Campaigning for Democracy And Socialism.
Critical Question: Is There a Common Good?
'Yes' seems the obvious answer. Yet at least a third of the country is carrying on like there is no such thing, or if there is, we need to defeat it.

As the cartoon to the right suggests, we have to organize, both to assert its reality and to expand and defend it.

We have little choice, given the humanity-destroying crises we face: a renewed pandemic, climate catastrophe, vast inequalities globally and at home and a white supremacist order in its dangerous death throes, to name a few.

We learn about them with our pessimism of the intellect. We defeat them by also using our optimism of the will.
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Tim Sheard, Hardball Press: Thanks so much for the LeftLinks issue, it's packed with great articles. I wonder if, in the article on Goldberg's thoughts on loneliness and authoritarian regimes, if it's not appropriate to describe the white evangelical groups as clerical fascists. That's the phrase I grew up with.

Also, I don't think Goldberg so much claims loneliness causes authoritarian regimes as that it uses lonely people as willing executioners? Just a thought,

John Case, Talkin' Socialism. Dan Kovalik, a longtime and tireless critic of imperial actions of the US in Latin America, attorney and Steelworker. He joins us 10am Eastern Sat, July 31 to discuss the latest Biden confrontations with Cuba, and connections to Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, Haiti, and more. Join us at our Zoom Meeting.

Photo: James Campbell, presente! A founding leader of CCDS, whose memorial is being planned this month in South Carolina

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We see the immediate problem of defeating the GOP Trumpists. This task is framed by the centrality of a path forward focused on taking down white supremacy, along with all other forms of oppression and exploitation. Naturally, this will include important battles within the Democratic party as well. This is the path to class unity and popular solidarity.

We are partisans of the working class and the oppressed--here and in all countries. We explore all the new challenges of shaping and fighting for a democracy and socialism for the 21st Century.

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Latest News
‘The War Has Changed’: Internal CDC Document Urges New Messaging, Warns Delta Infections Likely More Severe

The internal presentation shows that the agency thinks it is struggling to communicate on vaccine efficacy amid increased breakthrough infections

By Carolyn Y. Johnson and Joel Achenbach
Washington Post

July 29, 2021 - The delta variant of the coronavirus appears to cause more severe illness than earlier variants and spreads as easily as chickenpox, according to an internal federal health document that argues officials must “acknowledge the war has changed.”

The document is an internal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention slide presentation, shared within the CDC and obtained by The Washington Post. It captures the struggle of the nation’s top public health agency to persuade the public to embrace vaccination and prevention measures, including mask-wearing, as cases surge across the United States and new research suggests vaccinated people can spread the virus.

The document strikes an urgent note, revealing the agency knows it must revamp its public messaging to emphasize vaccination as the best defense against a variant so contagious that it acts almost like a different novel virus, leaping from target to target more swiftly than Ebola or the common cold.

It cites a combination of recently obtained, still unpublished data from outbreak investigations and outside studies showing that vaccinated individuals infected with delta may be able to transmit the virus as easily as those who are unvaccinated. Vaccinated people infected with delta have measurable viral loads similar to those who are unvaccinated and infected with the variant.

“I finished reading it significantly more concerned than when I began,” Robert Wachter, chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, wrote in an email.

CDC scientists were so alarmed by the new research that the agency earlier this week significantly changed guidance for vaccinated people even before making new data public.

The data and studies cited in the document played a key role in revamped recommendations that call for everyone — vaccinated or not — to wear masks indoors in public settings in certain circumstances, a federal health official said. That official told The Post that the data will be published in full on Friday. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky privately briefed members of Congress on Thursday, drawing on much of the material in the document.

One of the slides states that there is a higher risk among older age groups for hospitalization and death relative to younger people, regardless of vaccination status. Another estimates that there are 35,000 symptomatic infections per week among 162 million vaccinated Americans.

The document outlines “communication challenges” fueled by cases in vaccinated people, including concerns from local health departments about whether coronavirus vaccines remain effective and a “public convinced vaccines no longer work/booster doses needed.”

The presentation highlights the daunting task the CDC faces. It must continue to emphasize the proven efficacy of the vaccines at preventing severe illness and death while acknowledging milder breakthrough infections may not be so rare after all, and that vaccinated individuals are transmitting the virus. The agency must move the goal posts of success in full public view.

The CDC declined to comment.

“Although it’s rare, we believe that at an individual level, vaccinated people may spread the virus, which is why we updated our recommendation,” according to the federal health official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “Waiting even days to publish the data could result in needless suffering and as public health professionals we cannot accept that.”

The presentation came two days after Walensky announced the reversal in guidance on masking among people who are vaccinated. On May 13, people were told they no longer needed to wear masks indoors or outdoors if they had been vaccinated. The new guidance reflects a strategic retreat in the face of the delta variant. Even people who are vaccinated should wear masks indoors in communities with substantial viral spread or when in the presence of people who are particularly vulnerable to infection and illness, the CDC said.

The document presents new science but also suggests a new strategy is needed on communication, noting that public trust in vaccines may be undermined when people experience or hear about breakthrough cases, especially after public health officials have described them as rare.

Matthew Seeger, a risk communication expert at Wayne State University in Detroit, said a lack of communication about breakthrough infections has proved problematic. Because public health officials had emphasized the great efficacy of the vaccines, the realization that they aren’t perfect may feel like a betrayal.

“We’ve done a great job of telling the public these are miracle vaccines,” Seeger said. “We have probably fallen a little into the trap of overreassurance, which is one of the challenges of any crisis communication circumstance.”

The CDC’s revised mask guidance stops short of what the internal document calls for. “Given higher transmissibility and current vaccine coverage, universal masking is essential to reduce transmission of the Delta variant,” it states.

The document makes clear that vaccination provides substantial protection against the virus. But it also states that the CDC must “improve communications around individual risk among [the] vaccinated” because that risk depends on a host of factors, including age and whether someone has a compromised immune system.

The document includes CDC data from studies showing that the vaccines are not as effective in immunocompromised patients and nursing home residents, raising the possibility that some atrisk individuals will need an additional vaccine dose. ...Read More
Medicare for All Is Not Enough
The Two Souls of Socialized Medicine
Photo: Socialized Medicine: Iraq veteran Joshua Pitcher works with an occupational therapist at the James A. Haley Veterans Hospital in Tampa, Florida. The veterans' health system in the U.S. is funded and operated by the government.

By Martha Sonnenberg
New Politics
Summer 2021 

Acute social disturbances and crises, because they change the nature of everyday human experience, often lead to changes in social and political consciousness. Following the ravages of the Black Plague in the 14th century (1347–1350), people across Western Europe saw the inability of priests to intervene for their protection. Old certainties and beliefs about religious orthodoxies were overturned.

People lost faith in the status quo, and this led, eventually, to a more humanistic and secular worldview, typified by the Renaissance. Class relationships were also upended. Across the continent, there were many political rebellions, the most well-known being the Ciompi Revolt of 1378, in Florence. The Ciompi were wool carders and weavers, but the name referred generically to all the poor workers and artisans whose successful uprising enabled them to take over the Florentine government for four years.1

Today, the overwhelming morbidity and mortality of the COVID-19 pandemic, with its consequent social and economic devastation, has similarly dispelled the illusion of American exceptionalism and has revealed the inability of the current capitalist system to protect people’s health, livelihood, and their right to a fulfilling life. For the first time in decades, the word “socialism” enjoys new popularity. Younger activists, in particular, are showing a positive orientation to socialism.

Most dramatically and viscerally, the pandemic has exposed the failures of the American healthcare system: its inequity, its crippling bureaucracy, its fragmented and chaotic use of resources, its abuse of its own healthcare providers and workers, its inability to provide care to those who most need it, and its complete and dependent cohabitation with the insurance industry.

It is not surprising, therefore, that despite the many years of propaganda against “socialized medicine,” the American public, and healthcare providers, have become increasingly cognizant of these failures and consequently more open to options they might previously have rejected, including Medicare for All, or universal health insurance. Even the ordinarily apolitical New England Journal of Medicine published an article that discussed Medicare for All as a reasonable option.2 There are distinctions between universal health insurance and Medicare for All, but for the purposes of this article, I use the terms interchangeably.

The progressive left has seen this change in thinking as an opening to promote and build a movement for universal health insurance. For instance, an article published by the Sanders Institute—a think tank formed in conjunction with Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential run—declared: “Medicare for All can be the health wing of the broader justice movement.… In demanding guaranteed healthcare through Medicare for All, we are demanding a more just and humane society.”3 This same impetus can be seen in a 2019 article published in Jacobin, in which Benjamin Fong and Christie Offenbacher write: “Medicare for All is more than just a matter of fixing our broken healthcare system. And it’s more than just a good policy. It’s the perfect fight to pick with our ruling class—one that can unlock the power of a mass working-class movement in the United States.”4

Of course, there is no question that universal health insurance would be an enormous improvement in the American healthcare system—“Everybody in, nobody out,” in the words of the late Dr. Quentin Young, a longtime supporter of universal health insurance.5 It would cover every resident in the United States for all medically necessary services, including physicians, hospital care, long-term care, prescriptions, and mental, dental, and vision care. It would go a long way toward eliminating the racial, ethnic, and geographic inequities in access to healthcare. It would eliminate the interference of the insurance industry in medical care that so often causes conflicts between medical ethics and the profit-oriented demands of the insurance industry or corporate employers. And by separating health insurance from employment, universal health insurance would eliminate the premiums and out-of-pocket costs inherent in employer-sponsored plans.6 It would enable unemployed workers full access to healthcare and enable workers to leave jobs without fear of losing health insurance.

It is precisely because there has been such a change in the public’s understanding of the failures of the current healthcare system that we now see the potential for the left to expand its own vision of the changes we actually need in healthcare, beyond universal health insurance. Indeed, we have an opportunity to look more deeply into what socialized medicine might actually be, and how it might be realized.

The Limits of Medicare for All

Medicare for All is socialized health insurance—a unified system of public financing—and it does not pretend to be anything other than equitable access to care; it maintains private clinics, private physician practices, and private hospitals.

So while Medicare for All may be a necessary first step toward change in healthcare, it cannot challenge the quality, or current culture and class basis, of the way contemporary healthcare is delivered. On its own, Medicare for All is not sufficient to bring about the transformational creation of a healthcare system that can truly provide compassionate and quality care for patients, meaningful and safe work for healthcare workers, and a national public health service that can provide a safe and healthy environment for society as a whole.

When we look at the quality and the culture of the current healthcare system, we begin to appreciate the significance of what Medicare for All does not address. First, it misses the class-based medical hierarchy of healthcare, wherein the corporate employers are at the top, controlling the infrastructure and management of its institutions. Below the corporate level are the physicians, answerable to their employers but leading the delivery of care, primarily by issuing orders to be filled by nurses. Alongside, and sometimes below, the nurses are the support caregivers, the physical therapists, the nutritionists, the case managers, and various technicians. And at the bottom are the transport workers, kitchen staff, and custodial workers. This hierarchy leads to fragmentation of patient care as each group sees itself as separate from the others, with no need to coordinate care or recognize and communicate observed problems. Patients suffer from this fragmented and hierarchical system: it can lead to delays in care and services, to adverse effects from multiple medications, and to other errors in treatment.

Secondly, Medicare for All misses the effects that the pressures of privatized and profit-driven care have on healthcare workers at all levels of the hierarchy. From doctors to custodial workers, increasing numbers of people feel demoralized, disrespected, and devalued, leading to an increase in burnout, chemical dependency, depression, and suicide.

Thirdly, Medicare for All does not address the wide variability in the quality of care provided by individual doctors. While many physicians conscientiously practice evidence-based medicine, others maintain old habits of care that may be outdated, insufficient, or outright dangerous, or get their information about medications from drug company salespeople’s promotional pitches and advertisements, rather than from peer-reviewed research.

