and placed in trust.
But prosperity has not exactly been synonymous with agriculture for the tribe; even the sandy soil associated with the farm was not ideal for feeding cattle.
When Kissee came to the tribe in 2017, the herd needed a lot of attention, and not just for the usual issues related to cattle ranching.
“Nutritionally, we needed to work on how we were feeding the cows,” he said. “As you grow and develop a program, you hit hurdles that you have to grow and learn yourself.”
Beyond nutritional needs, Kissee used his knowledge in animal science and genetics to make the bulls and heifers carrying the Looped Square brand something to be proud of, with weaning calves weighing in at more than 550 pounds.
The tribe purchased the new ranchlands in October 2021 after the historic 12,000-acre Dillingham Ranch was divided in half and put up for sale. The site was near the tribal headquarters, the town of Okmulgee and the Okmulgee Airport.
It was promptly renamed the Looped Square Ranch, where officials expect to operate with some fewer than the 1,100 cow–calf pairs that made up the previous operations there. The property included a house, trailer, barns, and other buildings.
“The timing was right,” Kissee said at the time.
The purchase came about two months before construction on the meat-processing plant was finished. The plant opened in December with state-of-the-art equipment, multiple kill-floor spaces, a test kitchen, freezers, aerobic lagoons and filtration systems, and the retail space—all of which are certified by the USDA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation Environmental Services.
The plant brought its own set of challenges, however. In addition to struggles for materials and other problems caused by the pandemic, the tribe was faced with opposition from a neighboring residential community.
Residents of the town of Winchester sent letters of intent to sue the Muscogee (Creek) Nation for what they said were violations of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, and voiced concerns about the potential for environmental problems and odors they feared would be associated with the plant.
The tribe said the facility is designed for proper capture of wastewater and stormwaters, and has met all necessary requirements. The town remains opposed to the plant.
Taking Care of the Land
Tribal leaders are now focused on being good stewards of the land, an important factor in agriculture not just for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, but for other tribal nations as well.
Even the Looped Square name and brand draws on Muskogean design to represent Earth in a way that shows a balance between natural resources and agriculture that a non-Indigenous ag producer might not attempt. ...Read More
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From the CCDS Socialist Education Project...
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A China Reader
Edited by Duncan McFarland
A project of the CCDS Socialist Education Project and Online University of the Left
244 pages, $20 (discounts available for quantity orders from [email protected]), or order at :
The book is a selection of essays offering keen insight into the nature of China and its social system, its internal debates, and its history. It includes several articles on the US and China and the growing efforts of friendship between the Chinese and American peoples.
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Taking Down
White Supremacy
Edited by the CCDS
Socialist Education Project
This collection of 20 essays brings together a variety of articles-theoretical, historical, and experiential-that address multi-racial, multi-national unity. The book provides examples theoretically and historically, of efforts to build multi-racial unity in the twentieth century.
166 pages, $12.50 (discounts available for quantity), order at :
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NOT TO BE MISSED: Short Links To Longer Reads...
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With Planet Warming, We Are Sacrificing Lives
for Profits
Climate change is the result of a deadly calculus: human lives are worth risking and even losing over the profits of global corporations.
By SONALI KOLHATKAR
LA Progressive
MAY 16, 2022 - The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) recently dropped a bombshell announcement that should have garnered news headlines in the major global and U.S. media, but did not.
New WMO research concludes that “[t]here is a 50:50 chance of the annual average global temperature temporarily reaching 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial level for at least one of the next five years.”
WMO Secretary-General Professor Petteri Taalas explained, “The 1.5 degree Celsius figure is not some random statistic. It is rather an indicator of the point at which climate impacts will become increasingly harmful for people and indeed the entire planet.”
In 2015, the likelihood of reaching that threshold within five years was nearly zero. In 2017 it was 10 percent, and today it is 50 percent. As we continue to spew greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in dizzying amounts, that percentage spikes with every passing year and will soon reach 100 percent certainty.
When average global temperatures hit the tipping point of 1.5 degrees Celsius, climate scientists predict that most of the Earth’s coral reefs will die off. At 2 degrees Celsius, all will die off. This is the reason why United Nations members coalesced around staving off an average global temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius at the last global climate gathering in 2021.
The planet has already heated up by 1.1 degrees Celsius, and the consequences are dire across the globe.
India is experiencing its worst heat wave in 122 years, and neighboring Pakistan has broken a 61-year-old record for high temperatures. Dozens of people have already died as a result of the extreme heat.
In France, farmers “can see the earth cracking every day,” as a record-breaking drought has thrown the country’s agricultural industry into crisis mode.
Here in the United States, across the central and northeastern parts of the country, there is a heat wave so large and so severe that people from Texas to Maine experienced triple-digit temperatures in May.
Even the wealthy enclave of Laguna Niguel in Orange County, Southern California, is on fire, and dozens of homes have been destroyed. Although moneyed elites have far more resources to remain protected from the deadly impacts of climate change compared to the rest of us, occasionally even their homes are in the path of destruction, indicating that nowhere on Earth will be safe on a catastrophically warming planet. ...Read More
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I Invented Gilead. The Supreme Court Is Making It Real.
I thought I was
writing fiction in The Handmaid’s Tale.
