We hope our new format will be more readable, since nearly half of you get our newsletter on your smartphone. This is designed to work on nearly anything. If you want to get a link to share or just want to view it as a webpage, click the button above. We expect some glitches at first, but bear with us. To subscribe, send an email to [email protected]

February 21 - In state after state, Republicans want to suppress voting because they know they are a minority party.

The fundamental right in a democracy — the right to vote — is once more under siege. In state after state, Republican legislators have introduced literally hundreds of bills designed to suppress voting.

Their passion is fueled by Donald Trump’s big lie that the presidential election was “stolen” from him. Their targets are minorities — African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans, and the young. They call themselves Republicans, but their lineage comes not from Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, but from Jefferson Davis, the southern Democrat who led the Confederacy in its battle to keep Blacks enslaved.

The current debates have a haunting history. After the South was defeated in the Civil War, Congress passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. Often termed the “second founding,” these amendments ended slavery (13th), guaranteed equal protection under the laws (14th), and prohibited discrimination in the right to vote (15th).

The defeated South then began what was called Reconstruction. To be readmitted to the Union, they had to create new constitutions that rendered equal rights to all. In some states, newly freed Blacks constituted the majority. In many states, a new fusion politics began, often bringing the newly freed Black citizens together with small farmers and merchants against the old plantation aristocracy. In states like North Carolina, the new majorities passed remarkable progressive reforms in public education, public works, progressive taxation, land redistribution, and more.

The white plantation aristocracy could not abide the new order. They organized a systematic effort to suppress the new coalitions. America’s first domestic terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan, unleashed a wave of violence against newly freed Blacks and the whites who joined them. An estimated 5,000 Blacks were lynched. The violence that included setting fire to Black stores and neighborhoods was designed to drive Blacks and their allies out of polling booths and the South.

The plantation aristocracy successfully took back power, then imposed Jim Crow laws that made it virtually impossible for Blacks to vote. The federal government failed to check the violence, and in 1876, in a corrupt deal, Republicans agreed to end Reconstruction and remove the remaining federal troops. In 1896, to its lasting shame, the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson ratified the surrender, declaring separate but equal laws constitutional. It took more than 50 years before the civil rights movement and the Voting Rights Act restored the right to vote to African Americans.

Today’s Republican Party is founded on the reaction to the civil rights movement. From the 1964 Goldwater presidential campaign on, Republicans traded hats with southern Democrats to become the party of state’s rights, white sanctuary and opposition to racial equality.

Today’s Jefferson Davis Republicans know that they are increasingly a minority party. In Georgia, Arizona, Texas, North Carolina and other states, Republicans fear they will lose control. Once more, intimidation, mass incarceration and violence are used to intimidate.

After the last election, Trump rallied his supporters with the big lie that the election was stolen, inciting them to sack the Capitol and to march on state legislatures. Worse, even after the riot, 147 Republicans in the House and Senate voted to overturn the election.

The violence, just as in Reconstruction, is combined with a systemic campaign to suppress the right to vote. In 33 states, legislators have introduced 165 bills to restrict voting, the Brennan Center on Justice reports. In nine states, Republicans have introduced legislation to limit mail-in voting (nearly half of votes in the 2020 election were cast by mail due to the pandemic). In 10 states, Republicans are pushing more stringent voter ID requirements, knowing that these discriminate against minorities (25% of African Americans but only 8% of whites have no government-issued photo IDs). Other states are pushing to prohibit the use of student IDs to make it harder for the young to vote, roll back automatic voter registration laws, end Election Day registration or reduce the number of days for early voting.

In Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas, Republicans control all branches of government, giving them power to gerrymander districts in the redistricting after the 2020 census.

Once more the Supreme Court has aided and abetted these anti-democratic actions. The right-wing majority gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. For the first time, there will be no prior review by the Justice Department to limit racially discriminatory gerrymandering. Then in Rucho v. Common Cause, the “gang of five” ruled that the courts would no longer review challenges to partisan gerrymandering. No federal court will stand in the way of discriminatory outrages.

It took decades to overcome the Jim Crow laws imposed at the end of Reconstruction. It required mass demonstrations, immense courage on the part of ordinary heroes, and finally the leadership of Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr., among others, to begin to correct the injustice.

We can’t wait decades this time. Jefferson Davis Republicans are once more intent on imposing minority rule, and using the law and a partisan majority on the Supreme Court to enforce it. They’re using both terrorist threat and legal measures to intimidate and impede voters. Once more it will take popular opposition — demonstrations, voter registration and mobilization drives, popular education and engagement — to protect the right to vote. The House of Representatives has passed a law, HR 1, to expand and protect the right to vote. The bill is likely to face universal opposition from Republican senators, unless popular mobilization forces some to stand up.

It is time for ordinary heroes once more. ...Read More

Feb 22, 2021 - At the beating heart of the Big Lie—the deranged fantasy that the 2020 election was stolen from its loser, Donald Trump—is the Republican belief that the votes of Black people shouldn’t count. In lawsuit after lawsuit after the election, Republicans asked the courts to throw away votes that had been cast in predominantly Black communities. In Michigan, they literally singled out Detroit and threatened to refuse to certify its votes. The GOP’s entire postelection strategy was to reinstitute race-based voter disenfranchisement all the way up to January 6, when 147 Republican lawmakers voted to straight-up overturn the results because Black people had overcome the white supremacy baked into the Electoral College.