And finally, Medicare for All cannot address health issues beyond the purview of individual care—those more collective issues that affect the health of society as a whole, including issues of air quality, water safety, environmental protection, energy sourcing, transportation, food safety, immunization practices, problems of chemical dependency, pandemic preparation, and cohesive and strategic implementation of pandemic mitigation. The current public health system is weakened both by chronic underfunding and by the fragmentation of its multiple departments, agencies, and services. This conglomeration of entities provides no consistent public health infrastructure, and no consistent policy or messaging.

All of these issues must be addressed if we are to achieve new possibilities for healthcare. The sole focus on Medicare for All narrows our thinking about what we, as socialists, might envision as socialized healthcare.

What Is Socialized Medicine?

Conservatives have a long history of attacking universal health insurance as socialized medicine. This attack has deep roots in the United States. In 1945, the American Medical Association mounted strong opposition to the national health insurance plan proposed by President Harry S. Truman, despite his assurance that healthcare delivery would remain in the private sector. In response, AMA president Dr. Morris Fishbein said:

This is the first step toward the regimentation of utilities, of industry, of finance, and eventually of labor itself. This is the kind of regimentation that led to totalitarianism in Germany … no one will ever convince the physicians of America that the bill is not socialized medicine.7

A few years later, the AMA was joined by McCarthy-era anti-communists. The threat of German totalitarianism was supplanted by the threat of Soviet-style Stalinism as the subject of fear-mongering; red-baiters quickly suffocated any mention of national health insurance. Today, such condemnation of national health insurance as socialized medicine has become a mantra for the right, led most recently by Donald Trump.

The left, too, has sometimes associated Medicare for All with socialism. Fong and Offenbacher, in the Jacobin article referenced above, equate Medicare for All with “socialist policy,” further stating that the “Medicare for All system will be all the evidence we need to convince millions of people in America that democratic socialist politics is not only possible but also materially beneficial.”8

Thus, both the right and the left have subscribed to the conventional notion of socialized medicine, referring to government or state ownership and control of access to care, control of hospitals and care facilities, as well as the employment of physicians and other healthcare workers. The British National Health Service (NHS) is frequently cited as an example of socialized medicine.

I am proposing that we begin to look at socialized medicine not from this conventional perspective, but rather from that first articulated by scholar-activist Hal Draper in his 1966 article “The Two Souls of Socialism.”9 Draper famously viewed socialism in terms of “socialism from above,” and “socialism from below.” Socialism from above involved the imposition of plans, programs, positions, and policies to be handed down to (presumably) grateful masses, and over which those masses had no control. Socialism from below, on the other hand, involved social changes, plans, and policies that were realized through the agency and self-activity of those affected by those changes. To engage in socialism from below was for people to be actors in the making of their own history.

In terms of healthcare systems, socialized medicine from above would be consistent with Medicare for All (or the British NHS), as a primarily financial plan dispensed from above for the benefit of those below. Even when we consider the possibility of a unified, nationalized, and comprehensive public health system that addresses the collective health issues mentioned above, most current models (e.g., those in Denmark, Italy, and Finland) are based on control from above. No matter how beneficial they may be, all these healthcare systems hand down plans and policies from experts, managers, administrators, and bureaucrats to the people affected by these plans and policies. Journalist Laurie Garrett, in her comprehensive look at global public health systems, articulates the essence of socialized medicine from above, presenting it in its most benevolent form:

Public health is a bond—a trust … between a government and its people. The society at large entrusts its government to oversee and protect the collective good health. And in return, individuals agree to cooperate by providing tax monies, accepting vaccines, and abiding by the rules and guidelines laid out by government public health leaders.10

Envisioning Socialized Medicine from Below

Socialized medicine from below cannot be laid out as a definitive program. It must develop as a process over time, as people making change begin to feel empowered to create that socialized medicine. We can begin to envision how socialized medicine from below might evolve if we look at how people are surviving and living their lives in these times. Then we will also see the possibilities of liberation that are often hidden in the cultural crevices of their lives.

Community Activism

We can look to history for some clues about what socialized medicine from below might entail. Without accepting the authoritarian aspects of Maoism, we can appreciate the significance of China’s “barefoot doctors.” In the 1960s, China’s rural areas still had almost no medical care. The barefoot doctors were peasants, chosen by their fellow peasant farmers, to get three months of basic medical and paramedical training, after which they would go into rural areas with their own understanding of how peasants lived their lives. At times working alongside physicians, the barefoot doctors would provide basic medical services, preventive care, immunizations, sanitation, and health education.11 They educated their patients on these subjects, but they also educated themselves about the conditions of rural life and consequently played an important part in the modernization of healthcare in rural China.

Another historical example is the Black Panther Party’s programs of free breakfasts for children and free health clinics, which began in the late sixties. The free breakfasts addressed the nutritional needs of the community, while the free clinics brought preventive care and screening for genetic disorders such as sickle cell anemia, prevalent in their communities. Community activists, alongside nurses, doctors, and medical students, staffed the free clinics and empowered other members of the communities to provide these services. Significantly, these free clinics had roots in the civil rights movement, and gave rise to the Medical Committee for Human Rights. The Black Panthers brought to their communities a working model of how self-determined activity could advance public health.12

Of course, the power of community-centered activism has more contemporary examples, too. After Hurricane Sandy struck the U.S. Atlantic coast in 2012, community partnerships emerged to address health issues of low-income and immigrant workers. In speaking of her experience working with these partnerships, Dr. Sherry Baron said, “Focusing on the community and developing workplace exposure reduction programs with community partnership has been very successful in reaching a whole group of workers that we haven’t … reached in the past.”13

My own experience as a physician during the height of the AIDS epidemic was that initiatives undertaken by patients from the gay community had a significant impact on their care and on the subsequent behavior of doctors and hospitals. First of all, the patients corrected doctors who, reproducing an idea then conventional among the medical community, listed homosexuality as a medical problem. It was not a “problem” their patients explained; it was their life. They also demanded that they be referred to not as “victims” of AIDS, but rather as “people with AIDS,” thus asserting their agency in their relationship to the healthcare system. Further, patients’ loved ones refused to accept death as separate from life by demanding that the medical environment help them orchestrate a “good death,” insisting that hospitals allow friends, lovers, and family to be present at the bedside. This opened the door for the medical community to re-examine how it dealt with death.

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted more examples of grassroots efforts to create new methods of bringing healthcare to communities. For instance, in New York, the Bronx Rising Initiative empowered the healthier members of a neighborhood or community to make sure that the elderly, the disabled, and the immune-compromised got COVID-19 vaccine appointments. These community initiatives thus created their own solutions to the deficiencies in the government’s vaccination implementation plan.14 These community initiatives have pushed the United States government to address the inequities of vaccine distribution by developing ways to bring the vaccines, and the administration of vaccines, to underserved communities. ...Read More

Martha Sonnenberg is a retired physician who specialized in Infectious Diseases. She is a former Chief Medical Officer and a consultant in issues of hospital quality and safety.
Two Critical Battles Under the Democrat's Tent
Photo: Nina Turner (left) and Shontel Brown

In The Race Against Nina Turner, GOP Donors Fund Shontel Brown

With one week left in the Ohio primary, Republican donors have picked their Democrat — and the pro-Israel PAC supporting her.

By Matthew Cunningham-Cook
The Intercept

July 27 2021 - AS THE DEMOCRATIC primary for Ohio’s 11th Congressional District draws to a close, establishment pick Shontel Brown, a current Cuyahoga County Council Member and county Democratic Party chair, is facing a potential ethics probe for her past work supporting millions of dollars in contracts awarded to companies run by her partner and campaign donors.
According to a story published Tuesday by Newsweek and the Daily Poster, the Ohio Attorney General’s Office took interest in an earlier Intercept story and in June referred it to the state auditor’s office, where officials agreed the matter should go before the state ethics commission.

Meanwhile, and unrelated to the potential probe, newly released campaign finance disclosures show that Brown and a major Democratic PAC supporting her campaign have been heavily funded by donors who usually support Republicans.

The revelations come with just one week left in the contest between Brown and Nina Turner, a progressive former state senator who stumped for Sen. Bernie Sanders during his 2016 and 2020 presidential runs and who, to many observers, remains representative of his campaign against Hillary Clinton.

Clinton, a high-profile backer of Brown, notoriously lambasted Sanders as “not a Democrat,” and said that she was proud that her greatest enemies were “Republicans.” But in this case, finance reports show GOP donors flocking to Clinton’s chosen candidate in the heated congressional race.

With Clinton and Sanders again pitted against each other, this time via state-level surrogates, the special election race for Ohio’s 11th Congressional District has been described as a reflection of “party tensions.” In addition to Clinton, Democratic establishment figures like Rep. Jim Clyburn, DS.C., and well-funded super PACs have rallied behind Brown, while progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, DN.Y., and Justice Democrats have coalesced to support Turner.

Undergirding these tensions are donors with long histories of support for Republican candidates who are now funding Brown’s campaign, either directly or via the political action committee Democratic Majority for Israel, a major backer of her campaign.

Most notable among them is New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, a close ally of Donald Trump who donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration and has supported a slew of Republican candidates. A staunch supporter of Israel, Kraft in 2019 also launched and donated $20 million to a foundation to combat antiSemitism and the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, earning him a gala reception in Jerusalem to receive the Israeli Genesis Prize. Kraft has individually donated the election maximum $5,800 to Brown’s campaign, and with his family contributed more than $20,000. ...Read More
Photo: Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, chairs a Senate energy and natural resources committee hearing. Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP

The Democrat Blocking Progressive Change Is Beholden To Big Oil. Surprised? 

Joe Manchin owns millions of dollars in coal stock, founded an energy firm and Exxon lobbyists brag about their access to him. Republicans fundraise on his behalf

By Alex Kotch
The Guardian

July 20. 2021 - As “thousand-year” heat waves caused by the climate crisis rock the west coast and biblical floods engulf major cities, Senate Democrats are negotiating a $3.5tn budget package that could include an attempt to slow the use of fossil fuels over the next decade.

One prominent senator is very concerned about proposals to scale back oil, gas, and coal usage. He recently argued that those who want to “get rid of” fossil fuels are wrong. Eliminating fossil fuels won’t help fight global heating, he claimed, against all evidence. “If anything, it would be worse.”

Which rightwing Republican uttered these false, climate crisis denying words?

Wrong question. The speaker was a Democrat: Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

West Virginia is a major coal-producing state. But Manchin’s investment in dirty energy goes far beyond the economic interests of the voters who elect him every six years. In fact, coal has made Manchin and his family very wealthy. He founded the private coal brokerage Enersystems in 1988 and still owns a big stake in the company, which his son currently runs.

In 2020 alone, Manchin raked in nearly $500,000 of income from Enersystems, and he owns as much as $5m worth of stock in the company, according to his most recent financial disclosure.

Despite this conflict of interest, Manchin chairs the influential Senate energy and natural resources committee, which has jurisdiction over coal production and distribution, coal research and development, and coal conversion, as well as “global climate change”.

He even gave a pro-coal speech in May to the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) while personally profiting from Enersystems’ coal sales to utility companies that are EEI members, as Sludge recently reported.

Manchin is one of many members of Congress who are personally invested in the fossil fuel industry – dozens of Congress members hold Exxon stock – but he is among the biggest profiteers. As of late 2019, he had more money invested in dirty energy than any other senator.

How can this be? Wouldn’t basic ethics prevent someone from being in charge of legislation that could materially benefit them? Unfortunately, conflict of interest rules in the Senate are remarkably weak. And guess who is seeking to strip conflict of interest rules from a 2021 democracy reform bill?