By Margaret Atwood
The Atlantic via Portside
May 14, 2022 - In the early years of the 1980s, I was fooling around with a novel that explored a future in which the United States had become disunited. Part of it had turned into a theocratic dictatorship based on 17th-century New England Puritan religious tenets and jurisprudence.
I set this novel in and around Harvard University—an institution that in the 1980s was renowned for its liberalism, but that had begun three centuries earlier chiefly as a training college for Puritan clergy.
In the fictional theocracy of Gilead, women had very few rights, as in 17th-century New England. The Bible was cherry-picked, with the cherries being interpreted literally.
Based on the reproductive arrangements in Genesis—specifically, those of the family of Jacob—the wives of high-ranking patriarchs could have female slaves, or “handmaids,” and those wives could tell their husbands to have children by the handmaids and then claim the children as theirs.
Although I eventually completed this novel and called it The Handmaid’s Tale, I stopped writing it several times, because I considered it too far-fetched.
Silly me. Theocratic dictatorships do not lie only in the distant past: There are a number of them on the planet today. What is to prevent the United States from becoming one of them?
For instance: It is now the middle of 2022, and we have just been shown a leaked opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States that would overthrow settled law of 50 years on the grounds that abortion is not mentioned in the Constitution, and is not “deeply rooted” in our “history and tradition.” True enough. The Constitution has nothing to say about women’s reproductive health. But the original document does not mention women at all.
Women were deliberately excluded from the franchise. Although one of the slogans of the Revolutionary War of 1776 was “No taxation without representation,” and government by consent of the governed was also held to be a good thing, women were not to be represented or governed by their own consent—only by proxy, through their fathers or husbands. Women could neither consent nor withhold consent, because they could not vote. That remained the case until 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, an amendment that many strongly opposed as being against the original Constitution. As it was.
Women were nonpersons in U.S. law for a lot longer than they have been persons. If we start overthrowing settled law using Justice Samuel Alito’s justifications, why not repeal votes for women? ...Read More
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Union President On Why Care Work Is Inextricably Linked To Challenges Of Climate Change
Mary Kay Henry, above photo, the SEIU’s first woman president, says a stable care force could help communities adapt to and survive natural disasters.
By Jessica Kutz
19thnews.org
May 13, 2022 - When Democratic policymakers including Rep. Alexandra Ocasio Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey tout their Green New Deal legislation, they are usually speaking about climate-related jobs — employment in clean energy production, environmental restoration or climate adaptation work in cities.
Their overarching goal is to create policies and jobs that will transition the country in a way that centers low-income communities of color — those most impacted by the climate crisis.
Mary Kay Henry, the first woman president of the Service Employees International Union and a supporter of the legislation, wants the country to consider incorporating another class of workers all together in climate policy: care workers. The SEIU represents about 2 million workers, including more than 800,000 home care workers, most of whom are women, Henry said.
America's biopharmaceutical companies are committed to applying the latest scientific knowledge to research and develop new treatments to support mental health.
It’s why SEIU partnered with the Green New Deal Network for a series of protests last month, to present a united front on climate and care work as they urged Congress to pass Build Back Better legislation before the midterms, which included $500 billion for climate action and $150 billion in home care funding. The bill has been stalled for months, with no support from Republicans and opposition from two Democratic senators blocking its passage.
Henry argues that a stable care force could play a crucial role in helping communities adapt and survive a future replete with worsening natural disasters like wildfires, heat waves, hurricanes and flooding events.
Including care work in the fight for climate action could also broaden opportunities for women.
Clean energy jobs, which pay on average $25 an hour, are still overwhelmingly held by men. Care jobs, on the other hand, pay on average $13.51 an hour and are predominantly filled by women, women of color and immigrants. Most workers don’t receive any additional benefits like retirement funds or health care, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The 19th spoke with Henry about the reasons for linking these two policy priorities, the role care work can play in a green economy and how her union pushes for climate-friendly legislation across the country. ...Read More
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The New Labor Movement Is Young, Worker-Led and Winning
From Starbucks and Amazon to political campaigns and digital media, workers in historically unorganized occupations are forming unions—and breathing new life into the U.S. labor movement.
By Katie Barrows & Ethan Miller
In These Times
MAY 9, 2022 - This year, May Day was celebrated during a historic moment for the American labor movement. Nearly every day, news reports announce another example of workers exercising their rights as nonprofit professionals, Starbucks workers, and employees at corporations like Amazon, REI and Conde Nast announce their union drives. The approval rating for labor unions has reached its highest point in over 50 years, standing at 68 percent, and petitions for new union elections at the National Labor Relations Board increased 57 percent during the first half of fiscal year 2021.
Three years ago, we wrote an op-ed about how young workers in historically unorganized occupations — such as digital journalism, higher education and nonprofit organizations — were beginning to rebuild the labor movement. Today, Covid-19 has changed the way that we relate to work and created new sources of economic anxiety, while exacerbating old ones. Yet, young workers continue to fuel the new labor movement as they form new unions to win back a degree of control over their futures in a world fundamentally altered by a global pandemic. With momentum in union organizing and worker activism still growing, it is important to recognize the ways that workers in every industry are helping the labor movement live up to its values and reverse the years-long decline in union density.
