Campaigning for Democracy And Socialism |
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Will A Russian Antiwar Movement Find A Way To Grow? |
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Many people on the left will immediately get the cartoon, a takeoff of the famous 'Odessa Steps' sequence used by Sergei Eisenstein in his famous early silent films of the October Revolution, and the irony of the new flipped principal tension between the New Tsar and the people of Ukraine. Let's hope it spreads far and wide in Russia, where everyone will grasp it, and fan the flames of war protests. |
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GOP Fascism as the 'New Redemption':
Watch the Video Below
It just never stops. Van Gosse is correct that we are looking at "neo-Redeemers". It is not just the vision of a new Confed-eracy. It is an alignment that, like the Redeemers of the 19th century, are carrying out a very active 'counter-revolution.' --Bill Fletcher
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I agree. There are likely dozens of similar events going on everywhere at the base, some we hear about, like this one, but others we don't.
I'm going through a long new novel, 'M', actually a biography of Mussolini. Events there make clear what Gramsci meant by 'passive revolution' as the fascist path to power, ie, not all at once, but nibbling away, fighting two battles, stepping back one, arguing for 'peace', then fighting two more, and so on. A similar process here, in a way. --Carl Davidson
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Making Sense of
the War in Ukraine
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Convergence Magazine
Book Launch!
Max Elbaum is a Co-Editor, with Linda Burnham and María Poblet, of Power Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections and is on the Editorial Board of Convergence.
Max Elbaum has been active in peace, anti-racist and radical movements since joining SDS in Madison, Wisconsin in the 1960s. The third edition of his book, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che, was released by Verso in 2018.
Opening Chapters
Introduction: 2020 Was an Extraordinary Year
Linda Burnham, Max Elbaum, and María Poblet
special book site:
book study guide:
for Convergence:
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Photo: Children in war-torn Ukraine face trauma that can lead to severe mental health issues
Real Peace In Ukraine Will Only Come After Change In Russia
Ukraine's Oksana Dutchak is interviewed
by Fabian Wisotzky of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation
April 8, 2022 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung — The Russian onslaught against Ukraine has dragged on for over six weeks, costing untold lives and throwing the entire region into chaos. In recent days, the horrific images emerging from Bucha and other areas under Russian occupation have raised further questions about what Putin’s war aims really are and how much suffering he is willing to inflict to achieve them.
As sanctions mount and negotiations drag on with no agreement in sight, how can the killing be brought to a halt? Oksana Dutchak of the Center for Social and Labour Research in Kyiv, who recently fled the country, spoke with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Fabian Wizotsky about the situation in Ukraine and the increasingly dim prospects for peace.
Oksana, you left Ukraine a few days ago. How was the situation when you left and what kind of information are you getting from relatives and comrades who are still there?
It’s already been two weeks since I left, so my information about the situation on the ground comes from news, relatives, and friends. In general, it has become simultaneously more predictable and more disastrous.
The Russian army retreated from Kyiv and Chernihiv regions in the north of the country. That’s where the horrific images of destroyed buildings and infrastructure, massacres of civilians, torture, rape, and kidnappings are coming from. People I know and trust have visited these sites and taken testimony from locals who survived — I say that in case anyone reading this has doubts about what happened there being “Western propaganda”.
Oksana Dutchak is the deputy director of the Center for Social and Labour Research in Kyiv, where she studies work and working conditions as well as gender inequalities.
In the south we have the territories occupied from the very beginning of the war. There has been less destruction, but numerous reports of kidnapping, torture, killings, and rape. Local authorities, activists, volunteers, journalists, teachers, and many others are under threat. There is also a growing danger of a Russian offensive there, which could mean a territorial extension of the occupation and, hence, of more brutal repression and violence.
The worst situation will probably escalate now on the eastern front, where the main offensive will take place. We can’t even imagine how many civilians have been killed there and how many went through unspeakable violence. On 8 of April the railway station in Kramatorsk — the main hub to evacuate people to Western Ukraine — was shelled with cluster bombs. Dozens were killed.
Russia will do its best to hold these territories while capturing more, concealing the casualties, and destroying evidence of its crimes against humanity. On top of all this are the constant airstrikes behind the frontlines, which target critical and military infrastructure even as far as towns and villages in Western Ukraine.
Nowhere is safe now. Of course, the level of “personal” safety varies depending on where one is located. But after Russian officials openly declared their genocidal intentions recently, we have come to understand that the existence of Ukrainian society as a whole is under threat. It appears that they think basically any crime, destruction, repression, or level of violence is justified now. At this point, only a change in the material conditions can stop them.
What do you mean by “material conditions”? And what does the Ukrainian Left want from their comrades abroad, but also from Ukraine’s Western partners?
What I mean is that only material conditions will change Russia’s behavior— and by that I also mean forcing them into meaningful negotiations. Roughly speaking, the material conditions can be classified as military and economic.
The military dimension, of course, is about the battlefield. This dictates directly how much Ukrainian territory will be under Russian occupation in the immediate future, and hence defines the scope of violence and destruction in the short term. The economic dimension is about sanctions, which will determine, in the middle and long term, what kind of resources Russia has to supply the war.
These are the two demands voiced by Ukrainian Left with which I can identify: supply weapons and enforce sanctions. There is no other way. I know there are arguments against both of these demands, and while I still try to find the words to convince people who are opposed to one of them, usually weapons, I have little to say to those who are against both dimensions of applying pressure. Being against both is tantamount to washing your hands of the conflict.
What do you expect would be the effect of sanctions? Many leftists in Germany argue that full-scale economic sanctions targeting groups beyond the Russian elite would push the population to rally around the flag and generate even more support for Putin and his war. Earlier you said in an interview that you do not expect a protest movement in Russia strong enough to stop Putin, but you saw a chance for an elite rebellion against Putin. With regard to that perspective, what kind of sanctions would be useful to stop the war in Ukraine?
The prospects for a grassroots uprising against the war were very low from the beginning. The repression of any opposition and free media has been going in Russia for years, and the war only made things worse. The longer the conflict drags on, the less I believe in massive anti-war protests.
I also agree that there is a strong possibility that sanctions, combined with Russia’s massive propaganda machine, could lead to increasing support for the war inside Russia. But if there was no chance of a mass anti-war movement from the very beginning, should this factor be considered when debating sanctions? Instead of asking whether sanctions can diminish the almost non-existing anti-war movement in Russia, shouldn’t one ask what (if anything) could trigger the development of that movement?
In other words, in my eyes it seems like sanctions are not part of this equation anyway. I’m also not sure it’s worth discussing the chances of elite rebellion at the moment. I don’t believe that sanctions are the main factor here, either. They’ve definitely led to some “dissident” sentiments among Russian elites, but whether these sentiments will lead to something depends on many other extra-economic factors which are outside of our control.
I suspect that in German debates the argument against sanctions is that it could have a more disastrous impact on the population in general, rather than on Russian elites, who have more resources and can hide their assets abroad. This argument is valid, of course. But it is valid only so far as you consider sanctions as a kind of punishment. I don’t support the idea that sanctions are intended to punish. That should be left to an international tribunal — for the war criminals, the propagandists, for those who ordered, concealed, and executed crimes against humanity in Ukraine.
The main logic of sanctions, as I see it, is to cut into the material resources needed to wage the war. The war economy must be stopped. Unfortunately, social reproduction in capitalism fully depends on the economy, and there is no way to stop the war economy without disturbing the social reproduction of people living in Russian society. Moreover, however, without stopping the war economy there is no way to stop the destruction of the social reproduction of Ukrainian society, and, literally, to stop the escalation of violence and save lives.
This is the point where one has to make choices. This choice may be hard for German leftists. As far as I know, it is not a hard choice for anti-war leftists in Russia. And it is definitely not a hard choice for Ukrainian leftists. This is not because we’ve become nationalists. We are materialists, and this choice is strictly conditioned by the material reality of the brutal Russian invasion.
At the moment, the Ukrainian and Russian governments are negotiating a ceasefire and a diplomatic solution of the conflict. What do you expect from these peace talks?
I don’t think that the war will end soon. The delusions of the Russian government, which became obvious with its blitzkrieg plan at the beginning of the war, helped Ukrainian society mount a spirited defense to some extent. But they are also very dangerous in terms of the negotiations. I also view the current developments, not to mention the rhetoric coming from the Russian government and official propaganda, as signs of further escalation.
Because it won’t end soon, it is very hard to predict what these negotiations, which could drag on for months if not for years, will ultimately yield. The negotiations have several components — provisionally we can call them ideological, territorial, and geopolitical. The ideological component consists of the deluded Russian goals of “de-nazification” and “de-Ukrainization” — I don’t see any point in discussing them now, especially after they were used in the genocidal narratives of Russian propagandists.
The territorial component relates to the control of territories and international recognition of this control. This part will depend heavily on the battlefield and the material — military and economic — conditions of the war. Here I want to stress the danger of a position, shared by some leftists, according to which Ukraine should concede some or all of the newly captured territories. After all the stories of violence and repression in the occupied territories, ceding these territories to Russia would mean ceding the population to the disaster of Russian rule.
Finally, there is a geopolitical dimension — Ukraine’s neutral status, security guarantees, etc. This was pushed to the extreme by Russia, as by attacking Ukraine it has massively bolstered support for joining NATO in Ukrainian society, and triggered shifts in public and official opinion in some other non-NATO countries bordering Russia. Nothing else could be expected when people see the brutality of the Russian invasion: NATO status is perceived as the only way to guarantee the Russian military won’t attack.
The security dimension plays a crucial role now. I don’t know how these security guarantees for Ukraine may look in the end and how effective they will be. Especially taking into account that their effectiveness will much depend on Russia’s internal trajectory — as Russia is the main threat to our security. The stronger Russia and its aggressive militarism will be, the lesser the chance that any guarantees will be effective.
On a personal level, I came to the realization during our long trip to personal safety that, even after the war ends, I won’t feel secure in Kyiv unless some dramatic change happens in Russia. Something like defascistization and demilitarization. Without these changes, even when some kind of peace is negotiated, there is a big chance that one morning — maybe in months, maybe in years — I will wake up to bombing again.