While the failed Capitol insurrection has stymied at least some of these efforts, the very serious work of preventing Black people from voting in the future continues apace. The Brennan Center for Justice reports that state legislatures have already prepared three times as many voter restriction bills this year as were proposed during the same period of time last year. The numbers are staggering: “Twenty-eight states have introduced, prefiled, or carried over 106 restrictive bills this year (as compared to 35 such bills in fifteen states on February 3, 2020).”

In Pennsylvania, for instance, the Republican-controlled legislature has proposed 14 new restrictions. New Hampshire’s legislature has put forward 10. (They should change their state motto to “Vote Republican or Die.”) Senator Josh Hawley’s home state of Missouri has nine voter suppression bills kicking around, while 11 are on the docket in Georgia, which seems determined to suppress its way back to being a red state after Democrats won the presidential election and two Senate runoffs there.

The new laws cover everything Republicans could think of to make it harder for people to cast a vote. Many of the proposals are laser-focused on absentee ballots: Republicans want to make those harder to get, easier to reject, and impossible to fix. Other laws make it harder for people to register to vote. Still others want to make it easier to purge registered voters from the rolls.

Republicans don’t have to succeed in all of these attempts—and, ultimately, they don’t have to suppress that many additional votes—to throw future elections their way. Despite Joe Biden whupping Trump by over 7 million votes nationwide, his margin of victory in the Electoral College came down to about 43,000 votes across three states. The college is already rigged to produce Republican victories despite the will of popular majorities. If Republicans can make it just a little harder for the multiethnic coalition united against them to vote against them, then the Electoral College will do the rest.

The Republican candidate for president has lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections. What’s wild is that the GOP has no plans to address this problem, no strategy to broaden its appeal beyond the insular white racists and wealthy white business interests that represent a stagnant and aging minority of the country. There will be no reckoning, no autopsy, no self-reflection about what their party has become. For them, it’s voter suppression or bust.

The Democrats’ response to the Jim Crow–style policies being unashamedly pushed by Republicans appears to be the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The bill, renamed for the famed Georgia congressman after his death, seeks to restore elements of the 1965 Voting Rights Act eviscerated by Chief Justice John Roberts in 2013 and add additional protections against discriminatory voter ID laws.

The problem, somewhat obviously, is that the Supreme Court could strike down this voting rights act just as easily as it did the original. There’s no guarantee that Roberts will view Congress’s new law more favorably—and even if he does, the court today is very different from it was in 2013. To withstand a legal challenge, the Lewis Act would have to be upheld by Roberts, the three remaining liberals on the court, and at least one member of the ultraconservative wing: Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, or alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh. None of these conservatives have ever shown the slightest inclination to protect voting rights, and I’m not particularly hopeful they’ll start now.

But the rot goes deeper than that. Conservatives on the lower courts are in on the voter suppression game as well, since they also realize that denying the franchise to Black voters is the best way to ensure continued white dominance. Historically, white people have always been creative when it comes to dreaming up new ways to disenfranchise Black people—never mind the 15th Amendment’s prohibition on race-based voter restrictions—and white courts have always been willing to look the other way. Whether it’s forcing Black voters to count jelly beans in a jar or insisting that formerly incarcerated people pay fines before they’re allowed to vote again, the forces of white supremacy always find their muse when Black people try to exercise political power.

No legislation can anticipate all of their maneuvers. As currently written, the Lewis Act doesn’t have strong protections for mail-in ballots, because such ballots weren’t a big issue until a few months ago. This means the act is already outmoded, and while I’m sure it will be rewritten and strengthened, it does go to show that, when it comes to voter suppression, Republicans practice the kind of racism that never sleeps.

That’s why it’s critical to have judges who will uphold the principle of voting rights, even in new situations. The problem is that Republicans have stacked the courts with conservatives who clearly won’t. Don’t be fooled by the judiciary’s resistance to the Big Lie: Asking judges to throw out votes that have already been cast, as the Republicans did, is different from asking them to make it harder for votes to be cast in the first place. As we saw in the last election, conservative judges were perfectly happy to knock down laws that would have made it easier and safer for people to vote during a pandemic. ...Read More

  

John Fetterman is not easy to miss. He’s 6’8", 325 pounds, and usually dressed in a black work shirt and boots. He sports two large tattoos on his forearms, a shaved head, and a goatee. You might mistake him for a steelworker at first glance, but he’s actually the 40-year-old, Harvard-educated mayor of Braddock, Pa.

Fetterman has become a poster boy for the clean-energy revolution, thanks to an Environmental Defense Fund ad campaign that features him calling for climate and clean-energy legislation to help revitalize former steel towns like Braddock. He’s appeared before Congress twice to testify in support of the Waxman-Markey climate bill, arguing that a cap on carbon will help towns like his recover.

Braddock was once a thriving steel town along the Monongahela River, the place where Andrew Carnegie made his fortune in steel. The town’s population was over 20,000 in the 1950s, but the bottom began to fall out soon thereafter. Steel jobs left, and with them, the town’s prosperity and population. The town now has fewer than 3,000 residents, and empty houses and vacant lots line the streets. Unemployment runs about three times the national average, and the median household income is just $18,473.