Through organizing campaigns at the Nonprofit Professional Employees Union, we’ve learned that successful new organizing campaigns must be member-led. Recent organizing victories at Amazon in Staten Island and at Starbucks stores across the country have reinforced the importance of workers themselves being empowered to be the drivers of their own organizing campaigns. We’ve also seen this in other traditionally unorganized sectors, such as political campaigns, digital media and tech.
There are a variety of reasons why member-led organizing campaigns tend to be more effective. One is the commitment that worker-led union organizing requires — leading a union organizing campaign is not for the faint of heart. Worker-leaders must be dedicated, and their time and energy investment means they have more skin in the game. Additionally, these workers build genuinely supportive relationships with their coworkers through one-on-one conversations, working in teams on union materials, and happy hours that bring more workers into the organizing drive. The relationships built during a worker-led organizing campaign helps workers to feel supported, as they know that their coworkers have their back. This collective approach also solidifies workers’ resolve to push back on empty rhetoric from their employer.
Member-driven campaigns are also key to combating bosses’ anti-union campaigns. When workers are active in setting campaign strategy, reaching out to their coworkers, and driving the narrative of the union campaign, they can successfully push back on corporate union-busters’ messaging that the union is a ?“third-party” or ?“outside agitator” — because workers know that they are their union.
The significance of momentum can not be understated. In all of these newly organized industries, we’ve seen the power a single union victory can have when it sparks a new consciousness among workers who previously didn’t know they could join a union, or didn’t think unions existed that understood and could address their specific concerns. Union wins years ago at Gawker, the Center for American Progress and Kickstarter helped incite the momentum for new organizing, and laid the groundwork for the campaigns we are seeing today.
We’ve also learned the importance of publicizing our unions’ tangible contract gains. Workers want to be a part of a union that’s effective at improving their pay, benefits, and working conditions, so we as a labor movement need to make the public aware of our wins. That’s why our union and others in newly organized spaces will shout our wins from the rooftops with press releases, social media posts, news stories, and through any other means that will spread the word.
Today’s unions are making incredible gains and raising workplace standards. For example, members of our union at the Center for American Progress recently won a new contract that raised starting salaries by 20 percent over three years, secured annual raises of between 2-2.5 percent, and codified junior staff’s right to be credited on research and policy publications that they work on. Union members at G/O Media ratified a new contract that raised the organization’s salary floor to $62,000, includes trans-inclusive healthcare and prevents forced relocation for remote staff. At NPR, union journalists won 20 weeks of paid parental leave, a hiring process that commits to interviewing more candidates from underrepresented groups, and regular pay equity reviews. The more folks outside of the labor movement know about these victories, the more they will want to learn more about forming a union in their own workplaces.
Millennials and Gen Z are excited, energized, and winning new gains and a new sense of power at work. For the labor movement to continue to grow, we must learn from each other, continue implementing the strategies that are winning union organizing campaigns, and support new, young leaders. ...Read More
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Mass Protest Is Rising — Can It Confront Global Capitalism?
Capitalism is pushing to expand on the backs of working masses
who can tolerate no more hardship and deprivation.
BY William I. Robinson
Truthout
May 14, 2022 - The world has entered an epoch of escalating class struggle and mass popular protest as the global economy teeters on the verge of recession and international tensions reach the boiling point in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Revolt took off around the globe in the aftermath of the 2008 world financial collapse that put an end to two decades of the “globalization boom.” Popular insurgencies have since escalated on the heels of the pandemic and, although particular movements may rise and fall, there is no letup in sight. The first four months of 2022 saw mass labor strikes and unionization drives breaking out in industries and countries around the world.
Meanwhile, civil strife and political conflict are spreading. As inequality increases exponentially and mass hardship and deprivation spread, global capitalism appears to be emerging from the contagion in a dangerous new phase, placing the world in a perilous situation that borders on global civil war.
In the two years leading up to the COVID-19 outbreak, more than 100 major anti-government protests swept the world, in rich and poor countries alike, toppling some 30 governments or leaders and sparking an escalation of state violence against protesters. From Chile to Lebanon, Iraq to India, France to the United States, Haiti to Nigeria, and South Africa to Colombia, mass popular struggles appeared in some instances to be acquiring an anti-capitalist character (although others were driven by right-wing sentiments). Anti-capitalist struggles brought together students, workers and often migrant workers, farmers, Indigenous communities, anti-racists, prisoners and activists against mass incarceration, democracy and anti-corruption activists, those struggling for autonomy or independence, anti-austerity campaigners, environmental advocates, and so on.
However, the “global spring” of 2017-2019 was but a peak moment in the popular insurgencies that spread in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse — a veritable tsunami of proletarian rebellion not seen in decades. The mass uprisings that followed the Great Recession, among them Occupy Wall Street (which started in the U.S. and sparked similar movements in dozens of countries), the Arab Spring, and the Greek workers movement, captured the worldwide popular imagination. Some of these struggles suffered setbacks and defeat. Still, the global revolt ebbed and flowed throughout the 2010s but did not die down, and a fresh wave broke out in 2017.
The pandemic lockdown pushed protesters off the streets in early 2020. But the lull was momentary: Within weeks of the lockdown, protesters were out in force again despite the quarantine and the dangers of public congregation. Alongside these mobilizations, protests against the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020 sparked an anti-racist uprising that brought upwards to 25 million mostly young people into the streets of hundreds of cities across the country, the single largest mass protest in U.S. history. Many Black Lives Matter protesters called for the defunding of police departments — and for investment in a broad range of social services and supports. This call for expanding a social safety net posed a direct challenge to neoliberal capitalism, which funnels state dollars out of working class communities and social welfare programs and into policing, “defense,” and corporate welfare. Moreover, the BLM protests spurred solidarity actions throughout the world as 2020 wore on.