Your question was about expectations for the peace negotiations, but I want to add another expectation, which is extremely important for the needed change in Russia after the war. This expectation is that there will be an international tribunal addressing the crimes against humanity conducted by the occupying Russian army. Otherwise, no long-term security and peace is imaginable for the people of Ukraine and other countries in the region. ...Read More
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Ukrainian army soldier Dasha, 22, checks her phone after a military sweep on the outskirts of Kyiv last Friday. Smartphones have been essential for combatants and civilians in the war and have provided a means to share footage directly from the scene of fighting. (Rodrigo Abd/The Associated Press)
The Smartphone War: Soldiers, Civilians, and Satellites
Give The World a Window Onto Russian Invasion
Open source intelligence helps in understanding
how war in Ukraine is unfolding
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Digging Deeper into the Current Conjuncture: |
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Global Capitalism Has Become Dependent on War-Making to Sustain Itself
By William I. Robinson
Truthout
April 24, 2022 - The Russian invasion of Ukraine has sparked fierce political debate on the geopolitical consequences of the conflict.
But less noticed and equally as important, the war has paved the way for a more sweeping militarization of what was already a global war economy mired in deep political and economic crisis. Geopolitical tensions and international conflicts may be tragic for those caught up in conflagrations such as in Ukraine — but advantageous for those seeking to legitimize expanding military and security budgets and open up new opportunities for capitalist profit-making in the face of chronic stagnation and social discontent.
In late March, the Biden administration, citing the Russian invasion, called for a $31 billion increase in the Pentagon budget over the previous year and on top of an emergency appropriation weeks earlier of $14 billion for Ukraine’s defense.
Prior to the invasion, in late 2021, the U.S. government approved a nearly $800 billion military budget, even as, in the same year, it ended the war in Afghanistan. Almost overnight following the Russian invasion, the U.S., Euro- pean Union, and other governments around the world allocated billions of dollars in additional military spending and sent streams of military hardware and private military contractors into Ukraine.
Shares of military and security firms surged in the wake of the invasion. Two weeks into the conflict, shares of Raytheon were up 8 percent, General Dynamics up 12 percent, Lockheed Martin up 18 percent, and Northrop Grumman up 22 percent, while war stocks in Europe, India, and elsewhere experienced similar surges in expectation of an exponential rise in global military spending.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, in the words of the managing director of AeroDynamic Advisory, a Pentagon contractor, is “unquestionably the best F-35 salesman of all time,” in reference to a spike in U.S. government funding for the Lockheed Martin jet fighter. Said one consultant to Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon Technologies: “For the defense industry, happy days are here again. When the defense budget rises it tends to lift all boats in the industry.”
Militarized Accumulation
The Russian invasion — brutal, reckless and condemnable by any standard — has sparked debate on NATO’s proposed expansion into Ukraine and the role that it played in motivating the Kremlin. U.S. officials were keenly aware, in fact, that the drive to expand NATO to Russian borders would eventually push Moscow into a military conflict.
“We examine a wide range of nonviolent measures that could exploit Russia’s actual vulnerabilities and anxieties as a way of stressing Russia’s military and economy and the regime’s political standing at home and abroad,” notes a 2019 study by the RAND Corporation, a Pentagon-affiliated think tank. “The steps we examine would not have either defense or deterrence as their prime purpose,” it states, but rather, “these steps are conceived of as elements in a campaign designed to unbalance the adversary, leading Russia to compete in domains or regions where the United States has a competitive advantage, and causing Russia to overextend itself militarily or economically.”
But the provocation could not be reduced to geopolitical competition, however important, as most observers were keen to do. Missing from the larger picture was the centrality of militarized accumulation — of endless low- and high-intensity warfare, simmering conflicts, civil strife, and policing — to the global political economy. Militarized accumulation refers to a situation in which a global war economy relies on the state to organize war-making, social control, and repression to sustain capital accumulation in the face of chronic stagnation and saturation of global markets. These state-organized practices are outsourced to transnational corporate capital, involving the fusion of private accumulation with state militarization in order to sustain the process of capital accumulation.
Cycles of destruction and reconstruction provide ongoing outlets for over-accumulated capital; that is, these cycles open up new profit-making opportunities for transnational capitalists seeking ongoing opportunities to profitably reinvest the enormous amounts of cash they have accumulated. There is a convergence in this process of global capitalism’s political need for social control and repression in the face of mounting popular discontent worldwide and its economic need to perpetuate accumulation in the face of stagnation.
Wars provide critical economic stimulus. They have historically pulled the capitalist system out of accumulation crises while they serve to deflect attention from political tensions and problems of legitimacy. It took World War II to finally lift world capitalism out of the Great Depression. ...Read More
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Photo: Putin's' mercenary 'Wagner Gtoup' moved from Africa to Ukraine
One Of The Worst Ways Putin Is Gaslighting The World On Ukraine
Putin isn’t fighting neo-Nazism. He nurtures it, making his pretext for invading Ukraine even more repellent.
By Alan Soufan and Nathan Sales
NBC News Think
Editor: Soufan is a former FBI counterterrorism agent, and Sales is former acting U.S. undersecretary of state for civilian security, democracy, and human rights
April 5, 2022 - Among Russian President Vladimir Putin’s many fantastical pretexts for invading Ukraine, the urgent need for its “denazification” may be the most preposterous. Ukraine isn’t free of domestic extremists, but Putin’s claims are pure disinformation. In fact, the Russian strongman has been supporting neo-Nazis and white supremacists for years, including mercenaries and separatists who have waged war on Ukraine since 2014.
Putin isn’t fighting neo-Nazism. He nurtures it, making his gaslighting about Ukraine even more repellent.
Putin has condoned and enabled a transnational white supremacist network that stretches around the globe. It’s one more instrument in the toolbox Moscow uses to divide democracies.
Perhaps Moscow’s most notorious military proxy is the Wagner Group, mercenaries the Kremlin has used to wage deniable war and otherwise promote its interests in places like Syria, Libya and Mozambique. Recently the Wagner Group deployed to the Central African Republic, and it has shown up in Mali, where its brutal methods appear to be replacing previous efforts by the international community to fight terrorists active in the country.
The Wagner Group is named after the 19th century German composer Richard Wagner, whose music Adolf Hitler adored. The group’s leader, Dmitry Utkin, reportedly wears Nazi tattoos, including a swastika, a Nazi eagle and SS lightning bolts. Wagner mercenaries are reported to have left behind neo-Nazi propaganda in the war zones where they’ve fought, including graffiti with hate symbols.
The Wagner Group also has played a key role in Putin’s long war on Ukraine, with its fighters helping him illegally annex Crimea in 2014 and fighting alongside pro-Russia separatists in the country’s east since then.
They’ve been active in the current hostilities, as well. The Daily Beast reported Jan. 31 that dozens of Wagner mercenaries were pulled from the Central African Republic to join Russian forces massing at the Ukraine border. And The Times of London reported that as many as 400 Wagner mercenaries may have been sent to Kyiv to attempt to assassinate or capture Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Ukraine’s government has claimed that Zelenskyy has survived more than a dozen assassination attempts since the invasion began.
Then there’s the white supremacist group known as the Russian Imperial Movement, or RIM, which the State Department designated a terrorist organization in 2020 (an effort led by one of the authors here, Nathan Sales). With the Kremlin’s tacit approval, the group operates paramilitary camps near St. Petersburg in which neo-Nazis and white supremacists from across Europe are trained in terrorist tactics.
In 2016, RIM-trained terrorists conducted a series of bombings against a refugee shelter and other soft targets in Sweden, according to the State Department. Like the Wagner Group, RIM has deployed fighters to aid the Kremlin’s long-running war in eastern Ukraine. The group has supplied much-needed manpower, including people who are trained in asymmetric tactics and sabotage operations.
Russia uses neo-Nazi groups for much more than combat operations. Research by our organization — including a new report released Monday — shows that a key component of the Kremlin’s campaign to exploit fissures in the West is to use transnational white supremacists to promote racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism.
Myriad American neo-Nazi ideologues and operatives have traveled to Russia, as The New York Times reported in 2016, to attend networking conferences, illustrating the disturbing international links among this movement. Russia seems to welcome these figures with open arms. While the Kremlin has brutally suppressed civil society groups like those associated with pro-democracy activist Alexei Navalny, it has looked the other way on these white supremacists.
Russia is also serving as a refuge for extremists, with one of America’s most dangerous neo-Nazis finding sanctuary in the country. The BBC reported in 2020 that Rinaldo Nazzaro, the American leader of the white supremacist paramilitary group The Base, was living in Russia and directing the group from St. Petersburg. (Chatter on extremist online channels suggests Nazzaro may have stepped down from this role since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, perhaps at the behest of his hosts.) . ..Read More
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Photo: Members react during Starbucks union vote in Buffalo, New York, U.S., December 9, 2021. REUTERS/Lindsay DeDario TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
Unions Are On The Rise. Guess Why.
By Andy Serwer with Max Zahn
Yahoo News
April 23, 2022 - Unions are coming back and it’s pretty obvious, (to most of us), why.
The numbers are pretty small, but because the organizing has been at companies like Starbucks (SBUX), Amazon (AMZN), Google (GOOG, GOOGL), Activision Blizzard (ATVI), Etsy (ETSY) and even Apple (AAPL), the optics and implications are huge.
“Starbucks was a company that everybody thought could not be organized. Amazon was a place people thought you didn’t even try to organize; digital media workers didn't organize,” says Kate Bronfenbrenner, the director of labor education research at Cornell. “People thought that young workers didn’t want unions. All these myths are being exploded.”
What does this unionizing redux tell us?
For one thing, these companies aren’t exactly from your grandfather’s day when activists organized the steel, coal and auto industries. There isn’t much of that unionizing left to do in this country (excepting some foreign auto assembly plants in the South — and that has been tough going). The new surge is going after flagships of the tech and service economy.