Joe Manchin. ...Read More
Analysis Shows GOP Can Take Control of
Congress by Gerrymandering Just 4 States
Photo: A Fair Maps Rally is held in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on March 26, 2019, in Washington, D.C. SARAH L. VOISIN / THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES

BY Chris Walker
Truthout

July 29, 2021 -Republicans might be able to take control of Congress in next year’s midterm races without needing to win over a single additional voter.

As Democratic senators scramble to piece together a compromised version of the For the People Act, an electoral reform and voting rights bill, a new study finds that the GOP could gerrymander its way to victory in the 2022 midterms.

An analysis of Census data from a Democratic-aligned data firm called TargetSmart, first reported by Mother Jones, found that Republicans could pick up between six to 13 seats in the House of Representatives through redistricting electoral maps in just four southern states alone — Georgia, Florida, North Carolina and Texas. If Republicans take five seats in the 2022 midterms, it would result in the GOP winning a majority of seats in the House, as Democrats currently have a five-seat lead in that legislative chamber.

Put another way, the GOP could win the midterm elections if voters behave the same way that they did in congressional elections in 2020, simply if Republican-run state legislatures are able to redraw maps in their own favor.

Republicans have a significant redistricting advantage over Democrats in deciding how congressional maps will look in the next decade. According to one analysis, the GOP will have sole control over the design of 187 congressional districts, compared to just 75 for Democrats. The remaining districts will be drawn by bipartisan governments or independent commissions, or are “at-large” seats where there’s only one congressional representative in that state.

Supporters of the For the People Act argue that this disadvantage is precisely why electoral reform is needed — to ensure that the redistricting process is free from partisan gerrymandering on both sides of the political aisle. The legislation had called for requiring every state to create independent commissions to redraw maps, rather than giving political parties the chance to create boundaries that work to their advantage.

On Wednesday several senators were seen working inside the offices of Senate Majority Chuck Schumer (D-New York), crafting what they said would be a compromise of the For the People Act, which failed to garner the necessary 60 votes in the Senate to break a filibuster earlier this year. Among those working on the new legislation were Sens. Raphael Warnock (D-Georgia) and Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), the latter who said he opposed many aspects of the original For the People Act for being too partisan, in his mind.

Several aspects of the compromise bill are left uncertain, however, about what this legislation would do or if it can earn enough support to bypass the filibuster. Manchin has said he would not support any efforts at ending or reforming the filibuster in order to pass a voting rights bill. And beyond the question of the filibuster, it’s still unclear whether the compromise bill will include reforms for redistricting at all.

Polling shows that most Americans back such reforms, including those with conservative viewpoints, in spite of stiff opposition to the idea from Republicans. A survey conducted in February by the R Street Institute, a right-leaning organization, found that 57 percent of likely Republican voters support creating independent redistricting commissions in states across the country, while only 25 percent oppose the idea.

A Vox/Data for Progress poll from March also showcased significant support for the For the People Act, prior to it being blocked in the Senate. The poll had specifically mentioned the reforms in the bill, including redistricting reform and non-partisan commissions redrawing maps, and asked respondents whether they supported ending the filibuster in order to get those reforms passed. A majority of voters, 52 percent, said they backed it, while just 37 percent said they were opposed. ...Read More
The Great Contest of Our Time Is Between Humanity and Imperialism: The Thirtieth Newsletter (2021)

China Newspaper Interviews Vijay Prashad.
Graphic: Uttam Ghosh (India), Let Cuba Live, 2021.

Vijay Prashad: Dear friends, Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

On 23 July 2021, a full-page appeal appeared in the New York Times calling on United States President Joe Biden to withdraw the vindictive US blockade against Cuba. As that appeal went to press, I spoke to Chinese journalist Lu Yuanzhi of Global Times (GT). The remainder of this newsletter carries the contents of that interview, which ranges from the US policy against Cuba to the New Cold War against China.
 
GT: The novel coronavirus epidemic and the long-term US blockade have severely hit Cubans’ wellbeing. By exploiting Cuba’s current hardships, the US is exacerbating problems. As the sole superpower, the US has long pursued a hostile policy toward this small socialist country to its south. Why can’t the US tolerate a small socialist country in its periphery?

Prashad: Cuba, since 1959, has offered an alternative vision for humanity, one that puts the well-being of people before the requirements of profit. That Cuba – a poor country – was able to vanquish hunger and illiteracy rather quickly, while the US – a rich country – continues to be plagued by such elementary problems illustrates the humanity at the core of the socialist project. This is unforgivable for the elites in the US. Hence, they continue to tighten the wretched blockade against Cuba. In fact, they use all kinds of means – including social media warfare, a part of the hybrid war strategy – to undermine the confidence of the Cuban people. This was attempted on 11 July, but it failed. Tens of thousands of Cubans took to the street to defend their Revolution.

GT: Although the UN has overwhelmingly condemned the US blockade against Cuba for many years in a row, Washington has continued its inhumane policy. What does this mean for the US’ international image? US President Joe Biden said, ‘The US stands firmly with the people of Cuba’, but his administration has no intention to lift the blockade. Who are the audiences of such hypocritical diplomatic rhetoric?

Prashad: The US does not ‘stand firmly with the people of Cuba’. In fact, the US stands on the neck of the Cuban people. This is clear to the 184 member states of the UN that voted on 23 June to send a message to the US to end the blockade. The fact is that President Joe Biden has refused to even roll back the 243 coercive measures implemented by Donald Trump. The world recognizes the cruelty of the blockade on Cuba and of the illegal sanctions policy that the US exercises against at least 30 countries around the world. But, because of the power of the US, there are only a few countries that are willing to do more than vote in the UN General Assembly on behalf of Cuba.

Cuba needs material support, which is lacking from the international community; this material support would include supplies for the Cuban pharmaceutical industry, for example, and it would include food. If the US does not roll back the blockade, will key countries of the world come together to break it?
 
GT: The US’ handling of the COVID-19 epidemic is obviously a failure, with the highest death toll across the world. In the face of the pandemic, the US capitalist system’s value of economics over human life has been fully exposed. The pandemic has put a dent in the US’ institutional advantages and discursive power. Has the capitalist system become dysfunctional in the face of major crises?

Prashad: The capitalist system is very good at generating vast amounts of commodities and very high qualities of certain kinds of commodities. It is good at producing high-value medical care, for instance, but not so good at producing quality public health care. This has to do with the profit motive. Since there is great social inequality, most of the public does not have cash in their pockets for quality health care, so health care simply is not affordable or possible for the vast majority. It is this attitude towards health and education that shows us the inhumane side of capitalism. During the pandemic, 64 countries spent more to service their external debt than on health care. Such are the ways of the capitalist system: to ensure that wealthy bond holders in the developed world make their money while the poor struggle to survive.

GT: China’s response to the pandemic has clearly demonstrated the strengths of its people-oriented philosophy and its political system. What is your take on the increasing influence of China’s political system after the pandemic? How can the outside world better understand the unique advantages of China’s political system under the leadership of Communist Party of China (CPC)? How can China better counter the West’s slander of the CPC?

Prashad: China’s approach to the pandemic has been along the grain of the World Health Organisation’s recommendation: use science, compassion, and collaboration to tackle the pandemic. The Chinese people volunteered to help each other, doctors who are Communist Party members volunteered to go to the frontlines, and the Chinese state opened its coffers to ensure that the disease was vanquished and that the people did not suffer from a prolonged economic downturn. There is much to be learned from this approach; our studies on CoronaShock delve into this.

This stands in stark contrast to the anti-science, inhumane, and narrowly nationalistic attitude of many of the Western countries and several others in the developing world; their approach led to chaos. It is because of the failure in places such as the US that Trump, for instance, began to blame China in a racist way for the emergence of the virus. We know scientifically that viruses appear for a variety of reasons, and none of them have to do with race. Chinese intellectuals and others need to offer clear accounts of Chinese developments, including the abolition of extreme poverty and the rather quick defeat of COVID-19. Such accounts will help people in other parts of the world understand the relationship between public action and state action in China. This is widely misunderstood, largely because of the information war pursued by the US and its allies. On 23 July, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research published a key text called Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China based on field studies of the abolition of extreme poverty.

GT: The West’s narrative of the CPC in recent years has always avoided mentioning the CPC’s positive effects on China’s social progress and global economic development. Why can’t the West objectively evaluate the CPC?

Prashad: The West cannot be objective because the West fears the rise of Chinese science and technology. For the past 50 years, Western firms have monopolized the areas of high-tech, using intellectual property laws to lengthen their copyright advantages. Developments in China are an existential threat to the dominance of these Western firms in areas such as telecommunications, robotics, high-speed rail, and new energy technology. It is the fear of losing supremacy in these key tech sectors that drives the ‘new cold war’ against China and prevents a sober assessment of Chinese developments.

Rather than develop a sensible attitude, the West has gone in four directions. First, it has prosecuted a trade and economic war against China to maintain US economic and technological supremacy. Second, it has pressured developing countries and US allies to break with Chinese firms and isolate China. Third, it has attempted to smear China’s reputation by misleadingly using the framework of ‘human rights’ and by supporting anti-government and separatist forces within China. Lastly, it has pursued military provocation, particularly through the Quad alliance (Australia, India, Japan, and the US). These mechanisms blind the Western public to the realities of China.

GT: During China’s reform and opening up period, the country has been open to learning from Western societies. This has greatly boosted China’s development. Do you think there can be such an ideological emancipation in the West to take China’s political system seriously? 

Prashad: One hopes that clarity will come to the Western public, who are – as yet – guided by a political class that is doing the work for sectors of the economy that are threatened by Chinese scientific and technological developments. In the short run, no such positive evaluation is possible. It is more likely for such an evaluation to come in the countries of Africa, Latin America, and southern Asia, where people will understand the immense power of the abolition of extreme poverty and the immense power of the creation of an indigenous high-tech industry. Under Lula, Brazil abolished hunger through the Fome Zero program, while the Left Democratic Front-led Indian state Kerala has recently embarked on a poverty eradication program. These areas of the world can better appreciate the strides taken by the Chinese people than those who live in the West.

GT: Since Biden took office, his administration has spared no effort to rope in like-minded democracies to contain China, attempting to replicate the rivalry between the two blocs led by the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Do you think the democratic card is an effective way for the US to rally an anti-China camp?

Prashad: The idea of a community of democracies has a farcical edge to it because this new group is being put together to use all manners of force (diplomatic, economic, military, etc.) to pressure China and Russia to reverse their advances. A truly democratic group should abide by the UN Charter, which is exactly what the kind of sanctions policies enacted by the Western countries defies. That is why 18 countries have created the Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter. This is an important development, since it suggests that the point is to stand by the Charter and not to speak in the name of an abstract democracy that often means that a country must be subordinate to Western interests. The world does not wish to be divided into camps.

The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) will be 60 years old this September. The appetite in the developing world remains for the NAM project. Countries do not want to pick sides in a ‘new cold war’ that no-one, apart from the US, wants. The divide is not between China and the US, a division that the US is trying to impose on the world: the divide is between humanity and imperialism.

GT: Your book Washington Bullets lists the assassinations and infiltrations of the US CIA in various places. US imperialism has been resisted on a global scale. How do you see the fate of US imperialism?

Prashad: The US remains a very powerful country, with the largest military force that is capable of action anywhere on the planet and with forms of soft power (such as cultural and diplomatic power) that are enviable. Despite the terrible record of US interference in the developing world – which I document in Washington Bullets (2020) – the US retains a powerful hold on the world’s imagination. There remains a view – however wrong it is – that the US operates its power in a benevolent manner and that it acts in the universal, and not nationalist, interest. The cultural power of the US is considerable, which is why the US is so easily able to wield the weapons of information against any adversary.