The Pew Research Center has been conducting ongoing polls in the U.S. on views toward capitalism and socialism (although, of course, what people understand to be capitalism and socialism is not clear). According to its 2019 poll, a full 42 percent of U.S. respondents had a favorable view of socialism, although the Pew poll did not break down responses by age groups. But a 2018 Gallup poll found that 51 percent of those aged 18-29 had a favorable view of socialism. Seen in historical context, another Gallup poll found that support for socialism stood at 25 percent in 1942 among the U.S. population overall whereas this increased to 43 percent in 2019.
Revealingly, yet another poll found that support for socialism in the U.S. jumped by nearly 10 percent among young people in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic. This poll found that a full 60 percent of millennials and 57 percent of Generation Z supported a “complete change of our economic system away from capitalism.” Worldwide, a 2020 poll found that a majority of people around the world (56 percent) believe capitalism is doing more harm than good.
On a national level, according to the poll, lack of trust in capitalism was highest in Thailand and India (75 percent and 74 percent, respectively), with France close behind (69 percent). Majorities rejected capitalism in many Asian, European, Gulf, African, and Latin American countries. In fact, only in Australia, Canada, the U.S., South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan did majorities disagree with the assertion that capitalism currently did more harm than good.
Masses expressed this anti-capitalist sentiment in an escalation of protest during the pandemic itself. A palpable radicalization appeared to take place among workers and the poor, a heightened sense of solidarity within and across borders that intensified during the pandemic. In the U.S., for instance, no less than 1,000 strikes ripped across the country in the first six months of the contagion. Workers mounted protests to demand their safety. Meanwhile tenants called for rent strikes; immigrant justice activists surrounded detention centers; anti-incarceration organizers demanded the release of prisoners; auto, fast-food and meat processing workers went out on wildcat stoppages to force factories to shut down; homeless people occupied empty houses; and health care workers on the front lines demanded the personal protective equipment they needed to do their jobs and stay safe. For the most part wildcat strikes were organized not by union leadership but from the rank and file.
COVID-19 was thus the lightning bolt before the thunder. “Just a few weeks after lockdowns were widely imposed, protests began to reemerge,” noted the Carnegie Endowment. “Already in April [2020], the number of new protests rose to a high level; approximately one new significant anti-government protest every four days.” And there was no letup to mass protest in 2021, fueled, in the words of the Endowment, by an increasingly authoritarian political landscape and “rising economic insecurity” that “brought public frustration of the boiling point.” It added that many countries that did not previously appear in the tracker registered protests that year. Then, as the global class struggle heated up, the first four months of 2022 saw mass labor strikes breaking out in industries and countries around the world.
Devastating Effects of Capitalist Globalization
In all of their diversity, many of these fights had — and have — a common underlying denominator: an aggressive global capitalism in crisis that is pushing to expand on the backs of working masses who can tolerate no more hardship and deprivation. Capitalist states face spiraling crises of legitimacy after decades of hardship and social decay wrought by neoliberalism, aggravated by these states’ inability to manage the COVID contagion and the economic free-fall it triggered. The extent of polarization of wealth and power, of deprivation and misery among the world’s poor majority, already defied belief prior to the outbreak. In 2018, just 17 global financial conglomerates collectively managed $41.1 trillion dollars, more than half the gross domestic product of the entire planet. That same year, the richest 1 percent of humanity led by 36 million millionaires and 2,400 billionaires controlled more than half of the world’s wealth while the bottom 80 percent — nearly 6 billion people — had to make do with just 5 percent of this wealth.
Worldwide, 50 percent of all people live on less than $2.50 a day and a full 80 percent live on less than $10 per day. One in three people on the planet suffer from some form of malnutrition, nearly a billion go to bed hungry each night and another 2 billion suffer from food insecurity. Refugees from war, the climate crisis, political repression and economic collapse already number in the hundreds of millions as the social fabric is torn apart and whole communities collapse in peripheral areas. The pandemic followed by the repercussions from the Russian invasion of Ukraine have heightened these conditions even further.
The international development agency Oxfam reported this past January that during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic the 10 richest men in the world more than doubled their fortunes, from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion, while 99 percent of humanity saw a fall in their income and 160 million more people fell into poverty. The World Food Program (WFP) reported in May that “the outlook for global acute food insecurity in 2022 is expected to deteriorate further relative to 2021,” a year which, according to the WFP, “surpassed all previous records.” The war in Ukraine “is likely to exacerbate the already severe 2022 acute food insecurity forecasts, given the repercussions of the war on global food, energy and fertilizer prices and supplies.”
Hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of people, have been displaced from countrysides in the Global South in recent decades by neoliberal policies, social cleansing and organized violence such the “war on drugs” and the “war on terror,” both of which have served as instruments of mass displacement and for the violent restructuring and integration of countries and regions into the new global economy. Those displaced stream into the megacities of the world that have become ground zero for mass protests.