Point two is that this activity signals employees at these companies feel they’re not getting a fair shake. That may sound axiomatic, but it’s worth stating for those who think this is some sort of left-wing plot. Sure, there is behind-the-scenes organizing, but workers are receptive only if they feel marginalized. Until recently, the management of these newly iconic companies shared the spoils of their businesses equally enough to keep employees satisfied. Now income and wealth gaps have grown too wide.
Big tech companies and a few others have become massive wealth creation machines, with stock performance vastly exceeding the overall market, which benefits top executives disproportionately. Amazon has made Jeff Bezos one of the wealthiest people on the planet—worth $173 billion at last count. Apple is now the world’s most valuable company with a market value of some $2.7 trillion.
Starbucks, (like the video game giant Activision Blizzard), has lagged over the past half decade, but since its IPO in 1992, its stock has climbed 790% versus 177% for the S&P 500. Even Etsy, whose stock has fallen from a high of over $300 last fall to around $100 today, is still up some 10X over the past five years.
Matching these stratospheric gains in stock prices has been the rise in CEO compensation, most infamously measured by the ratio of CEO pay to the average worker.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, this gap is nearly as wide as ever: “CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 21-to-1 in 1965. It peaked at 366-to-1 in 2000. In 2020 the ratio was 351-to-1.” And there’s this: “Compensation of the top CEOs increased 1,322.2% from 1978 to 2020 (adjusting for inflation). Top CEO compensation grew roughly 60% faster than stock market growth during this period and far eclipsed the slow 18.0% growth in a typical worker’s annual compensation.”
You may not agree with me when I say that’s just not right, but understand there are consequences.
A recent study from Bloomberg, (which notes that Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren recently proposed a tax on companies with outsize CEO-to-worker-pay ratios) shows: "The typical CEO among the 1,000 biggest publicly traded firms in the country receives 144 times more than their median employee. Around 80% of those companies would be subject to higher taxes because of the pay disparity.”
Who doesn’t agree with Bernie Sanders when he says anybody who works 40 hours a week shouldn’t have to live in poverty? “It has always been true, of course, that CEOs make more than their employees,” Sanders said at a recent Congressional hearing, as Bloomberg reported. “But what has been going on in recent years is totally absurd.”
According to Bloomberg’s math, Amazon, Starbucks, Apple and Activision Blizzard CEOs were all paid more than 1000 times the average workers. Google was 21-1. Etsy wasn’t tracked.
Speaking of Etsy, it’s not just the CEOs who are raking it in. It’s the entire C-Suite. This chart from Etsy's most recent proxy shows the company’s NEOs (named executive officers) making many millions of dollars over the past three years.
I could say the same for other companies on this list. For example Apple’s NEOs make around $26 million a year, (though that company is far bigger, more successful and more complicated than Etsy, and as such, maybe the Apple execs are a bargain!) The point is that even at a company like Etsy, executives are making serious money, and seriously more money than employees, (and in the case of Etsy, more than sellers on its network).
Top executives of these companies have benefited from the stock market boom in two ways. One, they are often compensated in stock and two their compensation is often benchmarked based on their stock’s performance. Talk about a double dose!
Workers generally aren’t paid this way of course, or if they are, at far lower rates. Now they want a piece of the action. (I would caution everyone here to be wary of a possible flat or declining stock market going forward.)
BTW, I have to roll my eyes when I hear CEOs complain they can’t find workers to fill empty jobs. (“I don’t understand it. I gave them a raise four years ago from $7 an hour to $8.”) Duh.
A quote in this recent Insider article about the trucker shortage caught my eye:
“If you ask any trucker, it's kind of like a broken record," said Atkins, who's been in the industry for three years. "It's not a trucker shortage, it's a pay shortage.’ Atkins said there's a "major issue": He can open up a job site, type in "truck driving job," and see "a million ads" promising $100,000 to $120,000 a year. "But every trucker knows that is a 100% lie," he said. As of 2020, the median pay for heavy and tractor-trailer drivers was $47,130 a year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Bottom line: If employers keep paying their top execs more and holding down pay for everyone else, unions are going to keep rising up.
This article was featured in a Saturday edition of the Morning Brief on April 23, 2022. Get the Morning Brief sent directly to your inbox every Monday to Friday by 6:30 a.m. ET. Subscribe
By Andy Serwer, editor-in-chief of Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter: @serwer
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Photo: Greg Casar (left), Jessica Cisneros (center) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Photo illustration: Shoshana Gordon/Axios. Photos: Drew Angerer, Brandon Bell, Montinique Monroe/Getty Images
The Squad Could Grow Stronger Even If Dems Lose Big
By Alexi McCammond and Andrew Solender
Axios.com
The Squad is poised for big gains in November despite the Democrats’ likely loss of the House.
Why it matters: The progressive politics that mainstream Democrats blame for their decline stand to take center stage if both trendlines hold. And the Squad-Plus would be positioned to push the diluted ranks of its rivals into backing some of its agenda — impacting the 2024 presidential race.
State of play: As many as six staunchly progressive candidates have viable chances to win House seats this cycle.
The most notable is Greg Casar, the Democratic nominee in a solid-blue seat rooted in Austin and San Antonio, Texas.
Another Texan, progressive Jessica Cisneros, forced moderate Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) into a primary runoff set for May 24.
In Pennsylvania, state Rep. Summer Lee, a self-identified Democratic Socialist, is leading her nearest opponent for a Pittsburgh-based U.S. House seat by 25 points, according to a poll from Emily's List which is backing her candidacy.
Erica Smith in North Carolina, Becca Balint in Vermont and Amy Vilela in Nevada are three other progressives with shots at winning, multiple progressive strategists tell Axios.
Between the lines: Far from being chastened by any current Democratic losses, progressives would be inspired for future gains for their bloc.
"In 10 years, a lot more of Congress is going to look like the Squad," Karthik Ganapathy of Left Flank Strategies, a political consultancy supporting left-wing candidates, told Axios.
"This is where our politics is headed. Not just as Democrats — as a country."
What they're saying: "The progressive values we’ve been building our campaign around have attracted leaders in this space," Lee, the Pennsylvania candidate, told Axios.
She's been endorsed by two progressive icons, Sens. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).
A cohort of 14 progressive groups, lawmakers and leaders is hosting a fundraiser Wednesday evening in D.C. for Lee's congressional campaign. Rep. Ayana Pressley (D-Mass.), a charter Squad member, is one of the hosts.
Lee said that if progressives are in the next congressional minority, it could be time for Democrats to renew conversations around what it takes to pass things like the Green New Deal and Medicare-for-All.
"How are we using these two years to re-center the party?" she said. "To really ensure that we are aligned with our base, and through that alignment, pouring and using all of our resources to build that consensus to win on these big issues."
The backdrop: The Squad started out small but mighty after the 2018 midterms, with Pressley and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) joining Congress at the same time.
As freshmen, they pushed their party leaders to debate ideas like sweeping climate change agendas, abolishing ICE, providing free college and Medicare-for-All.
Last cycle, the number of Squad and Squad-adjacent progressives in Congress doubled with the elections of Reps. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), Marie Newman (D-Ill.) and Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.).
What we're watching: Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Tlaib and Pressley easily defeated primary challengers in 2020 and seem on glide paths for reelection this cycle.
Bush and Bowman both face credible primary challengers, though Bowman has more than doubled his challenger's fundraising.
Be smart: Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) said, "Everyone's fighting hard to keep a Democratic Congress."
His group has raised $35 million for progressive candidates and causes since its inception.
"But no matter what happens in November, blue open-seat primaries provide a real chance of major gains for progressive power. We can get real, vibrant progressives in those seats," Green said. ...Read More
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From the CCDS Socialist Education Project... |
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A China Reader
Edited by Duncan McFarland
A project of the CCDS Socialist Education Project and Online University of the Left
244 pages, $20 (discounts available for quantity orders from [email protected]), or order at :
The book is a selection of essays offering keen insight into the nature of China and its social system, its internal debates, and its history. It includes several articles on the US and China and the growing efforts of friendship between the Chinese and American peoples.
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Taking Down
White Supremacy
Edited by the CCDS
Socialist Education Project
This collection of 20 essays brings together a variety of articles-theoretical, historical, and experiential-that address multi-racial, multi-national unity. The book provides examples theoretically and historically, of efforts to build multi-racial unity in the twentieth century.
166 pages, $12.50 (discounts available for quantity), order at :
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NOT TO BE MISSED: Short Links To Longer Reads... |
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Activists Stage Massive Rallies Across The United States Demanding Decisive Action On Climate Change
By Kenny Stancil
Common Dreams
April 24, 2022 - Scores of people in communities around the United States took to the streets on Saturday to demand swift and bold legislative and executive action to tackle the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis as well as skyrocketing inequality.
At "Fight for Our Future" rallies held in Washington, D.C., Phoenix, Atlanta, and more than 40 additional cities across the country, the message was simple: Time is running out for Congress and President Joe Biden to make the bold investments needed to create millions of unionized clean energy and care sector jobs that can simultaneously mitigate greenhouse gas pollution along with economic and racial injustice.
The nationwide mobilization—organized by a coalition of more than 20 labor, civil rights, and environmental justice groups including SEIU, NAACP, the Sierra Club, the Sunrise Movement, the Center for Popular Democracy, and the Green New Deal Network—took place one day after Earth Day.
It also came just weeks after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reiterated in its latest report that "it's now or never" to confront the planetary emergency. Although Biden has vowed to "listen to the scientists," he and the leaders of other wealthy countries have so far ignored their numerous warnings to leave fossil fuels in the ground and embark on a rapid transition to renewable energy and a more sustainable built environment and food system.
Prior to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Biden had already approved more permits for drilling on public lands and waters than former President Donald Trump did in his first year. Since the start of Moscow's war, Biden has taken steps to boost domestic oil extraction and fracked gas exports to Europe, threatening to lock in polluting infrastructure for decades at precisely the moment when experts say emissions must be slashed.
"In this unprecedented moment of climate crisis, rising prices, energy insecurity, and racial and environmental injustice, it's vital that our leaders fight to establish a livable, just, and healthy planet for all," Ramon Cruz, president of the Sierra Club, said Saturday in a statement. "The latest IPCC report made clear that we not only have an imperative to address the climate crisis, but also the means to do so."