Fetterman, a native of York, Pa., moved to the town in 2001 after graduate school at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, to start a program for young adults. He was elected mayor of the city in 2005, and since then has made revitalizing the town his top priority. He has Braddock’s zip code, 15104, tattooed on one arm, and on the other are the dates of killings that have occurred during his time in office, along with the words “I will make you hurt.”

In the past four years, the town has launched a green-jobs summer program for youth, created a green space for the community, and brought a small alternative energy company, Fossil Free Fuel, to the downtown area. Plans are underway for a community center powered by geothermal energy.

Earlier this year, Fetterman and his town were featured in a New York Times article; it caught the attention of the Environmental Defense Fund, which enlisted Fetterman in its ad campaign in support of the House climate bill. The ads show the abandoned streets of Braddock and unemployed steelworkers from the region, with Fetterman calling for “a cap on carbon pollution” to “create jobs making things like solar panels and wind turbines.”

Grist caught up with Fetterman in Pittsburgh, Pa., recently to talk about his town and the hope for a green-job revolution. “At the end of the day, we need to build pragmatic solutions in environmental stewardship, of course, but we also have to make sure we’re taking care of the other side of the socioeconomic coin, [those who] don’t have the luxury of being able to care which kind of heirloom tomato they buy,” he told Grist.

A. Braddock is steel town a little bit outside of Pittsburgh. It was once an incredibly prosperous boomtown of 20,000 residents, and it’s now under 3,000. It’s a 90 percent loss in our population, and now 90 percent of our businesses are gone, 90 percent of our building stock is gone. It really grabs you. You can tell something really bad happened, but you’re not sure what. You can’t get 90 percent of the population to agree that the sky is blue, but 90 percent of people agreed that we need to leave here because things are in such a state that we don’t have any other options.

A. This was well before I arrived on the scene. It started in the ’60s. It was nothing really significant, but it was a trickle. And then it accelerated in the ’70s, and then the mills started dropping rapidly, then it really descended into chaos. It’s like the Warren Zevon song, “We were in the house when the house burned down.” And the people that remained have really gone through this kind of economic apocalypse, where it’s 28 days later and they’re kind of like the survivors of this scourge that was beyond their control. There was very little they could do as an individual besides hold on and try to maintain some semblance of the life they knew growing up, when Braddock had 13 furniture stores, three movie theaters, dozens and dozens of bars, restaurants, department stores, all of these things. And now there’s none. We don’t have any.

A. Well, many of them are unemployed. Many work in the service sector, in a large retail and lifestyle complex that’s down the river. Some work in the hospital that’s still in town, and some commute to Pittsburgh for other jobs.

A. Braddock and Pittsburgh need to continually be progressive and advance that frontier. That’s something that I’ve always been involved in and believed in strongly. Urban agriculture, for example. Braddock has this enormously large inventory of vacant lots. What’s the best way to marry the needs of the community with the realities we have in town?

We have kids that don’t have summer jobs. We don’t have any grocery stores in town, and we’ve got this large number of lots. Well, let’s build a small-scale urban farm. That way we create jobs. We create fresh organic produce. We use and beautify a lot that looked like it was a research-and-development lab for different weeds — they were waist high! It serves the community, and also does it in a way that is consistent with a sustainable, more progressive lifestyle. So from my perspective it’s a win-win.

It’s not a matter of having this fetish saying, I compost, so I can pat myself on the back. It’s saying what can we do as a community that improves the quality of life for our residents — and that we’re able to do it in a way that’s sustainable and adheres to these principles, that’s just icing on the cake.

A. Well, it started when I took office, and this summer we hired close to 100 kids. [They’re] working on the urban farm, creating a green space. Prior to us taking over, our community did not have a green spot for children to frolic, people to just kind of relax. So we have that now. We got a grant from the Heinz Endowment, which is a major local foundation, and we’re working on installing the first green roof in the area too. This is the last building of its kind, an eight-story building, that if we didn’t put a new roof on it eventually, it would go under. So we said, OK, we can put it as a green roof.

That’s the recurring theme for us in Braddock — it has to work with the framework we’re in. It’s not green at the expense of Braddock, it’s what’s right for Braddock, and thankfully I think it drives home why a lot of these principles really do make sense and it’s not just a bunch of “weird treehuggers” who care about these things. They are important principles not only for the environment but for helping communities as well.

We started [the green-jobs program] in 2006, with a limited number, and we scaled it up. It was 35 the first year, 50 the second, 70 last year, and now it’s 100. And each year we’ve had completion rates well into the 90s. And this year, again, it was 100 percent. I know that’s hard to believe. I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it myself. None of the corresponding stereotypes of bad movies that star white folks that come in and change a poor school — we didn’t have the fighting, none of these things....Read More

A rise in assaults against Asian Americans last year seems primarily tied to the coronavirus pandemic. Some Asian Americans also worry that heightened tensions between the U.S. and China and growing fears of China's espionage activities stateside could make them more vulnerable to racist attacks.

Driving the news: There were more than 2,800 incidents of verbal and physical assaults directed at Asian Americans in 2020, according to Stop AAPI Hate, an organization founded early last year to track hate crimes against people of Asian American Pacific Islander heritage, Axios' Shawna Chen reports.