The International Labour Office reported that 1.53 billion workers around the world were in “vulnerable” employment arrangements in 2009, representing more than 50 percent of the global workforce, and that in 2018 a majority of the 3.5 billion workers in the world “experienced a lack of material well-being, economic security, equality opportunities or scope for human development.”
As digitalization now drives a new round of worldwide restructuring it promises to extend the precariatization of workers who have employment and also to expand the ranks of humanity excluded from the labor market, while the climate crisis will generate water and food shortages, displace hundreds of millions more, and increase exposure to natural disasters.
This social crisis is explosive. It fuels mass protest by the oppressed and leads the ruling groups to deploy an ever more omnipresent global police state to contain the rebellion of the global working and popular classes. As the global civil war heats up in the post-pandemic world, the social fabric is coming undone. The crisis generates enormous political tensions that must be managed by the ruling groups in the face of societal disintegration and political collapse in many countries. It animates geopolitical conflict as states seek to externalize social and political tensions and accelerates the breakdown of the post-World War II international order, increasing the danger of international military conflagration (witness the Ukraine conflict).
Pandemic Repression and Global Police State
COVID-19 was in certain respects a blessing in disguise for the ruling class. The contagion forced protesters off the streets momentarily and gave capitalist states a respite with which to gather their repressive forces and deploy them against restive populations. The wave of repression and brutality unleashed by these states against their own citizens simply cannot be explained by the need for these states to keep them safe. To the contrary, the pandemic provided an expedient smokescreen with which to push back against the global revolt.
The case of India is revealing. Up to 150 million workers went on strike in January 2019. This was followed later that year by months of protest against proposed changes to a citizenship law that would discriminate against Muslims and by a second general strike in 2020 that brought out 250 million workers and farmers — the single largest labor mobilization in world history. The pandemic curfew imposed by the government conveniently undercut the civic uprising. When the government began to impose strict local lockdowns as the virus spread, it singled out neighborhoods identified with the protests. In these areas, heavy police barricades locked in residents for weeks. The government also forced tens of millions of striking migrant workers to march to their home villages for lockdown there, enduring on the way pitiless state repression, involving extreme dehumanization, deaths in custody, and mass arrests (all this while Mukesh Ambani, the richest man in India, increased his wealth by $12 million per hour during the pandemic).
In the United States, a wave of worker mobilizations that spread even before the COVID-19 contagion, led by a number of mass teacher strikes in 2018 and 2019, exploded during the pandemic, thanks to dismal working and unsafe working conditions in schools amid the pandemic.
The monumental 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings were met with particularly brutal state repression. Fearful of losing control, the ruling groups left no holds barred in unleashing the state’s repressive apparatus against the largely peaceful protesters, leaving at least 14 dead, hundreds of wounded and some 10,000 arrested. (I myself participated in the protests in my city of residence, Los Angeles, where I witnessed the use by militarized police and national guard units of tear gas, stun grenades, taser guns, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and batons against protesters.)
Governments around the world centralized the response to the pandemic and many declared states of emergencies, in effect, imposing what some called “medical martial law.” Such centralized coordination may have been necessary to confront the health crisis. But centralization of emergency powers in authoritarian capitalist states was used to deploy police and military forces, to censure any criticism of governments, to contain discontent, heighten surveillance and impose repressive social control — that is, to push forward the global police state. In country after country, emergency powers were used to selectively ban protests on the grounds that they spread COVID-19, harass dissidents, censor journalists and scapegoat minority groups. At least 158 governments imposed restrictions on demonstrations.
In many countries, governments required citizens to carry documents verifying their “right” to be out of their homes during the lockdown. The idea seems to have been merely to get populations accustomed to producing papers on demand, to ask permission to exist in public space. In the Philippines, strongman President Rodrigo Duterte issued shoot-to-kill orders for anyone defying the stay-at-home lockdown, while his government stepped up its campaign of extra-judicial killing of thousands of supposed criminals. In Latin America, charged Amnesty International, governments turned to arbitrary, punitive and repressive tactics to enforce compliance with quarantine measures and clamp down on popular protest. “Added to the structural challenges and massive social and economic divides present prior to the pandemic, these measures only combine to perpetuate inequality and discrimination across the continent.” Such repression was widespread around the world.
As I detail in my new book, Global Civil War: Capitalism-Post Pandemic, in country after country the pandemic provided capitalist states with a convenient pretext to crack down on the global revolt, tighten systems of mass surveillance and social control, and pass emergency legislation that gave them sweeping powers to repress the protest movements that had reached a crescendo on the eve of the outbreak.
While a major government response may have been necessary from a public health point of view, it became clear that the “new normal” as the world emerged from the pandemic would involve a more extensive global police state, including permanent mass surveillance and a new biopolitical regime in which states could use “public health” as a new pretext for keeping a lid on the global revolt. States used what international relations scholar Kees van der Pijl referred to as a “bio-political emergency” to further normalize and institutionalize state surveillance and repressive control in a way reminiscent of the aftermath of the 2001 attacks. In the wake of those attacks, 140 countries passed draconian “anti-terrorist” security legislation that often made legal the repression of social movements and political dissent. The laws remained in place long after the 2001 events.