What's required is "the political will to make transformational investments at the scale and speed the crisis demands," said Cruz. "There's a clear path forward for critical investments in climate, care, jobs, and justice, and Congress must seize this crucial opportunity to truly ensure the future we all deserve."
Previous attempts to advance House-passed social welfare and climate investments—rejected unanimously by Republican lawmakers—through the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process have been stymied by right-wing Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), whose votes are needed in the evenly split upper chamber.
In addition to being Congress' top recipient of fossil fuel cash this election cycle, Manchin makes nearly $500,000 per year from investments in his family's coal empire. Despite obvious conflicts of interest, Manchin has refused to answer questions about his ties to the industry.
Earlier this month, several West Virginians were arrested while protesting outside the plant that contracts with Enersystems, which is owned by Manchin's son and has paid the senator millions during his time in office.
The "Coal Baron Blockade" was just one of several direct actions organized in recent weeks by academics and activists around the globe, part of an apparent wave of non-violent civil disobedience to demand urgent decarbonization.
On Friday, a group blocked the entrance of a printing plant in New York City in an effort to hamper the distribution of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other corporate-owned newspapers to protest their failure to cover the climate emergency with "the frequency it deserves." The Times, for its part, did report on Saturday's nationwide day of action. ...Read More
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Photo: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) walks with Amazon workers during a rally outside one of the company's buildings in New York City on April 24, 2022. (Photo: Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images)
'The Time Is Now to Stand Up to Our Oligarchy,' Sanders Tells Amazon Workers on Eve of Union Vote
The Amazon Labor Union's historic win earlier this month made the JFK8 warehouse "the first domino to fall," said Rep. Ocasio-Cortez. Workers at LDJ5 can make their Staten Island facility the next one.
By Kenny Stancil
Common Dreams
April 24, 2022 - On a day billed as "Solidarity Sunday," Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez visited Amazon workers in New York City less than 24 hours before they start casting ballots on whether to form a union, after which Sanders departed to Richmond, Virginia to talk with Starbucks workers who have been organizing coffee shops around the nation.
"If Bezos can afford a $500 million yacht, he can afford to pay his workers at Amazon decent wages, decent benefits, and provide good working conditions."
Voting at Amazon's 1,500-employee LDJ5 facility—located across the street from the JFK8 warehouse that made history just three weeks ago by becoming the first of the e-commerce giant's U.S. workplaces to unionize—is set to begin on April 25.
"If [Jeff] Bezos can afford a $500 million yacht," Sanders (I-Vt.) said, referring to the company's billionaire founder in a video promoting Sunday's event, "he can afford to pay his workers at Amazon decent wages, decent benefits, and provide good working conditions."
Speaking from a stage in Staten Island, Sanders told Amazon workers that they are "sending a message to every worker in America that the time is now to stand up to our oligarchy, to stand up to this excessive corporate greed, and create an economy that works for all, not just a few."
Taking the mic from "Tío Bernie," Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) congratulated the organizing committee of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) on its groundbreaking victory earlier this month, saying that it "reminded the world that you don't need millions of dollars to stand up to multibillion-dollar corpor-ations, you just gotta do the work. You just need solidarity, you need to show people that you give a damn about them, and they will come together and organize and demand better for their lives."
ALU's successful union drive at JFK8 "was the first domino to fall," said Ocasio-Cortez, who called on Amazon to drop the dubious objections that it filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in a bid to overturn the results.
Derrick Palmer, ALU's vice president of organizing, said: "I'm glad that everyone is finally waking up and realizing the power that we have as an organization, as people... I think that's been lost throughout these years, and I'm glad that it's finally back."
"We've woken the country up, and I want us to continue on this journey," said Palmer. "I want us to win LDJ5."
Amazon—which is notorious for mistreating its workers and spent $4.3 million on anti-union consultants in 2021 alone—has intensified its union-busting tactics in the lead-up to the election that starts Monday.
But "LDJ5 has been busting their ass, organizing day-in and day-out," said Palmer. "We need to support them. And also we need to support all the Amazon facilities around the world who want to organize as well."
ALU president Christian Smalls—terminated by Amazon in March 2020 after he organized a walkout at JFK8 to protest management's refusal to adequately protect workers during the early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic—admitted that he has a vendetta against the company that fired him.
"From that moment forward we never looked back," said Smalls. "We said... we're gonna go anywhere it's necessary to advocate for worker's rights," and after Amazon defeated the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union last year in an Alabama election the NLRB invalidated due to corporate interference, he and his comrades decided to "bring it back home to New York."
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Photo: A robust Black woman stands at a makeshift podium in a winter coat; two other women behind her hold signs saying "SOS:Save Our Schools," and "Fund our schools"
This Could Be the Moment to Take Back Chicago
An unpopular mayor. Raging gentrification. A labor-community-Left coalition energized by recent wins. The 2023 elections could transform Chicago.
By Jackson Potter
Convergence
April 22, 2022 -Asked about the first word that came to mind when hearing the phrase “Chicago politics,” Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) Vice President Stacy Davis Gates didn’t miss a beat. “Possibilities,” she said. Chicago’s mayor and all 50 aldermen will be up for re-election in 2023.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot is unpopular. Her policies, like those of her predecessors, have accelerated inequality and the displacement of the city’s Black and Latino communities and the institutions that serve them.
In response, an energized labor-community-Left coalition has developed a legitimate program that has won key political fights and built a pole of resistance to challenge the business class for power over the city. In a sign of strength, our forces elected more left-leaning independents and self-declared socialists in the last election cycle of 2019 than at any time in the last 100 years.
If we can assemble a campaign for 2023 that can take the mayor’s office and a majority of the 50 aldermanic seats, we will have an unprecedented opportunity to turn the city that “works” for the few to one that works for the many.
Gentrification and displacement
Gentrification is changing the city in ways that threaten to undermine a working-class coalition before it can truly build power. When walking through the neighborhoods of Pilsen, the West Loop, Cabrini Green, and parts of Kenwood Oakland, one sees Chicago transforming into a sleek, tech-savvy, hipster-saturated paradise.
Whenever I return to my childhood home in Logan Square, I barely recognize it. Almost gone are the bodegas, working class apartment buildings, and the Latino families who used to live in them; replaced by gourmet eateries, tear-downs, and boutique storefronts.
Meanwhile, the gap between rich and poor, Black and white, downtown and periphery, is growing at a record pace. Jobs, income, residential property values, and retail sales downtown have outpaced any other area in the metro region while many working-class neighborhoods are seeing steep population losses, environmental contamination, violence, under- and unemployment, foreclosures and neglect—all of which are being exacerbated by the disparate racial impacts of the pandemic.
The devastation of low-income Black and Latino communities in Chicago, and the continued exodus of Black families, has accelerated under Lightfoot’s administration. A recent Chicago Sun Times article showed that 14 community areas out of 77 have seen a loss of affordable housing over the last 10 years, almost exclusively concentrated on the Black Southside. While all other major racial groups showed population growth, the Black population declined by 85,000, a 10% drop.
Gentrification is changing the city in ways that threaten to undermine a working-class coalition before it can truly build power.
“Since the mid 1980s, neoliberal urban policy” pushed to redistribute municipal investments from less advantaged neighborhoods, cities, and regions into more dynamic ‘entrepreneurial’ growth poles,” wrote geographer and urban theorist David Harvey. A Grassroots Collaborative report showed from 2002 to 2011, people living in the Black and Latino communities in Chicago suffered the greatest loss of jobs in the downtown area, supplanted by white suburbanites. Additionally, that population loss was only possible after the greatest destruction of public housing in the country’s history. ...Read More
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Russian Bombs Rain Telentlessly on Civilians in Mykolayiv
The attacks from Russia fall on non-military targets with cluster bombs that devastate human bodies but cause little structural damage. In other words, Russia’s objective appears to be inflicting terror.
By Sabato Angieri
Il Manifesto
April 24, 2022- MYKOLAIV, Ukraine - There is no rest for Mykolayiv: on Thursday night, the sirens sounded once again and several buildings in the north of the city were hit by the fragments of multiple cluster bombs.
At the scene, near a busy intersection, one can see that the walls of the buildings are now riddled with metal fragments from the explosion of the devices about a meter above the ground, and on the sidewalk, one can see a small crater that is characteristic of these bombs. A carpet of broken glass covers the ground everywhere, coming from store windows and windows on the upper floors.
The soundtrack is provided by the noise of the fragments being gathered together using brooms without long handles, those short ones common in many areas of the former USSR, which force those who are using them to bend down almost at a ninety-degree angle. For many of us, it remains a mystery why they don’t just attach a longer handle that would allow them to stand up straight; but, as an elderly lady told us in recent days with a smile full of irony, “How can you see what’s there if you don’t bend down?”
Workers could already be seen in the residential buildings, in the process of covering the gaping holes with opaque construction site tarps, while shopkeepers secured their merchandise by boarding up the windows with plywood panels using screwdrivers and hammers. According to the first press release of the regional administration, there was one dead and several wounded as a result of the attack; no further updates came during the rest of the day.
What is certain is that this was an area without any military or strategic objectives, and that accordingly there couldn’t have been any military justifications for hitting that spot. For this reason, it seems implausible that this could have been an air raid. Otherwise, the scenario would be that a bomber had deliberately aimed at a residential neighborhood just to terrorize the civilian population and cause as many deaths as possible. One should also recall that cluster bombs are particularly devastating against human targets, but practically useless against everything else, especially buildings.
These bombs maim, kill, burn, and, above all, they terrorize the population, but they have no effect on the enemy’s military defenses. In this case, it seems more likely that they were launched from Russian Grad multiple rocket launcher batteries from occupied areas.
The Grad system is unguided: after being aimed and launched, the rockets fall in an area that is more or less the intended one, but without any precision. This does not in any way mitigate the responsibility of the attackers, but it’s important to try to understand what kind of weapons the Russians are using along the southern front to try to outline their strategy.