What's happening: Most of the recorded incidents were verbal, but some were violent assaults.

In March 2020, a man stabbed three members of an Asian-American family shopping at a Sam's Club in Midland, Texas, allegedly "because he thought the family was Chinese, and infecting people with the coronavirus," according to an FBI report. The victims survived.

In January, an 84-year-old Thai man in San Francisco was shoved to the ground as he walked, sustaining fatal injuries.

On Feb. 3, a Filipino man was slashed across the face with a box cutter while riding the New York subway.

Between the lines: Hate crimes tend to surge around "big political moments" and during election years, Michael Jenson, a researcher at the University of Maryland and author of a 2020 report on hate crimes, told NPR.

"When President Trump began and insisted on using the term 'China virus,' we saw that hate speech really led to hate violence," Russell Jeung, creator of the Stop AAPI Hate tracker and chair of the Asian American studies department at San Francisco State University, told USA Today.

But Trump "could not have rallied the kind of hatred that he did without this country’s long history of systemic and cultural racism against people of Asian descent," writes Princeton professor Anne Anlin Cheng in a Feb. 21 essay for the New York Times.

That history includes:

"People attacking Asian Americans during the quarantine... are not fearing contagion from disease but assigning blame for it. Asian Americans are ... alleged to be culpable for sins ranging from the Vietnam War to an invisible infection. We are guilty by association even if our grandparents lament our alienation from their traditions."— Frank H. Wu, President of Queens College, City University of New York, in a recent report on the targeting of Asian-Americans in New York

Fast forward: The geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China today, and some proposed approaches for addressing espionage and intellectual property theft in U.S. scientific research, may exacerbate suspicions toward Chinese Americans.

The Department of Justice's recent indictments of some Chinese scientists at U.S. universities for failing to disclose Chinese government-linked projects has raised concerns of racial profiling.

Trump-era regulations imposed sweeping visa restrictions that could apply to hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens, and some legislative proposals could prohibit Chinese students from pursuing graduate studies in fields that involve sensitive technology, a controversial approach being pushed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.).

What to watch: The New York Police Department created a task force last year to focus on hate crimes directed at Asians. If assaults continue to occur, other regions may consider similar measures.

Editor’s note: This post has been updated to clarify and better explain why Asian Americans may be more vulnerable to racist attacks. ...Read More

Allen Ginsberg’s Howl went on to become a beloved icon of San Francisco

Feb 23, 2021 - Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet, publisher, painter and political activist who co-founded the famous City Lights bookshop in San Francisco and became an icon of the city himself, has died aged 101.

Ferlinghetti died at home on Monday night. His son Lorenzo said that the cause was interstitial lung disease.

Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, New York in 1919. His father died before he was born and his mother was committed to a mental hospital, leaving him to be raised by his aunt. When he was seven, his aunt, then working as a governess for a wealthy family in Bronxville, abruptly ran off, leaving Ferlinghetti in the care of her employers. After attending university in North Carolina, he became a journalist in 1941, then joined the US Navy during the second world war. While studying for his doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris on the GI Bill, he began to write poetry.

Returning to the US in 1951, he was drawn to California as a place to start afresh. “San Francisco had a Mediterranean feeling about it,” he told the New York Times. “I felt it was a little like Dublin when Joyce was there. You could walk down Sackville Street and see everyone of any importance in one walk.”

In 1953, he co-founded the City Lights bookshop and publishing company with friend Peter Dean Martin, who left soon after, with the mission to democratize literature and make it accessible to all. “We were young and foolish,” he told the Guardian in 2019. “And we had no money.”

While most bookshops across the US closed early and on weekends at the time, City Lights stayed open seven days a week and late into the night, fostering a countercultural community that attracted the likes of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. City Lights initially focused on selling paperbacks, which were cheaper but looked down on by the literary establishment, and publishing poetry, offbeat and radical books by the likes of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Paul Bowles, Gary Snyder and Gregory Corso.

In 1955, Ferlinghetti heard Ginsberg’s seminal poem Howl read for the first time at the Six Gallery in North Beach. The next day, he sent a telegram to Ginsberg: “I GREET YOU AT THE BEGINNING OF A GREAT CAREER. STOP. WHEN DO I GET MANUSCRIPT OF HOWL?” The epic poem was printed in Britain and shipped to San Francisco, where the copies were seized. Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg were arrested on obscenity charges in 1957.

“I wasn’t worried. I was young and foolish. I figured I’d get a lot of reading done in jail and they wouldn’t keep me in there forever. And, anyway, it really put the book on the map,” Ferlinghetti told the Guardian. Having already sent the poem to the American Civil Liberties Union, “to see if they would defend us if we were busted”, the ACLU successfully defended the poem at a trial that lasted months. The verdict set an important precedent for reducing censorship, and heralded a new freedom for books around the world, while also making both men internationally famous.

He self-identified as a philosophical anarchist, hosting many sit-ins and protests against war at City Lights. He regarded poetry as a powerful social force and not one reserved for the intellectual elite, saying, “We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.”

In later decades, Ferlinghetti became an icon of his city. In 1978, when San Francisco was rocked by the double assassination of the city’s mayor, George Moscone and city supervisor Harvey Milk, Ferlinghetti wrote a poem that ran two days later in the San Francisco Examiner. It was titled An Elegy to Dispel Gloom, and he was personally thanked by the city for helping maintain calm. In 1994 a street was named after him, and four years later he was named San Francisco’s first poet laureate.