Roughly 30 years ago, Cuba’s Fidel Castro urged countries around the world not to neglect the battle of ideas. US imperialism is not eternal. It is being confronted now by the growth of multipolarity and regionalism. These are the key developments that cannot be stopped by the US military or by cultural power. Multipolarity and regionalism are the real movement of history. They will eventually prevail. ...Read More
Statement of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism on the U.S. Manufactured
Crisis in Cuba
July 13, 2021

The Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) stands with the world’s people in condemning the U.S. government’s efforts to bring the economy and people of Cuba to its knees.

The grievances that sparked protests on Sunday, July 11th are based in legitimate concerns about the lack of medicines, medical equipment, supplies, food and electricity. Contrary to U.S. media propaganda, the crisis is rooted in the 60-year economic embargo of Cuba and a deliberate program of internal sabotage of the Cuban government.

According to Cuban government reports, “paid agents” of the U.S. organized to turn Sunday’s protests of real concerns into an anti-government “regime change” operation. The U.S. funds $20 million annually to Cuban “pro-democracy” organizations and individuals, and another $28 million annually for the U.S. Office of Cuba Broadcasting which operates Radio and TV Marti with over 100 employees broadcasting non-stop anti-government propaganda. The 7/11/21 protest was preceded by a social media campaign using the hashtag #SOSCuba that had been trending in Florida days before, placing blame for the hardships the Cuban people are facing on the government. It is reminiscent of a scandal that broke last year when CLS Strategies, a company with State Department ties, was found to have flooded social networks with harmful fake news about leftist governments in Latin America. (Common Dreams, 7/13/21, by Medea Benjamin and Leonardo Flores)

Despite near-unanimous world-wide condemnation of the U.S. embargo at the United Nations on June 23rd, the Biden administration refuses to rescind – even for humanitarian reasons – the 243 additional sanctions imposed by the Trump administration and its outrageous listing of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism. The Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign includes stopping remittances from family members outside Cuba, blocking cruise ships, curtailing most airline flights to Cuba, re-instituting a travel ban for U.S. tourists, and blocking Cuba’s ability to purchase medicines and medical supplies on the world market.

The situation is dire. Cuban President Diaz-Canel in speaking to protesters on Sunday explained how hotels have had to be converted to hospitals due to the alarming spike in coronavirus cases which, in turn, has caused periodic and more frequent electricity shortages throughout the country. Lines for food, water and supplies, often at inflated prices, are long. An embargo-caused shortage of gasoline is preventing food grown in the countryside from getting to market in the cities.

In response to the humanitarian crisis, the international community has organized against the embargo with a “Syringes for Cuba” campaign to enable the population to be fully vaccinated by the end of the year. The U.S. people have contributed $500,000 for 6 million of the 30 million syringes needed.

In a statement on 7/12/21, the Cuban government raised the alarm that the economic measures against Cuba “are intended to present a collapsed country in chaos, in order to provide a social outburst and justify an external intervention.” Indeed, anti-government Cuban Americans in Miami have waged protests much larger than those in Cuba on Sunday. Florida politicians are calling on President Biden to invade the country militarily.

On the other hand, following Sunday’s protests, Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee, called on President Biden to reverse the Trump era sanctions. In March 2021, 80 House members sent a letter to President Biden urging him to end restrictions on travel and remittances, and the following bills have been introduced: the U.S.-Cuba Trade Act of 2021 (S. 294) by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the Freedom to Export to Cuba Act (S. 1694) by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and the U.S.-Cuba Relations Normalization Act (H.R. 3625) by Rep. Bobby Rush.

This week, a group of Cuban Americans led by Carlos Lazo, a high school teacher who has been organizing monthly car caravans calling for an end to the embargo, is leading a walkathon from Miami to Washington DC to end in a rally on July 25th. Mobilizations to join them are being organized throughout the east coast.

During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden pledged to renew the engagement with Cuba begun under the Obama administration, and to roll back the draconian sanctions of the Trump administration. After inauguration, Biden said Cuba policy is under review but to date, his campaign promise has not been fulfilled. Now is the time.

We call on President Biden to:

  • Roll back the Trump era sanctions and remove Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism by Executive Order.

  • End budgets funding organizations and individuals in Cuba;

  • Immediately allow the purchase of medicines, materials and medical equipment to ease the humanitarian crisis of the coronavirus pandemic.

We urge members and friends to help build and participate in the July 25th protest in Washington D.C and work with peace and solidarity organizations to pressure Members of Congress to co-sponsor the above-listed bills. We must work to once and for all, end the illegal and inhumane 60-year embargo of Cuba.
From the CCDS Socialist Education Project...
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), 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.

Click here for the Table of Contents
Taking Down White Supremacy 

A Reader on Multiracial and Multinational Unity 

Edited by the CCDS
Socialist Education Project

166 pages, $12.50 (discounts available for quantity), order at :


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.

      Click here for the Table of contents
Bob Moses, Presente! A Powerful Crusader
for Civil Rights and Math Education
Photo: Bob Moses was teaching math at the Horace Mann School in the Bronx when scenes of Black people sitting at lunch counters across the South inspired him to become an activist., Rogelio V. Solis/Associated Press

‘May his light continue to guide us’: Civil rights leader Bob Moses dies at 86

Mississippi Today via Portside

July 25, 2021 - Robert "Bob" Parris Moses, a civil rights leader, educational advocate and pioneer in grassroots community organizing whose efforts played a key role in helping Black Mississippians gain basic rights, died Sunday at 86.

On Sunday morning, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Legacy Project's 60th Anniversary Conference posted on social media that Moses, a civil rights hero, had died.
"We honor his vision, tenacity, and fearlessness. His deep belief in people who find themselves in the socio/economic bottom made a fundamental difference for millions of his fellow Americans," the SNCC Legacy Project said in a statement.

Moses, a New York native, was a field secretary for SNCC in Mississippi. He also served as co-director of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), which used community organizing as a tool to launch voter registration projects across the state.
COFO served as an umbrella for an alliance between the SNCC, the Congress of Racial Equality and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and helped focus civil rights efforts in the state. COFO was known for its young organizers' door-to-door canvassing, voter registration preparation and workshops, and actual registration attempts in Mississippi.

Through his work with both of these organizations, Moses was instrumental in the Mississippi Freedom Summer, the 1964 voter registration drive created to increase the number of registered Black voters in Mississippi. That summer, white volunteers traveled to the South to work alongside African Americans who were fighting for access to the polls.

"At the heart of these efforts was SNCC’s idea that people—ordinary people long denied this power—could take control of their lives," the SNCC statement continued. "These were the people that Bob brought to the table to fight for a seat at it: maids, sharecroppers, day workers, barbers, beauticians, teachers, preachers and many others from all walks of life."
Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP and a Mississippian, said “Bob Moses was a giant, a strategist at the core of the civil rights movement. Through his life’s work, he bent the arc of the moral universe toward justice, making our world a better place. He fought for our right to vote, our most sacred right. He knew that justice, freedom and democracy were not a state, but an ongoing struggle.

“So may his light continue to guide us as we face another wave of Jim Crow laws. His example is more important now than ever…Rest in power Bob.”

In response to the state Democratic Party denying access to Black Mississippians, Moses, along with Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker and others created the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The effort created national attention at the 1964 National Democratic Convention as conflict developed over whether to recognize the integrated party or the traditional party. New party members ultimately failed at being seated as voting members of the 1964 convention, but their efforts brought new attention to the plight of African Americans in Mississippi and other Southern states and ultimately led to a revolution in the national Democratic Party on racial issues.

“He was a civil rights icon who made sacrifices for what he believed,” said state Rep. Robert Johnson, D-Natchez. “He could have done a lot of things, but he made sacrifices on behalf of the movement.”

In addition to his civil rights work, Moses taught math to students in Tanzania from 1969 to 1976. In 1982, Moses went on to found The Algebra Project. The national organization exists to teach students, especially low-income students and students of color, mathematical literacy and prepare them for college.

In 2000, Moses was honored by both the Mississippi House and Senate, whose members in past years had passed laws that he fought to overturn denying voting rights and other basic rights to African Americans.

“One of my greatest honors as a legislator has been to sponsor a resolution honoring Bob Moses for his work with SNCC and, later, with the Algebra Project,” said Sen. John Horhn, D-Jackson. “He was a quiet, meticulous, effective visionary and leader and his contributions to helping Mississippi free itself from the yoke of discrimination and tyranny are incalculable.”
State Rep. Alyce Clarke, D-Jackson, was just this past weekend honored at Jackson State University along with Moses and other civil rights leaders as being part of a mural titled "Chain Breakers." Clarke was the first Black woman elected to the Mississippi Legislature. She began serving in the state House in 1984. Clarke described Moses “as a brilliant person and somebody who did what he said he was going to do….It was an honor to be included in a mural with him and other civil rights leaders.”

Moses also inspired an exhibit in the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in downtown Jackson. The museum's fifth gallery, “A Tremor in the Iceberg,” is inspired by his description of the movement in Mississippi: “A tremor in the middle of the iceberg from a stone which the builders rejected.”

“Staff are saddened to hear of the death of Bob Moses, an American icon who left a tremendous legacy in Mississippi,” said Katie Blount, executive director of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. “We are honored that he was the keynote speaker during the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Lecture Series in 2014. His commitment to justice is displayed throughout the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Kayleigh Skinner joined the Mississippi Today team in January 2017 as an education and legislative reporter and advanced to a senior staff member in her four years with the company.  ...Read More


Photo: below: A destroyed car and debris lie on the side of a road in Reimerzhoven, district of Altenahr, western Germany, on July 23, 2021 about a week after heavy rain and floods caused major damage in the Ahr region. (Christof Stache/AFP )
Living on a Newly Unrecognizable Planet

The massive storms in Germany, heat domes, and fires that produce their own weather suggest that models of linear progress may no longer be appropriate for storms of this magnitude and intensity.
Common Dreams

July 27, 2021 - Germany is a wealthy nation. Its business and political leaders accept the reality of climate change and have made at least modest progress to prepare for and mitigate its effects. How then to respond to such events as a family moving to the roof of their house to escape the flood—only to have a surge of water so vast as to sweep them off the roof to their demise?

Such pictures are terrifying, but of more long-term importance is the questions raised by such mega-storms. These are not just big storms following relatively ordinary albeit destructive paths. In an effort to gain some perspective on these disturbing events I have drawn on recent work by two influential contemporary theorists, William Connolly and the late French philosopher Michel Serres (in block quotes). I have attached my own comments. My hope is that this will contribute to dialogue and action on a vital subject.

Events that challenge a culture-wide view of nature can evoke despair or anger and fuel extremist movements and quests for scapegoats.

In a recent editorial in Informed Comment Juan Cole cites remarks in The Guardian by Dieter Gerten, professor of global change climatology and hydrology at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research on three surprises of this weather system:

1. The records being set for the intensity of rainfall are well above the previous records.
2. This sudden spurt of records was unexpected.
3. The area affected is much wider than ever before.

The massive storms in Germany, heat domes, and fires that produce their own weather suggest that models of linear progress may no longer be appropriate for storms of this magnitude and intensity.

This shock of what scientists call "non-linearity," is dawning on many thinkers today. University of Chicago historian Dipesh Chakrabarty recognizes that important as his work was to globalization, nothing prepared him for "making sense of this planetary conjuncture within which humanity finds itself today."

Likewise, in a recent essay, the Johns Hopkins Political Scientist William E. Connolly discusses what the ideas of the French philosopher Michel Serres (d. 2019) about time and nature can tell us about the urgent moment in which we live.

Nature is in charge and is an active, unpredictable agent.