On Tuesday, for instance, Russian Sukhoi fighters dropped incendiary bombs on Mykolayiv, while on the ground one could also hear the incessant explosions of Ukrainian mortars and anti-aircraft fire could be heard. Since it is unlikely that those planes had crossed all of the Ukrainian territory in one direction or the other, it can be concluded that they didn’t come from Belarus or from the Rostov-on-Don province in the east (in Russian territory).
The planes could have taken off only from Crimea or the Black Sea, and in this regard, the sinking of the Moskva and the consequent distancing of the Russian fleet further than 200 km from land is an additional piece of the puzzle. In other words, everyone here is asking: what will Moscow’s intentions be after Mariupol falls?
While waiting to see how the situation in Mykolayiv will evolve, Kherson remains a great unknown. There are questions about whether the occupation troops will engage in a pseudo-campaign for the “independence referendum” called for April 27, and thus try to keep a lower profile with as little aggressiveness as possible, or whether they will continue to advance westward to conquer more ground.
What is undeniable is the reality of the long line of buses carrying refugees from Mykolayiv to Odessa on Thursday, the Red Cross vehicles lined up before the checkpoints and the reappearance of the word “Deti” (children, n.ed.) written on the cars of families fleeing towards the west. It is extremely difficult to try to understand how war can affect the psyche of those who are forced to go through it. However, without launching into theories that would require much more expertise, we can say that the disappearance of all security, of even the shortest-term planning, even if only about “tomorrow,” is constant torture in every armed conflict.
It’s the same with the disappearance of everyday life, or, to put it better, that of moments of serenity. The constant tension that a situation like one of the inhabitants of Mykolayiv or of many other Ukrainian cities brings with it would be enough to explain why war is devastating. Even without counting the dead and wounded, who can rightly be called the protagonists in the tragedy that unfolds at every step, but who are numerically in the minority.
Speaking of war scenarios, while the situation is stalling in the south, in the east the attacks and preparations continue for the elusive “great offensive” of the “new phase of the special operation,” as Moscow has called it. According to the usual British intelligence sources, this time conveyed through the words of Defense Minister Ben Wallace, “Russian troops are advancing towards Kramatorsk, the largest urban area of the Donbass under the Ukrainian flag.” As we have already written, the British have been talking for days about the imminent Russian offensive in the Donbass area and are calling the bombing of the cities in the center and north a “diversion.” The mayor of Kharkiv, Igor Terekhov, disagrees – he says that there have been dozens of deaths due to the incessant bombing over the past few days.
In the Lugansk oblast, Governor Sergiy Haidai said that “there are no more food stores left in Sievierodonetsk” and that “residents can only receive food through humanitarian aid.” Haidai also added that the towns of Rubizhne and Novodruzhsk had also suffered heavy damage in recent hours. Zaporizhzhia has also been hit again – according to the regional administration, Thursdayh’s bombings didn’t cause victims there, but several elements of the city infrastructure were rendered unusable. ...Read More
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Amid the Uprisings
Cedric Robinson’s theory of collective resistance.
By Jared Loggins
The Nation
APRIL 18, 2022
On the morning of December 17, 1979, several Miami police officers stopped Arthur McDuffie on a 1973 Kawasaki. The initial police report said McDuffie had run a red light, forcing officers on a high-speed chase through Miami, and falsely characterized the incident as a bike accident and a scuffle with officers. McDuffie was taken to the hospital with multiple skull fractures; four days later, he was dead.
In a turn of events that could have happened last year or last week, an internal investigation revealed that the officers’ version of events was almost entirely fabricated. There was a chase but no scuffle. McDuffie had already surrendered when the officers surrounded him, removed his helmet, and beat him lifeless. They allegedly ran over his motorcycle to make it look as though it had been in an accident. These details were enough to lead to charges against the officers, but not enough to convict them. After a speedy trial, prosecuted by state attorney (and future US attorney general) Janet Reno, an all-white-male jury exonerated the officers.
By nightfall on the day the verdict was announced, the city was in flames. As the historian Manning Marable put it in the pages of The Black Scholar at the time, “the streets belonged to the poor people of Liberty City.” As insurrection ruled the night, calls for order grew louder from state and local officials. Bob Graham, Florida’s Democratic governor, took to the press to tell residents that “we have come too far, worked too hard, to see that everything is lost in one more night of needless violence and rage.” Such declarations, of course, rang hollow for most of the people in the streets on those bitter nights, considering that state and local governments had done far more to ravage this community, gutting the social safety net and leaving the poor and vulnerable with no place to go but the prisons and the cooling boards built for them. Miami Mayor Maurice Ferré invited Andrew Young and Jesse Jackson to the city to help quell the rebellion, but it was too late: Miami was consumed by an uprising that had been produced by not just one act of police violence and corruption but a whole system of racial enclosure and exploitation.
Miami set the tone for a decade of relentless domestic warfare in which the police, state prosecutors, and elected officials attempted to crush the very people they were supposed to serve. As disinvestment intensified in deindustrialized urban centers, so too did the carceral state. Yet the strategy also generated resistance. Rebellious responses to disinvestment and brutal acts of “law and order” were, as Marable and other radicals noted at the time, living evidence that deceit, insult, humiliation, removal, and violence had not sucked the life out of a people subjected to a brutal racial contract; it had enlivened them. As Marable put it, “the uprising can only be understood as a ‘twentieth-century slave revolt.’” The uprisings in the cities were acts not just of desperation but of collective politics—efforts to jam the gears of continued capitalist and state violence and subjugation.
A young political theorist and contemporary of Manning by the name of Cedric Robinson made a similar point in the pages of Paul Gilroy’s London-based Emergency. “For the ever-growing numbers of Blacks forced to come to terms with the deteriorating situation in Britain,” he wrote, against the backdrop of the Brixton uprising that rocked the United Kingdom in 1981, “the historical record of Black collective resistance to political and economic oppression is rich and suggestive.” The uprisings were a form of democratic politics too—perhaps more democratic than the legislative systems that appeared so determined to maintain an order of racial partition in Western society.
Rejecting the resignation that was beginning to emerge in many corners of Black life after the civil rights movement, Robinson—much like Manning, Gilroy, and other Black contemporaries—found in the disinvested ruins of the city a new radical and egalitarian form of democracy. “The pursuit of justice is dialectically embedded in the very tapestry of injustice,” Robinson later noted. For him, the urban rebellions offered a vision of collective action in the face of a society that favored atomization, profit and property, and racial domination. The state might have cast these rebellions as incompatible with democratic aims, inconsistent because of their offense to civility and order. But Robinson insisted that they were the very expression of democracy. Just as Marx and Engels had maintained that the most exploited classes of modern society would become the agents of revolutionary change, Robinson asked who could understand democracy’s true moral and ethical demands better than those rebellious people farthest from justice.
In 1983, Robinson outlined the historical antecedents of this Black and urban radical democratic tradition in his book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. He departed from Marx and Engels by uncovering forms of radicalism that couldn’t be confined to the grammar and logic of the European working class and linked this tradition to the long struggle for decolonization. The rebellions of the 1970s and ’80s could thus be understood as forms of Black resistance within a longer inventory of resistance to capitalism’s order of racial and economic domination. The ordinary men and women in Miami and London were not unlike those Black workers who resisted earlier forms of racial and economic domination, forms that Robinson went to great lengths to highlight in Black Marxism. Slave resistance was an early antecedent of this tradition of radical democratic struggle, and it clarified for him the idea that something about justice could be discerned from those farthest from it. Drawing from the writings of Amílcar Cabral, W.E.B. Du Bois, and C.L.R. James, Robinson saw Black insurgencies as challenging the race-based structure of capitalism and the state by illuminating resistance as the basis of moral authority. In response to the question of who sets the agenda for Black struggle, Robinson answered in the plural: As he suggested in Emergency, Black liberation rested on “the maximum of the human resources contained in our communities.”
Robinson, who had long been the director of the Center for Black Studies Research at UC Santa Barbara, died in 2016. His insight into how Black mass movements have helped to reconfigure the nature of democratic authority and political activity in the modern era can be found in today’s movements struggling to free the country from its brutal confluence of state-sanctioned violence and capitalism. As Robin Kelley noted in 2017, “Today’s insurgent black movements against state violence and mass incarceration call for an end to ‘racial capitalism.’” It was a term that Robinson did not invent, but it was central to his analysis of domination in modern society. The insurgents today have sought to take the battle to the streets; theirs is a politics from below, not from above. The work of building new forms of life can happen nowhere else.
Over the past several years, organizers of these movements have drawn from and directed attention to Robinson’s work, particularly in the context of political education workshops building the bridge between theory and practice. Now, thanks to Pluto Press and to the dedicated work of his partner and longtime collaborator, Elizabeth Robinson, along with others like H.L.T. Quan and Kofi Buenor Hadjor, we have a new book that collects his published and unpublished work both before and after Black Marxism. Through these essays, we see further evidence of Robinson’s profound faith in the ability of ordinary people to fight against the corruptions of a world that routinely mocks the logic and practice of democracy. In them, we get a clear sense of what Robinson insisted in his work from the outset: that Black freedom struggles are a central part of resisting today’s violent racial and capitalist order.
Cedric Robinson was born in 1940 in Oakland, Calif. His family was part of the wave of African Americans who had moved from the South to escape the specter of racial domination. Often it was more than a specter: In one of the rare moments of biographical detail he shared, Robinson recounted, in a 1999 interview, why his family had left Alabama in the 1920s—his grandfather had beaten nearly to death the white manager of a luxury hotel in Mobile who’d tried to rape his wife, Robinson’s grandmother, who worked there as a housekeeper.
In Oakland, the Robinsons became part of a small but intrepid Black working-class community that was mostly confined to East and West Oakland. That fledgling community grew with the influx of manufacturing and industrial jobs in the Bay Area in the early postwar years. East and West Oakland were almost entirely Black because of racist federal housing policies and redlining, and it was there that Robinson witnessed the forms of care, education, and mutual aid found in Black communities under the Jim Crow racial order. As Robin Kelley notes, “He attended public schools where he learned from Black women and men who held advanced degrees but could not break the professional color bar. He took great pride in his teachers and the challenging intellectual environment they created.”