He remained active in City Lights until the late 2000s, chatting with fans and tourists who popped in just to meet the legend. “When he was still here every day, fixing a lightbulb or some other little thing, he never refused somebody who wanted to talk to him,” Elaine Katzenberger, the current manager of the shop, said. “He usually looked for some commonality to have a little conversation with them.”

Though mostly bed-bound and nearly blind in his later years, he remained busy, publishing his final book, Little Boy, on his 100th birthday. A loosely autobiographical novel, Ferlinghetti refused to describe it as memoir: “I object to using that description. Because a memoir denotes a very genteel type of writing.”

In 2019, San Francisco named 24 March, his birthday, Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day to mark his centennial, with celebrations lasting all month. In an interview from his bed to mark the occasion, he told the Guardian that he was still hoping for a political revolution, even though “the United States isn’t ready for a revolution … It would take a whole new generation not devoted to the glorification of the capitalist system … a generation not trapped in the me, me, me.”

When asked whether he was proud of his achievements, Ferlinghetti said: “I don’t know, that word, ‘proud’, is just too egotistic. Happy would be better. Except when you get down to try and define the word happy, then you’re really in trouble.”

In 1958, Ferlinghetti published his own first collection, A Coney Island of the Mind, which sold more than 1m copies. He went on to write more than 50 volumes of poetry, novels and travel journals. As a publisher, he maintained a lifelong focus on poetry and books ignored by the mainstream, even as it became harder in the face of the behemoth, profit-driven presses. ...Read More

Feb 20, 2021 - Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia is under sustained fire — including from low-paid workers in his own state — for his resistance to a provision in the Senate's coronavirus rescue package that would raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.

"I'm speaking to you, Sen. Manchin," Jean Evansmore of the West Virginia Poor People's Campaign said at an online event Monday. "You know that in West Virginia the minimum wage needs to be $23 in order for people to live, not wonder where their next meal is coming from."

"Enough's enough," added Pam Garrison, also with the West Virginia Poor People's Campaign. "When will you give us a living wage?"

Evansmore and Garrison's comments came during an online Moral Monday event organized by the campaign. The event highlighted voices of those impacted by low wages and the campaign's suite of policy priorities for the White House and new Congress, including lifting the minimum wage to $15 — a change the group frames as a way to "lift from the bottom and take seriously the costs of inequality."

Manchin and fellow Democrat Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona have publicly announced their opposition to the popular wage hike proposal.

The bill in question, the House-passed 'Raise the Wage Act', would incrementally raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour by 2025.

West Virginia's minimum wage is currently $8.75 an hour. While that's higher than the federal wage floor, it's far below the $24 an hour the wage would be now if it kept pace with productivity growth, and well below the $28.70 an hour rate MIT estimates to be a "living wage" for an adult with one child working full time.

Amid the progressive push for better wages, the Poor People's Campaign said Monday that Manchin had requested a meeting with the campaign — a meeting the anti-poverty group said was agreeable dependent upon the inclusion of "a diverse group of low-wage workers and moral leaders from the West Virginia Poor People's Campaign."...Read More

We are a small publisher of books with big ideas. We specialize in works that show us how a better world is possible and needed. Click Gramsci below for our list.

In a previous article, I examined the modern white power movement and broader political landscape in the United States. That essay’s aim wasn’t a comprehensive overview but a summary of who we’re fighting and the enemy’s defining characteristics. Equally important, what is the broader social and political landscape in the U.S.? And what about our side? What sort of resources, numbers, and capacity do we currently have?

n this piece, I emphasize the importance and necessity of organizing and how the left should generally relate to specific portions of the state, i.e., military and police. In my view, the left must spend more time organizing and less time critiquing, writing, and podcasting — none of which will change the world on their own. In fact, I argue that too much punditry has, in fact, hurt the left. Lastly, and most importantly, the left must develop a coherent position concerning the police and military. Doing so would greatly benefit future left-wing political efforts.

In Part Three, we’ll survey why the left must immediately support statist demands that would challenge capital and usher in a period of social democracy in the U.S. We’ll also discuss why the left must articulate a serious and principled vision for how to use the rule of law (the state) to corral, dismantle, charge, arrest, convict, and sentence members of the white power movement who advocate or participate in various forms of political terrorism.

Organizing is the only way to defeat the white power movement. The majority of Americans don’t agree or identify with the white power movement. That’s good for us, but not good enough. Public opinion must be turned into effective organizations, institutions, and campaigns, with massive numbers of ordinary people engaged, empowered, and ready to fight back.

Without question, not enough Americans who call themselves “progressives” or “leftists” or who nominally identify with progressive values and policies are actively engaged in organizing efforts. It’s a long-standing problem. In my experience, many of the people who self-identify as progressive or leftist spend a lot of their time shouting from the sidelines, often detached from the larger community and ongoing political efforts, which isn’t helpful.