As Connolly quotes Serres to this effect: "For whatever praise you may hear, whatever love you may profess for the sea and mountains, the desert or marshes, plants and animals, nature doesn't behave as a friend to humans or even their symbiont. By means of waves, fire, typhoons, poisoning, or devouring, it kills as calmly as bodies fall and eagles eat lambs."
What that means culturally is as important as the flames and floods themselves. Events that challenge a culture-wide view of nature can evoke despair or anger and fuel extremist movements and quests for scapegoats.

Connolly argues that Serres responds by teaching "us to master the will to mastery, first, because it cannot succeed and, second, because it fails to respond to the grandeur of that of which we ourselves are an intrinsic part."

Nonetheless angry denialism persists, which is to Serres "a sign," Connolly writes, "that they have not gotten over the profound disappointment that their favored images of time do not fit well rocky experiences they have themselves encountered."
This image of nature and time sustains and is sustained by such narratives, doctrines, and ideologies, among others, as confidence in eternal salvation or the indefinite advance of capitalism… Challenges to conventional views of time and nature are hardly an attack on ethics itself.

Connolly observes that "We are ethically enjoined to overcome [this disappointment] so that our thinking and responses to the world become more decent and in-formed. For existential disappointment, unless it is overcome, can morph into ressentiment, and the latter can morph into bellicose cultural dispositions to aggressive nihilism."

To respond to such disappointment, Connolly elaborates a critical theory of time.

Clock time is linear, straight forward and helps us organize our days. But this is not all there is to time. Evental time, "involves the intersection of two or more previously separated temporalities, each on its own speed, capacities, and vector. Bumpy intersections between viruses, pangolins, and humans set on different temporalities illustrate evental time."
That theory challenges the foundations of both mainstream environmentalism, with its confidence that nature will respond in predictable ways to such interventions as carbon taxes and deep ecology's faith that nature left to its own devices moves toward comfortable equilibrium. Both conventional theories and their several variants assume nature is for us in one way or another. In earlier work Connolly had labeled this shared posture ontological narcissism.

The tendency to refuse to adjust extrapolations into the future in the face of new events provides one source of the recent turns to fundamentalism, denialism, and fascism across the world. Each refusal might involve a desperate desire to save an old faith, to preserve an old image of time, or to protect the assumption that the progress of capitalism on a linear track can proceed indefinitely. Or several of these, re-enforcing each other. Hence, the need to develop a philosophy of evental time.

Break the hold of both views in order to curb the rage that follows event that expose even to us nature's cruelty. Mastery is nether possible nor desirable.

As for teleological views of unfettered nature as home and guidance for humans, if the arc of history did bend toward a preordained end that would mean we lived in a law-governed world with no possibility of novelty and freedom, as Jairus Grove points out in his Savage Ecology. A messy unruly nature is the necessary precursor of freedom.

Connolly writes,

  • "Each event emerges from the confluence of two or more temporalities, previously on different vectors, speeds and capacities. The conjunctions throw heterogeneous forces and beings into contact, as they intersect through collisions and ingressions. The resulting event turns or twists the vector of time that preceded it, now making a linear projection or "extrapolation"—to use Darwin's favorite word–based on processes that preceded it out of touch with the turn actually taken."

Non linearity may turn out to include not only numerical intensity far in excess of predictions made by the most sophisticated models but also whole social movements, artistic styles diseases not reducible to the original confluent bodies.

This is not a philosophy of inactivity or at best tending one's garden, in contrast to Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss. In an earlier work Connolly has termed such inaction passive nihilism.
Work on blockages within the self is in order. On the political stage:

  • "Those who accept the prominence of evental time are thus encouraged to adopt a double-entry orientation to extrapolation. Extrapolations into possible futures are always needed, but with each major turn of event adjustments of extrapolation are necessary."

Such a process may need to focus much attention and critique on various Biblical and Constitutional literalists whose work reflects and in part instills conventional concepts of time.
One may be excused for cursing a world that can wreak such brutal cruelty on the innocent, but once the words emerge, as Connolly says:

  • "The task for many now becomes how to overcome the assumption of progressive time, how to appreciate the grandeur of bumpy time, how to affirm a world punctuated by events that turn time. Doing so to encourage struggles against the worst things when a bad turn occurs without seeking racial, religious, scientific and theological scapegoats to hold responsible for that turn."

John Buell has a PhD in political science, taught for 10 years at College of the Atlantic, and was an Associate Editor of The Progressive for ten years. He lives in Southwest Harbor, Maine and writes on labor and environmental issues. His most recent book, published by Palgrave in August 2011, is "Politics, Religion, and Culture in an Anxious Age." 
Graphic: Salvadore Dali:
American Dream'

Forces of Change

What follows the Exhaustion of Neoliberalism?



New Left Review's 'Sidecar'
JULY 28, 2021


The extent of the break with neoliberalism initiated by the Biden administration will depend upon both the unfolding of Washingtonian politics and the impact of mobilizations from below. Yet in the background, impersonal forces will continue to affect the metamorphosis of capitalism through its successive stages.

It is from these structural constraints and opportunities that the fabric of the current conjuncture is woven. What can contemporary political economy tell us about them? Beyond the sphere of mainstream liberal thought, an array of recent theoretical contributions have tried to diagnose the current moment by situating it in the long-term rhythms of capitalist development. They offer a fresh light, if not a magic key, for understanding the systemic shift represented by Bidenomics.

Such forces of change are routinely ignored by liberal economists. Market exchange is viewed as a sphere of activity that depends solely on itself; conscious collective intervention must not interfere with the invisible hand or spontaneous order. However, it is increasingly clear that this faith in self-equilibrating market adjustment cannot provide a general theory of rapid socioeconomic change, nor a specific explanation of our present political turbulence. Recognizing this limitation, The Economist recently rejected neoclassical equilibrium modeling and Friedmanite instrumentalism in favor of evolutionary economics, which ‘seeks to explain real-world phenomena as the outcome of a process of continuous change’. ‘The past informs the present’, it declared. ‘Economic choices are made within and informed by historical, cultural and institutional contexts’.

This intervention signals the weakened grip of neoclassical economics on the profession as a whole. Yet the evolutionary schema nonetheless retains a deep loyalty to bourgeois ideology, premised on the belief that Natura non facit saltum, ‘nature does not make jumps’. For this school of thought, evolution is always incremental. There may be pragmatic exceptions to this rule, such as when neoliberals embrace shock therapy to dismantle the remnants of the ‘unnatural’ socialist order in Eastern Europe, or launch a revolution against the French social model in the style of Emmanuel Macron. But this opportunistic voluntarism is rooted in the presupposition of the transhistorical virtues of the market; it neither relies on a theory of periods in capitalist history, nor on an explanation of its turning points beyond ad-hoc arguments. 

Four decades ago, John Elliott wrote in the Quarterly Journal of Economics that despite their opposed ideological commitments, Marx and Schumpeter agreed on the three salient characteristics of capitalism’s evolutionary dynamic: ‘It comes from within the economic system and is not merely an adaptation to exogenous changes.

It occurs discontinuously rather than smoothly. It brings qualitative changes or “revolutions”, which fundamentally displace old equilibria and create radically new conditions.’ Pierre Dockès delineated this ‘mutationist’ perspective in his monumental work, Le Capitalisme et ses rythmes (2017): ‘mutation affects not an aspect or a character of the productive order, but the system itself: a change of state. From a certain threshold, there is percolation: the quantitative change of the elements crystallizes into a qualitative change of the state of the system’.

Still, the question remains: What is driving this percolation, and how exactly does it crystallize? More to the point, which long-term trends are pushing the current mutation beyond neoliberalism?

To illuminate these issues, we can first turn to the rich intellectual tradition derived from Schumpeter and Nikolaï Kondratiev, which links technological change to multi-decade waves of capital accumulation. For this tradition, clusters of innovation are deployed during the expansionary phase up to the point where most profitable avenues have been exhausted. Then a depressionary phase fosters an intensive search for new business opportunities, sowing the seeds of a new potential expansionary phase. These shifts are long waves rather than cycles. While depressions are an ineluctable outcome of capitalist development, it is by no means inevitable that a fresh phase of expansion will be unleashed.

According to Ernest Mandel’s Long Waves of Capitalist Development (1980), ‘it is not technological innovation per se which triggers a new long-term expansion. Only when this expansion has already begun can technological innovations occur on a massive scale’. This requires ‘both a sharp increase in the rate of profit and a huge widening of the market’. Because ‘the capitalist way of securing the first condition conflicts with the capitalist way of assuring the second’, Mandel argues that ‘changes in the social environment in which capitalism operates’ must intervene. In sum, while downturns are endogenous, upturns require exogenous ‘system shocks’ – wars, counter-revolutions, working-class defeats, the discovery of new resources – to allow capital accumulation to take off again.

Before his death in 1995, Mandel identified the ‘total integration of the former USSR and the People’s Republic of China into the capitalist world market’, along with a ‘major defeat of the working class’, as preconditions for an upswing. This analysis was partially borne out: the expansion of global value chains and the increasing rate of exploitation resulting from neoliberal policies, plus the availability of a huge reserve workforce, were decisive changes that propelled the upturn of the global economy from the mid-90s up to the 2008 crash. But due to mounting overcapacity and anemic demand, a full expansionary phase led by the digital economy failed to materialize. 

Mandel’s theory is seldom mentioned nowadays, but one can nonetheless find some of his ideas in the influential work of Carlotta Perez and Mariana Mazzucato. In a 2014 joint paper entitled ‘Innovation as Growth Policy: the challenge for Europe’, they too sought to describe the conditions for an economic upswing. ‘Markets alone cannot return us to prosperity,' they wrote. ‘Investment is driven by innovation; specifically, by the perception of where new technological opportunities lie. Private investment only kicks in when those opportunities are clear; public investment must be directed towards creating those opportunities across all policy spaces and affecting the entire economy’.

Perez and Mazzucato attempted to move beyond Mandel’s reliance on ‘system shocks’ by giving the state responsibility for the extra-economic factors necessary to launch an expansion. Desirable innovation should be made profitable through industrial policy – financial regulation, demand management, education, etc. – while adequate tax, fiscal and monetary policies should equip this active state with the necessary resources. 

Thus, the forces of change can lie outside the economic sphere. For Perez and Mazzucato, the ‘current problems are structural’ (read: endogenous) and date back to decades before the 2008 crisis. But, crucially, they believe that conditions to overcome them lie in the autonomy of policymaking. Policy can change structural conditions. This is an inescapable lesson from Communist Party-led Chinese catch-up, and the basic rationale for state capitalism’s return to grace.

If one accepts this argument, it is tempting to push it a step further by exploring the factors that might foster institutional change and reframe the conditions for capital accumulation. What immediately comes to mind is Karl Polanyi’s ‘double movement’. In The Great Transformation (1944), he writes that ‘while laissez-faire economy was the product of deliberate state action, subsequent restrictions on laissez-faire started in a spontaneous way’. If liberalization is a political project, the destructive impact of market forces is automatically ‘stopped by the realistic self-protection of society’. While Polanyi’s focus is on institutional change rather than accumulation waves, his analysis draws an unmissable connection between the two.

A recent contribution from the post-Keynesian school picks up where Polanyi left off, proposing an elegant endogenization of institutionally-driven class conflict in long-run economic fluctuation. In Michalis Nikiforos’s model, ‘The increase in the profit share is related to the domination of the self-regulating market and inevitably leads to a crisis. Society will mobilize to protect itself and there will be a counter-movement, which…shows up as an increase in the wage share’. For Nikiforos, ‘this counter-movement can also later lead to a crisis that will make the emergence of the self-regulating market more appealing and will lead to a change in the direction of distribution and an increase in the profit share’. He argues that the instability of income distribution is due to class struggle dynamics: the more power a class has, the greater its potential to appropriate a larger share of societal income. But the power of each class in turn rests on ‘its potential effects on the macroeconomic performance of the economy’. When excess profit begins to damage the economy in general, the political pressure mounts for an arrangement more favorable to wages. And vice versa.