In 1959, Robinson enrolled at UC Berkeley to study anthropology and discovered a radical world of rebellion on campus. Falling in with a group of students that included J. Herman Blake, the co-chair of the campus NAACP chapter, he initially got involved in a number of student protests against US involvement in Cuba. For Robinson and Blake, the struggle against the apartheid conditions of Blacks in the United States was linked to the struggle against colonial occupation across the Global South. In 1962, just after serving a suspension at Berkeley for protesting the Bay of Pigs invasion, Robinson traveled to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) under the auspices of Operation Crossroads Africa. The organization was itself an artifact of a Cold War “scramble for Africa” in which NGOs flocked to the continent to jump-start what were effectively neocolonial development projects under the guise of humanitarianism. But the experience only further radicalized him, as he discovered a profound sense of connection to those living under the weight of colonialism and underdevelopment. For Robinson, internationalism was both ideology and practice. “Africa understands, Asia understands, you and I and the millions of blacks in the U.S., Brazil, and the West Indies understand,” he wrote, “not because we are black or brown but because we have lived it and are living it now.” Already in 1962, as a young man still finding his way, Robinson could perceive the links between the forced enclosure and immiseration of colonial violence and the racial and capitalist order under which he grew up. Returning to Berkeley, he continued his work in anthropology so as to better understand the history of this social order and those that existed elsewhere.
At Berkeley, Robinson proved to be a ferocious intellect as well as an activist. He and his comrades read Marx, Ralph Ellison, Malcolm X, Melville Herskovits, and many others who were themselves struggling to understand the class and racial dynamics of their societies. Robinson’s interest in anthropology partly explains why these figures appealed to him. Yet for him and his friends, intellectual discovery served another purpose as well: political education. Education was not a mere scholastic endeavor for them; it was the study of what had gone wrong in the world and a search for affirmative acts of political struggle against anti-democratic forces.
Robinson continued his studies at San Francisco State, working on a master’s thesis critiquing the Stanford political scientist Gabriel Almond, whose account of “political culture,” he argued, too easily accepted the idea that the masses—their beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes—provided order to political society. It was exactly the other way around, Robinson insisted, and this argument turned out to be the beginning of his long-standing ambivalence toward the state as a means for achieving human flourishing, something neither to celebrate nor to simply cast aside. His work at San Francisco State earned him the attention of Stanford’s political science department, which in 1967 recruited him to join its PhD program. Despite his criticism of Almond, Robinson wound up working closely with him, as well as with the political scientists Charles Drekmeier and Alexander George In fact, Drekmeier chaired his doctoral committee and became an important voice in defending Robinson’s work during his time there.
Robinson’s dissertation, called Leadership: A Mythic Paradigm, proved to need a lot of defending from the faculty. Largely completed while he was visiting England as a Leverhulme Fellow with Elizabeth in 1970, it argued that the apparent naturalness of a political order was a myth exposed by the constancy of violence and repression that almost all such orders relied on; with only rare exceptions, political leadership as practiced in Western societies was top-down, institutionally unaccountable, and fearful of the kind of authority that comes from below. Even when these political orders called themselves democratic, they were in fact afraid of a truly democratic system. To contrast these Western political orders with more democratic forms, Robinson turned back to his training in anthropology, citing communities like the Tonga people in Zambia as examples of societies that have more effectively constructed order rooted in maximum human flourishing. He acknowledged these forms of kinship and community even as he recognized the tendency in the field of anthropology to minimize contributions of non-Western societies as primitive. But what he saw in the Tonga people challenged a foundational belief, as old as Aristotle, in which rule was seen as necessary to manage relations between human beings. In this way, the contribution of the Tonga people held practical and philosophical weight far beyond anthropology’s racist constraints.
In response to this challenge, Almond and George resigned from his dissertation committee: What was political science if not a “science” of states (or the state)? Robinson’s dissertation refused to confine human activity to this narrow frame of thinking, because by doing so, one recapitulated the state’s mythologies and reduced community to a means rather than an end in itself. Despite the controversy over his dissertation, Robinson eventually did get a PhD from Stanford, and his dissertation was published by SUNY Press as The Terms of Order in 1980. The book version was pretty much unaltered from the original. But the development of an expanding and solidifying neoliberal consensus—one that claimed to exist for the sake of those social forces (primarily the market) outside the state—only helped demonstrate Robinson’s point: Politics is everywhere, with or without the state. So, too, were forms of racial domination, economic dependence, underdevelopment, and violent repression.
Even before he completed his PhD and published his book, Robinson got a job as a lecturer in the political science department at the University of Michigan. In 1971, Black and Latino student activists had put tremendous pressure on the university administration to embrace a series of anti-discrimination policies and to hire more faculty of color, and Robinson joined a cohort of preeminent Black and feminist intellectuals that included Nancy Hartsock and Harold Cruse. At Michigan, he also began to develop the second part of his thesis: that politics happened outside the state as well as within it. He began to search for not only reactionary antecedents but also radical ones. As one of his former students recounted, “We read and debated classic, radical and contemporary books, articles and treatises, as well as each other’s research. Occasional guest lecturers included C.L.R. James, Robert Williams, James and Grace Boggs, as well as political and social activists from the area or further afield.” Robinson also paid close attention to the wave of urban rebellions sweeping the country in the 1970s and ’80s—the fonts of democratic action that he would later write about.
One of the first courses Robinson taught after joining the Michigan faculty was “Problems of Political Development: Black Radical Thought.” The course was noteworthy for a lot of reasons, one of which was that it was part of a constellation of courses and academic programs that were springing up across the country in response to a general failure to take Black radical thought seriously. “The purpose of this course is to reconstruct the historic relations between the Black Liberation movement (of the 20th century) and the various ‘Marxist’ oriented organizations, historic relations which have been of continuing concern among students of radical politics.” The readings that appeared in the syllabus were staples in many programs and organizing circles at the time: Robert Allen’s Black Awakening in Capitalist America, James Boggs’s Racism and the Class Struggle, George Padmore’s Pan-Africanism or Communism. The course may also have been among the first informal reading groups leading up to the publication of Black Marxism a decade later.
Walter Rodney’s 1972 book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa would mark an important development in Robinson’s thinking about radical democracy as well, and when he joined the faculty at SUNY Binghamton in 1973, it was a splendid coincidence that Rodney was there as a visiting lecturer. His book only further bolstered Robinson’s internationalism, helping him track the intersections between Black American resistance to racial partitioning and the resistance of postcolonial movements in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Rodney’s analysis of capitalist imperialism, he noted, also told the story of resistance, of “what African masses are doing and have done.” If one cared to look, Robinson insisted, the archive overflowed with examples of Black people refusing to resign themselves to the conditions they faced.
Black radical politics is fundamentally about reaching out to others, identifying the sources of a shared condition, and demanding that the world be reordered accordingly. It is an imaginative enterprise that rejects the inherited assumptions about how power and society are divided under a system of racial capitalism, one that seeks to find new connections in the midst of this atomization. To this end, Robinson challenged contemporary notions of race as a fixed, transhistorical category consistent across time and space. Every state, he argued, deployed its own racial signs and myths to crush its disposable populations and create “order.” In some of his later work, such as Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, Robinson elaborated on this tendency: “Racial regimes,” he wrote, derive their authority in part from the meaning-making power of cultural institutions, so that circulated images of so-called savages and brutes become the basis for politically justifying racial violence and partitioning. (Those who wish to know more about Robinson’s account of racial regimes should look forward to Josh Myers’s new biography.) Yet the source of their power is also the source of their weakness: The people these regimes oppress create countercultures and thereby toss a wrench into the gears of a system that feeds on racist images in order to stay alive.
Robinson’s account of racial regimes and the counterhegemonies they help spawn also pointed to the democratic forms of resistance these countercultures might create. The social life we inhabit—one that for centuries held human beings in bondage and continues to leverage race to the benefit of capital—cannot necessarily be altered in one fell swoop. Yet the countercultures and the acts of urban resistance that this social life can inspire help keep open the door of possibility. Freedom is not inevitable—every struggle for liberation may well fall back toward slavery—but it is only through struggle with others that this freedom is made possible in the first place.
The new essay collection—which includes Robinson’s reflections on Africa, US foreign policy, popular culture, and urban rebellion—tracks these struggles for liberation across the globe and wherever they can be found. At times, the search for radical democracy in these essays can appear to be too wide-ranging, but that is part of the point: If Black Marxism helped recover an alternative archive from which the left might draw in building a radical consciousness against racial capitalism, these essays expanded its scope and expression.
The essays that make up the first half of the volume explain why Robinson felt compelled to tell a different story about the meaning and true potential of democratic rebellion. “Bourgeois historiography,” he argues, has created a set of dominant Western historical narratives that are particularly contemptuous of the demos, depicting it as a body that needs to be governed from above. After examining the “Platonic origins of anti-democracy,” he then considers those expressions of politics that sought to resist it, including in Africa and the United States. In these communities, Robinson finds the ethos of emancipation: groups of people self-consciously building democratic culture by refusing colonial domination, capitalism, and enslavement. From the visions of African liberation he finds distorted in George Shepperson’s writings to the novels of Pauline Hopkins, and from the anticolonial studies of George Washington Williams, Frantz Fanon, and Amílcar Cabral to the ambivalent Black responses to Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign, the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion, and the misrepresentations of Black liberation in the blaxploitation film genre, Robinson tells the story of the Black radical tradition.
Robinson challenges Marxist historiography too. Again, readers will have to take note of the sheer audacity in reconstructing a historical archive with Black struggle at the center, particularly given the tendency even in left intellectual circles to do otherwise. Earlier in Black Marxism, he noted that neither Eric Hobsbawm nor E.P. Thompson—two leading historians of working-class radicalism in England—said much, if anything, about Black working-class struggles. Thompson’s magisterial book The Making of the English Working Class mentions Black people only twice—once in a passing reference to an artisan and once in reference to a Black man who appeared as Satan in the dream of a dissident minister. Robinson’s essays on the Black radical tradition and its misrepresentations seek to correct this record: By showing that there is much to recommend in the histories of Black struggle in the Americas, the Caribbean, and Africa, they attempt to provide new archives from which to envision the world. Robinson’s political thought challenges readers to turn to these histories not as an addendum to the dominant approach but as the approach from which to proceed. In the pages of Emergency, he quoted C.L.R. James in “The Making of the Caribbean People” to emphasize the point: “These are my ancestors, these are my people. They are yours too, if you want them.”