Punditry and organizing are not the same things. Yes, we need both, but today we have far too many pundits and far too few organizers. Yes, we’re amid a global pandemic; hence it’s more difficult to mobilize and organize — that also is understood. But the pandemic hasn’t stopped nurses, factory workers, teachers, students, churches, indigenous activists, environmentalists, immigrants, or unions from organizing over the past eleven months. Liberals, progressives, and leftists should learn important lessons from those who’ve successfully fought back during the worst pandemic in over 100 years. Their efforts are commendable.

Pundits focus on analysis and provide critiques. Organizers focus on power and deliver the strategy. Pundits talk about things we can’t control. Organizers talk about the things within our control. For instance, left-wing pundits complained that the DNC threw the primaries for Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020 over Bernie. Organizers went into those campaigns, as did Bernie (for those who listened), with the understanding that powerful interests would fight back.

Pundits focus on individual politicians and how they act within our existing economic and political systems. Organizers seek to understand better and change those systems. Pundits point out the failures of the Biden administration. Organizers inherently understand those inadequacies and seek to exploit them to our advantage. Pundits talk. Organizers walk. Pundits spend their time online, sharing, surfing, liking, Tweeting, commenting, and replying to the same. Organizers spend their time in the streets, neighborhoods, workplaces, and communities, talking, planning, networking, building, strategizing and fighting.

Since the pandemic began, millions of Americans have started podcasts and YouTube programs. Nothing is shocking about this trend, but it isn’t reassuring. Before the pandemic, Americans spent a disproportionate amount of their time online, watching TV, playing video games, or generally spending time in front of two-dimensional screens. That’s one reason why Sergio Kochergin and I opened a community-cultural center in Michigan City, Indiana, where we live: namely, to get people off their couches and out in public interacting with their neighbors, strangers, and friends.

Our primary goal was to use the space as an organizing hub for both local and regional efforts. We aimed to combine culture and politics, social activities and art, intellectualism, and the street. Our movements and projects should be social and fun and sophisticated, disciplined, serious, committed, and strategic. We must also dig in for the long-haul (bouncing from city to city, town to town, won’t cut it). We must build a serious core of organizers, then spread and democratize that knowledge and experience throughout the community, and repeat over and over and over again until we create thousands of organizers who can radicalize every workplace, church, neighborhood, apartment complex, high school, middle school, and university campus throughout the U.S....Read More

The Western left has largely fallen in line behind interventionist platitudes of “standing with the Chinese people, not the Chinese government.” But their cover of “principled critique” elides the fact that criticism does not exist in a vacuum. In this case, it is greasing the wheels for Western imperialist intervention under the auspices of a “new” Cold War.

Amidst the feverish critiques of China made by a growing cadre of “China scholars,” “media watchers,” and “think tank freelancers” across the Western world (the “free world,” they might tell you), a virulent distaste toward China for supposedly ethical reasons has become the norm. We’ve woken up to find ourselves in a Twilight Zone where the precondition for engaging with Sinophobia is the performance of a different kind of Sinophobic antipathy—one that disavows the possibility of Chinese political legitimacy while it virtue signals the Western critic’s own commitment to “justice.”

We’ve woken up to find ourselves in a Twilight Zone where the precondition for engaging with Sinophobia is the performance of a different kind of Sinophobic antipathy—one that disavows the possibility of Chinese political legitimacy while it virtue signals the Western critic’s own commitment to “justice.”

Western critiques of China, however, lay bare its stakes even as it feverishly disavows the very position from which it emerges. As principled Marxists, we must always ask after the historical context and political functions in which our words and actions take meaning.

Why, we must ask, is it so enticing to name China as the “new” face of imperialism, even as the United States retains undisputed global military supremacy, with more than 800 military bases abroad and an international sanctions regime enabled by the dollar standard?

Why do we continue to insist on the morally-bankrupt argument of “inter-imperialism” and shared sins when the very people whom we benefit by doing so are, in order of significance, the U.S. military, the Euro-American military-industrial complex, and international right-wing white supremacist organizations?

***

A series of frighteningly simple assumptions undergird China-watchers’ performance of ethical commitment. Many a think piece has begun with the proclamation that the new era of multipolarity will be defined not by U.S. imperialism, but by Chinese hegemonic ascendence. Such arguments, as they are furthered by Western leftists, adhere to a simple definition of imperialism, usually cropped from Lenin. Their reduced theoretical analysis goes like this: imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, borne by “the persistent tendency of mature capitalist state systems to generate violent conflict,” as Amiya Kuma has put it. Since China is capitalist, same as the rest of the world, it must also be veering toward imperialism, especially since it seems to be opening a number of trade partnerships with other Global South nations.

Unlike the late capitalist dons of Europe and the U.S., however, this Chinese “capitalism” is framed as more aggressive and predatorial; China’s relations with other Global South nations can’t be anything but exploitative, since exploitation has been the dominant theme in post-1945 relations between Euro-American empires and the rest. China must be chomping at the bit to rise to similar dominance: her boundless appetite for labor and raw materials from the developing world bespeaks her endless greed, alerting us to the stakes of her menacing rise. (Naturally, this discourse is also pulsating with sexualized pathology and racialized excesses.) Since it is the job of any Marxist to oppose the capitalist foe, “we” must stand against China’s bad-faith practices, and, armed with questionable sources and plenty of U.S. State Department-sponsored media material, “we” must correct China’s malignant development. ...Read More

Alexander A. Bogdanov’s novel Red Star was published in 1908 as an attempt to reenergize the dejected revolution-aries whose efforts had been crushed during the 1905 Russian Revolution.