Political Violence Pandemics
A recent report by Lloyd’s of London, a global insurance and financial conglomerate, warned that “instances of political violence contagion are becoming more frequent” and headed towards what it terms “PV [political violence] pandemics.” It identified so-called “super-strains” of political violence. Among what Lloyd’s deems as these super-strains are “anti-imperialist” “independence movements,” social movements calling for the removal of an “occupying force,” “mass pro-reform protests against national government[s],” and “armed insurrection” inspired by “Marxism” and “Islamism.”
State responses to this “political violence” are big business. According to a 2016 report, Global Riot Control System Market, 2016–2020, which was prepared by a global business intelligence firm whose clients include Fortune 500 companies, in the next few years there will be a multi-billion-dollar boom in the worldwide market for “riot control systems.” The report forecast “a dramatic rise in civil unrest around the world.”
Historically, labor militancy and mass protest unfold in waves, calibrated to capitalist expansion and crises, wars and major political changes. The ruling groups managed to beat back the last major cycle of worldwide mobilization from below, in the 1960s and early 1970s, through capitalist globalization and the neoliberal counterrevolution. But this time circumstances are different. Global capitalism is reaching limits to its expansion, given the ecological meltdown and the escalating threat of nuclear confrontation. The crisis is unprecedented and also existential. In addition, the global economy and society are more integrated and interdependent than ever, and global communications connect communities in resistance with one another across borders and on a planetary scale.
Short of overthrowing the system, the only way out of the social crisis for the mass of humanity is a reversal of escalating inequalities through a radical redistribution of wealth and power downward and through drastic environmental measures. The challenge for emancipatory struggles is how to translate mass revolt into a project that can challenge the power of global capital and bring about such a radical redistribution. To date, the global revolt has spread unevenly and faces many challenges, including fragmentation, absorption by capitalist culture, and for the most part the lack of coherent left ideology and a vision of a transformative project beyond immediate demands. To effectively fight back, disjointed movements must find ways to come together into a larger emancipatory project, and develop creative strategies to push such a project forward.
William I. Robinson is a distinguished professor of sociology, global studies and Latin American studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
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CHANGEMAKER PUBLICATIONS: Recent works on new paths to socialism and the solidarity economy
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This Week's History Lesson:
The Revolutionary 1965 Supreme Court
Decision That Declared Sex a Private Affair
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Photo: Before the critical 1965 Supreme Court ruling Griswold v. Connecticut, state and federal morality laws prohibited access to contraceptives, even to married couples (above: a picketer protests the opening of a new Planned Parenthood Center in New Haven, Connecticut). Bettman, Getty Images
A Smithsonian curator of medicine and science looks back to the days when police could arrest couples for using contraception
By Alexandra M. Lord
National Museum of American HIstory
Just a few weeks before her wedding in the fall of 1954, my mother asked her physician for advice about birth control. The doctor gently informed her that he could not provide her with this information. It was illegal under state and federal laws.
On her honeymoon she became pregnant, but later miscarried. To ferret out advice about birth control she turned to her friends. They had grown up middle class. And unlike her and her working-class family, they had access to doctors and medical practitioners that were providing women with the tools, information and guidance for avoiding unwanted pregnancies. It was through this network, that my parents found the information that they needed to delay starting a family; my oldest sibling was born three years after they married, and my parents chose to limit their family to four children.
Throughout most of the 20th century, my mother’s story was common. Access to information about safe and effective contraception, like condoms and how to use them, was hidden to many, yet accessible to predominantly white, middle-class men and women. All of this began to change in the 1950s and 1960s, the period when my mother and thousands of other American women learned, in guarded whispers, about which doctor would provide information about birth control.
These items, held in the collections of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, document a period when access to contraception was illegal. Those with connections, however, managed to find physicians to help with family planning information. This diaphragm fitting ring set dates to roughly 1930 to 1960.
Family physicians had reason to be reluctant. In 1873, Congress had passed the Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use, which was nicknamed the Comstock Act after social reformer Anthony Comstock, who had agitated for its passage. This federal law sparked a series of state laws that further limited access to contraceptives and information about birth control.
But as in every society, people who could have children aggressively sought out contraceptives, laws or no laws. Twentieth-century Americans were no different. In the Smithsonian’s collections, mid-20th century artifacts such as a diaphragm-fitting ring set, dating from between 1930 to 1960, reveal that physicians did assist patients in accessing contraceptives. Similarly, vending machines, which claimed to sell condoms only as disease preventatives, provided people with condoms, which were then used as contraceptives.
The state of Connecticut had some of the nation’s most severe anti-contraception laws, dating back to the late 19th century. Whether married or not, Connecticut citizens caught using contraceptives were subject to at least 60 days in jail, a hefty fine, or both. Physicians and nurses providing contraceptives were deemed accessories to the crime and liable to prison, a fine, or both.
Yet by the 1960s, those in the know had to access to information about contraceptives. They knew which doctor would provide married women with this information and which doctor was prepared to go out on a limb and provide unmarried women with this information. In some areas, doctors provided this information secretly and in other areas, they did so openly. Despite this, the state police regularly turned a blind eye, refusing to enforce the law.
As a result, Connecticut had one of the lowest birth rates in the nation, although many women who, like my mother, didn’t have access to the right information, still struggled to obtain contraception.