For as much energy as he put into challenging the limits of European radicalism and liberalism, Robinson also challenged the limits of what he called the “fictive radicalism” of Black nationalist thought. “I felt strongly that Black nationalism as it was being pursued by spokespersons like Stokely Carmichael and Louis Farrakhan was a failed enterprise,” he said in a 1999 interview. “As a peevish and perverse inversion of the political culture and racialism which had been used to justify the worst excesses of the exploitation and oppression of Black people, it served as a fictive radicalism, a surrogate mirage of the Black struggle.”
For Robinson, a truly emancipatory Black politics required transcending race. Radical black struggle, then, promised nothing less than total human emancipation from social domination in all its forms. Robinson was stubborn in his unwillingness to map out a concrete political program. But that was precisely because any grassroots, bottom-up expression of democracy was better understood as a constantly unfolding horizon of freedom and resistance. He refused the presumptuousness that is characteristic of political theory: Intellectuals, he insisted, can learn a great deal more by embedding themselves in the struggles of ordinary people than by trying to impose grandiose theories of change.
We can learn quite a bit from Robinson’s humility in this regard. His account, for example, of those Black struggles against fascism in the 1930s, led by the Negro World Alliance, the Provisional Committee for the Defense of Ethiopia, and the African Patriotic League, demonstrates the importance of paying careful attention to the front lines of struggle against racial capitalism and its fascist permutations.
If today we are bombarded with ideas about fascism as a threat external to American society, Robinson reminds us that Black struggle against fascism should be understood as a barometer of what racial capitalism has always been intrinsically capable of and what a movement against it should entail. Black Americans around the world responded to fascism the way they did because they were already victims of it, expressed in white supremacist longings for their partitioning and extermination. At the same time, Robinson understood the Black struggle against fascism as a global one, to be found among the dockworkers in southwestern Africa refusing to work on Italian ships or the hundreds of Black Cubans and Bahamians enlisting in the armies of Ethiopia. In one of his two essays on fascism, Robinson invoked the words of Milton Herndon, a Black steelworker who was killed while fighting fascists in Spain in 1937, to convey this point: “Yesterday, Ethiopia, Czechoslovakia—today, Spain—tomorrow, maybe America. Fascism won’t stop anywhere—until we stop it.”
The 2014 uprising in Ferguson, Mo., which appears at the end of the volume (in an essay co-written by Elizabeth), might also be an opportunity to draw connections to the long and historic inventory of Black struggle that could trace many of its American roots to Black anti-fascist actions in the 1930s. The militarized response, too, was not unprecedented in the United States; nor was it unprecedented against the backdrop of the ongoing brutal racial partitioning in other parts of the world. From the United States to the occupied territories of Palestine, racial regimes sustain order by enforcing difference through violence. Yet again sounding a familiar theme, the Robinsons were clear that oppressed people would not simply accept these terms.
One of the remarkable things about Cedric Robinson is that he was a profoundly collaborative thinker—both in the sense of not assuming an authoritative posture over the archives he illuminated and in terms of his pedagogy. It is a common refrain among those who have written about him: Over the course of his life, he and Elizabeth would often invite students into their home to study and find ways to challenge the world from where they were. ...Read More
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This Week's History Lesson:
Digging Up the History of the Nuclear Fallout Shelter
For 75 years, images of bunker life have reflected the shifting optimism, anxieties, and cynicism of the Atomic Age
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Photo: A Long Island family sits in a "Kidde Kokoon" underground bomb shelter in 1955. A Long Island family sits in a "Kidde Kokoon" underground bomb shelter in 1955. Photo by Underwood Archives / Getty Images
By Thomas Bishop
Zócalo Public Square
April 25, 2022 - The Russian invasion of Ukraine isn’t the first conflict to unfold on social media, but commentators have been quick to dub it the first “TikTok War.” Videos by young Ukrainians inside bomb shelters represent some of the most personal glimpses to date of teenage life inside a war zone. Amassing millions of views, offerings like “My Typical Day in a Bomb Shelter” and “What I Buy in a Supermarket During a War” document destroyed cities, bunker cooking and daily life underground, with nuclear threat lurking offscreen. Broadcast on an unprecedented scale, these viral visuals of family shelters have worked their way into our collective consciousness, humanizing the headlines and bringing the threat of nuclear destruction directly to our devices.
While the technology to share these images from Ukraine may be more advanced than ever before, the visuals of families in bomb shelters have always brought conflict to our doorsteps by making geopolitics concrete. A litany of photographs, government films and Hollywood movies over the last 75 years communicates the public’s fears of nuclear war. These images offer us a nuclear temperature check of sorts, reflecting the shifting optimism, anxieties and cynicism of the times.
It all started in Japan in the 1940s, in the immediate aftermath of the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when images of hibakusha (Japanese survivors of the bomb) and cities reduced to rubble first emerged. Since then, Japanese popular culture has always kept the atomic bomb front and center, from genbaku bungaku (atomic bomb literature) to the recognition of Godzilla (1954) as an atomic text to the global success of anime films such as Akira (1988) and the work of Studio Ghibli.
Each nation had its own unique cultural reaction to the bomb. In the United States, the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA), founded in 1951, set out to convince Americans that if the bomb did drop, they could survive the fallout. Over the course of a decade, the agency attempted to quell public anxiety over nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union through public education campaigns, school room drills, and exercises.
Diagram of a fallout shelter
Nearly half a billion FCDA booklets depicted the all-American family in their fallout shelter, creating a key visual focal point for early conversation about nuclear war in the U.S. Decidedly suburban, heteronormative and middle class in nature, this visual of white American families carefully lining shelter shelves with canned goods or taking their children by the hand as they walked toward their underground refuges broadcast a clear government-sanctioned message: A family that is together, well organized and ready could survive the next war. Of course, the messaging had as much to do with domestic politics as with preparedness, reinforcing traditional ideas about marriage and family values.
Overlooking complex questions of class, race, and sexuality, this doctrine of DIY survival also shifted responsibility away from the state. Putting the onus on the individual might have been a cheap and attractive policy for the government, but the notion of a nation of shelter builders taking survival into their own hands could only go so far. With the development of the hydrogen bomb and the knowledge that nuclear fallout caused cancer and cardiovascular disease, by the 1960s, the first generation to grow up in the shadow of the bomb had begun to question whether nuclear war was winnable in a traditional sense.
The anti-nuclear movement grew out of this, and with it, pop culture images of the family fallout shelter took a turn for the cynical. In a 1961 episode of “The Twilight Zone,” a quiet dinner party turned into a community tearing itself apart as fictional suburbanites scrambled to access the only fallout shelter in town. In the run-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Saturday Review covered a town hall meeting in Hartford, Connecticut, that descended into chaos when a community member threatened to shoot anyone who approached his private shelter.
Depictions of fallout shelters continued to reflect the public’s shifting moods as the Cold War fluctuated in temperature. When Vietnam dominated headlines in the late 1960s and 1970s, cultural discussion around family shelters largely disappeared; the shift from atmospheric to underground testing of nuclear weapons, the passage of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963 and a decade of thawing U.S.-Soviet tensions also fostered an atmosphere of relative ease. But a generation later, the election of Ronald Reagan returned nuclear war to watercooler conversation. By 1984, politicians were obsessing over the “evil empire,” and pop group Frankie Goes to Hollywood topped the charts with “Two Tribes,” a single lamenting Cold War jockeying.
Fallout shelters reemerged—though the family of the 1950s happily starting a new life underground had by then become a quaint relic of an already bygone past. In the 1980s, as global stockpiles of nuclear warheads reached over 50,000, visual culture around shelters got increasingly bleak. With anti-nuclear activism heating up, the arts presented a society on fire, where the fallout shelter took on a new symbolic role: futile final bastion in a world devoid of hope.
In the United Kingdom, where NATO stationed cruise missiles in 1979, filmmakers contributed two notable visions of bunkered families facing the end of the world. The animated feature When the Wind Blows (1986) told the story of an elderly couple, Jim and Hilda Bloggs, living in a tiny Cotswolds village after a nuclear strike rendered Britain a radioactive wasteland. The terrifying docudrama Threads (1984) dramatized the devastation of thermonuclear war in Sheffield and traumatized a generation.
The Cold War’s conclusion—the “end of history,” as political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared—repurposed shelters as historical relics that, in turn, became objects of nuclear nostalgia in culture. In the 1999 film Blast From the Past, for example, the family shelter became the perfect premise for a romantic comedy. Adam Webber (played by Brendan Fraser) is sealed away in his family’s bomb shelter during the Cuban Missile Crisis and emerges into the bustling modern world of the 1990s. Having grown up on a television diet of “I Love Lucy” and “The Honeymooners,” Webber’s efforts to find love render the fallout shelter a harmless time capsule of Cold War kitsch. Meanwhile, players of the first installment of the blockbuster video game “Fallout” (1997) took control of a “vault dweller,” similarly emerging from a bunker, to seek adventure. ...Read More
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These titles will be released in 2022, but you can order them from Hard Ball Press just in time for the holidays!
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Al Fin: Biden to End Racist Policy Against Asylum Seekers
WEEKLY BULLETIN OF THE MEXICO SOLIDARITY PROJECT
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Many of us thought that the Biden Administration would move quickly to reverse all of the racist anti-immigrant policies put in place by the Trump regime. Sadly, that did not happen.
One of the worst of these Trump-era policies has been Title 42, the measure used to block 1.7 million people from crossing the border, under the bogus rationale that we needed this blockage to prevent the spread of Covid. The truth? US public health officials unanimously saw no such health reason to implement Title 42.