The protagonist, Leonid, is a Russian revolutionary chosen, in the midst of the revolution, by the Martian expedition to visit their planet and learn about the centuries-old advanced form of communism there. Since the triumph of communism in Russia was the cause to which Leonid had decided to devote his life, he agrees to visit Mars so that he can absorb their ideas and principles.

Red Star is divided into short sections in which a particular aspect of a desired communist society is described directly and clearly, with limited literary frills. Bogdanov primarily uses dialogue to express his thoughts about the kind of cultural and political ends to which revolu- tionaries should aspire. The participants of these dialogues are experienced and know- ledgeable Martians (Bogdanov himself) and a fledgling Earthling (the Russian revolutionaries

in the first decade of the twentieth century).

Bogdanov’s Martian society is a socialist utopia, but it is not utopian socialism. Bogdanov’s conception is not a product of “men’s better insight into eternal truth and justice,” but rather of the materialist conception of history (albeit slightly altered due to different environmental conditions on Mars), which affirms that “the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged.”1

Bogdanov’s Martians live in a fully realized communist society; it is classless, founded on working according to ability and consumption according to desire. Their history never knew slavery. Feudalism was comparatively brief and never violent or overly militaristic. The creation of capitalism intensified when large-scale producers displaced the small peasants due to the latter’s inability to cope with the aridity of the soil. Only the large-scale farmers and cooperatives who pooled their resources together were able to tackle the issue of irrigation, but even they became prey to unsustainable credit traps and their land was seized and transferred to a small number of elite agricultural capitalists.

The Martian population grew and more arable land was needed. The epoch of digging canals ensued. Big capitalists employed most of the population and large-scale projects temporarily solved the problem of unemployment. However, the completion of the projects brought an economic crisis and a class conflict, which the proletariat won with strikes and uprisings. The bourgeoisie resisted until the tide turned, after which they retreated without ever attempting any counterrevolutionary measures. Some of them were pensioned off and others joined the state enterprises, willfully adopting proletarian class consciousness. Communism followed, and because there were no external threats or internal sabotage, the new system based on egalitarianism and collective labor was perfected over time.

When Leonid, a revolutionary witness to the violence and gore of 1905, learns about Martian historical development, he thinks to himself: “I could not help feeling a certain envy as I viewed this picture of steady social evolution free from fire and blood of our own history.”2 Martians highlight the uniqueness of their physical environment as the reason for the more peaceful transition to an equitable society. Their natural and cultural barriers were few to begin with. Mountain ranges and vast oceans are not as pronounced as they are on Earth. Gravity also played a favorable role, allowing Martians to move with greater freedom and speed.

Language was also similar all over Mars, and it too became a unifying force. All of these factors prevented separation into different nations and races, which continues to be a scourge on the peoples of Earth, where, according to Martians, fragmentation is caused by “the richness and variety of its natural environment, which together have produced a multitude of different world-views.”3 It is the reason why “the art of destruction on Earth is much more advanced than any other aspect of their peculiar culture.”4

“The tighter our humanity closes ranks to conquer nature, the tighter the elements close theirs to avenge the victory.”5 The conquest of nature became a shared goal and it, more than anything else, helped shape the uniformity of Martian communism. It allowed them to experience their humanity as a single whole, a necessary component in the process of addressing selfish impulses and appetites. Individual Martians differ in inclinations and ability, but “neither the private lives nor the public activities…are circumscribed in any way, so long as the activity of the society as a whole is not jeopardized.”6 They labor for the collective good in different industries and adhere to the instructions of the Central Institute of Statistics and its agencies, which “keep track of the flow of goods into and out of the stockpiles and monitor the production of all enterprises and the changes in their workforces.”7 If one industry requires additional labor for the production of necessities, workers relocate voluntarily until equilibrium is established. Such labor practices provide Martians with varied work, shorter working days, and reduced alienation.

The characteristics of Martian cultural habits are products of their collective labor practices. Scientific thought on all matters reigns on Mars. Practicality is the primary quality of their housing, clothing, language, social interactions, art, and education. Their residences and attires are simple, comfortable, and devoid of embellishments. They are designed to strictly serve their purpose and stimulate productivity. Their language, just like their clothing, is simple and genderless. Their interactions are goal-oriented and social pleasantries are completely foreign to them: “They never greeted one another, never said goodbye or thank you, never dragged out a conversation just to be polite if its immediate goal had already been reached.”8 Self-sacrifice for the common good is prevalent and the elimination of “an egoistic thirst for self-preservation, and the cruelty which that instinct inevitably breeds” has been fully realized.9

Romantic love is cherished, sobs for the departed are “muffled,” and one’s work and contribution to society outweigh all of the above.10 Monuments on Mars are never erected to a single individual but rather to historic events and collective achievements (such as the eradication of disease), for no Martian lives in a vacuum and has had at their “disposal the experience amassed by preceding generations and contemporary researchers.”11 One’s identity is marked by profession, expertise, and contribution to society. No Martian has the undisputed power of command, and leadership roles are rotated according to task and talent. Education is carried out in the Children’s Colony, where children are never separated by age groups and learning is initiated by pupils’ proclivities and augmented by reading materials and instruction carried out by professional educators as well as older students.