Long before the 1960s, physicians, public health advocates and others had repeatedly attempted to challenge Connecticut’s ban on contraception, hoping to overturn the law. But each time, they met with failure. Court decisions veered into the absurd. In 1942, judges on the state’s high court not only upheld the contraceptive ban for married couples, they also advocated “another method, positive and certain in result…[which] is abstinence from intercourse.” ...Read More
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The ‘Poppies’ Growing ‘Transgressive Journalism’
WEEKLY BULLETIN OF THE MEXICO SOLIDARITY PROJECT
from the May 18, 2022 Bulletin
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n the state of Guerrero, a new journalism is growing. We speak this week with two key players helping that growth along. Marlén Castro, a founder and reporter for the independent media collective Amapola Periodismo, is currently working from the capital of Guerrero, Chilpancingo.
Manuel Mancillas-Gomez, born in Tijuana, now teaches English as a second language at California’s Cuyamaca College in San Diego and serves as the Academic Senate president.
Marlén, why did you and other reporters create the independent digital media outlet, Amapola Periodismo, in Guerrero state?
Marlén Castro: Reporting was simply what I was happy doing when I started on a career path as a young woman. I didn’t have a goal of using media for social justice. In the capital where I still live, we had many local media outlets, and I got a job at El Sol de Chilpancingo, the most trusted paper in town. But when I wrote articles critical of local officials, I found out that these reports would not get published. The ruling party, the PRI, controlled the paper. That made me very uncomfortable, and I felt that Guerrero needed an independent news source.
How did you choose the name “Amapola” — “Poppy” — and why do you describe your reporting as “transgressive?”
The official narrative deems Guerrero a violent state dominated by criminal activity that deals with an illicit crop, heroin from the amapola. We aim to dismantle that story. The poppy has its own longer history, as a beautiful flower grown in our gardens for generations. And the people of Guerrero produce much more than heroin. They produce food for the people. We know that the heroin supplies a US market and that the control over the drug trade sits far away, in El Norte.
We want to provoke people to think differently about Guerrero. We give our intended audience, the people of Guerrero, the truth, both about the ineffectiveness and corruption of our local government, but also about the positive things that ordinary citizens are doing to make Guerrero a wonderful place to live. We write, for example, about locals who make chocolate, have tea shops, or make arts and crafts.
We see the poppy as a perfect symbol for our journalism, something indigenous that brightens our gardens, but also something that impacts the entire society. ...Read More
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There are hundreds of video courses here, along with study guides, downloadable books and links to hundreds of other resources for study groups or individuals.
Nearly 10,000 people have signed on to the OUL for daily update, and more than 150,000 have visited us at least once.
Karl Marx's ideas are a common touchstone for many people working for change. His historical materialism, his many contributions to political economy and class analysis, all continue to serve his core values--the self-emancipation of the working class and a vision of a classless society. There are naturally many trends in Marxism that have developed over the years, and new ones are on the rise today. All of them and others who want to see this project succeed are welcome here.
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Video for Learning: Dr. Oz terrible campaign | Last Week Tonight with John Oliver 5.5 min
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Harry Targ's 'Diary of a Heartland Radical'
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This week's topic:
WHERE SHOULD THE PEACE MOVEMENT STAND? IMPERIALISM, WAR, AND/OR DIPLOMACY
Click the picture to access the blog.
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Tune of the Week: Otis Redding - Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay ...4:45 minutes
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TV Review: ‘Meltdown: Three Mile Island’
Is a Methodical Look at an American Disaster
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By Daniel D'Addario
Variety
The partial meltdown at the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 was a perfect coalescing of factors in two senses. First, a series of cascading mechanical and human errors brought the plant close to a catastrophe that would have potentially made much of the East Coast uninhabitable, we’re told in the new documentary “Meltdown: Three Mile Island.” Second, coming as it did both within memory of the height of Cold War paranoia and days after the release of the film “The China Syndrome,” the disaster was perfectly primed to set off anxieties about the danger of atomic energy.
“Meltdown: Three Mile Island,” a new four-part documentary on Netflix, does an elegant job of braiding those two truths — that Three Mile Island was a narrowly averted nightmare scenario and that it lives on in the public imagination as an argument against nuclear energy. It can default, especially in its early going, to tools of the trade that feel underbaked — reenactments of, say, a phone ringing in a school where children wait for news about the disaster, the camera somewhat schlockily pushing in to amp up what’s already dramatic enough. But the power of the story “Meltdown” tells, as well as the insight of those on whom director Kief Davidson trains his camera, ultimately carries the day.
The reenactments and overtly sentimental touches are most noticeable in the early going, focused on the incident itself and its immediate aftermath. But that only represents the beginning of the saga, and the less interesting part besides. As “Meltdown” goes on, Rick Parks, an engineer with the engineering corporation Bechtel, comes to the forefront; he describes in sharply drawn detail manners in which the cleanup operation, in an attempt to save money and time, was shoddy to the point of risking further contaminating the air and land around Three Mile Island with radiation. (One anecdote, about the implementation of duct tape in the cleanup process, must be heard to be believed.)
Parks, whose life — and whose health, he purports — was thrown off course by his role in the Three Mile Island story, is at once a fascinating character and a welcome guide to the long tail of this story. The incident at Three Mile Island set in motion a botched cleanup that was as effective an argument as could be marshalled against the use of what is, when conducted safely, a clean source of energy. (One compelling piece of contemporaneous footage comes when a homegrown anti-nuclear power activist turns a Pennsylvania town meeting into a roaring display of might, urging her neighbors to voice their disapproval of venting the gas built up within the plant.)