This framework allows for a straightforward interpretation of the current conjuncture: ‘The recent crisis and the current stagnation are the result of the neoliberal institutional arrangements, which emerged as a response to the profit-squeeze and the crisis of the 1970s…The sudden rise of egalitarian political forces that were until very recently on the fringe of the political system, or the popularity of Piketty’s book, are all manifestations of society’s reaction against the institutional arrangements responsible for the crisis and the stagnation’. The unidimensional focus on the distribution of income is of course a limitation of Nikiforos’s model, but the advantage is that it provides an explanatory mechanism at both ends of the fluctuation.

Economists influenced by the so-called Regulation School have also tried to explain the recurrence of ‘structural crises’ which necessitate a major institutional restructuring and produce a new balance of class forces. In The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism, published in 2015, David Kotz anticipated a movement toward a more regulated form of capitalism, defined by a stronger state influencing and constraining the market. He notes that ‘the current crisis is not the first but the third crisis of a liberal form of capitalism in the United States. Each of the previous two crises was followed by a regulated form of capitalism. Big business played an important role in the shift to regulated capitalism both in 1900 and in the late 1940s, with large social movements creating a context that led big business leaders to support or acquiesce in an expanded state role.’

One of the strengths of the Regulation School, inherited from its Althusserian ascendency, is that its theorization of the succession of accumulation regimes is not limited to the regulated/liberal dichotomy. Each mode of regulation is organized under the constraint of a specific institutional form that weighs on the other components of the system. This allows for a serious engagement with capitalism’s qualitative evolution through its successive stages. Under this framework, competition, the capital-labor nexus and finance have each played prominent roles in different historical periods. Looking ahead, Robert Boyer sees the current conjuncture as open to producing three potential forms of regulated capitalism: a bio-capitalism centered around anthropogenetic activities; a platform capitalism associated with the rise of large digital companies; and a neo-dirigist state capitalism linked either to the Chinese model or to what he calls ‘democratic populism’.

The downside of the Regulation approach, however, is that the precise mechanisms of change tend to be overlooked. While mounting dysfunctionalities in the accumulation regime lead to a structural crisis, the process by which a new regime emerges is unpredictable – depending on trouvailles (incidental discoveries) rationalized ex-post by policymakers, theoreticians and social actors. The fascination with capitalism’s capacity to resuscitate itself after crises comes at the cost of an impoverished political imagination.
The most promising extension of the Regulation School – which comes closer to formulating a coherent theory of institutional change – can be found in Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini’s The Last Neoliberal (2021), an incisive analysis of Macron’s France. For Amable and Palombarini, macroeconomic dynamics, institutions and political mediations exist as a totality. Society’s institutional architecture stems from the historical sedimentation of macro-social compromises which are the result of irreducibly conflicting political processes. Those political processes are themselves determined by economic dynamics through the evolving expectations of various social groups. Following Gramsci, the neorealist approach places a clear emphasis on the autonomy of politics. Social expectations are not fixed in a crude expression of interests but proceed from moving ideological representations that respond to a specific political elaboration.

Macron is swimming against the international tide, toward an intensification of neoliberal restructuring. Amable and Palombarini’s theory provides a powerful interpretation of this phenomenon. The progressive disarticulation of the strongly coordinated national model, which took place over four decades of incremental neoliberal reform, disappointed the expectations of popular classes. This led to a disaggregation of the traditional right-wing and left-wing blocs, paving the way for a full-bloodedly neoliberal-bourgeois movement, embodied by Macron. However, the lack of popular support for this movement hinders is ability to pursue radical neoliberalization. This was forcefully demonstrated by the gilet jaunes, even before the Covid-19 crisis rendered the neoliberal playbook obsolete.
*
There is much to learn from these various iterations – Polanyian, post-Keynesian, Regulation, Gramscian – of the historical stages approach: the non-linearity of change, the contingency of technological-economic expansion on adequate institutional settings, the socio-political reactions to the destructive forces of markets, and the qualitative changes to the system brought about by its mutations. These insights help us to decipher the current conjuncture and forecast its possible directions. However, we must also keep sight of the cumulative effects of successive developmental stages.

Contradictions do not just exist within each phase; they also build up from stage to stage, as the dynamics of one accumulation regime conflict with its forerunners. Capitalism, as a system, is ageing.

With the globalization of manufacturing, overcapacity continues to mount and spatial fixes continue to exhaust themselves, making the internal contradiction of the process of accumulation manifest at a truly global level. It remains doubtful that services industrialization and its international fragmentation could create opportunities large enough to absorb this mass of overaccumulated capital. In the meantime, what James O’Connor described as the second contradiction of capitalism is gaining steam. For O’Connor, a key obstacle to capitalist development arises not within the accumulation process per se but ‘between capitalist production relations (and productive forces) and the conditions of capitalist production’, due to ‘capitalism’s economically self-destructive appropriation and use of labor power, urban infrastructure and space, and external nature or environment’. The ecological crisis, the rising price of healthcare and education, the deterioration of physical infrastructure – all this indicates increasing costs on the supply-side that could further hamper the accumulation process. Dealing with these issues is by no means out of reach of human agency. But it would be foolish not to ask whether the additional systemic constraint of profit-making may have set the bar too high. ...Read More
Mexico Steps Up Anti-corruption Measures and Support for Cuba

DAVID RABY looks at recent political initiatives by President Lopez Obrador and their potential impact on Latin America and beyond
Photo: Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador

By David Raby
Morning Star. UK

July 30. 2021 - AS THINGS stand Mexican ex-presidents have immunity from prosecution, but last year the current president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (Amlo) persuaded Congress and the Supreme Court to authorize a referendum (“consultation”) on changing this so as to end impunity. The vote will take place on Sunday August 1 2021.

The last five presidents at least are suspected of massive corruption and human rights abuses.

Amlo already ended his own judicial immunity, and it is obviously absurd that former presidents should enjoy a privilege denied to the incumbent.

Actual prosecutions would no doubt still be slow and complex, but the issue has great political significance for Amlo’s “transformation” program aimed at ending corruption and impunity and ensuring real democratic accountability.

Not surprisingly, opposition politicians and media tried to prevent the vote from happening, and now it is a reality, they are trying to minimize its importance and discourage people from voting.

The corrupt INE (National Electoral Institute), which did all it could to hamper the campaign of Amlo’s Morena Party in the recent midterm elections, is now abusing its power to interfere in the referendum.

It has only authorized one-third of the normal polling booths and is trying to hinder popular campaigning for a Yes vote.

But popular indignation at the repression, corruption, fraud and deceit of former governments is enormous, and spontaneous campaign groups have sprung up all over the country to promote the referendum.

A massive Yes vote next Sunday will greatly reinforce Amlo’s political position.

It is no accident that the issue going to a referendum is a legal one: reform of the judicial system was one of the major issues in the recent midterm elections, and judicial corruption is one of the biggest obstacles to the country’s transformation.

Such corruption is notorious in Mexico: time and again judges release notorious criminals on technicalities, and venal officials know they can get away with murder (often literally) by buying impunity. This is beginning to change, but it is a slow process.

At Amlo’s request the Mexican Congress passed a Judicial Reform Bill a few months ago: it includes a massive increase in legal aid funding and hiring of legal aid advisers, democratizing recruitment of judges and magistrates, gender parity and human rights training for magistrates and ending political patronage appointments in the judicial system.

But implementation of this reform depends on determined action by senior judges themselves (only they have the constitutional power to implement the reform), and above all by Amlo’s ally Chief Justice Arturo Zaldivar.

The president has requested a two-year extension of Zaldivar’s mandate (due to end next year) which is crucial to his success.

The importance of Amlo’s program (and hence of next Sunday’s vote) for Latin America (perhaps not always clear to some left-wing observers) has been dramatically brought home by recent events.

When the recent Washington-orchestrated protests began in Cuba, Amlo immediately (in response to a question at his July 12 press conference) reaffirmed Mexico’s principles of non-intervention and self-determination: “If they want to help Cuba, the first thing to do is suspend the blockade!” and “We express our solidarity with the Cuban people, without hesitation!”

Action followed words as on July 25 Mexico sent two naval vessels with 138 lorry-loads of medical supplies, food and diesel fuel from Veracruz to Havana.

On July 26 Amlo stated that all the nations that voted against the blockade at the UN should likewise take action to end it.

As a local Mexican official declared: “We in Veracruz are almost Cubans” (as well as geographical proximity the port shares Cuba’s African heritage).

Also on July 24 a carefully staged event in Mexico City celebrated the birthday of Venezuelan Liberator Simon Bolivar in the presence of 31 representatives of Latin American and Caribbean countries.

Reiterating Bolivar’s call for regional unity, Amlo gave a remarkable speech documenting the history of US intervention in the region and calling for the defence of sovereignty.

Cuba, he said, is the one exception and its 62 years of resistance constitute an exceptional achievement: the Cuban people deserve an award for dignity and the country should be declared part of the World Heritage.

Amlo stated that the model of domination imposed by the Monroe Doctrine (1823) has no future, and called on the US to accept a new relationship based on respect and equality, with no more interventions, sanctions or blockades.

The meteoric rise of China, he declared, is a direct challenge to US hegemony, but what is needed is dialogue, negotiation and equilibrium without domination by any great power.

With such a bold statement in defence of Latin American and Caribbean unity and sovereignty, the Mexican president has staked out a claim to regional leadership which is a direct challenge to Washington’s hegemonic stance.

All the more reason to hope for a Yes vote next Sunday to consolidate his power at home and abroad.

David Raby is a retired academic and independent researcher on Latin America. He can be reached at david.raby@hotmail.com and on Twitter @DLRaby. ...Read More
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This Week's History Lesson:
TEXAS HISTORY... Or Forgetting Almost All I Ever Learned
about the Alamo

The men who fought there may have been brave, but I no longer count them as heroes.


By Lamar W. Hankins

July 29, 2021 - As a child in the 1950s, it seems that almost everything I learned about “The Battle of the Alamo” was wrong, biased, or both.

My basic public education taught me that the Alamo was the quintessential symbol of freedom, often referred to as the “cradle of Texas liberty.” The defenders in 1836 were brave heroes who valued liberty more than life. Well, they may have been brave, but I no longer count them as heroes.

I did not learn in school that the battle had little, if any, military significance. The men who fought at the Alamo had a variety of motivations that became subsumed in the popular mind as a fight for liberty. Less than three months before that March 6, 1836 battle, the mission had been taken by force by a group of mercenaries, insurgents, squatters, and rebels, who represented no one other than themselves and their kin. Independence was declared for a Texas Republic only four days before the March 6 battle, which probably lasted no more than an hour.

Many of the brave Alamo defenders escaped before the mission was overrun by Santa Anna’s forces, who then executed the survivors, including many who had escaped and been captured. These defenders were seen by Santa Anna as pirates or terrorists, to use a common modern term.

Mexico wanted to limit or end slavery in its territory.

Mexico wanted to limit or end slavery in its territory, which was introduced to what is now southeast Texas by Steven F. Austin, among others, who modeled the plantations created there on those found in the southern slave states. In fact, there was great interest among the slave states in creating another slave state west of Louisiana. Illegal immigration by mostly white settlers, including organized and armed militias, had increased to the point that Mexico had to act to protect its control over its territories.