All aspects of Martian life are directed toward anonymity, equality, and collective creation. Martians are aware that these ideas are foreign to humanity on Earth, and they explain to Leonid that this is so only because “the common cause of mankind is not yet really a common cause among you. It has become so splintered in the illusions generated by the struggle among men that it seems to belong to individual persons rather than to mankind as a whole.”12 Costly periods of trial and error of different modes of production have helped the Martians conclude that the only way to prevent shortages of necessities is through collective labor and distribution.

This, in turn, has fostered a particular psychological makeup that allows them to perceive their species as a whole. However, the barriers they have consciously erected between humanity and nature—the superordinate goal of battling and mastering their environment—are both the foundation of their progressive virtues as well as the root of their doom. By perceiving nature as a separate entity rather than a part of the whole, Martians have agreed to participate in an unwinnable war in which each success is the birth of another struggle. The exploitation of one resource is the strategy they employ to combat the shortage of another, which inevitably creates additional scarcities and battlefronts. Crises can only be postponed and never entirely resolved. And in a world of finite resources, the destruction of the natural world is what brings nature its final victory over humanity....Read More

Feb 3, 2021 - In this eight-part series, 'Independent Lens' goes deep on the election of progressive civil rights attorney Larry Krasner as Philadelphia district attorney.

It's the most common question whenever an outsider — be it Ross Perot or Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump — runs for a position of power in an entrenched political system: Having big ideas or exciting the electorate is one thing, but when you challenge the political orthodoxy, how do you actually govern if you happen to win?

This is the backdrop of Ted Passon, Yoni Brook and Nicole Salazar's eight-part Independent Lens docuseries Philly D.A., which is premiering its first two hours as part of the virtual Sundance Film Festival and will launch on PBS later this year. Those first two episodes mark an extraordinarily promising start for the series, which boasts impressive access to Larry Krasner's Philadelphia district attorney's office and a nuanced approach that works hard to give this specific situation universal ripples.

For those who aren't tapped into municipal elections across the country, Krasner is a lifelong civil rights attorney who was elected district attorney of Philadelphia in 2017, part of a wave of progressive candidates voted into similar positions in cities including Baltimore and, more recently, Los Angeles.

Krasner built his reputation suing the Philadelphia Police Department at least 75 times and campaigned for office, after the previous DA's tenure ended in multiple scandals, promising wide-ranging reforms including an end to cash bail, revised sentencing standards and the adjustment of law enforcement priorities relating to marijuana possession and sex work. Krasner won in a rout, but only after facing push-back from establishment figures in the DA's office and most law enforcement organizations.

The series picks up with Krasner settling into this unexpectedly obtained office and trying to navigate all the minefields — principally, how to develop and focus a staff, many of whom you've fought against in court over the years, and how to collaborate with a police department that you've accused of racism and wanton violence.

Directors Brook and Passon build out their story on several levels. At the most micro, it's the story of an unlikely man who spent his life fighting The System and then, at the age of 56, decided that he would become The System. Krasner is personally defined by his relationship with his father, a writer of pulp crime fiction whose time in a wheelchair taught young Larry lessons about fighting against powerful institutional bullies, which carries over into his professional identity. Krasner and his wife, a Philadelphia-area judge, have the sort of endearing marriage between clever, passionate people that you wish more TV shows and movies might construct.

Then there are the machinations in the offices of the district attorney, next door to City Hall, where Krasner's newly recruited assistant DAs and staffers have to figure out how to work with the existing team. It's a task made even harder when Krasner fires 10 percent of the office at the end of his first week in office, setting up relationships that are nervously optimistic and straight-up antagonistic. Thus far in the episodes I've seen, Brook and Passon don't have much access within the police department. As a result, those institutional conflicts have to be conveyed through angry talk-radio appearances by the Fraternal Order of Police bigwig John McNesby. But within the DA's office, they at least have a number of featured figures who express cautious skepticism.

Finally, on the most macro level, there are Krasner's pet social justice issues, presented in ways that weave them into the context of the city. To illustrate the issue of cash bail, the filmmakers spend time with Reuben Jones of the Philadelphia Community Bail Fund as he withdraws money to post bail and fills a van with people who have spent days, weeks or months in jail without being convicted of any charges simply because they couldn't afford to pay the charges, even very modest ones. In an episode looking at the "Damaged Goods" file of Philly cops whose testimony would be more damaging than helpful on the stand, the directors capture the blowback from shoddy police work on an ill-fated murder case.

With the help of journalists and local activists, this is all tied together with a history of recent Philadelphia politics, policing and troubled community relations, touching briefly on the likes of Frank Rizzo and the 1985 MOVE bombing. Using in-depth specificity as a gateway to universality, you can see how these issues impact every urban area, and you can see the allure that progressive candidates would have in cities with the highest rates of incarceration, in the nation with the highest rate of incarceration in the world.

The series is clearly enamored with Krasner's aspirations, but it isn't blind to his early failings, most stemming from a predictably myopic refusal to understand that the job he was elected to do requires tactful politics and negotiation. It remains to be seen how pragmatic the show's approach to Krasner will be and in what directions the series will open up in subsequent episodes. Based on the first quarter of Philly D.A., though, I'm looking forward to watching the rest. ...Read More