Instead of following the advice of these experts, the Biden Administration continued Title 42 last spring, forcing asylum-seekers to go back across the border to languish in the miserable conditions of Mexico’s migrant camps.
The Biden Administration caved here — to the racist anti-immigrant ravings of the Republican Party. Republicans don’t just want to keep immigrants out. In many states, they’re also proposing policies to restrict the rights of minority voters. Latin@s represent the fasted-growing sector of the US electorate, and the Republican Party is doing its damndest to suppress Latin@ votes.
Biden and the Democratic Party need to wake up and smell the frijoles. If Biden fails to come through on his promises to implement a truly humane immigration policy and defend the democratic interests of the 60-million-strong Latin@ people, now overwhelmingly Mexican-American/Chican@, the president risks handing over the US Congress, Senate, and White House to the most racist and neofascist major party ever seen in our country. And that would be spell enormous trouble for Latin@s in the US and for México as well.
Now finally — al fin — Biden has promised to end the use of Title 42 as of May 23, 2022, after enormous pressure from Latin@ immigrant rights organizations, civil liberties organizations, and Latin@ members of the US Congress. About time! But ending Title 42 ought to be only the first step in changing a very dangerous course. ...Read More
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Our Amazing Resource for Radical Education |
There are hundreds of video courses here, along with study guides, downloadable books and links to hundreds of other resources for study groups or individuals.
Nearly 10,000 people have signed on to the OUL for daily update, and more than 150,000 have visited us at least once.
Karl Marx's ideas are a common touchstone for many people working for change. His historical materialism, his many contributions to political economy and class analysis, all continue to serve his core values--the self-emancipation of the working class and a vision of a classless society. There are naturally many trends in Marxism that have developed over the years, and new ones are on the rise today. All of them and others who want to see this project succeed are welcome here.
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Video: Michigan Lawmaker Says, ‘We will not let hate win’ 5 min
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Harry Targ's 'Diary of a Heartland Radical' |
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Tune of the Week: Janis Joplin - Ball and Chain ...6 minutes
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TV Review: Faithful Mormons Won’t Be Happy
with Hulu’s ‘Under the Banner of Heaven’
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Despite excellent performances and production values, Hulu's 'Banner' left me with the same wary bewilderment I felt after reading Jon Krakauer’s book.
Religion News Service
(RNS) — “Under the Banner of Heaven,” a new Hulu miniseries with an all-star cast that debuts Thursday (April 28), may not make many members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints happy. But then again, neither did Jon Krakauer’s 2003 bestseller on which the seven-episode show is based.
The miniseries closely tracks Krakauer’s account of the gruesome 1984 murders of 24-year-old Brenda Lafferty, played by Daisy Edgar-Jones of “Normal People,” and her 15-month-old daughter near Salt Lake City, Utah. Like the book, it explores the underworld of Mormon fundamentalism and polygamy, following the descent of a family of brothers into madness, misogyny, and violent religious extremism.
But Hulu adds a fictional element in the character of Detective Pyre (pronounced “Pie-ree”), a devout mainstream church member whose investigation loosens the moorings of his conventional, taken-for-granted Mormon faith. Andrew Garfield shines in this role, totally believable as the good-natured detective, returned missionary, and family man.
I approached the series with some wariness. I read Krakauer’s book nearly two decades ago, but it’s famously replete with historical errors and misleading generalizations, causing the LDS church at the time to issue multiple statements of protest or clarification.
Krakauer’s book routinely violated the basic premise of the study of history, which is to carefully chronicle change over time. Historians don’t get the luxury of pinpointing a few watershed moments from the distant past and holding them up as “proof” of this or that current event, as though nothing had occurred in the interim. Yet that’s what Krakauer’s book did repeatedly, drawing direct lines from Joseph Smith’s or Brigham Young’s actions to the 1984 slaying of Brenda Lafferty and her child.
More than any specific historical inaccuracy, however, was the book’s underlying theme: that religion is profoundly illogical and often dangerous. “Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion,” Krakauer wrote. “And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off. Anything can happen.”
“Faith is the very antithesis of reason.” Think about that. This means that in Krakauer’s view, it’s not just violent extremists like the Lafferty brothers who are to be feared. It’s not even just Latter-day Saints. It’s all of us, anyone who dares to believe that God may inspire people, speak to them or guide their actions.
Those common elements of faith are totally irrational, according to Krakauer — and therefore dangerous seedbeds for violence. (Never mind that some of the greatest atrocities of the 20th century occurred in state systems that did not countenance religion. It would be news to Stalin’s millions of victims that religion was to blame for their deaths.)
I hoped, in the almost 20 years between Krakauer’s book and Hulu’s miniseries, that these basic misconceptions about religion would be challenged and found wanting. It was encouraging to hear that one of the creators of the miniseries, Dustin Lance Black (who won an Academy Award for best original screenplay for “Milk”), grew up as a Mormon and had made an effort to talk to church members and leaders about the proposed series when it was in development.
Mormons “get stereotyped so often,” Black told reporters in a press conference last month. So, he said, he asked church leaders and members if there was anything they wanted to be corrected from Krakauer’s book, and he then doubled down on efforts to draw a clear dividing line “between fundamentalists and members of the LDS Church.”
In that, I think he succeeded. It’s crystal clear throughout the series that there’s a major difference between fundamentalists (who practice polygamy and are depicted in the series as wearing pioneer clothing and living in compounds) and the more mainstream members of the LDS church in the early 1980s.
The latter are shown in tidy nuclear families as they do mundane things like kneel for family prayer or meet with the bishop to prepare their eight-year-old children for baptism. They own Cabbage Patch dolls and play board games. Local LDS leaders are depicted as being horrified by polygamy, excommunicating any mainstream Mormons who try to practice it.
In fact, the series does a good turn by showing that even within the LDS church, there’s some diversity. Brenda’s parents are strong Mormons, but they encourage her to get an education and delay getting married. They’re suspicious of the youngest Lafferty brother she brings home to meet them, thinking that his uber-conservative family sounds controlling and would try to limit her choices; tragically, of course, they’re all too right.
Yet, my overall impression after viewing the first five episodes available to reporters is that despite some added nuances, the series hews closely to Krakauer’s basic premise: that religion is built on a decaying foundation of violence and a hunger for power. The show adopts Krakauer’s breathless manner of cutting back and forth between the distant past and the immediate present. There’s a dizzying interplay of short clips from the days of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, with the latter depicted as one-dimensional.
Emma Smith (Tyner Rushing), who objects to both her husband’s practice of polygamy and to the cartoonish Young, comes off as a hero as she tries to keep Smith on the straight and narrow. She refuses to countenance either polygamy or violence. ...Read More
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Book Review: Mill Workers, Suffragists, And ‘Rosie The Riveter’ Helped Change The Definition Of ‘Woman’
In “Woman: The American History of an Idea,” Lillian Faderman argues that as American women emerged from the home, forces conspired to push them back.
By Barbara Spindel
Christian Science Monitor
April 15, 2022 - In a memoir written late in her life, teacher and poet Lucy Larcom recalled the decade she worked at a cotton mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the mid-1800s. “I felt that I belonged to the world, that there was something for me to do in it,” she enthused. As Lillian Faderman illustrates in her sweeping “Woman: The American History of an Idea,” that sentiment had been largely denied to women, who had long been told that their place was in the home.
In her exhaustive study, Faderman, a prominent LGBTQ historian and professor emerita at California State University, Fresno, charts the changing meaning of “woman” from the 17th century to the present day. With such an expansive time frame, she necessarily writes in terms of broad historical patterns, but she illustrates them with a wealth of examples.
When small numbers of women became industrial wage laborers in the early 1800s – performing their jobs away from the watchful eyes of their families, as opposed to bringing spinning or weaving work into their homes – the shift was momentous. As Faderman observes, a woman could “begin to define herself outside of her roles as daughter, wife, and mother.”
Throughout the book, Faderman is attentive to issues of race and class, noting that dominant notions of womanhood oppressed different women in different ways. In early America, upper-class white women had little choice but to fulfill the role of “lady,” while some middle-class women aspired to that status. On the other hand, enslaved Black women were particularly vulnerable to rape and abuse.
During the 19th century, women increasingly argued that their difference from men made them morally superior rather than inferior. With this justification, many embraced a range of causes, including temperance, the abolition of slavery, and suffrage. Still, they were denied the full rights of citizenship. “The contradiction was too blatant to ignore,” Faderman writes. “Popular sentiment deemed woman morally superior to man while perpetually reminding her of the inferiority of her place.”
“Woman” proceeds briskly through American history, documenting cycles of progress followed by backlash. Faderman observes that wars gave women space to “step beyond the boundaries that were deemed natural to them,” but that periods of crisis were often followed by renewed calls for women to occupy traditional roles.
For instance, during the Depression, when jobs were scarce, women were pressured to leave the workforce to make room for men. When the United States entered World War II, however, women were needed to take over the jobs of men fighting overseas. They were “urged out of the home that they had so recently been urged into,” Faderman wryly notes. But in the postwar years, women were once again called upon to quit their jobs, to marry young, and stay home raising children.
Faderman tells the fascinating story of Coya Knutson, the first woman from Minnesota elected to Congress. She served two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, but her campaign for a third term, in 1958, was derailed when her estranged husband signed a letter written by her political rivals urging her to quit politics and “go home and make a home for your husband and son.” “She was mocked all over America,” Faderman reports, “with headlines jeering, ‘Coya, Come Home.’” The leaked letter was seen as pivotal in her eventual defeat.
This stultifying cultural coercion, what Betty Friedan in 1963’s “The Feminine Mystique” called “the problem that has no name,” helped give rise to the women’s liberation movement of the ’60s and ’70s.
The parade of names and events in “Woman” can be dizzying. Still, the author’s impressive array of examples amply proves her central point, that oppressive “formulations of the idea of woman – notwithstanding some modifications here and there – kept a tyrannical hold in America for four hundred years.” As she notes, notions of gender are now being contested in previously unimaginable ways. Could these new understandings of gender at last put the traditional concept of “woman” to rest? Because that concept has proved so persistent over the centuries, Faderman is not yet prepared to say. ...Read More
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