James Bowie had been a slave trader and smuggler; he had arrived in Texas in 1830 with 109 enslaved people. With the help of an opportune marriage, Bowie quickly amassed claims on enormous amounts of Mexican land. The Alamo, located in what is now downtown San Antonio, was far removed from East Texas cotton fields, and General Sam Houston thought the Alamo so insignificant in the fight for a Republic of Texas that it received almost no reinforcements or supplies from other insurrectionists. The brave and foolish men who perished in the Alamo were wedded to white supremacist ideology prevalent throughout the southern United States.

As art historian and curator Ruben C. Cordova has written, “‘Remember the Alamo’ was a call for vengeance against Mexicans that was used as a rallying cry at San Jacinto and during the Mexican-American War. James E. Crisp points out that the Alamo ‘became a hammer for bashing Mexican Americans in Texas.’ It is still the preeminent anti-Mexican symbol and slogan (both in and out of Texas), which is presumably why President Donald Trump mentioned the ‘last stand’ at ‘the beautiful, beautiful Alamo’ in his [final] State of the Union address.”

There is more to this history that needs to be corrected.

There is more to this history that needs to be corrected, but this is a start, remembering, as Cordova wrote, the Alamo “best represents the liberty of whites to enslave, kill, expel, segregate, oppress, and otherwise dominate people of color. The Alamo is the cradle of Texas slavery, and a host of other oppressions.”

I may have learned all of this, and more, 60 years too late, but it is worth trying to correct the historical record so that my grandchildren and great grandchildren don’t live their lives with a false and brutish narrative.

To learn more about the true story of what happened at The Alamo about 185 years ago, read Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford. My local San Marcos newspaper was unwilling to confront this mythology by publishing my own reminiscences of a failed education about the Alamo. The editor and publisher of the San Marcos Record apparently did not want to become a part of the effort to correct this story in Texas history. Nick Castillo, the editor, wrote me: “After consulting with my boss, we’re going to pass on this one.”

The Alamo was not always an important symbol for Texas mythologists. The artifice was left in ruins for decades before its tale became a twisted story, slanted toward a dominant theme of celebrating whiteness and denying the anti-slavery position of Mexico, leaving out uncomfortable facts about both Tejanos and the white “heroes” John Wayne helped make real (or unreal) for generations of Texas school children.

History should be about understanding the complex moral realities that have been a part of the history of human beings for at least 10,000 years. I may not be pleased with all that I learn about the generations of my family that stretch back to 1670, when my ninth great grandfather immigrated to Virginia as an indentured servant, but the truth, whatever it may be, is more important to me than mythical heroes and false claims of valor.

[Rag Blog columnist Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, City Attorney, is retired and volunteers with the Final Exit Network as an Associate Exit Guide and contributor to the Good Death Society Blog. ...Read More

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Art in the Public Square: Oppression or Liberation?
WEEKLY BULLETIN OF THE MEXICO SOLIDARITY PROJECT
JULY 21, 2021/ THIS WEEK’S ISSUE/ MEIZHU LUI, FOR THE EDITORIAL TEAM

Monuments in spaces where the public congregates can be as much advertising as art. Monuments often function as “ads” for conquerors and military commanders. The statues say to all who walk by: “Buy this story, accept this guy as your hero!”

In our interview this week, Santa Monica City Councilor Oscar De La Torre challenges the message of a mural at his City Hall entrance that “whitewashes” how the Spanish brutally subjugated indigenous people. De La Torre and his California community aren’t buying that message. Public art, they insist, must not put white supremacy on a pedestal. That message is getting across elsewhere. In Charlottesville, Virginia, public outrage recently pushed Confederate General Robert E. Lee off his high horse.

Art for the public can and should be inspirational and aspirational. At this task, the Zapatistas have become masters, as they show in their recent “invasion” of Europe, a complex work of art complete with a “navy” and an “air force.” The boat they sailed in and the war plane they are building mimic and mock the instruments of traditional military power. Their army and navy come to conquer with the power of love, respect, and cooperation. 

The Zapatista artwork’s images and artifacts — their voyage from México itself — come across as whimsical, even humorous. But the Zapatistas aren’t joking. They’ve demonstrated over the years that they can be capable of real military defense. What they have created, what they defend, the story they want to tell all amount to a vision and a model of what can be. Objects in the public square can themselves be instruments of oppression or vehicles for liberation. The people are choosing. The people will choose.

Oscar De La Torre’s parents hailed from Jalisco, México. But he was born and bred in Santa Monica, California, a city he has now served as an elected school board member and more recently as a city councilor. In that service, De La Torre has never pulled his punches, especially when it comes to naming white supremacist practices and demanding they be ended.

For nearly 80 years now, a mural has been the first thing anyone entering the Santa Monica City Hall sees. What does that mural depict?

The mural depicts Santa Monica’s historical starting point in 1769, when the conquistadors arrived to colonize at sword point what was then still a part of México. We see a Spanish priest, with an armored soldier holding a sword standing next to him. The priest is pointing at two naked Native Americans kneeling at his feet next to some water.

Opposite the mural of Santa Monica’s founding is another mural intended to offer a vision of the city’s future. The people in this image are all white — even the dog is blond! — and they’re playing tennis and polo, sports of the rich. ...Read More
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André Gorz’s Non-Reformist Reforms Show How We Can Transform the World Today

By Mark Engler and Paul Engler
Jacobin

July 22, 2021 - In the 1960s, radical thinker André Gorz developed a novel concept that went beyond the tired reform versus revolution debate. With non-reformist reforms, popular movements can win immediate gains that shift power away from elites — and clear the way for more radical transformations.

For well over a century, radicals have debated whether systemic change might come through reform or revolution. Strategists — particularly within the socialist tradition — have disagreed on whether gradual steps might incrementally bring about a new society, or whether a sharp break with the existing political and economic order is required.

During the New Left of the 1960s, Austrian-French theorist André Gorz attempted to move beyond this binary and present another option. Gorz proposed that through the use of “non-reformist reforms,” social movements could both make immediate gains and build strength for a wider struggle, eventually culminating in revolutionary change. A certain type of reform, in other words, could herald greater transformations to come.

The Origins of the Non-Reformist Reform

Born Gerhard Hirsch in Vienna in 1923, Gorz immigrated to France in the late 1940s and cultivated a rich life as an engaged intellectual, immersing himself in the concerns of popular movements and becoming a provocative and sometimes influential voice for several generations of labor, socialist, and environmental activists. In the 1950s, he was a friend and interlocutor of Jean-Paul Sartre, advocating for the strain of existentialist Marxism associated with the storied journal Les Temps Modernes, where he served on the editorial committee. In the 1960s, Gorz co-founded a publication of his own, Le Nouvel Observateur, and was influenced by the ideas of radical educator and social critic Ivan Illich.

He went on to write pioneering works on ecological politics and, in his eighties, wrote his last book, Lettre à D. An unexpected critical and commercial success, the volume was an extended love letter to his wife of nearly sixty years, who long suffered from a debilitating neurological disorder. The two ultimately committed suicide together by lethal injection in 2007, having decided that neither wanted to live without the other.

Gorz advanced his idea of non-reformist reforms in one of his early books, A Strategy for Labor — published in French in 1964 and English in 1967 — as well as in essays from the same period. In mapping a path forward for social movements, he disagreed with social democrats who believed that the harms of capitalism could be ameliorated simply through electoral politics and parliamentary dealmaking. Yet he also criticized radicals who perennially predicted a revolution that was nowhere on the horizon.

“For at least the past thirty years,” Gorz wrote, “the Communist movement has propagated the prophecy that capitalism would inevitably, catastrophically collapse. In the capitalist countries, its policy has been to ‘wait for the revolution.’ The internal contradictions of capitalism were supposed to sharpen, the condition of the toiling masses to worsen. Inevitably the working class would rise up.”

This did not happen, however — at least not in the way they had envisioned. Instead, by the 1960s, the advanced capitalist world was enjoying a stretch of robust economic growth — Les Trente Glorieuses, or the three glorious decades, as the postwar period became known in France. Capitalism could not cure itself of its “crises and irrationalities,” Gorz wrote, but it had “learned how to prevent their becoming explosively acute.”

Elsewhere, reflecting on an earlier era marked by deep poverty, he observed that “[d]estitute proletarians and peasants did not need to have a model of a future society in mind in order to rise up against the existing order: the worst was here and now; they had nothing to lose. But conditions have changed since then. Nowadays, in the richer societies, it is not so clear that the status quo represents the greatest possible evil.”

Gorz acknowledged that deep poverty and misery still existed, but only among a fraction of the population — perhaps a fifth. Those suffering most were not a homogenous industrial proletariat ready to come together as a unified force. Instead, they were a diverse and divided collection of people that included the unemployed, small farmers, and elders facing economic insecurity.

Changing times, Gorz believed, called for social movements to adopt a new strategy — specifically, a strategy focused on making concrete gains that could serve as transitional steps toward revolution. “It is no longer enough to reason as if socialism were a self-evident necessity,” he argued. “This necessity will no longer be recognized unless the socialist movement specifies what socialism can bring, what problems it alone is capable of solving, and how. Now more than ever it is necessary to present not only an overall alternative but also those ‘intermediate objectives’ (mediations) which lead to it and foreshadow it in the present.”

Gorz disagreed with social democrats who believed that the harms of capitalism could be ameliorated simply through electoral politics and parliamentary dealmaking. Yet he also criticized radicals who perennially predicted a revolution that was nowhere on the horizon.
In this approach, transformation would come about “through long-term and conscious action, which starts with the gradual application of a coherent program of reforms.” Fights for these reforms would serve as “trials of strength.” Small wins would allow movements to build power and put them on more favorable footing for the future. “In this way,” Gorz argued, “the struggle will advance. . . [as] each battle reinforces the positions of strength, the weapons, and also the reasons that workers have for repelling the attacks of the conservative forces.”

Gorz did not rule out the possibility — or even the necessity — of a later showdown between workers and capital. But he criticized leftists in France who refused to pursue immediate improvements, lest they weaken workers’ desire for revolution. “These leaders fear that a tangible amelioration in the workers’ condition, or a partial victory within the capitalist framework, will reinforce the system and render it more bearable,” Gorz wrote. Nevertheless, he argued:

These fears. . . reflect fossilized thinking, a lack of strategy and theoretical reflection. On the assumption that partial victories within the system would inevitably be absorbed by it, an impenetrable barrier has been erected between present struggles and the future socialist solution. The road from one to the other has been cut…. The movement behaves as though the question of power were resolved: “Once we’re in power…” But the whole question is precisely to get there, to create the means and the will to get there.

Making Change Structural

What, then, makes up a “nonreformist” or “structural” reform?

In his most basic formulation, Gorz defines these reforms as changes that are not tailored to accommodate the current system. “[A] not necessarily reformist reform is one which is conceived not in terms of what is possible within the framework of a given system and administration, but in view of what should be made possible in terms of human needs and demands,” he writes. “A non-reformist reform is determined not in terms of what can be, but what should be.”

Beyond this, Gorz is sometimes ambiguous, and it can be hard to find precise standards in his work for what constitutes ideal demands. Nevertheless, some key themes emerge.

First, an individual demand should be seen as but one step toward something larger. Reforms, he writes, “must be conceived as means, not as ends, as dynamic phases in a process of struggle, not as resting stages.” They must serve “to educate and unite” people by pointing in “a new direction for social and economic development.” Each reform should be connected to a wider vision of change.

In Gorz’s words, workers’ “partial struggles for jobs and wages, for the proper valuing of human and natural resources, for control over working conditions, and for the social satisfaction of the social needs created by industrial civilization cannot succeed unless they are guided by an alternative social model. . . which gives these partial battles a comprehensive perspective.” Nonreformist reforms should help illuminate the path to that alternative. A socialist program, he remarks, should “exclude neither compromise nor partial objectives, so long as they go in the right direction and as long as that direction is clear.”