By contrast, Parks is not an ideologue, although he put a lot on the line in order to make sure the cleanup happened safely (just how much is a revelation that “Meltdown” makes deliberately, after nicely establishing the context and the stakes). He seems to be, though, a believer that what went wrong at Three Mile Island was, first, a series of errors and, more perniciously, a calculation of what corners to cut. “We’ll never have a viable nuclear industry in this country,” Parks tells the camera, “until we take the profit motive out of it.” A slow burn of well-controlled indignation, “Meltdown” makes Parks’ case methodically and well. ...Read More
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Book Review: How Alice Became an Activist
By Adam Schragin
Against the Current
ALICE EMBREE’S MEMOIR, Voice Lessons, weaves stories of inner and societal change to tell the story of a radical awakening in small town Austin, Texas and paints a carefully considered portrait of a life in and of movements.
The book begins with a sketch of a childhood in a much smaller, much more segregated Austin: “Fewer than 160,000 lived in Austin in 1955, and the thundering roars of jet-propelled commercial flights were far in the distant future,” she writes. Behavioral observation is a skill Embree learns early, and not infrequently what she sees is acquiescence to oppression.
In the ’50s topics like menstruation and birth control were taboo, and she also watches as the adults in her immediate family trip around the subject of her mother’s cancer as if the disease was a personal failing.
A telling incident occurs in 1961 when Embree is on a school trip as part of the “Red Jackets,” the Austin High drill squad. The Red Jackets were integrated, and after being turned away from one restaurant, at the next “a waitress came over, addressing Glodine [a Black student] in the sweetest voice, ‘I’m sorry, honey, we just can’t serve you here.’”
Embree recalls, “I wasn’t afraid to speak up, but I expected others to respond, to get up as well. No one else did. The adult sponsors didn’t intervene. They didn’t follow us outside…it was the silence that shocked me.”
Breaking up the silence becomes a passion for Embree at The University of Texas, where she joins the Students for a Democratic Society, picketing and sitting in at segregated lunch counters. She develops her voice by working as a typist and editorial assistant (charmingly referred to as a “Shitteworker”) at the countercultural ’zine The Rag, and then as a writer full stop.
Many memoirs by authors radicalized in the ’60s use the decade as the central ballast for their stories, but for Embree that time serves as a springboard first into women’s liberation and then more broadly into “intersectionality.” The process is gradual, but it all leads back to one moment, a phone call that Embree says “changed my life.”
She had moved to New York with her then-partner Jeff Shero* to launch another countercultural magazine called The Rat. While Shero is taking a break from The Rat to work on a book in Mississippi, he is notified that the publication has been taken over by women in his absence. Embree overhears him on a phone call describing his former colleagues as “bourgeois bitches.”
Suddenly, “the personal became wrenchingly political,” as she puts it, and “an unfamiliar rage, rooted in a thousand dismissals, came to a rolling boil.” Shero later told editor Abe Peck that Embree “exploded like I’d only seen Black people go hysterical in the South.”
A realization that her partner’s progressiveness only extended to where his comfort zone ended — and beyond that was a politics indistinguishable from mainstream male chauvinism and racism — spurred Embree to search for a truly inclusive movement, one founded by women and led by women.
Embree eventually leaves Shero and becomes fully ensconced in this new activism back in Texas, involving not just a feminist awakening at The Rag but the formation of the Austin Women’s Center and a women’s birth control hotline, which Embree says addressed “two issues women faced: access to birth control and access to safe, legal abortions.”
Embree stepped into more leadership roles. She became an organizer of the Texas Media Conference and in her off time placed a hex on the LBJ library with her sisters in WITCH (the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell).
Feminism was Embree’s driving force in the ’70s, and she formed or joined grassroots organizations like the Austin Women Workers, the Austin Women’s Health Organization and more. And while in the ’60s Embree’s interest in democracy abroad led to her getting involved with the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), in the following decade her international advocacy expanded, especially after Chilean president Salvador Allende was deposed and killed in a military coup in 1973.
Embree and other Austin activists responded first by crashing CIA director William Colby’s speech at the University of Texas, and later creating The Austin Committee for Human Rights in Chile, active from 1977 until democracy was restored in that country in 1989.
One potential pitfall for memoirists is the tendency to embellish potential or personality, which Embree avoids through honest appraisal. “We were like butterflies, with the gunk of the chrysalis still stuck to our wings, the legacy of ’50s expectations shrouding our vision,” she says, and later writes: “Our concept of revolutionary change was, to put it mildly, naive.”
Embree is one of many activist memoirists to reach a similar conclusion, but what sets her apart is optimism. “The energy level of younger activists, new to the struggle, is both exhilarating and exhausting,” she states toward the end of her book, and tells me via email that she was “elated” when leftist Gabriel Boric won the Chilean presidential election.
For her part, Embree expresses that “I hope I bring a sense of staying power, a reminder not that we did things better in the ’60s and ’70s but that movements in our younger years changed the trajectory of our lives, not for a decade or two but for a lifetime.”
Activists lucky enough to have met Embree can attest to her knowledge and strong example, to say nothing of her staying power. For those who haven’t had the pleasure, Voice Lessons is an excellent introduction.
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