In practice, Gorz thought that socialists might often ally with moderate social democrats and liberal reformers, who are apt to see short-term reform as an end in itself. But this makes it all the more important for radicals to be clear about their far-reaching objectives. “The fact that social-democratic leaders and socialist forces may find themselves in agreement on the necessity of certain reforms must never be allowed to confuse the basic difference between their respective goals and perspectives,” he writes. “If a socialist strategy of reforms is to be possible, this basic difference must not be masked…. On the contrary, it must be placed at the center of political debate.”

Second, Gorz argues that the way a demand is won is as important as the demand itself. Demands must be a “living critique” of existing social relations, not only in content “but also in the way they are pursued.” For instance, a $1 an hour raise extracted through a bitterly contested strike is very different from an increase arbitrarily handed down by an employer or government functionary. Gorz writes: “Any reform whatsoever — including workers’ control — may be emptied of its revolutionary significance and reabsorbed by capitalism if it is merely instituted by government fiat and administered by bureaucratic controls, i.e., reduced to a ‘thing.’”

Nonreformist reforms, scholar Amna Akbar explains in her insightful reading of Gorz, “are not in themselves about finding an answer to a policy problem: they are centrally about an exercise of power by people over the conditions of their own lives” — what Gorz calls “an experiment in the possibility of their own emancipation.”

Some critics have argued that the question of how a reform fight is waged is so central that focusing on the content of any near-term demand misses the point. They contend that while a reform may have greater or lesser benefit, the idea of a “silver bullet” reform with inherently radical potential is a misconception: Any reform itself is not transformative, only the struggle is.

In response, defenders of Gorz’s concept might point to a third trait of structural reforms: Nonreformist reforms are changes that, once implemented, boost popular power at the expense of elite groups. As Gorz writes, these reforms “assume a modification of the relations of power; they assume that the workers will take over powers or assert a force. . . strong enough to establish, maintain, and expand those tendencies within the system which serve to weaken capitalism and to shake its joints.”

Gorz argues that the way a demand is won is as important as the demand itself.
For Gorz, the quintessential non-reformist reform is one that increases worker control over the production process in a workplace or industry. Today, some activists have pointed to significant changes to labor law — including the repeal of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 — as reforms that would shift the balance of power. Others have touted singlepayer health care as a structural change, not only because it would decommodify an important sector of the economy, but because it would stoke further action.

“Medicare for All doesn’t just offer much-needed and greatly deserved relief to working people,” writes author and journalist Meagan Day. “It also increases our ability to intentionally push back against the ruling class. If unions didn’t have to make major sacrifices to protect health benefits, what else could they fight for? If a worker didn’t have to worry about losing health insurance when they lose their job, how much bolder could they be in standing up to their boss? If health care coverage is made independent from employment, how much less power would the bosses have over workers in the economy and in politics?”

In each case, what is at stake is not just a short-term material gain, but also the ability to win more in the future. For Gorz, non-reformist reforms seek to undermine the established order. “Structural reforms should not be conceived as measures granted by the bourgeois State at the end of a compromise negotiated with it, measures which leave its power intact. They should rather be considered as cracks created in the system by attacks on its weak points,” he writes.

A strategy of non-reformist reforms “aims by means of partial victories to shake the system’s equilibrium profoundly, to sharpen its contradictions, to intensify its crisis, and, by a succession of attacks and counterattacks, to raise the class struggle to a greater intensity, at a higher and higher level.”

The Art of Radical Compromise
The key to putting nonreformist reforms into practice is balancing two difficult realities: first, that compromises can be filled with pitfalls for social movements and therefore must be viewed with caution; second, that refusing to bargain over nearterm reforms brings problems of its own, ultimately leading to a dead end. The practitioner of structural reform must walk the precarious line between these truths.

When it comes to the problems of compromise, radicals who warn social movements against cutting deals often point to the dangers of cooptation and of legitimizing the system. While these perils are sometimes exaggerated, the warning is not unfounded. The long experience of social movements has affirmed that reformist compromises, even when they bring real benefits, come at a cost: Firedup supporters are often demobilized when an incremental gain is won, and sometimes they are never reactivated.

Gains won with the cooperation of elected officials — who inevitably present their smiling faces at ribbon-cutting and bill-signing ceremonies — reinforce the mainstream narrative that those in power are the ones responsible for advancing social change. Movements that are “invited in” to help oversee or administer reforms can lose much-needed talent to inside game bureaucracy.

As a result, their ability to generate greater pressure from the outside is weakened. Professionalism begins to seep through the ranks, with radical organizers morphing into more comfortable functionaries. Movements, as a time-honored saying holds, go to Washington, DC to die.

The system, Gorz argues, has formidable power to weaken and coopt reforms, muting their potential to push toward a revolutionary confrontation.

One strength of Gorz’s analysis is that it does not deny such difficulties. Rather, he insists that movements face them head on. The system, Gorz argues, has formidable power to weaken and coopt reforms, muting their potential to push toward a revolutionary confrontation. “There are no anticapitalist institutions or conquests that cannot in the long run be whittled down, denatured, absorbed, and emptied of all or part of their content if the imbalance created by their initiation is not exploited by new offensives as soon as it manifests itself,” he writes.

And yet, while the possibility of cooptation is real, this outcome is not inevitable. “The risk must be run,” he argues, “for there is no other way.”

Gorz held to this position because he was clear that the consequence of opting out of reform fights is self isolation. He was critical of “maximalists,” utopians, and dogmatic sectarians, whose insistence on purity removed them from actual struggle. He recognized that putting together a near-term program could not simply be a matter of coming up with the most radical demands possible.

Those pursuing structural reforms, he argued, could not “aim at the immediate realization of anticapitalist reforms that are directly incompatible with the survival of the system, such as the nationalization of all important industrial enterprises[.]” Reforms that would eliminate capitalism outright might be desirable, but the whole point was that workers did not yet have the power to implement these types of changes. “If the socialist revolution is not immediately possible, neither is the realization of reforms immediately destructive of capitalism,” he writes.

Radicals must ask what intermediate steps they will accept, knowing that these are not the fulfillment of their most transformative desires. Using the example of a union in conflict with an employer, Gorz writes that a given win “will not result in the abolition of capitalism. Victory will only lead to new battles, to the possibility of new partial victories. And at each of its stages, above all in its first phase, the battle will end with a compromise. Its path will be beset with pitfalls.” In this process, “The union will have to ‘dirty its hands’” and risk legitimating the power of the boss. ...Read More
TV Review: ‘The Crime of the Century'
Prolific documentarian Alex Gibney turns his attentions to the opioid crisis in a four-hour HBO documentary.


By Daniel Fienberg
Hollywood Reporter

Ultraprolific documentarian Alex Gibney really needs to slow down his output. He may be a machine, but I’m but a man incapable of generating five-to-10 Gibney-specific review ledes per year.

Alternatively, ultraprolific documentarian Alex Gibney really needs to speed up his output. Like seemingly everybody else these days, Gibney is steadliy finding things to take umbrage at, but even at his outrageous current pace, there’s a real risk of even typically thorough Gibney productions feeling like nourishing-but-reheated leftovers.

Welcome to Gibney’s The Crime of the Century, a four-hour HBO documentary chronicling the deepening morass of the opioid crisis in America. It’s a project of well-earned pique, unfolding with Gibney’s strong sense of cause and effect. But this is one of those instances where it’s hard to imagine viewers settling in for four hours of burgeoning irritation without having already learned nearly all of the pertinent facts from a dozen previous books, newspaper exposés, segments on every TV news magazine imaginable and long-term comic treatments from The Daily Show to Full Frontal to Last Week Tonight. The opioid crisis isn’t over, so Gibney isn’t exactly late to the party, but there’s no question that the pizza with the freshest toppings has been gone for a while.

Alex Gibney on Why He Takes on the Opioid Crisis in 'The Crime of the Century' Documentary
The point that The Crime of the Century makes most clearly — as articulated in the title — is that the opioid crisis in America isn’t a piece of tragic happenstance, a situation that we found ourselves in because of inertia or weakness. It’s a crime and specifically a crime borne of capitalism, where a handful of people running a handful of drug companies put profits over humans and became rich at a level of obscenity that defies comprehension. Those people were able to accumulate those billions by incentivizing individuals and companies below them to prioritize making millions over proper regulation or legislation — and in some cases even prioritized hundreds of thousands of dollars over the ability to look clients or communities in the eye. It’s a sin in which both victims and perpetrators resist ideological lines. The 500,000+ opioid overdose deaths since 2000 have been in red states and blue states, and the politicians pushing or signing toothless laws to protect the fattened drug companies are both Republicans and Democrats.

Gibney traces the problem to the Sackler Family, moguls of Purdue Pharma and benefactors of art galleries. But there’s a deeper dive into how the proliferation of OxyContin and then fentanyl couldn’t have happened without a wholesale redefinition of “pain” and “pain management” — one in which the concerns of people with genuine and chronic ailments were never really a part of any equation, because a drug made exclusively for late-stage cancer patients will never make enough money to be worth developing and marketing.

The problem — and this is not actually a “problem” in general but just a problem for this documentary as a piece of original reporting — is that not only is Gibney following in the footsteps of writers like Patrick Radden Keefe (Empire of Pain) and Barry Meier (Pain Killer) and the investigative team at The Washington Post, but they’re among his featured subjects. As I’ll always say, I find Gibney most interesting when he’s following his own frustrated sense of injustice and least interesting when he’s providing a visual showcase — lots of pretty closeups of poppy plants and Nomadlandesque snapshots of American decay — for other people’s work. There are original documents and revelations here, but they aren’t always presented in a way that lets you know what’s new and notable about them.

It’s easy for Gibney to know where to point his finger. The condemnation of figures like Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers and John Kapoor and Insys Therapeutics is easy and vicious. But nobody with the last name “Sackler” is going to sit down for an interview with Alex Gibney. On the political front, folks like Senator Christopher Dodd and former Congressman Tom Marino and now senator Marsha Blackburn are called out for coddling Purdue and then the affront that is the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act, but they’re not going to appear in a film like this either.

This leaves Gibney with the challenge of figuring out the personal stories he wants to depict in the documentary; the results are interesting, if questionable.

The closest Gibney comes to a clear onscreen villain is Dr. Lynn Webster of Lifetree Pain Clinic, whose smug answers regarding addiction are intercut with the story of a Utah man whose wife overdosed on drugs Webster prescribed. Like most of the figures here, Webster is decidedly midlevel in a conspiracy that goes all the way to a top only glimpsed in news footage, previously unseen depositions and text-only testimony.

In lieu of either the top-level figures or the lowest level victims — this is not a “human face of overdoses or addiction” documentary, but Showtime’s The Trade already exists — Gibney looks, sometimes with excessive curiosity or sympathy, at people like Alec Burlakoff, a sales chief at Insys whose astonishing glibness is matched only by Gibney’s overgenerosity in providing self hanging rope. There are sad and ruminative backstories given for one of Burklakoff’s primary deputies and for an unlikely fentanyl kingpin — and while I don’t disagree with the implication that past the tippy top of wealthy predators, nearly everybody is caught in some kind of victimization vortex, my thought at more than a handful of points was: “I feel bad for this person, but people are dead because of them.”

Most disappointing is that The Crime of the Century is basically the 2019 version of this story with some updates for various disappointingly resolved lawsuits and a bit of fleeting awareness of the impact of a yearlong quarantine on addiction (an element that, frankly, deserved much more acknowledgment than anything presented here). The Crime of the Century is good instead of great, which could be the lede to many Alex Gibney documentary reviews. ...Read More
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